I think that we won't be able to have full self-driving on standard public roads, for a while, where non-self-driving vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) mix with self-driving cars.<p>I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.<p>But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.<p>And we <i>definitely</i> won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
I think there won't be a big bang where we go from no self driving to fully self driving vehicles at once. It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. Since quite some years we've had cruise control, now there's adaptive cruise control. Then cruise control became able to overtake other vehicles. Next up, they may be able to take a certain exit based on satnav, etc.<p>It's hard to say when, but chances are that at some point in time we'll simply have FSD, while nobody realized that's where we were headed because it was all marketed as small(ish) individual features.
Personally I'd be satisfied with just being able to hand the highway driving over to the car. Keep me in the middle of the lane, don't let me hit another car or any object in the road, and sound a chime when I'm a mile from the exit.
This is not a great article. It's based around Ford admitting they're not a software company, that they won't be able to compete effectively in this space. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.<p>This does not mean that self driving cars "aren't going to happen" -- in fact, the progress by industry leaders has been methodological and constant. The evidence clearly shows that it <i>is</i> happening, and has every indication of <i>continuing</i> to happen. Five years ago people were incredulous that a computer could pilot a car at all. Now, everyone has conceded that this is possible and the criticisms are about <i>how</i> a computer pilots a car and whether it should make more risky maneuvers. This is exactly what we would expect progress to look like.<p>As progress continues, companies will learn whether or not it is profitable to develop competing products, or concede to market leaders. Ford has conceded. Rivian has conceded. They will license technology developed by other companies with more capable technical teams.
I don't know if Tesla originated the approach, but they're the first I'd ever heard of doing it by my camera or radar or anything like that. I remember my first reaction was befuddlement, when highways cost like $xxx million per mile, why would the trivial cost of dropping electronic friendly markers for lanes and such be anything but a trivial 0.1% cost that should facilitate self driving from the road construction end as a primary means of situating self-driving vehicles?<p>Instead you have cars with that forever risk of death to their passengers when self-driving due to the non deterministic factor of not having a highway equivalent of train rails.
Actual self driving is likely to happen, but it's going to need some accommodations.<p>They might be high-resolution mapping with the ability of (local) government to mark changes as they occur. Road workers with devices that can direct automated vehicles to avoid holes in the road and the like plus other special cases.<p>Along the way there will be many stand-alone (self-parking) and in between (freeway/highway autonomous driving) functions that will be very useful and will be attractive to customers.<p>If we're only talking about "the holy grail" unlimited full autonomy, then yes, it's probably not possible, since it approaches general intelligence.
Self-driving cars will definitely happen. It won't happen next year, but it will absolutely happen. That's the way humans are. If they can do something and make some money, they will do it.
Talking to a developer about self-driving cars is a good litmus test of sincerity and/or competence.<p>Utterly unbelievable that Tesla is still selling "Full self driving" cars to customers.
It could probably be done today with richer sensors on the car than just visual <i>and with "smart" roads outfitted with specialized symbols and transponders to guide the car</i>.<p>Pure self drive like humans do requires a cognitive model of cause and effect and the nature of the world being navigated, not just pattern recognition and prediction.<p>Enormous advances in predictive and pattern recognizing AI have been made in recent years, but these things still don't "understand" anything. I put understand in quotes because I still don't think we understand understanding.<p>The mistake of those who have bet the farm of self drive (Musk/Tesla being chief among them) is to jump the gun and think that the AI advances of the last decade have made it just a problem of scaling a technology. It's not. It's still a fundamental invention problem, not a scaling problem, but what we have is good enough to fool us into thinking we can get there.<p>Musk's other big venture SpaceX can successfully build and scale rockets to send humans to the Moon and Mars. That's because that, unlike full self drive, is just a matter of scaling already thoroughly understood physics. We know exactly how to build such things. We just haven't done it yet (beyond Apollo).
Q: Is this the same article style like the one from New York Times about humanity not able to fly in a million years 9 days before Wright brothers did it? (<a href="https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/" rel="nofollow">https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...</a>)<p>A: Yes, it is.
> Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves.”<p>i.e., “Tesla has won, we’ll license the technology from them.”
>The fact is that these existing services are extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours <i>(though the latter is arguably a regulatory issue)</i><p>Is it though? Cruise would like you to believe that the only reason they don’t have fully driverless cars in SF during the day is strictly regulatory. However, it is far easier to drive in a dense urban environment at night when roads are empty than during the daytime when roads are crowded. I bet the disengagement rate is so high during the day (when the cars have backup drivers) that fully driverless operation would be impossible.
the self-driving myth has pumped countless startups in the past 15 years. i guess the downturn is a good opportunity to move to some different myth (i suggest longevity, which is more likely to happen).<p>I wish some of the investment was used to create semi-autonomous vehicles for the disabled instead.
Recent and related:<p><i>Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850</a> - Oct 2022 (481 comments)<p><i>Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739</a> - Oct 2022 (107 comments)
I beg to differ. Self driving cars are unlikely to make it to the West but the outlook for the East (China) is totally different.<p>In the West there are economic woes that will make the dream of everyone having 2.2 Teslas in the driveway not happen. There is no getting around this, the West is in a bit of a pickle.<p>Meanwhile, in China they have an entirely different way of achieving self driving. That is to put 5G (6,7 or 8...) on everything. Therefore, when you approach a junction, the 5G gadgets at that junction with their all seeing eyes and ability to communicate with vehicles just tells your car where to go and when.<p>By the magic of 5G it will also know what the deal is at the next point of decision, so your car can arrive for when the lights are green and you can be on your merry way.<p>The sensors on the car can do the lane keeping assist and slam on the anchors should an unexpected object appear on the highway.<p>There are aspects to this approach that are un-American. So it is not going to happen, even if a magic wand magically fixes economic woes that are far too structural for America to fix.<p>You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?
