from Hacker News

Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

by dhruvkaran on 8/27/13, 6:23 PM with 81 comments

• by mason240 on 8/27/13, 7:06 PM

  "Work is already underway in Japan to build a dedicated autonomous driving proving ground, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2014. Featuring real townscapes - masonry not mock-ups - it will be used to push vehicle testing beyond the limits possible on public roads to ensure the technology is safe."

  Meanwhile Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets with their autonomous car.

• by wayne_h on 8/27/13, 6:44 PM

  Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars?

  The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

• by hardtke on 8/27/13, 7:19 PM

  I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.

• by hrvbr on 8/27/13, 7:14 PM

  Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation.

  I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms, especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers. This would be a huge progress for humanity.

• by Apocryphon on 8/27/13, 7:17 PM

  I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?) How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?

• by tbrownaw on 8/27/13, 6:50 PM

  What is "within two vehicle generations"?

• by runako on 8/27/13, 7:03 PM

  From no working prototype to multiple commercially available vehicles in 7 years. Yeah, okay.

  I hate to be that guy, but it took ~3 years to get the Leaf to production. And the Leaf uses well-known technology that had been shipped by other vendors a decade earlier. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a very long reach.

• by ebbv on 8/27/13, 6:55 PM

  No thank you.

  I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment.

  But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be human error.

  Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true. But my response to that is:

  1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways.

  2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car, the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car.

  3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones.

  I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate the problem, not improve it.

• by johansch on 8/27/13, 7:09 PM

  Why doesn't Google just buy Tesla already?