Autonomous Vehicles

[dgaddis]

We've talked about self driving cars a bit here and there. Lets do it some more.

The recent review from the NTSB about the incident where a self driving Uber hit and killed a pedestrian/bicyclist (she was pushing a bike) has some interesting revelations (to me, anyhow).

NTSB: Uber Self-Driving Car Had Disabled Emergency Brake System Before Fatal Crash : The Two-Way : NPR

To review:
A Volvo fitted with Uber's self driving system hit and killed a woman. She was walking across the road pushing a bicycle. It was after dark. The "driver" wasn't looking at the road until just before impact.

I'm not trying to sound harsh or insensitive, but the woman who was hit and killed is primarily the one to blame here. She was walking across a four lane road in the dark and wasn't looking out for traffic. It's sad she's dead, but, had she been watching for traffic, she'd still be alive. It's not like the car randomly swerved and jumped the curb and hit her - she walked in front of it. That said, the car should have seen her and acted accordingly - I mean if I'm driving down the road and someone is walking across the road, and I see them, I try not to hit them, even if they shouldn't be walking out in front of me. Happens all the time actually, and so far I've yet to mow anyone down.

Now, lets discuss the car. What's surprising to me is how the Uber system works. It recognized something was in the road ~6secs before it hit her. It registered a bicycle a little over 1 second before it hit her.

The two big "WTFs" in my mind:

1. The car did not brake or use any evasive maneuvering. The Volvo has factory installed automatic emergency braking that will act on it's own, but the Uber system turns it off "to prevent erratic behavior". The system relies on the "driver" to intervene with braking and/or steering.
2. The Uber system does not give any alerts to the driver that it has seen something in the road.

In other words, the car 'thought' "oh look there's a person directly in my path of travel" and then did nothing.

It seems to me that #1 (auto braking is turned off) is done because the system isn't good enough to be trusted. And with that in mind, I can't for the life of me understand why #2 would be true. Why wouldn't it alert the driver?

With self driving cars, once people get used to them and start trusting them they will not be paying attention to the road. Therefore, you cannot count on them to do emergency braking or maneuvering. That's exactly what happened here, the "driver" wasn't looking at the road for quite some time. And if these systems do require 100% attention from the driver, then what's the point at all? Because they'll certainly pay even less attention than they do now with a self driving car vs one they have to drive themselves.

Further, I wonder what the process was like that approved the use of these things. Did the NTSB or Arizona DOT know that the system would turn off automatic emergency braking, and not alert the driver to potential dangers?

[becomingblue]

I read an article a few days ago similar to the one you referenced. I was surprised to read that the system(s) had been disabled on the car. When the actual accident occurred, I was stunned that it happened the way it did. These automated systems were supposed to save lives and in this case, it didn’t. Now we find out stuff was disabled. I wonder if the driver knew.

I’m not sure what to believe anymore related to the news reports on these cars: testing, miles driven with no accidents, etc. Are they working or not? I know there are teething pains with any new system of this magnitude, but I wonder what true reliability of this stuff is.

Personally, I think automated cars and the push for them is pure snake oil. It isn’t going to work. It can’t work just by putting gadgets in a car. There will have to be infrastructure added to the road system itself and right now in my area, merely filing craters/potholes seems to be a chore. If the system doesn’t work everywhere, it shouldn’t be used anywhere.

I could go on. I’m not normally a betting person, but I would wager the farm that in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, automated cars will not have saved any more lives than proper driver training. IF you could even quantify either.

[mmoore]

I would wager the farm that in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, automated cars will not have saved any more lives than proper driver training. IF you could even quantify either.

with the increasing amount of distracted driving I would take that bet.

[David Tollefson]

I read an article a few days ago similar to the one you referenced. I was surprised to read that the system(s) had been disabled on the car. When the actual accident occurred, I was stunned that it happened the way it did. These automated systems were supposed to save lives and in this case, it didn’t. Now we find out stuff was disabled. I wonder if the driver knew.

I’m not sure what to believe anymore related to the news reports on these cars: testing, miles driven with no accidents, etc. Are they working or not? I know there are teething pains with any new system of this magnitude, but I wonder what true reliability of this stuff is.

