Waymo is getting ready for freeway driving in California:
California regulators on Friday granted Alphabet’s self-driving car division Waymo permission to expand its robotaxi service to include highways in several Bay Area cities and large swaths of Los Angeles, a massive expansion that comes amid concerns about the impact more driverless cars will have on city streets. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) allows the company to deploy its robotaxis on local roads and freeways at speeds up to 65 mph.
A few weeks ago Waymo began testing freeway driving in Phoenix without a safety driver. They didn't say when they might start in California, but they now have permission.
As always, forget about Cruise and Tesla and all the others. Waymo is the gold standard in autonomous driving, and they already have a fair amount of experience with trucks on highways. By this time next year I imagine Waymo will be all but 100% capable of driving anywhere there's a paved road.
I’m going to laugh when the cars go rogue!
“Nine days after a Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate took down the biggest US health care payment processor, pharmacies, health care providers, and patients were still scrambling to fill prescriptions for medicines, many of which are lifesaving. On Thursday, UnitedHealth Group accused a notorious ransomware gang known both as AlphV and Black Cat of hacking its subsidiary Optum. Optum provides a nationwide network called Change Healthcare, which allows health care providers to manage customer payments and insurance claims. With no easy way for pharmacies to calculate what costs were covered by insurance companies, many had to turn to alternative services or offline methods.”
The assumption is that these cars are safe from hacking when it’s clear that nothing is safe. So why would we increase our exposure to these attacks when we cant yet prevent them? It’s dumb.
All newer cars are susceptible to hacking. Driverless or not.
Yes but most cars aren’t able to drive themselves, so if they’re hacked, they simply become inoperable. A driverless car however could be hacked to, say, crash right into a Walmart front door or not stop for any red lights. Seems orders of magnitude worse than my non-driverless car simply failing to turn on or losing the ability to control the internal temperature.
You haven't imagined the possibilities completely. I read an article a couple of years ago where some white hat hackers were able to trigger sudden acceleration, sudden braking, turning windshield wipers off at bad times, etc. I don't think the auto-makers themselves have a full understanding of how vulnerable an undefended ECU can make a car AND its driver as soon as it's ignition is powered up. IIRC it was some type of fairly current (2-3 years ago) SUV - so plenty of mass-for-mayhem to hack.
You probably should check your citations.
If it's the idiots flashing weird pictures at Teslas, you should check what version of software they were using or what they had to do to manipulate it.
Thank you for mansplaining that to me. My greater point was: cars designed for driverlessness have greater capacity to inflict harm on others, precisely because if they are fully driverless, they could zoom into a crowded area and kill lots of people without a person even in the car much less behind the wheel able to stop it, whereas a non-driverless car would still require a human to be behind the wheel, somebody who might be horrified by what’s about to happen and slam on the brakes. But sure. Let’s pretend a car that doesn’t require a driver and a car that does require a driver pose equal risks to bystanders in the event that a hacker hacks into their computer system.
It takes a special level of stupidity to connect the entertainment system to the ECU.
So why would we increase our exposure to these attacks when we cant yet prevent them? It’s dumb
What would be dumb is not benefiting from a statistical increase in road safety because of irrational fears. Mind you, if there's evidence these driversless cars are less safe than human-driven cars, we should delay their introduction.
But I can't imagine the authorities who green light this stuff don't have evidence to the contrary. And yes, as H. Wilson mentions, human-driven cars can be hacked, too.
Says the chinese guy.
Take your waymo... I'm still gonna laugh.
Take your waymo
If they're available next time I need a ride, I might well do that. I mean, it's hardly the case that human taxi drivers don't occasionally get in accidents. This isn't that complicated. Look at what the data tells us.
Enjoy your irrational luddite-ism.
Until you put 200 million of these driverless cars on the road, there is no basis for asserting an "increase in road safety". Talk about irrational exuberance.
At this point we don't know how the safety compares in everyday driving conditions; we have no data whatsoever, just predictions from test data.
This is why authorities are carefully gauging the admission of driverless cars. If something goes wrong, against expectation, at least the damage is limited. "So far so good" seems to be the result for so far, but only for Waymo.
I still think this is a waste of engineering resources that would be put to better use in research about climate change and its prevention. The whole thing seems driven by tech vanity rather than any rational need for the technology.
That's not how science works, tho, you can't just swap a mechanical engineer and make them 'study climate change'.
"At this point we don't know how the safety compares in everyday driving conditions; " This is completely false. We have lots of real world data from the 4 cities where Waymo is operating full time.
Evidence... not cited?
Human driven cars that are hacked into still allow the human to hit the brakes. Cars not driven by humans might crash into something before the humans inside can respond. I can’t believe this isn’t self evident, but apparently there are lots of people who think “as long as people are in the car, they’ll have equal opportunity to respond to an errant command to commit mayhem whether or not the car is mainly being driven autonomously” and “driverless cars will never be hacked so that they go somewhere without a human inside them at all.” Both of those seem to pose much more risk from hackers if they aren’t 100% true.
You can;t actually instantaneously crash a car. If it was possible humans wouldn't be able to drive them as we are notorious for being distracted and loosing focus.
