Autonomous Vehicles

[72gmc]

Almost amusing to see Levandowski, who despite his shenanigans appears to have profited from his former status as a guru, is now promoting autonomy only on industrial sites. The equivalent of autonomous slot cars on slot car tracks. I'm guessing this idea was proposed years ago and quickly dismissed as not $exy enough.

[vertical_doug]

I think the corollary is what a typical industrial robot is like versus 3-CPO in the movies or any of the dancing robots from Boston Dynamics.

[htwoopup]

How much of the issue laid out in @dgaddis ‘s OP due to almost industry culture.

By that I mean, all of these guys come from the software industry where the concept is ship before it is ready or else you aren’t a company. As an example of how this type of thinking is even demanded by the money see https://www.ycombinator.com/library/...arly-and-often.

The problem is that in regular software, so the spreadsheet pivot table doesn’t work….BFD.

But in cars, someone can actually die.

And, there is a culture in software engineering all too often to just do a hack to fix an issue and get to actually programming a real fix to the software in the next release. An example of that is shown in the OP example of having the emergency braking software turned off…it must have caused an issue with the Uber software so rather than fix the Uber software NOW let’s disable the Volvo stuff and get to that further down the product cycle.

This different culture and the folks running the companies not being car guys/ metal guys is further evidenced by the piss poor QA in production of Teslas. The quality of the fit and finish would NEVER get out of an auto plant run by car guys.

Just because you are smart in one thing doesn’t mean you are smart in everything. And while there are plenty of great software engineers (and many here), there are far too many who don’t spend enough time or ask for enough input from subject matter experts with different views and from different perspectives/views.

[72gmc]

I think the corollary is what a typical industrial robot is like versus 3-CPO in the movies or any of the dancing robots from Boston Dynamics.

That’s a good corollary. I’ll also guess that someone at some point didn’t want to accept that constraint, but constraints aid creativity, and there could be much more progress by now if the investments were focused on realistic use cases.

[72gmc]

“It feels like the widespread use of autonomous driving is seven years away, and it’s been seven years away for 10 years,” says U.S. Department of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. “So the question is, will it be seven years away 10 years from now, or will we actually be getting somewhere?”

https://jalopnik.com/u-s-in-valley-o...hec-1849699276

[vertical_doug]

well, not to beat a dead horse but......

Tesla, Ford and VW Sound the Death Knell for Driverless Car Hype
2022-10-27 12:30:15.913 GMT


By David Welch and Craig Trudell
(Bloomberg) --

The autonomous-driving sector just endured a day that tech
and automotive giants may well look back on the way Wall Street
recalls March 16, 2008.

Whereas the day Bear Stearns collapsed was an epochal event
in the global financial crisis, when flawed assumptions about
the value of mortgages pushed banks to the brink — and some over
the precipice — Oct. 26, 2022, will go down as the date that
seismic consequences emerged from years of faulty presumptions
about driverless-vehicle technology.

First came the shock that Argo AI, the startup Ford and
Volkswagen had each seeded with multibillion-dollar investments,
was shutting down. Within hours, Reuters reported that Tesla’s
self-driving claims are under criminal investigation. A person
familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Justice Department
prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco have been probing
statements by the electric-car company and its executives since
last year.

It’s difficult to come up with two more polar-opposite
approaches to a mission one Ford executive said Wednesday will
be harder than putting a man on the moon.
Elon Musk put a target on Tesla’s back in 2016 by starting
to charge thousands of dollars for what the company calls Full
Self-Driving (FSD) capability. Six years later, the CEO
acknowledges the system still isn’t “feature complete,” and
cautions customers to expect two steps forward and one step
back.

By contrast, Argo CEO Bryan Salesky emphasized the need for
safe and limited deployments of test vehicles and close
partnerships with cities and stakeholders that its driverless
cars would share the road with.


Argo.ai seemed to take road safety more seriously than many
competitors, including a creative collaboration with A lot of people have seen Argo as one of the AV
"good guys."
Neither the scorched-earth nor the nice-guy method is
working.

Tesla is the subject of two defect investigations by the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and headed for
the first of several potential trials over crashes blamed on
Autopilot, its driver-assistance system. California accused the
company in August of misleading consumers, and a Golden State
resident who sued last month is proposing class-action status
for his claims that Musk has been stringing the public along
with perpetual promises that the company is on the cusp of
perfecting the technology.