Personally, I think automated cars and the push for them is pure snake oil. It isn’t going to work. It can’t work just by putting gadgets in a car. There will have to be infrastructure added to the road system itself and right now in my area, merely filing craters/potholes seems to be a chore. If the system doesn’t work everywhere, it shouldn’t be used anywhere.

I could go on. I’m not normally a betting person, but I would wager the farm that in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, automated cars will not have saved any more lives than proper driver training. IF you could even quantify either.

The only way it's going to save lives is what I see as the eventual end-game of autonomous vehicles -- all other users will be banned from the public roadways, including motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclists.

[becomingblue]

Agreed. But, when they pry my cold dead hands from the handlebars, as they say.

[Too Tall]

Saw something similar to this concept being hauled on a flatbed in DC today >>

[j44ke]

I'm not trying to sound harsh or insensitive, but the woman who was hit and killed is primarily the one to blame here. She was walking across a four lane road in the dark and wasn't looking out for traffic. It's sad she's dead, but, had she been watching for traffic, she'd still be alive. It's not like the car randomly swerved and jumped the curb and hit her - she walked in front of it.

I don't agree that she is primarily to blame. The driver of the car wasn't paying attention to where the car was going. The car was an experimental vehicle. Wouldn't paying attention to where an experimental vehicle was going be the primary job of the driver? It is an experimental vehicle, not an actual finished done ready for prime time real world use car. I know that area - it isn't ever totally dark there. It is extremely confusing in terms of all the various sidewalks, some of them on the median, bike paths, bike lanes, turning lanes, impending traffic light, etc. Even though signs say don't cross over to the median from the sidewalk, what if you are riding in the bike lane southbound and need to get over to the northbound bike lane? They look perfect for that. And with all the ASU students in that area with apartments and nearby school buildings, you have to pay attention when driving around there. The lack of reflectors correctly positioned on the bike and the presence of drugs in the system of the woman killed are not conditions that make her primarily to blame, especially when there is no toxicology of the driver of the autonomous vehicle (evidently.) And wearing dark clothing also does not mean she is to blame for getting hit. At most, she showed bad judgment assuming that oncoming cars were either going to allow her to cross the street there or that she had enough time to make it across the street at that point. But still she isn't to blame for her death. Bad judgment has nothing to do with blame. Bad judgment could however be used to describe what is an unfortunate accident. Bad judgment which the driver of the autonomous car also showed by forgetting that even though she was sitting in an autonomous car, she was still the driver of that car, not a bystander in the driver's seat. Two people + two cases of bad judgment = one death.

The one to blame are the officials who allowed this car on the road to use unsuspecting people as guinea pigs with no warning that the car approaching them is being operated by a computer program. That car should have been covered with flashing lights and emitting a loud alarm sound to alert people to the possibility that this car might see them and not stop and that no one in the car would stop it.

Screen Shot 2018-05-25 at 8.40.42 PM.jpg

[bigbill]

I'm encouraged by autonomous vehicles for certain circumstances. Many cities have digital speed limit signs on highways that are subject to heavy traffic. Speeds are calculated based on the most efficient movement of traffic and if cars actually followed those speeds, traffic would move faster. Right now, there are many drivers that are smooth and steady in traffic while there are others that surge and stop. Autonomous cars could be controlled by traffic computers to maintain a steady flow, even if it's 35mph, it's better than stop and go.

[vertical_doug]

The blame here is Uber's. They consistently display a cavalier attitude towards regulations. They aggressively pushed to get these cars out. They aggressively went from 2 drivers to 1 driver monitoring the car in a short order. This company needs to be fined heavily. They are displaying the classic better ask for forgiveness then permission. If the punishment is not heavy, then the cavalier bet vs regulations was the right one. It's that simple.

(Has anyone seen the write up on what the driver was looking at? Was it a display screen for the car show stats that he needed to check? If so, going to one driver was not well thought out since it required eyes off road)

[dgaddis]

I don't agree that she is primarily to blame...

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying she deserved it, or trying to lessen the value of her life. Just because she made bad choices doesn't mean she should have been killed for it. I didn't mention the toxicology report because whatever it had said, I still feel like she shouldn't have been in the road. Or at the very least she shouldn't have assumed traffic would slow to let her across. I say she's 'primarily' to blame because she was acting outside of the expected norms, and in the video it didn't look like she ever even looked to see if traffic was coming.

