For adaptive cruise control (varies speed based on the car in-front of you), some will only take you so slow. Some auto makers can have the adaptive cruise control bring you to a full stop (for something like stop-and-go traffic).
Then a step up on the "drifting out of your lane" is one that will attempt to keep you in your lane (Acura and Mercedes have this, goes by the name "Lane Keep Assist"). [0]
I think both approaches are necessary, and complement each other well. An incremental approach will be the best way to clear out the psychological obstacles to self-driving cars, people need to gradually get used to the idea or else it will just be met with fear. and google's approach is already proving to be an effective tool to clear out regulatory obstacles and get the public excited.
And for a company like Tesla, who will sell their own cars, an incremental approach can be self-funding. Google has a ton of money to dump into research and is unlikely to bring a car to market themselves, so building a finished product will make it easier to find customers to license individual components of their tech to.
I was wondering what data they were gathering, and what they would do with it, and how it could be useful to other drivers:
What if you have a Tesla driver profile and you could see your driving habits ranked amongst all other tesla drivers (anonymously) to determine your rank as the most safe, efficient, slow, fast, whatever driver.
To see where you stack among others would have an effect on your driving. To see how your particular car performs against all others - its mileage vs age against others etc...
I think that there is a whole other layer that could be added onto the Tesla experience that other car manufacturers are far too old and less nimble to do appropriately.
As a blind person I get excited about this until I think of just how much the first models will cost. I guess I should save what would now be a car payment if I could drive in hopes that it will be enough of a down payment that I can afford one of these when they come out and pass all the regulatory hurdles.
I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done.
He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.
I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? If traffic is three times as heavy during rush-hour as it normally is then you would either have to have a lot of cars sitting idle the rest of the day or raise costs for rush-hour so high that it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. I’d be interested if there’s any statistics on traffic volumes for areas including cities and there outlying suburbs in the United States to see what the economics of a service would have to look like taking into account daily variations in traffic patterns.
Even assuming everyone commutes at the same time, the status quo cars sitting idle the rest of the day, the only difference is that they need two or three spaces to park each, and typically in high value locations. Your car sits at home at night and at work during the day. With the car service there could be half as many parking spaces or less, and they can drive themselves to a garage in some remote area, rather than within walking distance of a place you want to be.
The car service makes car pooling and mass transit more practical as well. Maybe you could hitch a ride with someone to work, but then you might have to stay late. With personal car ownership, you need to drive alone both ways, but with the car service, you can share the morning trip and if you need to take separate transportation in the evening. If buses in your area can't reliably get to work on time, you could have the car service pick you up to go to work, the the bus take you home.
> I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense?
The "automated fleet" idea is not how people are planning to see this idea play out. Automated, self-driving cars are one thing, but an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles operating very efficiently (meaning without human drivers) but each with a separate destination.
To an alien watching from orbit, a country of automated cars would appear different from the present only in that the cars would be much closer together than they are now, with no increased danger of collision -- indeed, less danger. Cars would still leave the freeway and go to their intended destination just as they do now, just more efficiently.
> it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work.
It would if everyone still owned a car as they do now, the only difference being that the car drives itself. If the idea of a "fleet" were taken seriously, why not switch to trains or buses instead of cars? The only reason to have a car is to be able to go directly to your destination.
> an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles...each with a separate destination
When I hear the word "fleet" it usually just means a number of vehicles bought by one company: A car rental company has a fleet of cars. A trucking company has a fleet of trucks. A car dealer has a fleet manager. (Forgive me for pointing this out, I'm sure you know it already, just trying to clarify the terminology.)
Enterprise Rent-a-Car will already send any of the cars in their fleet to your door. Of course they send a human along to drive the car to you.
If they got an automated fleet they could offer the same service they do now, but they would just send the car over by itself.
At least that's what "automated fleet" sounds like to me. :-)
I am assuming that services which rented out automated cars would have large numbers of them. I’m referring to them as a fleet in the same way logistics companies refer to a fleet of trucks even if there not all driving the same rout.
If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
I'm using "fleet" in the same way as you, jareds. A single company owns a large number of vehicles rather than a large group of individuals each owning one vehicle.
