from Hacker News

Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

by stopads on 1/18/20, 5:44 PM with 897 comments

by colordrops on 1/18/20, 9:00 PM
I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will make it easier for the cars. Eventually non-self-driving cars will not be allowed on the road, and will be a niche hobby on race tracks.
by wwweston on 1/18/20, 8:00 PM
Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is.
Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving.
If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there.
Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems solved before we start reaping the benefits.
by baybal2 on 1/18/20, 8:35 PM
I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after hearing this.
People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is.
And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous.
The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like trying to make people using horses for transport in 21st century, by trying to make a horse than if better than a car.
by Booktrope on 1/18/20, 8:36 PM
Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession. That, of course, would mean far less cars. So don't expect a traditional car manufacturer to lead the way.
This is incidentally one reason for Tesla's huge market value. The company actually has a plan to transition from individual ownership to fleet, so when this happens it will be prepared to deal with a new manufacturing reality.
Just try to imagine VW without all those ads to sell a positive self image because you drive a sexy cool car they make.
by jasonhansel on 1/19/20, 2:56 AM
I think it's pretty clear that mass transit and (e-)bikes--not cars--should become the primary modes of transportation, at least in urban areas, if for no other reason than that they're inherently more sustainable. I would be concerned that self-driving cars will only arrive after Peak Automobile has already come and gone.
by robbrown451 on 1/18/20, 7:26 PM
This strikes me as weird:
> "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen."
First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously?
But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at least in the near term. To think we'd just give up on it seems absurd.
by akrymski on 1/18/20, 11:04 PM
Thank God! Self driving cars are not a solution to the world's problems. Better public transport is. Why can't we have self driving buses that replace trams? The level of AI needed for that is already there. As the population of major cities grows, we can't expect everyone riding around in their own car. Public transport is better for citizens and the environment. We need to be reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and ideally not covering the planet with asphalt altogether. Trams in cities like Amsterdam and the London underground are much more efficient modes of transportation than self driving cars will ever be.
by odnes on 1/18/20, 11:57 PM
I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la consciousness).
Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches (Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things.
Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be tempering his expectations.
That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is. But I think that solving driving (being able to drive any situation a human can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.
by sschueller on 1/18/20, 9:18 PM
I find it extremely unethical for Tesla to sell its customers a $6000 option to "Enable full self driving mode" some time in the future. Does anyone really think that this will happen before their car is totaled/broken/old/end of life (10-15 years)?
by listenallyall on 1/18/20, 7:51 PM
Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night, fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the conditions.
We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without pilots. Or even getting them from runway to gate without humans. Nor is anyone claiming that pilot-less planes are coming soon.
by rgbrenner on 1/18/20, 7:48 PM
Since when has VW been at the forefront of self driving cars? Is there a reason their insight would be especially accurate?
This just reflects VWs ideas to accomplish the goal... ie: they have none.
Let me know when Google says it's not possible.
by crusso on 1/18/20, 7:37 PM
Despite that, he's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW to receive the technology.
He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have a level 4 autonomous vehicle?
This article makes no sense.
Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the technology that we produce. If you picked some cutting-edge technology that isn't key to our market-share yet, he'd have even less of a clue.
by KKKKkkkk1 on 1/19/20, 12:29 AM
Mr. Hitzinger is saying that L5 cars will never happen. Most people feel that L5 is equivalent to artificial general intelligence, and it's pretty much a given that it may never happen. But now that Waymo and Cruise and everyone else have failed to hit their self-imposed milestones, the more pressing question to ask is whether geo-fenced only-in-good-weather autonomy will ever happen.
by emmelaich on 1/19/20, 1:52 AM
Meta: I dislike the use of "admit" in the title and story.
Why are "admit", "confess", "announce", "reveal" etc used instead of the usually more accurate "says"?
(rhetorical question)
by LastZactionHero on 1/19/20, 12:12 AM
never? What does that even mean? We've only been driving cars like 100 years. Only had computers for 60, and decent portable ones for 20. Self-driving literally just became remotely possible, and you're telling me never?
