[teebot]

I don't know if any amount of data collection and model refinement will allow self driving in ALL situations. We always see self driving demos in California on very large roads, I'd like to see one in a small crowded street of Napoli or on a crossroad in Ho-Chi Minh.

[Diederich]

> very large roads

I've seen quite a few Google self driving cars on Castro in Mountain View. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4082/4939372588_47979bceec_z....

That picture doesn't do it justice during the most busy hours of the evening, where there's tons of people crossing and bicycles flying about in every direction.

Given that, I've never seen a crowded street in Napoli or a crossroad in Ho-Chi Minh, but I can imagine they are a completely different level of complex all together.

As noted elsewhere, the announcement was that the necessary hardware will now ship standard. Musk has said elsewhere that the software is many times harder than the hardware.

[buro9]

> Given that, I've never seen a crowded street in Napoli

My three tests for self-driving cars would be:

1. Drive through Milan on a Saturday afternoon, from the outside of the city, and park on the opposite side of the centre of the city.

2. Drive through London during a weekday, similar thing... cross the centre and find a parking space and park.

3. Drive through Paris during a weekend, same deal.

Those three cities are the most stressful to drive through for various reasons.

With Milan it's speed and decisiveness, small spaces and tight navigation.

With London it's the mix of traffic with a high cycling % along with a good mix of motorbikes and heavy goods vehicles as well as a phenomenal number of pedestrians who will walk out at any moment.

With Paris it's the speed of the ring-road (and the challenge of handling variable speed traffic on and near it) as well as the tight spaces on the streets and the numbers of scooter riders.

I also like the diversity of traffic signals and signs across those cities.

When I see a self-driving car manage those cities I am going to be impressed. It will exercise so much of their systems to do any one of those.

PS: I like that they are all fashion capitals... it would be a good marketing campaign to throw in Tokyo and NYC and present an accessible and fashionable angle to a set of super complex technical achievements.

[wang_li]

Those all sound like more or less the same problem: traffic.

Why don't some of the teams impress me and try driving somewhere with black ice, strong crosswinds and blowing snow. If their systems can't drive in negative environmental conditions, they will be largely worthless in many locales.

[andegre]

I see this response a lot about autonomous vehicles won't work until they can handle the situations that you mentioned. That's not fair. Those are the ultimate worst/hardest situations for ANY driver, human or autonomous.

In my opinion, the fully autonomous vehicles shouldn't need to handle those situations. Leave that up to the human to navigate.

Fully autonomous should be able to handle the NORMAL day-to-day driving responsibilities. If you're going to require those situations that you mentioned, we'll never have fully autonomous vehicles.

NOTE: when I say fully-autonomous, the car will still have a steering wheel and someone sitting in the driver seat. The google car that had no steering wheel would never happen in the "real-world" only tightly controlled environments.

[throwaway7767]

For me, the entire reason for being excited about these developments is the hope that we'll reach fully autonomous ("level 5" autonomy) vehicles, as that will be game-changing. No more need for driving ed or licenses, mobility for younger, older and disabled people, cheap autonomous taxis, being able to take a car home after drinking, etc.

If we never see a car that can actually drive itself without human intervention, I will be severely disappointed. All that work and hype just for some driving assistance systems?

[wang_li]

>Those are the ultimate worst/hardest situations for ANY driver, human or autonomous.

They may be difficult conditions, but people drive in them all the time. Something like 30-40% of the US population drives in snow and wind for months at a time. They're not uncommon. What's the great utility of a car that can only perform its function in ideal circumstances, i.e. on a closed track.

[dismantlethesun]

I wouldn't consider it terrible to have a car that can only self-drive during the summer.

I'd compare it to having a convertible car---it has one lovely feature, that only really proves it worth during elusive weather conditions.

[akotulski]

> In my opinion, the fully autonomous vehicles shouldn't need to handle those situations. Leave that up to the human to navigate.

This will make driving in those conditions even more dangerous. If people start relying on self driving cars, their driving skills will deteriorate. If computer can't drive the car safely, rusty driver won't do better job.