We wouldn't need to dedicate such a high level of inefficient resources to parking vehicles that sit mostly unused and it could offer us the opportunity to remake our cities to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.
Those are hardly the only reasons. I want a vehicle that has my stuff in it: My kids' car seats, my cell phone charger, my wife's umbrella, our radio presets, etc. If a random car pulls up at my house and I have to put 3 armloads of stuff in it every time I get in, that's a big deal. I frequently put stuff in my car for a second destination; sports equipment, a change of clothes, re-usable shopping bags, library books, etc. That's impossible if I'm in someone else's car. I want a vehicle that's comfortable and that I'm familiar with; I sit in it for 2 hours a day, and I don't want to worry if I'm going to end up with gum on my pants from the previous occupants.
My car isn't just a train or a bus that goes directly to where I want it to; that's called a taxi. My car is a small extension of my house.
I recently consumed a piece that argued that auto manufacturers have been supremely successful in linking our personal cars to our egos. "You are what you drive." It really hit home for me and appealed to the part of me that finds little appealing in attachment to physical things.
However I will say that your issues are pretty easily solved, imo. The car service simply customizes your ride experience with your radio choices. Car seats are necessary because of imperfect human drivers and (?) not necessary when robots are driving.
Removable/secure trunks could be stored at some site until needed, retrieved from cars and stored by robots since lifting and carrying are simple tasks for robots. When you request the next leg of your service, the first stop is the storage center where your secure trunk was stored.
I already mentioned about the maintenance facilities Musk is working on. Cheap and effective sensors detect gum/soilage, modern fabrics repel dirt and detritus and are cleaned to tolerable levels. Or another car comes instead. And your 2 hours in a car drops precipitously as smart-queuing greatly improves travel times.
This reminds me a lot of the book by Bruno Latour: "Aramis, or The Love of Technology", which was about a French government-sponsored light rail project called "Aramis" (Really a revolutionary public transport concept), where each car would route itself to it's destination independently, coupled to the cars in front and behind electronically, rather than physically. Of course, continual political interference scuppered the whole thing before they could get it to work (a challenge with the technology of the day), and the whole thing drifted on and on for decades without really taking off. Now, of course, the whole thing would be much easier, and the technology behind self-driving cars might actually make it a reality.
Well sure, if you're sticking with the one car per person model, you still need enough cars for the peak concurrent usage. The difference with automated cars is that you theoretically only need exactly enough cars for the peak concurrent usage, whereas we currently (presumably) have many more cars than that.
I haven't thought about this deeply, I'm thinking out loud...
What are the energy cost implications of this? Okay, I drive my car to work, and it sits there until I go home. If it was part of a fleet, it would leave my work parking lot, go to some other part of town (empty, using energy), and so on. Okay, we can also save energy by ride sharing, but I speculate that it wouldn't take much to make that really unappealing. In reality, we don't just go from home to work and back; we stop at the grocery, drop the kids off at school, and so on.
We already have fleets of automatic cars - they are called taxis. Their neural net is wet, is all. So as a first approximation I'd say taxi fleets are a pretty good proxy for energy use and cost. Sure, the driver needs to be paid, but we can model that.
If most people don't own their car and use a fleet service, then it would be easy for the fleets to offer discounts to people who were willing to share a ride for part of the journey. Being able to automate car-pooling could drastically increase the passengers-per-car during rush hour so rush hour traffic might decrease.
It would be an interesting experiment to have a mass-market transit system priced based on demand. If a ride at 9am cost twice as much as a ride at 10am or 8am, would we start seeing a more companies offering flexible hours or varying their hours to take advantage of cheaper commutes?
If you ask me, they should raise prices on the MRT during rush hour, instead of just lowering prices in early the morning.
But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
King County Metro definitely has peak and non-peak fares. I don't think that's all that unusual.
Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
> I guess I should save what would now be a car payment
In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.
So you will then have a car of your own, and then what? Lots of young people are opting not to buy a car; they are a huge black hole for money and can be extremely inconvenient to operate in modern cities.
It might turn out that by the point the technology exists for self-driving cars, private car ownership will be extinct and driving a car within city limits a felony.
They may be subsidized but I could see myself making enough money where I wouldn’t qualify for the subsidy if it was income based but not making enough money to be able to easily afford one if they were six figures.
