>Not only might it take much longer to arrive than the company has ever indicated—as long as 30 years, said Urmson—but the early commercial versions might well be limited to certain geographies and weather conditions. Self-driving cars are much easier to engineer for sunny weather and wide-open roads, and Urmson suggested the cars might be sold for those markets first.

Urmson put it this way in his speech. "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both."

He went on to say, "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations."

https://web.archive.org/web/20160422140357/https://spectrum....

I've personally seen a few "self-driving cars" on the streets of SF and I suspect many of you reading this have as well (particularly if you live in the Mission or South Park).

Just last year I was talkng with engineers at the self-driving car company "Cruise" which had a free internal app to taxi employees around with a self-driving car. I personally saw the tech demoed. One of the engineers called one up to go drinking the weekend prior (sans drinking buddies - company policy). He claimed his coworkers come to work in them occasionally. The cars and engineers could be a grand charade but it seems like "self-driving cars" are already used by non-daredevils every weekday.

I learned to drive on backroads of rural Colorado; It may be these cars are safer than I in the sometimes "adverse" driving conditions of San Francisco.

Is this really how a distant technology looks?

That can be how a distant technology looks, if the stakes for failure are that people die.

You can get early adopters from one tail of the bell curve, hype, working prototypes, and people dying because prototypes fail. There may be a churn of companies... "We know that AlphaDrive and BetaDrive both killed people but we here at GammaDrive want to reassure you that we're totally committed to your safety!" "But that's what BetaDrive said." "Yeah but we REALLY MEAN it this time." "Wait, what to you mean, 'we'?" "Um, nothing..." "You hired BetaDrive's employees when they went out of business, didn't you?" "Uh... Oh would you look at the time!"

With that said I don't know Cruise and maybe they're doing better than Tesla.

And looking at cruise, their website is low grade marketing. Mostly concerned about hiring and not about pushing their actual technology. it's amateur hour honestly.

If Tesla could develop a network of self driving buses, that would have far greater reach and impact than trying to solve how to make a private network for charging and all case-considered self-driving system for asshole-mobiles. Not that Tesla cars aren't amazing, but they seem like a giant waste of resources for self-centered people. Not to mention in situations like self-driving, buses have completely predictable paths and because of that, it's much easier to optimize for corner cases to work toward a general solution.

With the exception of the handicapped, people don't really need cars. Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute <30 miles and hauling cargo <100 lbs with a trailer. Electric skateboards are also great if you have little to carry and <12 miles to go. Beyond that, self-driving delivery fleets in the vain of UPS and buses make sense. There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid.

But guys like Elon Musk are happy to burn the earth to the ground to terraform Mars instead of working on how to terraform places like Arizona or Pakistan because it looks better to them on paper. Or so it would seem.

What country do you live in? We don't all live in downtown SF. In fact, most of us don't. We live outside the city and drive 20 miles to get to work (you're nuts if you think most people are going to spend hours commuting 60 miles on a bicycle every day). And there are no bike Lanes, let alone paths And it snows.

>There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid.

You're on another planet. It's interesting that you talk about finding practical soltutions to "real problems" yet seem to lack any notion of what the real problems are.

Yeah, I could get an e-bike, I just have to make 5x+ the trips to the store since I doubt it could hold what I can get in 1 trip now. How would I drive 20 miles one way to work in the winter when there is zero public transportation here? There's no bike lanes out here, and taking an e-bike on the road will eventually get you killed, that's if you can stand driving 40 miles round trip in the snow / rain 5 days of the week.

I guess I can move, (as been suggested before lol) but now there's a lot of new problems with that that an e-bike won't touch.

It just isn't feasible for most people yet. Hopefully sometime soon, but definitely not right now.

Only when they aren't. Winter means snow, ice, and below zero temperatures and my hands simply can't handle the extra cold from the wind. I'm not handicapped and do walk during the winter, but tend to take the bus on the very rainy and very cold days despite dressing for the weather. let alone the fact that I'm no where near skilled enough with a bicycle to feel safe riding on 2inches of ice - regardless of studded tires. Summers have really strong sun, making folks deceptively warm and sweaty. I dont' know about your job, but most of mine want me to be clean and not smell of sweat when I arrive. I always have the chance of cargo: I walk to the grocery store most times. (I am not legal to drive in my present country).

When I lived in Indiana, there were not only problems with actual weather, but then I ran into route problems. The easiest route for commutes was major roads, but unfortunately most of those roads aren't built for people to ride bikes or walk. In some places, doing either activity on those roads meant you got stopped by the cops and told to find another path to take. You were putting cars and yourself at risk using that road. Luckily, there are more paths for such things here.