[jobigoud]

I've experienced London and Paris but I would still swap one of them with a city in a less developed country for variety.

Say Dakar for example (2.5M people): no road signs, pedestrians on the highway, constant honking from every directions, more varied "vehicles" like horse carriage and "car rapides" (small buses).

[irishcoffee]

> 3. Drive through Paris during a weekend, same deal.

Having recently returned from Paris, I was completely flabbergasted by the driving patterns. It was surreal. I am excited about Tesla and this self-driving car, I really am. If it can in fact navigate around the city of Paris on a Saturday I'm not sure how I would react. Probably wouldn't believe it.

[IanCal]

I do rather wonder just how hard these situations really are for machines. Watching videos taken at the Arc de Triomphe actually leave me thinking the google car could possibly be fine already.

It knows where it is, it knows where it needs to go and they already have an "aggression" where they'll pull out a bit to signal to other drivers they're going.

The really complex part for us is that we can't easily keep track of all the things around us and have very slow reactions. The computer knows the distance of all things around it accurately and can respond in milliseconds and doesn't get flustered or angry. Or am I missing something, is there a lot of complex reasoning?

[buro9]

Visit Milan!

I ranked them in order of crazy. Milan is the most crazy of crazy. As are the motorways around Milan. I am pretty sure that the shared philosophy to not use the brake is that if they just go faster they can be ahead of any trouble about to occur.

[mvidal01]

I'd be impressed if a self-driving car could cross Ho Chi Minh City during M-F.

[celticninja]

to be fair on point 2 a human driver would have issues finding a legal, valid parking spot in London.

[0xffff2]

Dude, compared to streets in European cities, Castro is most definitely a "very large road". The lane widths anywhere in California are massive compared to the older roads in Europe.

[hjnilsson]

That is an hilarious example compared to streets in Europe. I'm interested how it would tackle this road for example: https://www.google.no/maps/@40.9956543,17.2208349,3a,75y,266...

[lucaspiller]

> a crowded street in Napoli

I'm in Rome, which isn't quite as bad, but yes compared to driving in the US it's completely different. Every day I have to deal with someone cutting me up, or doing something otherwise stupid. You need to drive quite aggressively here, and in a self-driving car I'd imagine the journey would take twice as long, as it would keep stopping to give way to avoid an accident - and drivers would definitely try to take advantage of that.

[doikor]

It will be a long time before Teslas can drive on dirt roads or roads covered in snow. But most daily driving happens on pavement either on the highway or in the city. Both of which it already handles quite well and will just get better.

[ZanyProgrammer]

Most daily driving happens where software engineers in the Bay Area live, you mean.

[raisedbyninjas]

80% of the US lives in an urban area as of 2010.

[ghaff]

Note the definition of urban area though: "To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."

Urban really means not clearly rural. But there are a lot of "urban areas" 10s of miles outside metropolitan areas that people would consider exurban with forests and homes on significant acreage.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

To clarify even more, Kansas is listed as having almost 80 Urban Areas in the 2010 census. I think many of the people in this thread would flatly classify those areas as rural.

[dagw]

The reason most people can handle driving on shitty dirt roads, in snow and other "uncommon" situations is because they've first logged thousands of hours of practice driving under more normal conditions. Remove that experience and routine and why would you expect them to have any idea what to do in those tricky situations where the AI fails on them?

[davidiach]

That's not the case. Children can learn how to drive in snow or dirt roads in a matter of hours. Learning to drive on public roads has more to do with learning the rules than learning to drive a car per se.

[ryanmarsh]

This. Lots of kids on farms learn to drive the farm truck off road as soon as their feet can touch the pedals while seeing over the steering wheel.

Any folks who grew up on a farm who can confirm?

[technofiend]

I didn't grow up on a farm, but my grandparents were from rural Arkansas and raised me in a small Texas town. I had plenty of opportunity to learn to drive cars on back roads and had my own dirt bikes and motorcycles by age nine. (Modern day helicopter parents would boggle at the freedom we kids had in the 70's). By the time I was twelve my grandmother retired and bought a 3.5 acre plot in rural Texas.