But you're right, it was the combination of several mistakes. The driver, and Uber, and the officials that allowed the car on the roads are certainly partially to blame for her death too.

If she didn't walk in front of the car, she wouldn't have been hit.
If the car had braked, maybe it wouldn't have hit her.
Had the driver been paying attention to the road, maybe she wouldn't have been hit.

[j44ke]

I'm also saying that the expected norms in that area are that cars will slow and yield to pedestrians even outside of crosswalks, because there are so many of pedestrians (admittedly many of them distracted) in that area associated with the presence of a major university. When I first arrived at ASU, I was astonished by how willing car drivers were to stop for pedestrians. It was outside of my expectations as normal behavior. My normative experience (Richmond, VA) was that you often couldn't cross the street without being an another car. So regardless of the pedestrian's errors and those of the driver's, the expectation of the pedestrian could have easily been that the car driver would yield to her crossing the road. However, because there was no indication that this was a "special" kind of car, any pedestrian crossing the road would not have known that whatever expectations might have been reasonable in that area were not a part of the car's autonomous behavior.

I also think had the car hit and killed an ASU student, the accident would have been a much bigger problem for the car owner and the city.

[dgaddis]

I also think had the car hit and killed an ASU student, the accident would have been a much bigger problem for the car owner and the city.

Agree 100%. Uber got lucky that it was "just a homeless person". Most folks have already forgotten about the whole thing.

[vertical_doug]

The news clip referenced in the story.



From Bberg Businessweek

Self-Driving Cars Are Starting to Look Like a $100 Billion Bust
2022-10-06 04:01:10.461 GMT


By Max Chafkin
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The first car woke Jennifer
King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high‑pitched hum. “It sounded like a
hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. King
lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-
acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing.
Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway.
It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof—a laser
sensor—and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division,
Waymo.
She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-
driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to
execute a three-point turn. This would’ve been no biggie, she
says, if it had happened once. But dozens of Google cars began
doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.
King complained to Google that the cars were driving her
nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. Sometimes a few of the SUVs
would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an
army of zombie driver’s-ed students. The whole thing went on for
weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS
affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. “It is kind of
funny when you watch it,” the report began. “And the neighbors
are certainly noticing.” Soon after, King’s driveway was hers
again.

Waymo disputes that its tech failed and said in a statement
that its vehicles had been “obeying the same road rules that any
car is required to follow.” The company, like its peers in
Silicon Valley and Detroit, has characterized incidents like
this as isolated, potholes on the road to a steering-wheel-free
future. Over the course of more than a decade, flashy demos from
companies including Google, GM, Ford, Tesla, and Zoox have
promised cars capable of piloting themselves through chaotic
urban landscapes, on highways, and in extreme weather without
any human input or oversight. The companies have suggested
they’re on the verge of eliminating road fatalities, rush-hour
traffic, and parking lots, and of upending the $2 trillion
global automotive industry.
Omny Studio: Self-Driving Cars Are Looking Like a ...
Listen to the story.
It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi
in the wild. Which is rare: Six years after companies started
offering rides in what they’ve called autonomous cars and almost
20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are
vanishingly few such vehicles on the road. And they tend to be
confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they
still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy.
State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction,
animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry
calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call
“left turns.”
The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only
to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s
devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the
work continues. Earlier this year, Cruise LLC—majority-owned by
General Motors Co.—recalled all of its self-driving vehicles
after one car’s inability to turn left contributed to a crash in
San Francisco that injured two people. Aaron McLear, a Cruise
spokesman, says the recall “does not impact or change our
current on-road operations.” Cruise is planning to expand to
Austin and Phoenix this year. “We’ve moved the timeline to the
left for what might be the first time in AV history,” McLear
says.
Cruise didn’t release the video of that accident, but
there’s an entire social media genre featuring self-driving cars
that become hopelessly confused. When the results are less
serious, they can be funny as hell. In one example, a Waymo car
gets so flummoxed by a traffic cone that it drives away from the
technician sent out to rescue it. In another, an entire fleet of
modified Chevrolet Bolts show up at an intersection and simply
stop, blocking traffic with a whiff of Maximum Overdrive. In a
third, a Tesla drives, at very slow speed, straight into the
tail of a private jet.
This, it seems, is the best the field can do after
investors have bet something like $100 billion, according to a
McKinsey & Co. report. While the industry’s biggest names
continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the
world of robo-taxis isn’t just around the next unprotected
left—that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity.
“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai
Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s
Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of
dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC,
then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most
recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of
$30 billion, roughly thesame as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc.,
a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former
autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year
and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked
memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and
suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of
the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in
recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-
driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous
vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst
at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”

Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that
even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate.
Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more
or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for
more than a decade, the field’s biggest star. Now he’s running a
startup that’s developing autonomous trucks for industrial
sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that’s about
as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to
handle. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s
invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so
little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about
profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-
truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe.
I think it’s more like zero.”
In some ways, Levandowski is about as biased a party as
anyone could be. His ride on top of the driverless wave ended in
ignominy, after he moved from Google to Uber Technologies Inc.
and his old bosses sued the crap out of his new ones for, they
said, taking proprietary research along with him. The
multibillion-dollar lawsuit and federal criminal case got
Levandowski fired, forced him into bankruptcy, and ended with
his conviction for stealing trade secrets. He only avoided
prison thanks to a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
On the other hand, Levandowski is also acknowledged, even
by his detractors, as a pioneer in the industry and the person
most responsible for turning driverless cars from a science
project into something approaching a business. Eighteen years
ago he wowed the Pentagon with a kinda-sorta-driverless
motorcycle. That project turned into Google’s driverless Prius,
which pushed dozens of others to start self-driving car
programs. In 2017, Levandowski founded a religion called the Way
of the Future, centered on the idea that AI was becoming
downright godlike.
What shattered his faith? He says that in the years after
his defenestration from Uber, he began to compare the industry’s
wild claims to what seemed like an obvious lack of progress with
no obvious path forward. “It wasn’t a business, it was a hobby,”
he says. Levandowski maintains that somebody, eventually, will
figure out how to reliably get robots to turn left, and all the
rest of it. “We’re going to get there at some point. But we have
such a long way to go.”
For the companies that invested billions in the driverless
future that was supposed to be around the next corner, “We’ll
get there when we get there” isn’t an acceptable answer. The
industry that grew up around Levandowski’s ideas can’t just
reverse course like all those Google cars outside Jennifer
King’s bedroom. And the companies that bet it all on those ideas
might very well be stuck in a dead end.
All self-driving car demos are more or less the same. You
ride in the back seat and watch the steering wheel move on its
own while a screen shows you what the computer is “seeing.” On
the display, little red or green boxes hover perfectly over
every car, bike, jaywalker, stoplight, etc. you pass. All this
input feels subliminal when you’re driving your own car, but on
a readout that looks like a mix between the POVs of the
Terminator and the Predator, it’s overwhelming. It makes driving
feel a lot more dangerous, like something that might well be
better left to machines. The car companies know this, which is
why they do it. Amping up the baseline tension of a drive makes
their software’s screw-ups seem like less of an outlier, and the
successes all the more remarkable.
One of the industry’s favorite maxims is that humans are
terrible drivers. This may seem intuitive to anyone who’s taken
the Cross Bronx Expressway home during rush hour, but it’s not
even close to true. Throw a top-of-the-line robot at any
difficult driving task, and you’ll be lucky if the robot lasts a
few seconds before crapping out.