This is an off-the-cuff remark turned into a clickbait headline for a fairly bland article.
by waynecochran on 1/18/20, 8:05 PM
The technology is not the only problem. The lawyers that are defending every dead body, and there will be dead bodies, that will sink self-driving cars. Even if everyone is 95% safer with self-driving cars, those that are killed by a self-driving car (in combo with a public that is easily swayed with non-objective arguments) will be hard to dismiss.
by yalogin on 1/19/20, 1:18 AM
Yeah I am on the side of the skeptics. We cannot do AI in a fully controlled environment properly. What hope do we have to master a use case where the nature, elements in the physical world, vandals are all throwing all kinds of wrenches into the mix. The vision or dream of a level 5 self driving car is something I will only believe once I see.
by aplummer on 1/18/20, 7:28 PM
To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.
by jeromebaek on 1/19/20, 10:13 PM
Think about it. Soft AI that assists the driver (automatic turning, cruise control, automatic brakes) is now mainstream. Why is it that full self-driving cars are categorically different? Because it requires full faith in the machine. When assistive technology goes wrong, the driver can correct it and -- get this -- the reason the driver can correct it fast enough is precisely because the driver doesn't fully trust the technology. the driver is on alert, always, because they know the technology is not meant to be trusted fully. now a full self-driving car asks the driver to trust it fully. so the "driver" can take a nap, read a book, whatever. if the driver needs to be on alert, it's by definition not a fully self-driving car. and i dont think we will get there, ever.
by MarkMc on 1/19/20, 1:01 AM
Lots of people are arguing about 'when full self-driving cars will happen' without giving a precise definition (and therefore without having to think too hard about the problem).
The article describes Level 5 as 'full computer control of the vehicle with zero limitations' but what exactly does that mean?
(a) Does it mean a vehicle available for sale to the general public that can drive at night when it is snowing on a new road that has not first been mapped by a human?
or
(b) Does it mean that there is at least 1 city of a million residents where at least 50% of vehicle journeys did not require any occupant to have a driver's licence?
To me (and Volkswagen) it's far more useful to forecast when the second criteria will be met than the first.
by anonytrary on 1/19/20, 1:47 AM
They "admit"? It's not like the recent "full self-driving car by 2025" craze fooled anyone who knew even a modicum about the current state-of-the-art in ML applied to self-driving cars. I remember doing a back-of-the-napkin on this a couple years ago. It would take something like 7 nines of accuracy across all types of driving tasks for us to remove the need for a fallback human behind the wheel. AFAIK we don't even have 7 nines of accuracy for highway driving yet, so this is clearly a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Maybe ask again in 2070.
by speedplane on 1/19/20, 10:08 AM
To build a true self-driving car, as a prerequisite, you'll need a true general AI. Imagine a complex construction site in an intersection with police navigating traffic. The AI driver will need to understand the officer's visual and audible cues and act accordingly. That level of sophistication requires something far more advanced than anything we're seeing today.
by dlkf on 1/19/20, 10:11 AM
The headline is a masterclass in weasel words.
1. First, it begs the question. By saying "X admits Y" we are assuming that Y is true. This is very different than writing "X says Y", or "X believes Y" etc etc
2. Then, they carefully chose Y to include the word "may" so that they can claim it is true regardless of its content. As long as the rest of Y isn't literally a tautology, you're good to go. "A teacup may be orbiting Jupiter" etc etc
3. But step 2 is sneaky. The way that the word "may" makes the overall statement true is different than how it functions in the quoted speaker's sentence. In his sentence, he means like "there is a good chance it will never happen." When they use "may" to make Y true, it is invoked in a much weaker sense.
Basically they are reusing the word "may" in two different sentences to achieve a misleading headline. They obviously have skin in the game and I don't expect this to be a fair article.
by antirez on 1/18/20, 10:12 PM
It was quite clear to many of us that autonomous driving at a certain level is a very hard goal to reach, but it may happen in the long run. However what is incredible is that actually a form of AD, that is public transportation, is available for centuries yet in many places in the world this option is ignored. Guess why? The key is in the "public" part.
by temporaryvector on 1/18/20, 8:05 PM
To a certain extent I agree. I had already written at length in another post about this topic, but my opinion is that what we think of as a "car" right now will never be fully autonomous.
