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A comment on Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success. Parent comment

Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by chubot on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:33PM (#12323640)
YES. This is the difference between LEVEL 3 autonomy and LEVEL 4 autonomy, which I didn't know about until this week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification

Level 4 still a LONG time coming. That was underscored for me by this interview:

http://thisweekinstartups.com/george-hotz-commaai/

George is kind of arrogant and brash... but even he says "I don't know anything about level 4". Everyone thinks level 3 and 4 are the same thing, but now that I've heard him dismiss level 4, that actually gives me more confidence in his startup.

Those are two completely different things!!!

Google has been working on self-driving cars since 2009, and the DARPA challenges were around 2005-2007. We're not even at level 3. Level 4 might not come for decades after that.

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by fastball on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:38PM (#12323680)
Pretty sure we are at level 3 already.

Tesla has "good enough" L3 already on the road, and I highly doubt Tesla's Autopilot is anywhere near as sophisticated as what Google is working on in their labs.

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by tim333 on Friday August 19, 2016 @06:46PM (#12324061)
"Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time."

You can get on a bus that does that now in Helsinki. Admittedly they are slow and on set routes but even so they're there.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-...

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by dilemma on Saturday August 20, 2016 @03:28AM (#12325598)
Preprogrammed paths is absolutely not what is meant by self-driving vehicles. Preprogrammed means a human has made all the decisions an actual self-driving vehicle would need to make.
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by tim333 on Saturday August 20, 2016 @05:37AM (#12325865)
Though whatever you call them there's a lot of potential for that kind of stuff. There are a lot of busses in the world and if they can drive themselves that's a big thing even if it is on set routes. Plus trucks driving themselves on certain prepared interstates with humans to take over for the last 10 miles could be big.
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by dilemma on Sunday August 21, 2016 @12:46AM (#12329425)
They're not "driving themselves" in either case. They are executing a program.

Problem is, that makes them rigid and unable to handle anything unplanned for.

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by latortuga on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:39PM (#12323692)
Doesn't Tesla's Summon feature qualify as Level 4?
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by dmoy on Friday August 19, 2016 @06:32PM (#12323990)
Not really, no. L4 is talking about the whole trip.
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by tim333 on Saturday August 20, 2016 @05:33AM (#12325850)
That was an interesting Hotz interview.
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