Fans of the world’s richest man have gotten accustomed to
frequent posts from the soon-to-be Twitter owner about new
iterations of FSD beta software beaming to their vehicles. After
Musk tweeted recently about a next major release coming this
week, one follower replied with relief, writing that he’d been
hesitant to use the latest version of FSD after his Tesla veered
toward an oncoming car.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
@teslaownersSV@28delayslater Update probably goes to wide
release next week. This is a big one.

Ford thought when it first invested in Argo five years ago
that it would be able to broadly market cars capable of going
driverless in certain conditions by 2021. Now, the automaker has
concluded it needs to invest in driver-assistance technology
that’s more achievable in the near term. Its decision to switch
gears led VW to walk away, too, according to people familiar
with the matter, and Argo was unable to attract new investors.
The $2.7 billion impairment recorded on its investment in
Argo dragged Ford to an $827 million net loss last quarter. VW,
which reports earnings on Friday, announced an almost identical
injection in the startup in 2019.

“The team we have at Argo has been working on what I
consider to be the hardest technical problem of our time," said
Doug Field, who Ford hired away from Apple’s car project last
year. “It's harder than putting a man on the moon.”

This is a world away from what car and tech leaders were
saying when driverless-car hype was at its peak. McKinsey
predicted just three years ago that global revenue generated by
autonomous vehicles could reach $1.6 trillion annually by the
end of this decade. The head of General Motors-owned startup
Cruise similarly talked in early 2020 of a trillion-dollar
addressable market. Chris Urmson, who said while at Google that
the goal was for his son to never need a driver’s license, sent
out a memo to staff at his cash-strapped startup Aurora
Innovation last month laying out options including cost cuts and
even a potential effort to sell to Apple or Microsoft.
Argo is arguably the most substantial casualty within the
self-driving space to date, though it isn’t the first. San
Francisco-based Zoox sold to Amazon in 2020, and Uber cut bait
with its self-driving unit months later, offloading it to
Aurora. Early last year, GM’s Cruise acquired Voyage, a startup
that had been trying the narrow use case approach to autonomy,
operating in Florida retirement communities.

When GM reported quarterly results this week, analysts
pressed Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt about the state of autonomy. He
argued companies that are deploying and expanding now have game,
and are distinguishing themselves from those that don’t.
“We're seeing increased separation between the companies
operating commercial driverless services, and those that are
still stuck in the trough of disillusionment,” Vogt said.
“What's happening here is that the companies with the best
product have pulled ahead and are accelerating.”
Time will tell just how far along GM and Cruise will get in
building a viable business. The unit aiming for $1 billion
revenue by 2025 lost $497 million in the most recent quarter,
bringing its total deficit this year to $1.4 billion.

Ford CEO Jim Farley is skeptical the industry is anywhere
close. “Profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a
long way off,” he said Wednesday. “And we won’t necessarily have
to create that technology ourselves.”
Like reading this newsletter? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com
for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and
subscriber-only insights.

--With assistance from Keith Naughton, Monica Raymunt, Edward
Ludlow and Tom Schoenberg.

[vertical_doug]

[Scott G.]

IMG_0046.png

[Too Tall]

Possibly the worst attempted play for lazy (entitled) class of humans ever foisted by the transportation industry.

There I said it.

The caveat for my true hate for fully automated driverless cars is that it came too soon. Were we, yeah you buddy, to fully support the massive infrastructure required to do this right it could have wonderful benefits for us carbon units.

Dedicated highways, lanes etc. etc. are some of the infrastructure needed blah blah blah.

The tech. is great, let's be smart here ok?

[rwsaunders]

Well, essentially an airplane with autopilot is a pretty close comparison with two people monitoring the aircraft in the air and countless others on the ground paying attention. Sooner or later the technology will advance. I heard a great comment once about autonomous trucks all traveling at the same speed in one lane of a highway when someone chimed in…”isn't that called a train?”.

[Scott G.]

(snip)

Dedicated highways, lanes etc. etc. are some of the infrastructure needed blah blah

In first world countries they call them trains.

[Too Tall]

In first world countries they call them trains.

Now I'll have nightmares.