The incumbent car manufactures, by which I assume you mean GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and the like, are operating a far different market segment. They face a much more difficult market, where profit margins are tighter, because they by default aim to the mass market.
Tesla is operating in the upper luxury end of the market, where margins are fatter, where vehicles sold can be lower but the margins maintained. They are making very large cars, even their follow up model to the S is the same wheel base. Why is that? Most likely because Musk knows they cannot deliver the range needed at cost and more importantly, a size, that a smaller car will be.
There are many self driving efforts going on in the market, both Mercedes and Infiniti have vehicles on the market that offer some limited form of self driving. Mostly lane departure and the like but they are pushing distances.
Tesla should be the one who worries most, because they have a unique product only for a short time and they won't get into the smaller sized car market because the technology path they have followed is not progressing fast enough.
If they made a car the size of standard midsized car, lets pick Fusion or Accord, the wheelbase shrinks by ten inches on average, width comes down too. All that shrinkage will take away from battery capacity, hence range. That is one reason many of the offerings by the incumbents have less range. Many use a battery solution not all that different, just restrained by size and technology.
There was a reason Musk went for the price point he did, it allowed larger vehicles which current technology requires. Never bet on the incumbents sitting still, Musk certainly is not. It just comes down to, can Tesla execute well in the mid size market, should they ever get there. Who knows, he made cede that space by licensing tech to let other people work the small margin sales
It depends what market segment you're looking at. If it's the 'Electric Car' market, Telsa are pretty much the leaders in this segment apart from a handful of super-micro city cars.
If you mean the 'Performance Car' market, apart from one or two niche offerings and prototypes, the usual manufacturers should be spooked by Tesla's potential to realise and implement new technology.
Musk makes no secret of his positioning in the market and going for the price point that they have. But there are hundreds of different cars at the same price point of the Model S, none of which are even in the same ball park.
The necessity for the incumbents to appeal to the mass-market is exactly why they should be worried, they're business relies on so many manufacturing synergies to reduce price, adapting all of those chassis and systems to cope with electric drive and self driving is going to be a challenge if they're to sell to their exist mass-market customers, at a price they expect. Tesla doesn't have that problem.
Tesla leads the electric car market in technology, but not in volume; there are many more LEAFs on the road today than there are Teslas. Total sales for the LEAF are about 65,000.
Tesla is delivering 550 cars per week[1], which is about 2357 per month. In August Nissan sold 2420 Leafs[2]. So seems like sales are just about equivalent. Except that Tesla is supply constrained and sells direct to consumers, so that 2357 underestimates actual sales. And many of those Leafs are sitting in dealerships, while none of the Teslas are.
Now Telsa only sold 5k cars in 2012, so it's doubtful they have on the road more than half of the 75,000 Leafs that have been sold[3]. But the Leaf started shipping in December 2010[4] whereas the Model S started shipping in June 2012[5] so it's not exactly a fair comparison.
The Chevy Volt actually did better than either in August, with 3351 sales[2]. Although their year-to-date sales were the same as the Leaf (14k) which suggests they had some late resurgence.
You're comparing US LEAF sales with worldwide Tesla sales. Worldwide LEAF sales are around 4,500 a month. In the US, at least, LEAFs are in high demand. In Atlanta dealers have only 120 hours of supply. Before the Model S, Tesla sold the Roadster, but the numbers were so low they don't affect the comparison.
At this point one can only talk about installed base as both Nissan and Tesla cannot meet demand. Nissan makes its own batteries but cannot make them fast enough. And of course the markets are fairly different. The LEAF is much, much cheaper, and is in no way a luxury or performance car.
Tesla is trying to catch up to other manufacturers here: Mercedes has sold cars with lane assist (preventing drifting out of lane) since 2009 and Ford has a self-parallel-parking system for a while.
A lot of companies with a "hardware" background have trouble writing software - they simply do not grok the management mentality and organizational culture that is required to do it efficiently. More to the point, they have difficulty distinguishing between ill-disciplined cowboy development and the agile, fast-moving (albeit highly disciplined) approach that you really need to have to develop complex systems without exponentially sky-rocketing costs. This culture may be changing (slowly) - but my gut instinct is that Tesla stands a chance to throw them some surprises before they do.