I would have thought freeways were safer for driverless cars.
They are, but not all the sensors can 'see' at the proper distances, and the relative damage that can happen is higher.
Depends on the freeway having clear markings with no snow. Not all DOTs maintain well marked and clear roads though. (DC interstates are notorious for missing signs, painted lines, etc. and they don’t do a great job of plowing them either.)
Yeah, we have driver assist features in our Leaf.
Some of them are very useful, like the warmings that a car is coming up on your left or right. A discrete but noticeable warning light appears in the appropriate side mirror. If you start to move in the wrong direction it starts flashing and activates the stick shaker and will escalate to audible if you keep drifting.
The backup and forward alerts that let you know you are getting too close to obstacles is particularly nice in parking lots - like coming blind out of a stall between two big SUVs. Warnings will start sounding as soon as the front or rear bumper barely pokes out beyond the masking vehicles.
The adaptive cruise control is also nice -- it very reliably maintains proper distance from cars in front of you and will slow down if they do and speed back up when things start to move faster. It is also capable of aggressive braking if some yahoo tries to slam in in front of you and you suddenly are far too close to them for comfort.
The lane guidance feature is a bit less useful. If the road lane markers are well maintained they are nice to have, but poorly maintained markers are not helpful and I usually turn off that feature in those cases.
I have driven rentals with lane guidance. I find it somewhere between useless and actively dangerous. I find the wheel twitching at odd places where the system thinks it necessary, often for no discernable reason. Then on straight stretches of road it complains at me that I am not myself twitching the wheel. I can't imagine relying on this, but I can easily imagine someone else thinking that between lane guidance and adaptive cruise control they can take a nap while on the freeway. The last rental I had I was much happier after I broke down and read the manual to figure out how to turn this turkey off.
"DC interstates" ?
There are interstates in every state and DC, even Hawaii.
None in Santa Cruz, tho.
Sure, there’s I-295 in DC but that’s as much exception as anything.
I don't know. Coming off 17 onto Ocean sure feels like an interstate.
In the District proper: 295, 395, and a few hundred feet of 495 as it crosses the Wilson Bridge.
In _metro_ DC: 495, 95, 295, 270, and 66.
495 os "the DC Beltway" even if it only enters the District proper for a few hundred feet over the Potomac.
As someone raised in NW DC, DC is strictly that which inside the boundaries of the District.
Not only DC; the freeways are in lousy shape almost anywhere in the US.
Driverless cars aren't using signs. They have everything memorized.
I think the bigger problems are how they deal with:
1) traffic (my Waymo experience suggests this will be a huge issue with cars freezing up and blocking traffic)
2) officers directing traffic around crashes (rather than go around the block, there is no meaningful way to preprogram vehicles to follow officer hand directions and the flow of traffic)
3) emergency traffic from behind (will it conflict with an emergency vehicle changing tactics, resulting in Waymo vehicles getting in the way and not being able to respond to that change?)
The flow of traffic is easy to incorporate. Which is how you can mostly have cars respond to hand signals. Will need to train police officers to recognize self driving cars and not to change the hand directions when encountering them.
Kevin continues to taunt Yogi Berra.
We'll see, said the monk.
Everyone, and I do mean everyone, knew that drones would become weapons. Why do folks suddenly lack imagination when it some to driverless car bombs?
Everyone, and I do mean everyone, knew that drones would become weapons. Why do folks suddenly lack imagination when it comes to driverless car bombs?
I'll wait to see when everyone on the Autobahn is in a car that's in full control.
I'll believe it when all the fat taxi and uber drivers are out of business.
What will those guys do? It's the only job for people who can barely walk and want to talk about how dentists used to put radioactive elements in your fillings so the CIA could track your teeth from space but then the public started catching on to it and they had to hurry up and replace every filling in America with something less radioactive.
What's the next step for these guys?
Congress?
!
Yeah, no. Snowy evening in January with gusty 25+ mph cross winds on I-294 around Chicago. Same scenario, but a 2 lane mountain road in rural West Virginia.
Neither sounds like a scenario when anyone other than a first responder should be out on the roads in the first place.
Just another Tues in Chicago....when we still had regular snow storms instead of tornado outbreaks
And you wonder why insurance is high.
During our only winter storm in January, the roads were snow covered for 6 days. In past winters, they were snow covered off and on for 6 weeks. But I’m sure they will work fine the rest of the year.
Driverless cars were already doing fine on snow covered roads in Finland in 2018.
They likely do what I do. Drive 10 mph.
This article seems to dispute your claim.
https://futuremobilityfinland.fi/self-driving-experiment-in-finland-successful-despite-extreme-weather-conditions/
"...at speeds up to 65 mph."
As long as they stay out of the left lane.
Something for Kevin's AI files: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/despicable-me-4/umc.cmc.4f0d89klog7q9jl3b7uknj7zd
"By this time next year I imagine Waymo will be all but 100% capable of driving anywhere there's a paved road." Sorry, they'll still be restricted to a few per cent of the nation's roads where they've invested billions to get and keep perfect maps and with minimal bad weather.