Not only that, but e-bikes have a limited range in most circumstances. Higher-end ones go far enough, but some of the cheaper models risk losing power at the higher ends. By the time most e-bikes has power to spare on those commutes, here they might be legally a scooter.

I do agree with having a robust public transportation system, however. That actually soves the issues with the bikes, but bikes alone seem won't work.

And yeah, not having bike paths makes it a whole different story. Drivers can be very irresponsible regarding the safety of cyclists (especially during inclement weather). I would personally be very weary if I had to bike exclusively on the street. Where I live, I can get pretty much everywhere without touching a single street thanks to all the dedicated multi-use / bike paths. In fact, the reason I purchased a e-bike and decided to try to go car free was the installation of a bike path that parallels the major highway here. But all of the bike paths here are a response to how many people here are cyclists and the dedication of the community to take steps to fight climate change/pollution. Though places like Indiana may never have a good bike system without some sort of federal intervention if they are really that anti-biking, but there are much better places to live if you like to bike. Riding around the Denver/Boulder metro area is an absolute hoot and there are places that are even more bike friendly.

Living in Colorado I bike to commute in both freezing conditions and 100+ degree weather conditions without catching a sweat on my e-bike. I'm not some hyper fit guy, I've got a dad-bod and long hair (along with a beard at the moment) and I generally run warm. But after I settled on trying to use the e-bike I got as my primary means of transportation, I started solving some of the problems you discuss.

For instance during the winter, I wear a black down jacket (with a massive backpack that keeps my back extra toasty), a insulated black balaclava with ski goggles, ski gloves if it's extra cold (otherwise just some simple neoprene gloves), long johns and thick wool socks and to combat the wind I ride with my hands in my jacket pockets (though that's admittedly only possible because of the long open curves of the bike path and I never have to make any surprise emergency stops). You might think that I'd be sweating like crazy in all of that, but you have to remember, with an e-bike, my effort for pedaling is similar to that of riding a beach cruiser down a flat boardwalk with a tailwind regardless of wind, hills or cargo and my layering is generally designed to keep me comfortable. At most I will unzip my coat to ventilate my torso. And when I get to my destination, I usually just stop off at some restroom to slip off my long johns - sometimes I'll also switch my shirt.

Also on the note of snow, while I wouldn't recommend it as it's super sketchy and totally unsafe, I've found that getting around in even a few inches of snow on the ground is weirdly doable with an e-bike if you have it in throttle-only mode. The reason being that you can keep your body still and work on maintaining your balance while letting the motor do all the work. It works so well because you don't have to worry about unpredictable tire slippage causing you to throw your weight. An e-bike tire can slip all it wants and I'm still just going to be standing over my bike in a track stand while maneuvering the front tire. Plus with mountain bike tire, you get better traction on snow or mud so it works even better than my track bike.

During the summer, I wear white UPF rated compression tights under highly breathable hybrid shorts and a UPF t-shirt. I wear white nylon gloves, and a thin moisture wicking white balaclava with sunglasses. Do I look like a kook? Sure. I get a lot of weird looks. But I don't mind, the white outfit not only protects me from sun burns, it increases the evaporative cooling of my sweat as well as reflecting most of the light so my skin isn't really being heated by direct radiation. The result is I can get around quite comfortably regardless of the heat outside. And during the summer, it's even easier to carry an extra shirt or pair of short to switch to into a non-ninja-esque outfit. Plus, despite the weirdo factor, it's at least a little fun to go into a bathroom and come out wearing tights like Superman.

Regarding range, that's one of the cool thing about e-bikes, the one I bought for $1300 and most bikes I've seen over $1200 have a battery that can be unlocked and easily removed so I just bring the charger with me (not much larger than a power brick for a gaming laptop), stick the battery in my bag and then just plug it in where ever I'm stopping. The battery fully charges in 4 hours so assuming I don't need to go more than ~25 miles in a 5 hour window, the e-bike works perfect. (Though I will say that there definitely is a big power output drop off when the battery gets under 30% but I rarely get mine under 40%)

The big thing bikes have over buses is convenience and price. Much like a car, you can anywhere you want and because of the speeds (up to 28 mph for class 3 or 20 mph for class 2 motors) my commutes are generally faster than by bus, and I'd say on average, only 40-50% slower than taking a car which might sound high, but that's usually only an extra 10-15 minutes plus I get the fun of riding a bike around. Not to mention in areas where finding parking is difficult, riding a bike can actually end up being faster than driving.