I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication, something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have priority access so they always have one available.
The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode.
I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an accident, etc.).
On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to, although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off, and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by publications focused on those audiences.
by jnurmine on 1/19/20, 9:19 AM
SAE level 5 is unlikely to happen since the autonomous cases will be developed and optimized for the common case of a semi-clear weather mostly urban environment with plenty of signs and full mobile and GNSS coverage. The odd cases will simply not be a priority.
Can one take an "autonomous car" up a barely visible car wide path (not a real road) which squiggles through a forest (up to a cottage)?
Can one make an autonomous car understand a free-form textual sign when there's a roadwork or accident?
Drive in a place without marked roads?
There are plenty of edge cases and difficult situations.
Hitzinger says that level 4 might be achievable. I agree, it is conceivable that some day a lane of a motorway could get reserved for semi-autonomous vehicles; those vehicles can communicate with each other and are allowed to drive much faster (say, 250 km/h) since it's mostly a straight way, computers have faster reaction times especially given early warnings from cars ahead in the chain and so on.
by hinkley on 1/18/20, 7:33 PM
In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade.
If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate.
Solve a simpler problem, if you can.
by shrubble on 1/18/20, 7:34 PM
If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars.
However that would mean that everyone would have access to it.
The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
by rhizome on 1/19/20, 1:34 AM
Computer models of reality will always be simulacra, and the gap between reality and the model is where death and failure in general reside. "A map is not the territory," explains that computer models are always a perception, and while a technology may even be able to switch between myriad of these "perceptions", the conclusions derived will themselves be limited to a simulation of reality, no matter what.
Sure, technological advances will boost the vision resolution or interpretive rigor to insane levels (compared to present day), and this will be used to acquire increased confidence from the public, but is that enough for you to sit your child in the street and trust the driverless car to steer around it? This is the question I would ask of any proponent of any model-interpreting public technology.
by martythemaniak on 1/18/20, 10:21 PM
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Level 5 = human = 100% of drivers. I honestly don't think that's the case at all. If I am being charitable, I'd say half of drivers would meet the implicit level 5 criteria discussed in these threads.
For example, there's a snowstorm out here today. Unless they really need to, people aren't going out displayed their incredible skill at navigating through snowsquals with centimeters of snow on the ground. They just stay home.
What will determine the success of self driving cars is not philosophical musings but their usefulness in day to day life. And if you can spend 10k on a system that'll work most of the time, but refuse to go out in snow squeals, it'll sell very well. I'd buy it.
by nojvek on 1/19/20, 2:54 PM
It’s really hard to predict. I have sat in a Tesla, have a comma ai kit, seen tons of videos of Cruise, Zoox, Waymo, Voyage Taxis.
The space is incrementally improving. Lots of new ideas.
I’m very bullish on systems that improve human driving and slowly move to more and more autonomy than “replace humans”
Anyone claiming full self driving is around the corner is prolly lying. I have no idea when it will be here. The edge cases are enormous.
But self driving on selected city routes and highways in good weather is here.
I would say Highway lane following and distance keeping is already better than human.
We aren’t great at holding monotonous focus. Machines on the other hand excel at that. We do excel at edge cases though. Marrying the two seems like a good bet.
by aetherspawn on 1/19/20, 1:54 AM
I don’t think full self-driving will happen any more than full self-flying planes exist, however, I do think that lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and auto merge/lane shift, park assist, emergency auto braking and adaptive cruise control should become mandatory in every car in the next 5 years. This is the same way that stability control is mandatory in nearly every country.
