[vardump]

Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces.

Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.

[renewiltord]

Well, universality is not necessarily a useful end goal. Lyft is a successful company that doesn't operate even in Canada. A solution that works only in coastal California may well be sufficient.

Lots of things come to the Bay Area and Los Angeles before anywhere else. Partly that's because coastal California is an innovation hotbed. Partly because it's a single large rich market. Since one of these that succeeds entirely in the safe parts of California would be an incredible game-changer on its own (door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!), it's still amazingly exciting.

And while lots of Americans view many things as unchangeable, that's not the case in many other places. In China, if you were to talk to public planners about how autonomous vehicles will handle detours, they'll just say, "Oh, we'll use transmitters to tell you. We can sign the transmitters so you know they're trustworthy." Everything about the universe is mutable.

Yep, no ice road truckers will be autonomous in the next year, and that's okay.

[loufe]

Not to take away from your point but Lyft does operate in Canada, now.

[wutbrodo]

> door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!),

What does spikable mean here?

[renewiltord]

Sorry, couldn't think of a good word. Rapid increase in supply to meet demand. Because the units are smaller they are more fluid. Because they are autonomous storage doesn't have to be centralized and they aren't subject to human scheduling constraints.

[wutbrodo]

Ah gotcha, thanks for clarifying.

[beams_of_light]

Road infrastructure is going to change, by necessity. It seems like self-driving technology is as good as it can be, given current circumstances. There's no way to get self-driving cars to airplane safety numbers without on/near road devices/reflectors/computer-readable signage/etc, edge compute, better pedestrian understanding of what the cars are seeing and are capable of reacting to, and probably much more. It's time to give it the infrastructural boost it needs to become an everyday reality. We need to put sensors in the road when they're re-paved, transmitters in signs with solar chargers when they're replaced, LIDAR reflectors on the road sides and in medians, start offering clothing/accessories with transmitters or reflectors that clearly identify people as pedestrians...

[rrdharan]

Is the reason all of this makes more sense than just building tracks and trains just the fact that there’s an evolutionary path to get there with incremental releases along the way?

Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?

[chriswphoto]

I used to believe that self driving cars were a panacea for mobility. Then I moved to Boston, sold my car, bought a bike and realized that in dense urban cities, cars are the enemy, doesn’t matter if the are Electric and autonomous. They generally don’t fit in cities. Cities should be built for people not for single occupancy high speed, deadly cars.

[idavidrein]

well the ideal cheap ride-sharing AV world would have much more spread out cities, no?

[beams_of_light]

IMO, the reason mass transit isn't popular in moderately populated areas (think population per sq mi/km) is that it's too inconvenient. In these places, it's much, much quicker to hop in your car and get where you're going than to try to use the public transportation system, which is a pretty sparse set of bus routes in most places.

I'm a firm believer in Elon Musk's vision for public transit, wherein you may own an autonomous vehicle that is hired out for rides by others via something like Lyft. If you choose to own a car, it'll sit at your house when you choose, but can go out and make you money while you have nowhere to go. At this point, you can imagine that there are detractors from this idea - namely those who would profit from owning all the vehicles, those who manufacture traditional vehicles, and the fossil fuel industry, to name a few. Those people are the ones who will keep us in a state of limbo as long as possible from a legal and infrastructural standpoint. We have to decide that this future is better than the one we're in. It'll have a vast impact on pollution, anthropological contributions to climate change, and human equality and prosperity.

All we have to do is start demanding progress and stop accepting mediocrity.

[chx]

As far as I know "navigating a busy parking lot while raining" is a problem the autonomous car industry does not even have an idea how to solve.

[BubRoss]

In a parking lot the car would be starting from a position it can stay in, so requiring a person to intervene is one option. Also busy parking lots frequently don't stay busy forever and heavy rain doesn't last forever either.

A look at the local weather could see where a storm is and give an estimate of when it will be able to automate leaving and require a person otherwise. I think there are pragmatic answers to extreme situations.

[ghaff]

As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. It can also be hard to predict weather in much of the US. And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option.

Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

[anchpop]

> As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi.

You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad).

> Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

I and many other Americans live in places that don't have any public transit, so a few robocars that only worked during the day would be a huge improvement.

[ghaff]

Wait. So you're now going to just dump me at the side of the road if it starts raining?

I appreciate the general point that autonomous driving that only works under some conditions would be useful. But I think it's more along the lines of handling highway driving under most circumstances which already pre-supposes a licensed sober driver that can take over control with a minute or two notice.

I already have an option for local driving. It's called taxis/Uber/Lyft and robo versions won't be all that much cheaper.

[dev_tty01]

Hmm. If I'm a city administrator, I'm not going to license fair weather robo-taxis to operate in the city. They would drive out many other taxis and then people can't get home when the weather turns bad. Anything else is just bad resource management.