“Humans are really, really good drivers—absurdly good,”
Hotz says. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for
every 100 million miles or so driven in the US, according to the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even that number
makes people seem less capable than they actually are. Fatal
accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior—speeding,
drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel. As a
group, school bus drivers are involved in one fatal crash
roughly every 500 million miles. Although most of the accidents
reported by self-driving cars have been minor, the data suggest
that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more
frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions
being especially common. “The problem is that there isn’t any
test to know if a driverless car is safe to operate,” says
Ramsey, the Gartner analyst. “It’s mostly just anecdotal.”
Waymo, the market leader, said last year that it had driven
more than 20 million miles over about a decade. That means its
cars would have to drive an additional 25 times their total
before we’d be able to say, with even a vague sense of
certainty, that they cause fewer deaths than bus drivers. The
comparison is likely skewed further because the company has done
much of its testing in sunny California and Arizona.
“You think the computer can see everything and can
understand what’s going to happen next. But computers are still
really dumb”
For now, here’s what we know: Computers can run
calculations a lot faster than we can, but they still have no
idea how to process many common roadway variables. People
driving down a city street with a few pigeons pecking away near
the median know (a) that the pigeons will fly away as the car
approaches and (b) that drivers behind them also know the
pigeons will scatter. Drivers know, without having to think
about it, that slamming the brakes wouldn’t just be
unnecessary—it would be dangerous. So they maintain their speed.
What the smartest self-driving car “sees,” on the other
hand, is a small obstacle. It doesn’t know where the obstacle
came from or where it may go, only that the car is supposed to
safely avoid obstacles, so it might respond by hitting the
brakes. The best-case scenario is a small traffic jam, but
braking suddenly could cause the next car coming down the road
to rear-end it. Computers deal with their shortcomings through
repetition, meaning that if you showed the same pigeon scenario
to a self-driving car enough times, it might figure out how to
handle it reliably. But it would likely have no idea how to deal
with slightly different pigeons flying a slightly different way.
The industry uses the phrase “deep learning” to describe
this process, but that makes it sound more sophisticated than it
is. “What deep learning is doing is something similar to
memorization,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University
psychology professor who studies artificial intelligence and the
limits of self-driving vehicles. “It only works if the
situations are sufficiently akin.”
And the range of these “edge cases,” as AI experts call
them, is virtually infinite. Think: cars cutting across three
lanes of traffic without signaling, or bicyclists doing the
same, or a deer ambling alongside the shoulder, or a low-flying
plane, or an eagle, or a drone. Even relatively easy driving
problems turn out to contain an untold number of variations
depending on weather, road conditions, and human behavior. “You
think roads are pretty similar from one place to the next,”
Marcus says. “But the world is a complicated place. Every
unprotected left is a little different.”
Self-driving companies have fallen back on shortcuts. In
lieu of putting more cars on the road for longer, they run
simulations inside giant data centers, add those “drives” to
their total mile counts, and use them to make claims about
safety. Simulations might help with some well-defined scenarios
such as left turns, but they can’t manufacture edge cases. In
the meantime the companies are relying on pesky humans for help
navigating higher-order problems. All use remote operators to
help vehicles that run into trouble, as well as safety
drivers—“autonomous specialists,” Waymo calls them—who ride
inside some cars to take over if there’s a problem.
To Levandowski, who rigged up his first self-driving
vehicle in 2004, the most advanced driverless-car companies are
all still running what amount to very sophisticated demos. And
demos, as he well knows, are misleading by design. “It’s an
illusion,” he says: For every successful demo, there might be
dozens of failed ones. And whereas you only need to see a person
behind the wheel for a few minutes to judge if they can drive or
not, computers don’t work that way. If a self-driving car
successfully navigates a route, there’s no guarantee it can do
so the 20th time, or even the second.