When a work colleague drove home completely wasted and his Mazda CR-V nearly drove itself, you could not tell that his driver input was erroneous. Actually, it felt very safe. It dawned on me that these systems will mitigate a great deal of preventable accidents due to human stupidity.
by dboreham on 1/18/20, 7:21 PM
Not any exec but "The CEO of Volkswagen's autonomous driving division".
by holoduke on 1/18/20, 10:53 PM
I believe the first fully automated transport system will go via the air. Air is so much easier to control. The complexity of automating vehicles in a very chaotic setting (land) exceeds that of building drones capable of flying from a to b. It will start with freight transport and slowly as reliability increases you get human transport via drones as well. Fully automated land transport is only possible when the system is clean and predictable. That means closed roads are open to only the entities which are part of the automation. Very difficult to establish.
by ecpottinger on 1/18/20, 7:27 PM
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws has something to say here.
by ec109685 on 1/18/20, 9:05 PM
Yes, that is why trying to ship a level 5 car for the general public’s use is folly. There are .001 situations that will take 1000x the effort to automate, so automating almost all is a better approach.
by stretchwithme on 1/19/20, 1:06 AM
It will happen. When it will happen is impossible to predict.
But I am pretty sure it will happen within 20 years. 5 years? Unlikely.
In any case, it will require much better testing than just letting it learn on the street. A vehicle should be able to deal with a snow covered road in the dark going down a hill with babies crawling across the road.
And EMP-induced total electrical failure. No sense in a million people getting injured at once, should that ever happen. Emergency brakes should quickly engage in a predictable way when power is lost.
by trasneoir on 1/20/20, 9:49 AM
"[Engineers] tend to overestimate what can be done in the short-term and underestimate what will be done in the long-term."
I'd expect level 5 autonomy to be slow, because level 4 delivers 80% of the benefits for 20% of the cost.
BUT "never" seems crazy unless you've got a very pessimistic outlook on humanity's medium-term future. Other than extinction or the collapse of civilization, what could cause it to "never" happen?
by linuxhansl on 1/18/20, 10:44 PM
Hah. I've been saying that for a while, much to the amusement of some of my friends and coworkers. Some of them claim that their kids will never need to learn how to drive. Maybe I'll have the last laugh, although I wish I'd be wrong about this.
I hope that by the time I'm too old to drive - a few decades from now - self-driving are available, but I'm not betting on it.
by dyeje on 1/18/20, 8:45 PM
It's kinda funny that we're investing so much into a potentially impossible technology just to avoid building public transport.
by rmason on 1/18/20, 10:51 PM
Almost all the self-driving programs use rules based solutions literally a big if this do that. Only one, comma.ai, uses artificial intelligence.
There's video on YouTube from three years ago with George Hotz predicting that Level 4 or 5 would never be reached without artificial intelligence. It made sense to me then and it still does today.
by rhacker on 1/19/20, 5:03 PM
The title is awful..
Volkswagon can speak for its own company. It can't speak for the industry. If it were to speak for the industry the word admit can't be used. It would be a different word, like "believe".
Volkswagon can certainly admit that "they" won't have full self driving capability, but it can't "admit" that for other people.
by oblib on 1/19/20, 5:08 PM
Until we have roads designed to fully participate in assisting self-driving cars, and cars that communicate with each other, we'll have serious issues that will make it unsafe, and thus impractical.
The cost to upgrade roads appears to be a significant hurdle. A google search says:
"There are approximately 4,071,000 miles (6,552,000 km) of roads in the United States, 2,678,000 miles (4,310,000 km) paved and 1,394,000 miles (2,243,000 km) unpaved."
And there's this:
>> einrealist 18 hours ago [-]
>> I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology.
That's even more difficult to address.
We have to evaluate the cost/benefit of implementing this once we get the tech to the point of near total awareness of real world conditions. It might make sense to implement it on major highways, but probably not on rural roads and neighborhood streets because it's not something we can skimp on.
To make it cost effective the roadway tech has to be for the most part "dumb". We cannot rely on "smart" tech that requires complex communication systems or dumb tech that's easy to hack, like lines painted on the road or stop signs and traffic lights that AR can "see".
I think we'd be better off working on implementing assistive safety technologies for automobiles and mass transportation infrastructure like high speed railways.
by Causality1 on 1/18/20, 8:40 PM
After Elon Musk so helpfully pointed out that once cars are self-driving there is absolutely no reason for companies to sell them to us, I have to say I hope it never happens. Why would a company sell me a car for $30,000 when it can add it to a self-driving taxi fleet and generate $300,000 in revenue over the lifetime of the car?
by acolumb on 1/19/20, 4:32 PM
I do think that full self-driving cars will exist (meaning that you can put in the GPS coordinates of a location and it will drive itself there.)
