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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.
Pretty sure the people creating the self driving technology are overselling its capabilities to car makers. Not to mention the real world accidents from Tesla's and the Uber incident has to place some fear of liability in car makers these days. Even with a human behind the steering wheel doesn't mean they can recover when the technology has a brain fart.
Many, including me, have said it is not going to be that easy to make a fully autimatic car. These dreams of most new sold cars being fully automatic within 5 or even 10 years etc. are not realistic.
I really don't want to be babysitting some semi-automatic car, so i won't touch the tech until it is completely and fully automatic, so i can sleep in the car while it's driving.
"We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles"
That's fine. We didn't believe you anyway.
Is anyone besides the CEOs themselves surprised that the corporate-types vastly underestimated the complexity of a problem they didn't truly understand in the first place?
The complexity of autonomous vehicles is immense, especially since the general public and regulators are expecting them to be better at making decisions and safer than human drivers. I'd be willing to say that it's orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between reusable and non-reusable rockets.
Tesla has oversold the autopilot and people died
In the US the most consistent roads are the interstates, but if you've driven in enough states, you know that the interstates aren't exactly uniform from place to place.
That's putting it mildly. I can tell when I cross the border from Ohio to Michigan with my eyes closed. Michigan's roads suck and are badly underfunded (only Georgia spends less per capita - they need to raise taxes but the republicans control the legislature and break out in hives when they hear the words "raise taxes".
We need to see how self-driving cars handle construction zones, rain, snow, and fog on interstates first.
I think they will figure it out but it's just going to take a lot longer than many people (including Elon Musk) are proposing that they will. I figure even best case we are at least 15 years away from a truly self driving car that could be sold to the public. And that is probably being wildly optimistic. I think the technology will make it's way in to use fairly steadily and already has but full autonomy is quite a ways off yet. I think it's a worthy goal but it's just going to take a while because it's not an easy problem to solve.
The complexity of autonomous vehicles is immense, especially since the general public and regulators are expecting them to be better at making decisions and safer than human drivers. I'd be willing to say that it's orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between reusable and non-reusable rockets.
The difference between reusable and non-reusable rockets is physics and engineering.
The difference between human drivers and self-driving cars is hundreds of millions of lines of code that all have to work perfectly.
Trust me, physics is easier.
I've pretty much expected this for a while.
Don't get me wrong the progress that has been made in this field is incredibly impressive, and I have no doubt that eventually we'll be there, but I've found it laughable when you have people with kids who are 8-9 years old stating that their kids won't have to learn how to drive.
Autonomous driving is a VERY complex problem, and while it may be 90% solved, that last 10% will likely take us decades to perfect. I wouldn't expect fully autonomous cars to be the norm for probably 40-50 more years.
Heck just look at the situation Boeing is in right now. Aviation is arguably a much easier task to automate, because there are fewer other vehicles around (and the ones that do typically have transponders announcing their location), and the environment is much more structured as to procedures, yet they've had multiple planes crash due to faulty sensors and autopilot related functions.
Electric cars - sure, they'll be the norm in 10-15 years. Autonomous though? It'll be a while.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
What does Ford have to do with GM's failed efforts, Tesla's failed efforts, and Google's failed efforts?
Ford may have done all the things you mention (except for being partly responsible for the failure of everyone else), but it's absolutely correct in arguing that it overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles. It did. It thought it was on the cusp of taking off, and in reality it's still years away from being practical.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.