A lot of the difference between the (for want of a better word) "software" mentality and the "hardware" mentality comes from how we approach risk. One approach emphasises mitigating the impact of adverse events by emphasising flexibility and agility; the other approach emphasises minimising the chances that adverse events occur at all, by emphasising predictability and control.
In other words, do you design so you can fix it quickly when it breaks (at the expense of having it break often), or do you design it so it very rarely breaks (but when it does, it is more expensive to fix)?
The answer to this question not only depends on how safety-critical the system is, but how complex it is too. The prediction-and-control approach rapidly becomes untenable when you have systems that reach a certain level of complexity -- the cost of accurately predicting when failures are going to occur rapidly becomes larger than the cost of the failure itself. As the complexity of the system under development increases, the activity looks less like development and more like research. The predictability of disciplined engineering falls apart in the face of sufficient complexity. Worse; complexity increases in a combinatorial manner, so we can very easily move from a predictable system to an unpredictable one with the addition of only a small number of innocuous looking components.
Most forms of mechanical engineering emphasise the second (predictive) approach, particularly for safety critical equipment, since the systems are simple (compared to a lot of software) and the costs of failure are high. On the other hand, a lot of software development emphasises the first (agile/reactive) approach, because the costs associated with failures are (normally) a lot less than the costs associated with development.
Of course, a lot of pejorative terms get mixed up in this, like: "sloppy engineering", and "cowboy developers", vs "expensive failures" and "moribund bureaucracy" but really, these approaches are just the result of the same cost/benefit analysis producing different answers given different input conditions.
Problems mainly arise when you use the wrong risk-management approach for the wrong application; or for the wrong part of the application. Things can get quite subtle quite quickly.
One of the challenges in developing automotive ADAS systems is that a lot of the software is safety critical, and therefore very expensive to write, because of all of the (necessary) bureaucratic support that the OEMs require for traceability and accountability.
Equally, a lot of the advanced functionality for machine vision / Radar / Lidar signal processing is very advanced, and (unfortunately) has a lot of necessary complexity. As a result it is very very costly to develop when using the former approach; yet may be involved in safety-critical functions.
This is not by any means a solved problem, and very much requires detailed management on a case-by-case basis.
Certainly testing infrastructure becomes much more important as the sensor systems that we develop become more complex. (Disclaimer: my area of interest). Indeed, my experience indicates that for sophisticated sensor systems well over 80% of the effort (measured by both in hours of development & size of the code-base) is associated with test infrastructure, and less than 20% with the software that ends up in the vehicle.
Perhaps the word "test" is a misnomer here; since the role of this infrastructure is not so much to do V&V on the completed system, but to help to develop the system's requirements -- to do the "Data Science" and analytics that are needed to understand the operating environment well enough that you can correctly specify the behaviour of the application.
Probably. I can understand that some people will want to do their own driving for fun, but driving in traffic isn't very fun. So they'd probably 1. have the car drive itself to the open highways outside of town. 2. switch into manual mode and cruise.
Honest question: is there harm in competing self-driving schemes? I really don't want to shop "safety." By that I mean, paying more for stopping in the rain well or having one competitor hold the patent for driving in the snow properly. I imagine it will be properly regulated, but I'd love it to be an industry-wide initiative where everyone shares and maybe even uses the same codebase.
What you are looking for is basically what happened with 3-point safety belts:
"The three point belt was developed by Nils Bohlin who had earlier also worked on ejection seats at Saab.[15] Volvo then made the new seat belt design patent open in the interest of safety and made it available to other car manufacturers for free.[16][17]"
Alas, that is a bit of a pipe-dream. It would be nice if there were an open-source codebase for this, with a consortium of companies contributing, as it would mean better systems overall and lower cost to the consumer; but the senior management of the companies that are involved get too big an ego boost from owning the IP on all that cleverness. Plus, the tragedy of the commons applies: everybody wants a piece of what is going to be an astronomically huge market. (Not just passenger cars -- a big chunk of the road transportation & logistics business will be up for grabs too).
"They will have to be proven as perfectly safe. One accident and people will go crazy."
And though that's true, it of course made me think about the countless accidents involving human-driven cars through distraction, drink/drugs, weather, medical issues, confusion and whatever else.
