Fully driverless cars could be months away

Fully driverless cars could be months away(arstechnica.com)

32 points by tnash 8 years ago | 13 comments

Zanni 8 years ago |

I've always been a big proponent of self-driving cars, but only because I imagined them as fully autonomous. A fleet of self-driving cars that rely on being backed by, essentially, a call center, sounds like a nightmare.

"When Waymo tested in Phoenix earlier this year, drivers sometimes had to take over the wheel to prevent the cars from holding up traffic because it took too long for humans in the command center to answer the cars’ requests for help."

Spivak 8 years ago | |

I guess the ability for a single person able to essentially 'drive' an entire fleet of cars is an improvement but it's not exactly the utopia I imagined.

vannevar 8 years ago |

Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than "months".

I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and the relative lack of pedestrians." (Emphasis mine.) Probably wise, but I'm sure they've already carefully calculated the risk/return vs pedestrian fatalities and are coming out ahead.

shallot_router 8 years ago | |

How could a driverless car ever truly be tamperproof, though? At some point we'll just have to accept it as a potential risk.

vannevar 8 years ago | | |

Good question. Tamperproof to me means they can't physically be spooked into doing things, as well as being secure from hacking. In theory, they just have to be as safe as human drivers, who manage to kill thousands of people each year. But as a practical matter, people will probably demand that they be much safer than humans. And it will take awhile to prove that out.

Someone 8 years ago |

…if ‘fully’ means ‘remotely operated, when the going gets tough’, such as, I guess, in bad weather (rare in Phoenix), or when there is a lot of traffic in one place, times when demand for taxis is highest.

ocdtrekkie 8 years ago |

This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly:

"Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product."

Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections:

"Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles."

So the TL;DR is that someone has been pressured to rush a product to release in an area with few safety regulations that could cause a lot of harm if it malfunctions.

nieksand 8 years ago | |

On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone:

http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf

nealabq 8 years ago | | |

Which invites the question: how long before human-driven cars are no longer allowed on the public roads?

I'm guessing year 2035.

na85 8 years ago | | |

So we should push out half-baked solutions?