In 2008, Levandowski kludged together his first self-
driving Prius, which conducted what the industry widely
recognizes as the first successful test of an autonomous vehicle
on public streets. (The event was recorded for posterity on a
Discovery Channel show called Prototype This!) Levandowski was
aware of how controlled the environment was: The car was given
an extremely wide berth as it made its way from downtown San
Francisco across the Bay Bridge and onto Treasure Island,
because there was a 16-vehicle motorcade protecting it from
other cars and vice versa. The car did scrape a wall on its way
off the bridge, yet he says he couldn’t help but feel amazed
that it had all basically worked. “You saw that, and you were
like, ‘OK, it’s a demo and there are a lot of things to work
on,’ ” he recalls. “But, like, we were almost there. We just
needed to make it a little better.”
For most of the years since he built his first “Pribot,”
Levandowski says, it’s felt as though he and his competitors
were 90% of the way to full-blown robot cars. Executives he
later worked with at Google and Uber were all too happy to
insist that the science was already there, that his prototypes
could already handle any challenge, that all that was left was
“going commercial.” They threw around wild claims that
investors, including the Tesla bull Cathie Wood, built into
models to calculate that the industry would be worth trillions.
Once again, this was a bit of self-hypnosis, Levandowski
says. The demos with the sci-fi computer vision led him and his
colleagues to believe they and their computers were thinking
more similarly than they really were. “You see these amazing
representations of the 3D world, and you think the computer can
see everything and can understand what’s going to happen next,”
he says. “But computers are still really dumb.”
In the view of Levandowski and many of the brightest minds
in AI, the underlying technology isn’t just a few years’ worth
of refinements away from a resolution. Autonomous driving, they
say, needs a fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to
quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by
rote. That is to say, Google engineers might spend the rest of
their lives puttering around San Francisco and Phoenix without
showing that their technology is safer than driving the old-
fashioned way.
In some ways the self-driving future seemed closest and
most assured in 2017, after Levandowski went to Uber and Google
sued them. Google accused Levandowski of taking a work laptop
home, downloading its contents, and using that information to
jump-start his work at Uber. (Although he doesn’t deny the
laptop part, he’s long disputed that its contents found their
way into anything Uber built.) The lawsuit was destabilizing but
also validating in a way. Google’s $1.8 billion claim for
damages suggested it had done the math based on just how
imminent the fortunes to be made from driverless technology
were. “People were playing for this trillion-dollar prize of
automating all transportation,” Levandowski says. “And if you
think it’s really just a year away, you take the gloves off.”
Uber had promised to defend Levandowski if he was sued, but
it fired him in May 2017, and he faced an arbitration claim in
which Google sought to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars.
During the 2018 trial, with Google struggling to prove Uber had
used its trade secrets, the company settled with Uber. It got
about $250 million in Uber stock, a fraction of what it had
initially sought, plus a promise that the ride-hailing company
wouldn’t use Google’s driverless technology.
The fallout continued for Levandowski in 2019, when federal
prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted him on 33
counts of trade secrets theft. Soon after, the deal his new
company, Pronto.ai, had been negotiating with a truck
manufacturer—to try out Pronto’s more modest driver-assist
feature for trucks—fell apart. “It turns out a federal
indictment does cramp your style,” he says. An arbitration panel
also ordered him to pay Google $179 million. He stepped down as
Pronto’s chief executive officer, turned the company over to its
chief safety officer, Robbie Miller, and declared bankruptcy. As
part of a deal with prosecutors, in exchange for the dismissal
of the other 32 counts, Levandowski pleaded guilty to one and
was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in August 2020.
Because of the pandemic, the sentence was delayed long enough
that he never served a day before his pardon, which came on the
last day of the Trump presidency.
According to a White House press release at the time, the
pardon’s advocates included Trump megadonor Peter Thiel and a
half-dozen Thiel allies, including Arizona Senate candidate
Blake Masters and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Levandowski says
that he and Thiel have some mutual friends who spoke up for him
but that they never talked until after the pardon was announced.
He says he doesn’t know why Thiel took up his cause, but Thiel’s
antipathy for Google is legendary, and pardoning Levandowski
would’ve been an opportunity to stick a thumb in the company’s
eye. Earlier this year, Levandowski reached a settlement with
Uber and Google over the $179 million judgment that will allow
him to emerge from bankruptcy.
The idea that the secret to self-driving was hidden on
Levandowski’s laptop has come to seem less credible over time. A
year after Uber fired him, one of its self-driving cars killed a
pedestrian in Phoenix. (The safety driver was charged with
negligent homicide and has pleaded not guilty; Uber suspended
testing its cars on public roads and added additional safety
measures before resuming testing. The company was never
charged.) Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora, the now-
struggling upstart, in 2020, when times were better. In
September, Waymo claimed, based on the results of a simulation,
that its vehicles are safer in some circumstances than humans.
Back in the real world, the safety figures are much less
conclusive, and Waymo is basically where it was five years ago.
(Waymo disputes this.)