>A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale<p>Sure, you cannot deny the fact that it already happening. There's a surprising number of driverless cars on the road already.<p>In terms of meeting the 'omnipresent scale'. This is much harder. There's a ton of people whose life choices mean their car budget is <$5000. Which means they can only afford 20 year old death trap beaters.<p>So how does society get to the point where $150,000 driverless cars can be afforded by those people? It's from the amortization table and depreciation. It might be decades before there can be any major proliferation. That isn't the goal of driverless. The obvious caveat is most manufacturers are working on subscription models.<p>The interesting thing about the current system. A tremendous cost to society is the poor investment into transportation. You drive around a city and you'll see millions of $ sitting in driveways not doing anything. Whereas public transit is certainly not the alternative to this poor investment.<p>This is where the driverless taxis come in. The people who genuinely use their vehicles to a significant extent can still do so, but most people really just need low cost transportation. Which is indeed why public transit must exist and also why large cities are repairing that huge wealth damage.<p>In the near future public transit like buses will go away and be replaced by driverless taxis. Not exactly nostradamus to see that coming. This will be what presents driverless cars at an omnipresent scale. This absolutely will be happening very soon.
Teslas (while much maligned and deservedly so) can already drive pretty well on most well painted and high traffic roads. Granted it is very conservative and often I take control just to avoid other drivers honking at me for taking too long to turn.<p>But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already.<p>I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
Self-driving cars were always overhyped in the US because roads are the only decent transportation infrastructure.<p>A future where we have better cars is a waste. For long distances, we should build trains. For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes. This technology already exists and is very good, it’s just not supported by the government-business hybrid that runs the US.
Cruise and Waymo are the clear market leaders in Autonomous Vehicles. Tracking the progress of these companies in the past year alone where they are operating with no safety driver in dense San Francisco is incredibly impressive. The field of machine learning in general is advancing at a great pace as well. I think by the end of the decade in places with limited weather events AV will be as common as Uber. At some point people will reconsider buying a new car and just rely on a robotaxi subscription along with walking, cycling, and transit to get around. It will be survival of the fittest though, only few companies will succeed. Tesla 'Autopilot' on the other hand doesn't even use Lidar, seems to disconnect frequently and is much more dangerous. I really think they use deceptive marketing.
I think it's more likely that human-driven cars will become outlawed and infrastructure modified to accommodate fully-autonomous. It's not what I personally would want, as I simply enjoy driving cars and motorcycles, but it's what I think will eventually happen.
Self driving cars will happen but they will need a bit of help from their environment, just as human drivers need stop signs, light signals etc.<p>I can see urban streets and freeways being first to succumb to self driving. Remote, lightly traveled roads will take a long time ie decades before self driving is safe there.<p>The real conundrum of self driving is that if it becomes capable for 99.9% of situations people find when things go really bad, heavy snow storm, earthquake, floods, forest fires etc drivers will have lost their touch for driving just when they need it most and the self driving abandons them.
Self driving cars can react on what is happening around them (if sensor suite will catch that information) but are unable to predict what is happening around them, because they don't understand situation they are in.
I mean, what’s wrong with trolley cars and light rail? There’s your self driving car. I don’t think automated transportation is a technology problem, it’s more a political problem. Nobody wants to put money towards a system that is for use by the common public.<p>Think about this: trolleys and light rail don’t require batteries, they are more efficient, the maintenance is way lower, they reduce traffic, what’s not to like? And it would be <i>trivial</i> to make them self-driving. But it’s politically unthinkable.
It's time to admit this is a game: journalism plays with society by projecting dream-like nonsense on the technology industry. It's time to admit we have large institutionalized portions of society whose purpose is basically immature nonsense, such as pushing idolization of the entire landscape of fashion and celebrity.
Just use trains and bicycles. We've had the answer for 100 years.<p>I live where driving is a requirement. Self driving cars will not handle rural roads for a LONG time. And I really don't want something the size of a Cybertruck hurtling along the roads around where I live without someone actually doing some thinking.
I have always been skeptical of FSD because of liability. The system we have today distributes liability to the driver in almost all circumstances – 94% to 96%, according to one quick statistic. It is difficult to imagine this liability being redistributed to a handful (or even 1 or 2) auto manufacturers who remove the driver from the equation.<p>In other words, I am not sure that auto manufacturers can afford the liability assuming their system reaches a state in which it is 'safer' than a human driver under any condition. The cost of proving that in courts across the world may not be economically feasible.
Ah yes, the scam companies that care more about raising vc money than solving the actual problem obviously would never make it happen.<p>Then there's comma.ai that's the actual leader in the space having production units you can buy and fit into your car right now.<p>Something the "experts" that seem to be expert only at reading company financial numbers seem to have missed.
fsd beta looking cool with output of what it sees
<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco</a>
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/27/self-driving-cars-arent-going-to-happen/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunc...</a>
> Argo AI was considered a leader with solid technological fundamentals by most experts in the field, so its shuttering is a strong signal not to be ignored.<p>I thought Cruise was the leader, with Waymo next.