Fully automated Self driving cars is either a pipe dream or decades away in which many more people will be killed on the road in the name of technological progress.
Fully autonomous cars are already a reality with Waymo in AZ and AutoX, Baidu in China. I don't know how safe the Chinese companies are, but Waymo's safety record [1] is nothing short of stellar.
Good for Waymo and hopefully Google keeps up this science project. But it's a very limited and almost as perfect an environment as you could have outside of a controlled test area. Those who were saying L4/5 would be decades at least away seem to be those who were on the right track. Kids growing up today are going to have to learn to drive.
L5 may be decades away. I think we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by end of this decade. SF is heating up with Cruise and Waymo's heavy testing. Their progress will be a great indicator for true city driving.
>we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by end of this decade
I think you're far more likely to see L4 on limited access highways in good weather. A robotaxi service in a major city seems much more problematic given all the random behavior by other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. and picking up/dropping off people in the fairly random ways that taxis/Ubers do. (And you'll rightly be shut down 6 months for an investigation the first time you run over someone even if they weren't crossing at a crosswalk.)
And for many people, including myself, automated highway driving would actually be a much bigger win than urban taxi rides which I rarely have a need for.
Waymo selected the one state willing to entirely remove any safety reporting requirements for self-driving cars as the place to launch their service. Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, if they had confidence in their safety record, they would've launched it in California, not Arizona.
Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed unsafe. A former employee expressed disappointment they weren't the first self-driving car company to kill someone, because that meant they were behind.
> Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, if they had confidence in their safety record, they would've launched it in California, not Arizona.
California only months ago opened up permits for paid robotaxi rides. So no, they couldn't have launched it in CA. If you've noticed, they actually are testing in SF with a permit.
> Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed unsafe.
What lies? Their CA disengagement miles are for everyone to see, their safety report is open, they have had 0 fatalities in their years of operation. Seems like you just made this up.
I recall a particular incident where Waymo was marketing their car being able to drive a blind man to a drive-thru, way before the thing could safely drive more than a mile on it's own. My understanding is that in 2021, it still can't navigate parking lots (which would preclude using it for drive-thrus).
Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny that a few months later, a journalist got an admission out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look for it and where to look for the signal.
The article is seven years old at this point, but it's also incredibly humbling in how much bull- Waymo puts out, especially compared to the impressions their marketing team puts out. (Urmson's son presumably has a driver's license by now.)
In at least one scenario, the former Waymo engineer upset he had failed to kill anyone yet ("I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death"), caused a hit-and-run accident with a Waymo car, and didn't report it to authorities, amongst other serious accidents: https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-cars-i... Said star Waymo engineer eventually went to prison for stealing trade secrets and then got pardoned by Donald Trump. Google didn't fire him for trying to kill people, they only really got upset with him because he took their tech to Uber.
I'd say Waymo has a storied history of dishonesty and coverups, behind a technology that's more or less a remote control car that only runs in a narrow group of carefully premapped streets.
> I recall a particular incident where Waymo was marketing their car being able to drive a blind man to a drive-thru, way before the thing could safely drive more than a mile on it's own.
How is a marketing video relevant from 2015 relevant to their safety record? They weren't even operating a public robotaxi service back then.
> My understanding is that in 2021, it still can't navigate parking lots (which would preclude using it for drive-thrus).
Completely false. Here is one navigating a Costco parking lot (can't get any busier than that) [1]. If you watch any videos in that YouTube channel, it picks you up and drops you off right from the parking lot. Yes, you can't use it for drive-thrus, but it doesn't qualify as "lying about capabilities".
> Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny that a few months later, a journalist got an admission out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look for it and where to look for the signal.
Here is one recognizing a handheld stop sign from a police officer while it stopped for an emergency vehicle [2].
which many more people will be killed on the rise in the name of technological progress.
Seeing as car crashes are the leading cause of deaths from people aged 1-54, it may be an improvement from the status quo
More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. The U.S. traffic fatality rate is 12.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. An additional 4.4 million are injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Road crashes are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people aged 1-54.
I'd say it depends on how many of those deaths are caused by the driver doing something unsafe. I'd be more comfortable with higher traffic deaths that primarily affect bad drivers than a lower number of deaths randomly spread across all drivers by a blackbox algorithm.
If you are texting while driving and hit a stopped car or run a red light, you are very lightly to kill others. Actually more likely, as a side impact is more dangerous than a frontal one.
> Road crashes are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people aged 1-54
This isnt true according to the CDC. Cancer and heart disease lead for the 44-54 group, and while "accidental injury" does lead from 1-44, if you break down the data, in many cases vehicle based accidents are not not the largest single source. For example:
Will changes such as machine-readable road markings, car to car communications, and traffic management systems make this happen quicker.
For example, couldn't emergency vehicles could send out a signal directly to autonomous vehicles or via a traffic managagemnt system to slow down or require the driver to take over when approaching. An elementary version of this is Waze which will notify you of road hazards or cars stopped on the side of the road.