Levandowski says his skepticism of the industry started
around 2018. It was a little more than a year after Elon Musk
unveiled a demo of a Tesla driving itself to the tune of Paint
It Black. Levandowski checked the official road-test data that
Tesla submitted to California regulators. The figures showed
that, in that time, the number of autonomous miles Tesla had
driven on public roads in the state totaled—wait for it—zero.
(Tesla hasn’t reported any autonomous miles traveled in
California since 2019. The company didn’t respond to a request
for comment.) Although Levandowski says he admires Tesla, is
impressed by its driver-assistance technology, and believes it
may one day produce a truly self-driving car, he says the lack
of progress by Musk and his peers forced him to question the
point of his own years in the field. “Why are we driving around,
testing technology and creating additional risks, without
actually delivering anything of value?” he asks.
While Tesla has argued that its current system represents a
working prototype, Musk has continued to blur the lines between
demos and reality. On Sept. 30 he unveiled what looked like a
barely functional robot, promising it would unleash “a
fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.” Six
years after it began selling “full self-driving” capabilities,
Tesla has yet to deliver a driverless car. Levandowski, for his
part, has been spending time in gravel pits.
For more than 100 years, mining companies have been
blasting rocks out of the hills near Santa Rosa, Calif., and
crushing them into gravel bound for driveways, roads, and
drains. Levandowski sometimes refers to Mark West Quarry, where
Pronto has been operating its driverless trucks since last
December, as a “sandbox,” and it’s easy to see why. The dusty
mine features life-size versions of the Tonka toys you’d find in
a child’s playroom. Yellow excavators knock enormous boulders
down from a terraced cliffside into the mining pit, where front-
end loaders pick up the stones and place them in 50-ton dump
trucks to be carried to the crusher. “An 8-year-old boy’s
dream,” Levandowski says as the boulders rattle through the
crusher, which spits the smaller pieces out onto piles.
The mine work started as a sort of backup plan—a way to
bring in revenue while Pronto got trucking companies comfortable
with using its driver-assistance technology in their long-haul
semis. Now, Levandowski says, construction sites are Plan A.
Pronto took the same basic system it had used on the semis and
built it into a self-driving dump truck, adding cameras, radar,
and an onboard computer. Because connectivity is spotty at mine
sites, the company created its own networking technology, which
it spun off as a separate company, Pollen Mobile LLC. “With
mining we’re doing driverless, but controlling the environment,”
says Pronto Chief Technology Officer Cat Culkin. BoDean Co., the
company that owns Mark West Quarry, is one of a half-dozen
clients that pay installation fees to retrofit dump trucks with
sensors, plus hourly fees for use. Neither Levandowski nor
BoDean will say how much Pronto charges or how much it’s taking
in.
Here’s his new vision of the self-driving future: For nine-
ish hours each day, two modified Bell articulated end-dumps take
turns driving the 200 yards from the pit to the crusher. The
road is rutted, steep, narrow, requiring the trucks to nearly
scrape the cliff wall as they rattle down the roller-coaster-
like grade. But it’s the same exact trip every time, with no
edge cases—no rush hour, no school crossings, no daredevil
scooter drivers—and instead of executing an awkward multipoint
turn before dumping their loads, the robot trucks back up the
hill in reverse, speeding each truck’s reloading. Anthony Boyle,
BoDean’s director of production, says the Pronto trucks save
four to five hours of labor a day, freeing up drivers to take
over loaders and excavators. Otherwise, he says, nothing has
changed. “It’s just yellow equipment doing its thing, and you
stay out of its way.”
Levandowski recognizes that making rock quarries a little
more efficient is a bit of a comedown from his dreams of giant
fleets of robotic cars. His company plans to start selling its
software for long-haul trucks in 2023. And hopefully, in a few
decades, all his old boasts will come true: driverless cities
with cushy commutes, zero road fatalities, and totally safe road
naps. But for now: “I want to do something that’s real, even if
that means scaling back the grandiose visions.”

To contact the author of this story:
Max Chafkin in New York at mchafkin@bloomberg.net

[caleb]

For most of the years since he built his first “Pribot,”
Levandowski says, it’s felt as though he and his competitors
were 90% of the way to full-blown robot cars. Executives he
later worked with at Google and Uber were all too happy to
insist that the science was already there, that his prototypes
could already handle any challenge, that all that was left was
“going commercial.” They threw around wild claims that
investors, including the Tesla bull Cathie Wood, built into
models to calculate that the industry would be worth trillions.
Once again, this was a bit of self-hypnosis, Levandowski
says.

