>>> I've seen actual self-driving cars on actual roads.
No you haven't. You've seen supervised cars with pilots ready to take over when needed. No manufacturer yet has dared release a truly hand-and-eyes-free vehicle onto public roads.
Yes we do. They exist and are on the road. Just look at Tesla, Waymo, etc. These cars are able to be given a destination and they will drive themselves there. There are limitations, but that doesn't make them not self driving.
>>On the other hand, I feel that we will not have self driving cars for a really long time. Instead I believe we will have flying cars before that, who will solve the last mile problem.
We already have flying cars. They are called helicopters, and they are only available to various government agencies, large corps and the rich.
>> If we can have self-driving vehicles that are twice as safe as the average human, then they should be allowed on the streets.
Absolutely disagree with this approach. Self driving cars can't be merely slightly better than your average human - they need to be completely flawless. Just like an airplane autopilot can't be just a bit better than a human pilot, it needs to be 100% reliable.
> In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.
Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."
>It seems to me that self-driving cars can't be just as safe as the status quo, but have to be far far better. It's an unreasonable need, but human nature.
What would be the point of self-driving cars which were no safer than the status quo? That's just removing freedom from drivers and adding more complexity to infrastructure for no added benefit.
It's also exactly the narrative that proponents of self-driving cars have been driving (pun intended), self-driving cars would eliminate all, if not nearly all, accidents and fatalities.
> But must the standard for safety be higher than existing human drivers?
> We're net ahead already with auto-driving.
We don't really have enough data to know that. Really, we haven't even scratched the surface of figuring out if that is true. E.g. we have no idea what kind of emergent phenomena will arise when roads full of self-driving cars interact with each other.
History is littered with examples of engineers thinking they were 90% of the way there when they were actually like 10% of the way there.
> Just trying to hit enough milestones to get scooped up by somebody bigger.
A few years back, during the peak of the self-driving hype cycle, I considered doing exactly this. I think with a small team of sensor and Bayes filter experts, a car outfitted with expensive but off-the-shelf sensors, and about a year of dev time, you could get a car that self pilots 95% of the time on a wide suburban road in clear conditions. That extra 5%, other road types, and worse visibility conditions would each take you far more effort than that. But if your goal was just to show results fast and get acquired, it'd be easy to convince people you were almost there.
> A roadway can be MUCH smarter than a car.
If we're building specialized roadways, you can steer a vehicle with two strips of metal tied together by wooden boards. And it can travel twice as fast as a car while holding a hundred times the passengers. And it was invented 200 years ago.
>The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast.
A lot of danger of motor vehicles is when motorist choose to be dangerous though. If self-driving cars force motorists to follow speed limits and other traffic control devices, that will limit their uptake by quite a bit I think
> Noone thought self-driving cars would actually work.
Many people thought self driving WOULD work and that we'd be further along than we are now. We have vastly overestimated how far we'd be, and vastly underestimated how much time and effort it would actually take.
Self driving cars as they exist today are still mere toys compared to where the industry thought they were going to be. Look at Cruise, Waymo, Zoox, Uber's ex-self driving car division and others.
We are not anywhere near the self-driving autonomous cars we had hoped for.
>I'm convinced the self-driving cars are still a ways off as well.
Technology-wise, absolutely they are. The problem is that in actuality, they aren't. Companies will continue to push as hard as they can for as wide of a launch as they can, while governments (and any kind of sorely-needed oversight) will be ages behind.
> * I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast *
Like electric cars, or landing rockets, or even getting to the moon.
I don't think anyone honestly thought self driving cars would be easy or fast, but they're getting better every single month, and sooner or later they're going to be better than human drivers.
> We've already had fatal self driving crashes while the self driving system was in operation.
There is no true (level 5) self-driving system yet, only driver-assist where the system may hand back control at any moment. It's only true self-driving when there's no human in the car.
> Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse.
> I feel self driving cars need to do everything humans do and then 10x better to succeed
I hope that's not the case. Even if self-driving cars are only as good as the median human driver, a universal rollout of that tech would save countless lives. I really hope that when the first self-driving fatality happens the media or public fear doesn't blow it out of proportion.
-- so your doubts are anachronistic to say the least.
> Self-driving cars have way too many hurdles to overcome before they reach that point. I mean, Europe hasn't even moved over to automatic transmission yet.
> Instead, the consensus has become that we’re at least 10 years away from self-driving cars.
I'm going to assume the founder of a self-driving truck company knows what he's talking about.
But at the same time, I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that I sat in a car that drove itself all around San Francisco, dealing with a ton of edge cases.
Maybe we won't get to a 100% drive-anywhere-you-want-car in 10 years, but to be fair, a lot of humans aren't capable of driving a car anywhere either.
There are a lot of LA drivers who can't drive in snow, for example. I was one of them, until I got practice, and even then, I'm not that safe at it.
I think as long as we set the bar at "drive anywhere a car can go with 100% safety" we will never reach that bar.
But if the bar is at "drive as well as a human in most of the places humans drive", well, I've already seen a car that can do that.
I think it's more than an idea when we have self driving cars, they just don't meet our standards for safety yet so they aren't legal on public roads.
I mean, we had airplane flight in 1903. Good chance you'd die if you went up in one for the first decade. But we did have powered flight.
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