[thollandpe]

Like autopilot. But with no 3rd dimension. Or anything larger than a bird sharing some of your airspace. And without any FAA approval.

Seriously, how is it that any of these automated vehicles are out using the same roads that we, as humans, have to be tested and licensed to use with our motor vehicles?

[Saab2000]

Well, essentially an airplane with autopilot is a pretty close comparison with two people monitoring the aircraft in the air and countless others on the ground paying attention. Sooner or later the technology will advance. I heard a great comment once about autonomous trucks all traveling at the same speed in one lane of a highway when someone chimed in…”isn't that called a train?”.

Autopilots on an airplane are effectively “dumb” tech. They don’t make any decisions and only follow inputs of the crew members. Autonomous driving will require a far higher level of “thinking” and decision making by the vehicle. Additionally, commercial airplanes basically only operate in controlled airspace with strict procedures and constant human communication and coordination. We all know of crazy intersections that are hard for a driver to navigate. We’re not ready for cars to do this IMHO. I’ve tried Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” and while surprisingly good in some areas, it required constant attention and occasional intervention. It’s nowhere near ready for prime time.

[sk_tle]

In first world countries they call them trains.

As a matter of fact there are train lines that allows people to set their cars in a train. It is used in some places in Switzerland to pass some tunnel that saves you miles of slow mountain roads for example. There is one between Oberwald and Realp that connect Valais/Wallis to Uri canton. It save a lot of time compared to climbing and descending the Furka and it also allow cyclists riding there to enjoy the route with less motorized traffic (still way too many campers and motorbikes though).


But there are also night trains that allows you to put your car in a wagon and cross a country while sleeping in a comfortable cabin. A hungarian friend of mine living in Switzerland use this every year to visit family in Budapest, crossing most of Austria in a night train from Fieldkirch to Vienna. This allows him to bring his car without having to drive for hours and it is cheaper than renting a car for 2 weeks in hungary. It is also cheaper than many night stops in an hotel. They also have lines from Vienna to Croatia.
https://www.nightjet.com/en/angebote/automotorrad



Having said that I could see a future where autonomous electric cars drive like trains on highway were cars can connect to each other and use slipstream more effectively and safely and people would take control on the last miles or if a section includes road work.

[sk_tle]

Has anyone experience with waymo autonomous taxis? As someone who lives without a car I have a love/hate relationship with Uber and Cabify. Their apps are more reliable than the one from the official taxis in my city and you can schedule easily a trip to the airport and be pretty sure a driver will wait at your door. Same cannot be said of regular taxis who might just cancel the trip while you are asleep and live you stranded at 4 am. But on the other hand if you are far from a place where a driver is likely to get a new customer you can sometimes wait a very long time and sometimes give up if it is easier to find an official taxi in a dedicated stations even if you have to walk 5 or 10 minutes. Also it might not applies everywhere, definitely not in Mexico for example, but in my are on average there are more uber/cabify drivers that are downright scary while driving when most official taxis seems to be much more relaxed. Special mention to the Uber driver who decided it was totally ok to put a reggaeton song with totally NSFW lyrics while my 11y old daughter was on the back seat.

Sleepless taxi service seems like a great idea on paper but as long as they are managed by a for profit private company I guess robot taxis would be even more configured to optimize for rentability and would totally skip trips to less rentable neighborhoods/trips. Am I right?

Sadly I can see the following pattern:
1. offering a faster/more comfortable service than public transport
2. become a monopoly
3. let cities abandoning public transport because private autonomous taxi works better and feel safer and public transport his abandoned by all who can afford it. Low income people gets screwed.
4. once there is no competition, profit driven enshitification of the service. Everyone ends up screwed.

[Tom]

This is a thread drift but you made me chuckle thinking of our car ride from Sorrento to Naples. We hired a service and the young fellow was a very good driver, knew the roads like the back of his hand so could make what I thought were quite adroit passes on the narrow twisty roads before getting to the A3. Except for one tunnel where he had seen stray cats so he drove quite conservatively there. But that was just the appetizer. He had another client to pick up at the train station after he dropped us off at our hotel and we got delayed for a time while an accident cleared so we wound up doing 150km/h weaving through traffic all the while he declaring "Stupid people! They're breaking the future!"