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Ford CEO Says the Company 'Overestimated' Self-Driving Cars (engadget.com)
Ford CEO Jim Hackett scaled back hopes about the company's plans for self-driving cars this week, admitting that the first vehicles will have limits. From a report: "We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles," said Hackett, who once headed the company's autonomous vehicle division, at a Detroit Economic Club event on Tuesday. While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex." Hackett's announcement comes nearly six months after its CEO of autonomous vehicles, Sherif Markaby, detailed plans for the company's self-driving car service in a Medium post. The company has invested over $4 billion in the technology's development through 2023, including over $1 billion in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company that is creating a virtual driver system. Ford is currently testing its self-driving vehicles in Miami, Washington, D.C. and Detroit.
While I think self driving cars is in fact another level of complexity entirely, this kind of makes me think NASA/ULA vs SpaceX. How much complexity is the problem that needs to be solved, and how much is the sheer inertia of a company that has been going one direction for a very long time?
No kidding. Anyone who is both an experienced driver and experienced programmer could see that car companies, including Tesla, were grossly overselling autonomous vehicles. The fact that anyone was seriously talking about fully autonomous vehicles and projecting a timeline for their availability was a bad joke.
As I keep pointing out, think of all the situations you've encountered on the road in the last year that no computer could handle without a vast increase in the capability of embedded AI. Weather, emergency vehicles, detours, mismarked roads, etc. all make fully autonomous vehicle a fantasy, at least in 2019 and the near future.
To me the question isn't why they they are underestimating the problem, but instead why are they concentrating on self driving cars?
Obviously the first applications should be self driving Buses, Long Haul 18 wheelers, Garbage Trucks, etc. etc.
Things where slower speed is acceptable whose route is mostly pre-planned, where companies are paying a man to drive rather than someone is driving themselves.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
People like to say "everyone's stupid" and thus "if AVs are 10% better than human drivers, it will be worth it". But once you talk to the actual developers and technologists and ignore the futurists, they'll tell you that getting a machine to make decisions even half as good of humans is really, really, really difficult.
We don't give "stupid" people enough credit. The innate base intelligence of someone that doesn't regularly kill others on the road is very difficult to emulate, regardless of how we consider them in relation to the more intelligent members of the species. They don't just follow lines in the road, they adjust to lighting conditions, curvature in the road, they know how people will swerve in advance of potholes. They can quickly decide if someone/thing is about to go into the road or even make subjective judgements on how another vehicle will move on a freeway based on minute experiences in the last 30 seconds.
From a purely decision-based analysis, driving an automobile is extremely complex... still too complex for a computer to measure and judge appropriately to be autonomous. We'll get there... but it won't be quick, cheap, or easy.