What won't happen is cars without the ability to have a human take over. There are too many fringe cases to allow cars without steering wheels.
by joshuaheard on 1/18/20, 9:37 PM
I don't understand why they want to make them fully autonomous. Even human drivers must stay inside the lanes. Why can't they make a semi-autonomous car that operates automatically with some sort of electronic lane marker, and have drive by wire with a human driver for off-road?
by je42 on 1/19/20, 9:56 AM
Wow. A CEO without a vision. A CEO should be pushing for boundaries.
I were a VW engineer, why would I continue working in the autonomous driving division, if my CEO says the team would never succeed in the end game ?
I'd rather work in a company where the leadership is actually leading instead putting on the brakes.
by 8bitsrule on 1/18/20, 8:56 PM
Building intelligence into a path for vehicles to follow is probably an easier and less expensive option.
by wavegeek on 1/18/20, 11:31 PM
The trough of disillusion has arrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
The big challenge for self driving cars is that they are held to a standard of perfection. No human driver can meet that standard either, but they are exempted due to incumbency bias.
The benefits of self driving cars are so phenomenally huge that if they are possible they will happen. Apart from the costs of paying people to drive, there are the time benefits of not wasting time driving cars - is there anything more boring and tedious? - and the fact many people, the young, the old, those with poor eyesight cannot drive.
I don't see any evidence it is not possible within 10-20 years. Cars will get smarter and easier to drive and the final step will not seem large. For the edge cases, there is always the possibility of having the vehicle temporarily being taken over by someone remote. Remote driving is already done in some mines.
by classified on 1/22/20, 1:49 PM
Lo and behold, there still exist actual engineers that recognize the "AI" bullshit propaganda for what it is. Good that there are still engineers whose job description does not include the dissemination of fashionable lies.
by hownottowrite on 1/18/20, 8:00 PM
Clickbait.
This is definitely not consistent with statements Alex has made in the past. Seems like more of an off the cuff remark a German engineer would make while confident that the fully realized result is right around the corner.
by peterwwillis on 1/18/20, 10:09 PM
Put the cars on rails, focus on the safety and switching systems. We don't need full AI, we just need to not have an individual human be solely responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times.
by hotz on 1/19/20, 10:08 AM
I predict it would take a good few centuries for the entire planet to only consist of self driving vehicles. I doubt we'd have a single country in our lifetime solely using self driving vehicles.
by owens99 on 1/18/20, 9:23 PM
It’s not a coincidence this guy works at a big corporation like Volkswagen and holds the opinion he does.
If you want to know about the future, don’t ask the incumbents. They will only tell you about the status quo.
by keanzu on 1/19/20, 12:39 AM
Incorrect use of the word admit
admit (v): confess to be true or to be the case.
Correct use in a sentence: "VW admits guilt and pays $4.3bn diesel emissions scandal penalty"
The word admit doesn't apply to predictions of the future.
by j45 on 1/18/20, 11:31 PM
30-60% automated driving will still be a big leap forward. Less attention used up while driving.
Compare driving somewhere vs taking a ride share and how much more prepared/present you are when you arrive.
by pcarolan on 1/18/20, 11:57 PM
All I want is to sleep or read on freeways. Solve that first and you’re competing with airlines and unlocking billions or more in value. Prioritize please.
by ogre_codes on 1/18/20, 7:50 PM
This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For $47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a $100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and nobody else is delivering on that.
[1] Yes, I know about the accidents
by sakopov on 1/19/20, 2:00 AM
Wouldn't self-driving cars require substantial changes in road infrastructure to support full autonomy?
by steveharman on 1/19/20, 8:25 AM
I am not one, nor have I ever knowingly met anyone who wants a a self-drving-car.
Electric, sure, bring it on.
by zhoujianfu on 1/19/20, 6:41 AM
I think they may never happen because full self-FLYING “cars” (vtol drones) will very likely happen first (it’s more a regulatory thing than a tech thing).