I wasn't allowed to fell the trees but I had to use a chainsaw and cut the branches off the felled trees and then section the denuded trees into small enough rounds they were suitable for busting into firewood with an axe. I was given the option to learn to drive my grandfather's stick shift Toyota pickup truck in order to move all the wood with that, or move it by hand. It was an easy decision.

[dagw]

Driving a tracktor with it's big nobbly wheels and low gear ratios along a dirt path is trivial compared to trying to coax your Honda with worn out tires up a icy hill or out of the mud. The two just don't compare.

[millettjon]

I learned to drive a small manual shift tractor at 7 and mowed a 4 acre lawn with lots of trees and bushes. Also snowmobile and motor boat.

[ghaff]

Learning the rules and developing situational awareness.

But, yes, until you're talking about more serious off-road/bad road (which is challenging in a completely different way), there's nothing especially hard about driving on a private dirt road.

[doikor]

I did my driving education during the summer and got my license. Got my first car during the middle of winter and just learned to drive in snow (we did have a 2 hour course on a slippery track as part of the driving education). It isn't really hard. Just have proper winter tires and don't go too fast.

Also driving the shitty back roads in Finland was a lot of fun in my old Honda Civic which didn't have power steering or ABS (let alone any kind of traction control and stabilization you have in newer cars). Driving a modern car with all the modern aids is very easy on dirt. On snow some of them can hinder you though (some automatic gearboxes just don't know what to do when none of the wheels have any traction) but for the most part it is very easy too if you have winter tires.

Driving is very easy. Too easy I think which causes people to drive way too fast for the situation quite often.

Main issue for driving on dirt roads/snow for automated cars I see is just seeing the road itself correctly not with controlling the car.

[pjscott]

I don't think you're wrong, but I predict that this will be a complete non-problem: by the time people's skills have atrophied significantly, self-driving car technology will have improved to the point where it won't matter anymore.

[wmeredith]

Honestly, I kind of want to drive in those situations. (I enjoy driving for the most part.) It's exactly on long stretches of highway or during an urban commute that want autopilot.

[rayiner]

I'd settle for a test drive in downtown DC where roads get shut down at random, one-say streets switch directions throughout the day, etc.

[Drdrdrq]

That's really more a navigational problem though?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Or anywhere in India:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM

Edit:

This video from a motorcyle gives a nice first-person perspective:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqOLehUdqkU

[Retric]

I don't think self driving cars need to work on say dirt roads to be useful. So, ALL situations is kind of misleading.

[redwood]

While I agree for roads with no other cars around, I think there are shortcuts that can be taken on roads where there are indeed other cars. If you think about what humans do an unknown conditions or abnormal conditions, they basically follow the car in front of them. Self-driving cars could follow the same paradigm

[HiroshiSan]

What happens when the car in front goes off a cliff on a twisty mountain road?

[phkahler]

>> What happens when the car in front goes off a cliff on a twisty mountain road?

Humans have been known to "follow" the car in front of them when its not appropriate. Being parked on the side of the freeway (especially on a curve) is one of the worst places to be. I recall hearing that people hit those parked cars quite often.

[HiroshiSan]

I was driving down a two way street, a car parked on the right was facing the wrong way, which made me think I was driving down a one way street. I saw a street light and had to use it to conclude I was in fact not on a one way street and that guy parked illegally.

Fun issues to think about.

[funkdobiest]

Yes, small cobblestone streets in Philly? I wonder how it handles other bad/rude drivers? In the video I saw it merging on to the freeway, but sometime you have to go over the speed limit to get in front of the car that is in the merge lane, will it be courteous to allow others to merge properly?

[clarkmoody]

The most important thing is if the car has the capability to detect when its effectiveness is lower than some threshold and smoothly hands control back to the human.

At the same time, it would beam this data back to HQ and to other cars, telling them to avoid the area of uncertainty.

[testrecord]

Here in Pittsburgh I see Uber's self driving cars every once in a while. We've some pretty crazy/small/hilly roads here.