[BubRoss]

This person said navigating automatically out of a crowded parking lot in the rain. You shifted this to just driving in the rain.

[BubRoss]

If it was a robo taxi and not your own car, you could go take a different robo taxi.

Also, predicting the weather a week out isn't the same as giving an ETA when you can see a map of the storm happening live. That is a completely separate scenario.

[stale2002]

> And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option.

yes you do. There is a whole lot of driving that happens in perfect conditions.

Think "Truck driving, on long highways".

Replacing half of all truck drivers is still a trillion dollar industry.

And for your robo taxi situation, you can simply only allow the robotaxis to run half of the time.

Human drivers, can simply get in their cars, and be paid to drive, when it is likely to be unsafe driving conditions. IE, surge driving/pricing.

But there absolutely would be days/times/places where the robo taxi would be perfectly safe. And these days/times/places could be predicted easily, ahead of time.

IE, in arizona, I am sure that it is safe most of the time, and there would not be any issues with snow.

[Talanes]

Where are you going to get all these truck drivers and taxi drivers to work on call when the robots can't?

[ghaff]

>IE, in arizona, I am sure that it is safe most of the time, and there would not be any issues with snow.

Parts of Arizona.

[stale2002]

> Parts of Arizona.

Sure. Thats my point. And that is still very valuable.

[chrisseaton]

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible.

But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

[vardump]

Humans can and regularly do so pretty safely.

Ask Canadians, Swedes or any other people living in a location with long winters.

[draugadrotten]

I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me. As a human, I knew I could drive safely where the bus had been driving seconds ago. A self-driving car would have... tell me.

[rossjudson]

Pulled over, like you should have done.

I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.

It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done driving a car.

[soared]

You can’t pull over in that situation unless you want to get your car stuck, be stuck in the cold all night, and potentially rear ended.

[RandomBacon]

Are you sure those two red lights can see and know where they are going?

[chrisseaton]

> I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me.

Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.

[ghaff]

Pulling over in a snowstorm to the side of the highway can be pretty dangerous too. Once you're in that situation there aren't necessarily great alternatives.

[dev_tty01]

Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.

[chrisseaton]

Why is any traffic moving in conditions this bad? Just stop.

[stale2002]

How about "Dont use the self driving mode during a snowstorm. Make the human drive".

That sounds like it solves the situation nicely.

[ghaff]

That definitely works. It just means that if there is a possibility of a snowstorm or other circumstance that self-driving doesn't work, you now require a driver who can take over control. Which is fine. It just eliminates the robo-taxi use case of self-driving which is what a lot of people seem to care about.

[Jasper_]

I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered roads just fine.

[chrisseaton]

People in San Francisco struggle to drive in the rain let alone the snow.

[rootusrootus]

Ha, we joke about that in Oregon, too, and it rains quite a lot here. And after a long, rainy winter, it gets a little nuts for a few days when the sun comes out again, because it seems like everyone has forgotten how to drive on sunny days.

[yellowapple]

Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same standard.

[chrisseaton]

> Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be useful.

[gambiting]

Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine.

[chrisseaton]

> Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine.

I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.

[gambiting]

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved.

As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.

[candu]

Exactly.

If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.

[travisporter]

Unfortunately public transit is considered an epithet where I live because it brings crime from the city into my "idyllic crime free" suburb just 10 miles away from city center (no joke). I hate driving and have put my eggs into a self-driving (hopefully super low emissions) taxi service to come online.

[vladislav]

They're probably not even detecting the lane markings or road surfaces as they're baked into the HD map.

[Animats]

Yes. As they're leaving the Broadway tunnel, the map shows crosswalks and lane markings on the side that belong to a street above the tunnel.

[stale2002]

> Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces.

Ok... What if I were to tell you that there is a solution to this?

The solution to this, is simply "dont drive in those conditions".

A self driving car can't get in a wreck that is caused by snowy roads, if it simply doesn't drive in the snow.

Self driving, during perfect conditions is still extremely valuable, because it turns out that there is a whole lot of driving that is in perfect conditions.

So, you would do things like prevent the taxis from running, if there is any chance of rain at all. I am sure that there are lots of places where rain is not an issue, and rain could be predicted ahead of time. Not everywhere. But still in many places.

[baby]

> Good lane markings

did you see that 5 lane intersection going over a tram lane? I myself had no idea where I would have driven there.

[spacehome]

I’m pretty sure I can’t meet that standard.

[vardump]

Actually I'm sure you'd do just fine. Humans can just pretty effortlessly deduce required information out of numerous clues.

[taneq]

You lot are always so fixated on snow. Give it a decade or two and with global warming, the environment might meet us halfway on that one.

[advaita]

Doesnt climate change mean a higher probability of extreme events, and hence higher chances of severe winter storms/blizzard/snow?

I am out of my depth in terms of the topic we are discussing so I might be quite wrong.