And flying would be superior to driving (faster, no traffic, no need to maintain infrastructure, etc..) so there’d be little incentive to continue even trying to get to level 5 for self-driving.
by yzh on 1/19/20, 2:54 AM
Experiences tell us, when someone makes a comment that something may __never__ happen, she probably is wrong. Our current transportation infra is designed for our current transportation tools. Full self-driving cars require a revolution of urban design and transportation infra. Long-term wise I think these will happen for sure.
by FpUser on 1/18/20, 9:23 PM
"Not only will the tech get as good as humans"
Let's suppose it will happen. Do you have a proof that such "good" tech does not develop a will to one day run over every human it can?
by m0zg on 1/18/20, 11:10 PM
Translation: we were caught with our pants down, we're now 10 years behind the leaders in the field, and when the tech actually matures in 10 years, it might undo Volkswagen.
by mbostleman on 1/18/20, 9:21 PM
I think that the amount of demand and market momentum that appears in the future is a better predictor if what will get done than an executive’s opinion based on current costs.
by mymythisisthis on 1/18/20, 7:45 PM
Why not drone cars, driven remotely?
by gok on 1/18/20, 8:39 PM
Well it certainly falls far outside of VW's tech wheelhouse. It would be really hard to cheat on autonomous driving tests.
by wojciii on 1/18/20, 8:35 PM
I would like to read the article, but an add covers 1/2 of the screen and can't be closed or moved.
by interdrift on 1/19/20, 2:01 PM
Never? lol this guy is joking
by edisonjoao on 1/22/20, 1:48 AM
just say tesla is farther ahead and anyone will not catch up
by OrgNet on 1/18/20, 11:52 PM
That's a nice way of saying that Elon Musk is full of it with his autopilot...
by RedComet on 1/18/20, 10:23 PM
Good.
by 0xff00ffee on 1/18/20, 8:54 PM
I was at an ML conference in 2017 and the keynote speaker asked the audience how many years they thought it would be until ADAS lvl 5 was on the market. The keynote had proudly proclaimed 5 years, and then audibly scoffed when about 90% of the hands went up for "20 or more years". There's such a disconnect between real engineers and cheerleaders.
by growlist on 1/19/20, 6:20 PM
Full self-driving cars would be cool, but even a good satnav + cruise control and lane assist gets you most of the way there. Apart from smaller roads, the car almost drives itself.
by zweep on 1/19/20, 4:08 AM
The only way we NEVER fully get self driving cars is if we nuke or bioterrorism advanced civilization off the planet in the next 50 years.
by jay_kyburz on 1/19/20, 4:49 AM
Climate Change will have a very significant impact on our entire society such that people don't need or want cars any more. We may turn to virtual environments and telecommuting for everything.
Updated to clarify message a little.
by euske on 1/19/20, 3:52 AM
I always thought that self-driving technology is one of the schemes devised by researchers for getting a long-term funding. It has an immense appeal to the public and sounds plausible enough to laypeople. We've seen a bunch of promises like this: nuclear fusion energy and earthquake forecasting. In Japan, trillions of yens were (and still are) spent to these two technologies but their practicalities are pretty much questionable. I think self-driving tech joined this.
by jakeogh on 1/18/20, 9:33 PM
A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424
by Geee on 1/18/20, 8:32 PM
Volkswagen doesn't develop self-driving tech. They use Mobileye's solution like everyone expect Tesla, Waymo and GM/Cruise. They aren't really in the position to make that argument.
Level 5 means that the car can drive autonomously > 95% of the time, and it will absolutely be possible. Level 4/5 distinction doesn't really make any sense once the autonomy gets beyond certain percentage. It doesn't mean that it's level 4 until it hits 100% (which is impossible).
Level 5 car is designed to drive in all conditions, but there are always statistically unlikely corner cases or situations that require high-level decision making, which the car can't handle by itself. A single driver may never hit such case, and for them the experience is full self-driving.
by axguscbklp on 1/19/20, 1:23 AM
Well yeah, of course. Full self-driving probably requires artificial general intelligence and it is quite possible that humans will never develop artificial general intelligence. The real surprising thing, for me, is how many otherwise intelligent people bought into full self-driving hype.
It's likely that if humans ever developed the sort of AI necessary for full self-driving, this AI technology would radically transform the world. Using it for cars would be one of the least important applications.