Like crypto, if money is sufficiently easy, just about any hair brained scheme can look viable.

Hopefully with interest rates returning to historical norms, the oxygen tank will gradually get turned off on the fake it 'til you make it crowd.

[sk_tle]

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying she deserved it, or trying to lessen the value of her life. Just because she made bad choices doesn't mean she should have been killed for it. I didn't mention the toxicology report because whatever it had said, I still feel like she shouldn't have been in the road. Or at the very least she shouldn't have assumed traffic would slow to let her across. I say she's 'primarily' to blame because she was acting outside of the expected norms, and in the video it didn't look like she ever even looked to see if traffic was coming.

But you're right, it was the combination of several mistakes. The driver, and Uber, and the officials that allowed the car on the roads are certainly partially to blame for her death too.

If she didn't walk in front of the car, she wouldn't have been hit.
If the car had braked, maybe it wouldn't have hit her.
Had the driver been paying attention to the road, maybe she wouldn't have been hit.

I understand it happened in a urban or city area?

The problem is not the pedestrian, the autonomous system or the driver. The problem is that cars have no business going at a speed that do not allow them to stop in less than 5 meters in a city pedestrian place. Highways are to interconnect cities, not to cross them. Any pedestrian should be allowed and able to cross a street between two slow moving vehicles the way we used to do in the early 20th century. Jaywalking has never been a real problem but an invention of the car industry.


Barely overexagerated illustration of the issue:
https://twitter.com/the_transit_guy/...68092256923648

No amount of technology or driver education will ever solve those problems.

[j44ke]

The road where the accident occurred in Phoenix is a divided road with a planted central median and two to four lanes on either side, depending on how close to an intersection. In Europe it would be an autobahn with stoplight intersections. Crashes at intersections on these sorts of streets can be spectacular. I arrived at one just after a pickup truck broke a Honda Accord in half and then crashed into a quickee mart. The speed limits often seem irrelevant.

[caleb]

The road where the accident occurred in Phoenix is a divided road with a planted central median and two to four lanes on either side, depending on how close to an intersection. In Europe it would be an autobahn with stoplight intersections. Crashes at intersections on these sorts of streets can be spectacular.

It is a uniquely American species of stupidity to have high traffic four lane roads with cars often going 60mph+, at grade, with lights, and right turns on red.

[rwsaunders]

Look at the variety of sponsors on the University of Michigan’s Mcity’s website for example…Toyota, HONDA, Ford, State Farm, Verizon, Deloitte to name a few. CAV’s attract strong interest from researches and investors alike and are tied into the subject of “Smart Cities”. The relatively recent surge in research, fabrication and test deployment of urban vehicles, was a seed started many years ago and government support behind the subject matter has strong ties to the military as well. I’m not saying this in a negative manner, but the link is pretty clear when you start reading more about where the industry is headed.

https://mcity.umich.edu/

https://mcity.umich.edu/did-you-know...-mcity-opened/

https://mcity.umich.edu/our-vision/fast-facts/

[vertical_doug]

Look at the variety of sponsors on the University of Michigan’s Mcity’s website for example…Toyota, HONDA, Ford, State Farm, Verizon, Deloitte to name a few. CAV’s attract strong interest from researches and investors alike and are tied into the subject of “Smart Cities”. The relatively recent surge in research, fabrication and test deployment of urban vehicles, was a seed started many years ago and government support behind the subject matter has strong ties to the military as well. I’m not saying this in a negative manner, but the link is pretty clear when you start reading more about where the industry is headed.

https://mcity.umich.edu/

https://mcity.umich.edu/did-you-know...-mcity-opened/

https://mcity.umich.edu/our-vision/fast-facts/

Only in America is the real world condition have a stop sign shot up with buck shot.

[rwsaunders]

Only in America is the real world condition have a stop sign shot up with buck shot.

Wasn't that awesome? I liked the skater boy with the tossle cap pulled over his/her eyes and of course, the buck.