We haven't proven our driving abilities as perfectly safe, not by a long shot!
I highly doubt that. What's way more likely is that even if they are just slightly more safe, you will be able to get cheaper insurance for them. Eventually, over time, this will push all self directed cars off the road.
There is even a disruption potential: Put together a new insurance company that only insures self driving cars and make it meaningfully cheaper. The ones that still insure self directed cars and self driving cars both will have a tough time to compete because their blended economics don't allow for the super cheap rates.
I don't think many people will necessarily own their own self-driven cars. Why have something there idle when it could be doing other work? More likely it will operate more like a taxi or by subscription. Or even own your own, but have it used in a pool to recoup costs, a bit like swap-n-go gas bottle refills.
A self-driving car would be able to provide a lot more information about how the accident happened.
This would probably except a lot of accident since they could prove that what they did was (mostly) correct, and it was either the other drivers' fault or something outside of their control.
Any accident this wouldn't cover, would undergo a lot of scrutiny, more like how airplane crashes are, than car crashes are today. And they would be able to fix it. Which would be a pretty good argument for self-driving cars.
The public aren't really aware of how much of a flight's control is handled by a computer and how much by the pilots themselves. Behind closed doors, literally.
I'm keen to see self-driving cars, but there will be a lot of opposition. Lobbying from trucker unions and the like will push negative stories and pressure decision makers, for example.
It won't be about an abstracted concept of "safer". It will be about whether the car is perceived to be a better driver than "me". Most people estimate their own abilities as above-average.
Stanford has a group called "VAIL" which is an acronym for the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. [1] As you probably know, Audi is a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Auto Group. AFAIK, this group was borne out of the DARPA Autonomous Car challenge, where the Stanford team partnered with VW to win the challenge. [2]
They've produced several different VAG-based models including several Audis that mainly focus on self-driving and similar AI. One of their more high profile recent examples was an Audi TT that climbed Pikes Peak without any human input. [3]
Some pretty cool stuff, and likely the cars you saw.
There is actually a reasonable amount of competition within the autonomous car space. A lot of people online only ever hear about Google's initiatives, but Audi, BMW et al. are building driving systems, some of which approach 100+ km/h.[1]
I definitely agree that more competition in the area is good. Hopefully as more players build these systems, they'll continue to improve and be commercialized quicker.
That's why I added "obvious", because even though there are a lot of autonomous efforts (large and small) from other companies, Google seems to be getting all of the attention.
Actually, several manufacturers have self-driving car projects[1]. some of them are even field-testing them in real-life situations, such as a driven leader truck being followed by other trucks[2].
So, I don't think it lacks competition for Google, who doesn't even build their cars - most probably they'll license the technology for other companies, and Tesla may well be one of them.
Google will put a markup on licensing. If Tesla owns technology and produces it, they can a) have it free for their own cars, b) license it out and compete with Google's pricing. Tesla's model is so successful because they keep everything in-house, therefore there aren't tons of profit layers added onto production and distribution.
I can't wait for the autonomous car manufacturers to start suing the crap out of each other for patent infringement. And by "can't wait for" I mean "dread".
Google probably has close to a million miles of self-driving car experience by now, Tesla is several years behind Google in this field.
I'd be willing to bet that they were planning some sort of partnership. This isn't a technology that you want to get wrong, and once other vehicle manufacturers start offering a comparable electric car (soon) then Tesla will need to have something to differentiate themselves.
The article reads like it was translated into English. So many bizarre word choices. Anybody else notice? Self-ruled cars. Features owned by other cars. Sovereign driving. Systems (that) have congregate functional safety. I stopped reading after enough little phrase bombs like those.
ADAS isn't just about the self-driving cars that Google is testing. ADAS includes systems like:
- Warnings if you drift out of your lane (Mercedes has been advertising this for four years)
- Warnings and stops if the car predicts an accident may occur soon (Infiniti has been advertising this for years)
- Automatic parking (Ford has been advertising this for years)
- Blind spot detection (many car companies have it)
- Cruise control that maintains minimum distance to the car in front of you (BMW and Audi mid and high-end cars had it since 2010)
It really looks like Tesla is trying to develop those features for the Model S and future cars.