You basically suggesting Google to give up their(only?) leverage. Open source is all good, but if they can't make money out of these projects, you will see less of moon shots.
This seems like the kind of domain where the government can be useful. Negotiate terms to buy the aggregate data off everyone experimenting with self-driving vehicles and make it all publicly available for them all to use. Its a safety issue more than anything else, because we have borderline genocide going on every year with tens of thousands of roadside deaths, making cars safer is not just some side project for profits sake alone.
Why should the tax-payers subsidize private actor's R&D? I'm sure Google is amenable to partnership/sharing their data with anyone for the right amount or under the right terms; free hand of the market and all - no need for government "meddling".
Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide, it becomes relevant that the various states (I'm extending this globally since several European car companies are also engaged in automation development) it is paramount it be made accessible in the same way we seem to be finally having the epiphany that should have happened at least two decades ago that scientific research should be made openly available.
You make it sound like it is such a travesty or a great injustice, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Generating this data is not rocket science; it is fairly well-documented, the components are commodities and the process repeatable, one of the big challenges is that it is capital-intensive to scale. If the data is valuable as you postulate, raising the required capital should be easy, capitalism has been solving this problem for centuries.
> Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide,
No, it really isn't a matter of survival (at nation-state level you've elevated the discussion to). There are things that kill more people than vehicular accidents, so if your angle is "saving lives", then world governments really need to step-up their health game and meaningfully fight heart disease and cancer; hell, maybe they could even buy all the pharmaceutical research data and open that up to the public while there are at it (good luck getting a good price from GSK, Pfizer et al).
Google's push to expand their Cloud offering is also showing them trying to pursue non-ad based revenue.
-- disgruntled open source dev
I don't have the familiarity with what they're collecting (and how) to make any actual guesses on how you'd go about it.
Beyond that, no company is going to want to share their general data. There's too much time and expense behind its collection, and just sharing it wouldn't be enough; to make sense of it they'd have to share a lot of insights into their proprietary systems as well.
Then again, as someone who won't buy a self-driving car for as long as possible, it might be fun to learn the driving styles of different self-driving cars and use them to my advantage. E.g. If I know that tailgating a Prius which is going the speed limit in the left lane will cause it to move over in self-driving mode, or that a Mirai will always brake-check itself when it gets cut off, it might be possible to exert some control over them if it's advantageous in traffic to do so.
All the things you describe are as likely to cause accidents as wrong turns or over-acceleration. If Toyota can't get this right (my bet is they will) then they won't and shouldn't be doing autonomous cars, despite their "change of heart".
Pushing other peoples' cars around does sound kind of fun, but I hope we'll have something better to do than frustrate commuters.
How is that a bad thing?
1,300,000 people die each year in car wrecks and another 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 more are injured and/or disabled.
Google's motto is "Don't be evil" after all. Is valuing short term profits over millions of lives not "evil"?
>Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.
-Larry Page
1) Google said don't be evil 10 years ago
2) I THINK that X is evil
3) Therefore, Google should not do X
Killing puppies is evil. Is not open sourcing sensor data they spent their money money to get evil? I don't think so.
If google opens the data (that I would argue is still incomplete), and irresponsible actors are given a means (via incomplete LIDAR maps, algorithms, etc) to mislead people already screaming TAKE MY MONEY, that would likely lead to a TERRIBLE image for self-driving cars if and when those race-to-the-bottom companies cause injuries and deaths.
I could foresee that those irresponsible actors could then scapegoat Google's data as the source of issues, whether or not that is true.
BUT I suppose injuries, deaths, and ensuing lawsuits are what prompts stricter licensing and oversight committees. I believe however that strict enforcement of self-driving cars will be an eventuality, no homebrew kits I'm afraid.
Running a private experiment to gather data.. that data is private. Sharing that data is opt-in, not opt-out. Google has no obligation to release it. (If they do, cool. But not evil of them not to).
Now it is valid to say the government should run more studies on self driving cars and share that data. But I am not sure any business would exist in this country if every private R&D effort they did got open-sourced.
> “Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence,” they wrote. “While none of these miles are fully autonomous today, we just point out the scale of experience that can accelerate the development of the AI, mapping and learning for autonomous cars.” [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-12/google-ca...
Hmm… Let's try comparing 24 minutes of miles logged in Google Maps (and Waze) with Uber's data and see where they stand then…
>> “Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence,”
Google's data is not limited to its autonomous driving project, despite what the cleverly-worded sentence implies. Off the top of my head: Google also has 3D LIDAR data from human-driven StreetView vehicles, GPS and accelerometer data from millions of mobile Waze and GMaps users.
https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/master-plan-part-deux?redir...
As the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car could break and your car will still drive itself safely. It is important to emphasize that refinement and validation of the software will take much longer than putting in place the cameras, radar, sonar and computing hardware.
Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.
Here Elon mentions a milestone of 6 billion miles. At their current rate, Tesla will hit that in 5 years, but clearly we can expect the rate to increase rapidly.
How many Tesla cars have with their self-driving feature? 20,000 cars? They'll have 100,000 cars RSN.
By 2020, we will have 2 orders of magnitude more data.
Sure, but so will Google. Their latest claim is > 1.5m autonomous miles and thanks to their Streetview project they have a ton more detailed mapping data than that.
Btw, I'm not saying that Google didn't do a great job, and make valuable progress. The game, however, is about to take a huge leap. Google was an early investor in Uber and many thought they were going to cooperate.
First, tesla collects zero lidar data. So no, they don't, because they don't collect the same kind of sensor data.
The second assumption is that the sensor data google is collecting, that is similar to tesla's, can only be collected by google's self driving fleet ,and not any of the other ways google has to collect data.
Because, as above, it's not the same kind of sensor data, this is also false.
1) They're basically duplicating the early Google cars with mostly the same sensor suite bolted on top and integrated in the side panels. This is good because it means that unlike Tesla, they're planning for fully autonomous.
2) Since the human driver is still responsible for switching lanes, it looks like this is very early stage testing and data collection.
3) I think it's great that they're taking the approach of giving customers a view of what the car is doing via the back seat tablet, and even encouraging them to share. This is a great way to get people comfortable with the tech.
4) It still saddens me that everyone is keeping their autonomous data proprietary. How much faster could development go if Google let anyone have access to their million+ miles of driving sensor data instead of needing to collect it all from scratch?