Buses are definitely part of the equation, which was the point of my original comment, but that shouldn't negate bikes as a preferable means of transportation. Especially if you have a situation in which you can get away with commuting by traditional bike rather than an e-bike. They're the most energy efficient standard mode of transportation available to my knowledge.

https://truecostblog.com/2010/05/27/fuel-efficiency-modes-of...

I'm a big fan of the added basket on the back of the bike - so there is no need to put anything on my back.

Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" (https://waymo.com/apply/faq/) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now.

See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym...

They already have at least 600 cars in that area and already announced plans to buy 80k cars.

So if by "mass" you mean "millions of cars available world wide" then yeah, maybe not 20 years but it'll take a decade to scale this world-wide.

But to me "self driving works in practice" will be validated within months of Waymo launching in Arizona and then they'll enter a phase of dazzling scale up to other cities.

For comparison it took Uber 7 years to outgrow taxis and I expect self driving to grow a bit faster.

Once the technology works it's just a matter of capital expenditure and physical limits of how fast you can scale car manufacturing.

It'll take many years to deploy this world-wide but I don't think this is the standard most people use when they determine if self driving technology works or not.

I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.

They've also done a lot of their testing in the SF Bay Area, which is a pretty difficult urban area to drive in.

They're obviously launching in Phoenix because it's the easiest major city to drive in, but they're also obviously going to expand to other places once they get successes in Phoenix.

Honestly, to me, the more interesting question is: As self-driving cars slowly expand to other cities, will other cities intentionally start making their lane markings more obvious and doing other things to make it easier for self-driving cars to drive in?

Sometimes, shuffling around blame can cause things to get fixed. Previously, with bad lane markings, you could blame bad drivers for accidents. But with self-driving cars, you can only blame the software. So if a self-driving car company is willing to serve one city with good lane markings but not another city with bad lane markings, suddenly the city government gets the blame for bad lane markings.

The more complex things that can happen in urban areas though, yeah that's hard. All kinds of weird shit can happen that takes social understanding to know how to deal with. Right now it looks like for those situations Waymo is relying on remote "coaches" that tell the cars what to do at a high level (guidance, but not directly control).

"Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide"

Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs".

Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service.

Waymo (and others) are testing in other places.

From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/: Kirkland (lots of rain), Bay Area (including San Francisco), Detroit (snow during winter), Atlanta, Austin.

I don't see how you arrived at the 1% and 1% of what?

If it took Waymo 10 years to drive in Phonix, Arizona, it'll take them 1000 years to improve enough to drive in Detroit?

Those things are pretty binary: either they can drive autonomously or they can't.

GP's assertion that driving in Phoenix is easier than most other places is absolutely correct.

I don't dispute that Phoenix is easier to drive than San Francisco or Detroit during winter.

It's perfectly rational to debut such service in the easiest possible environment.

I just don't think that it's a fundamentally different problem to make this work elsewhere.

This technology already improved by leaps and bounds. At first those cars couldn't finish a drive in the desert, with no other traffic.

I don't have an inside knowledge on this but the fact that they are already testing the cars in more difficult areas indicates they are working on more difficult problems.

It's anyone's guess how far they are on that front.

My guess is that after launching publicly in Phoenix, it'll take less than a year to launch publicly in San Francisco.

It is one thing to have broad streets, well marked, with multiple levels of marking, e.g., stripes, plus curbs, plus medians/sidewalks, plus trees/shrubbery. All of these well-designed and well-built modern road features cooperate to make a consistently recognizable environment. And the lack of serious weather is a big deal too.

Contrast that to a city like Detroit or Boston, where the streets are anything from modern to ancient, literally paved over the cow-paths, constantly changing with construction, lucky if the lane markings are still visible, pedestrians in all kinds of odd situations (legal and illegal) -- orders of magnitude more difficult to sort the environment. Now add snow in quantities enough to make it often difficult as an experienced human driver to figure out where you are in the lanes, and then snowbanks in odd places after it is cleared'.

Sure, it's still 4 wheels, power plant, steering wheel, roads, but two quite different games.

Going for a walk in Central Park at lunch and hiking up Denali in Alaska are also ostensibly similar activities, but in actual reality, are very different games.

>...I don't have an inside knowledge on this...

So, based on your complete lack of knowledge on the subject, you think that the current solutions will easily extend to more difficult applications? I work in a related field (image/signal processing and ML) and I can assure you that there is no such thing as a general solution here. It is absolutely reasonable to expect that your 70% solution may simpler never work for the remaining 30% and you have to go back to the drawing board.

Yes, but that same source for population indicates that Phoenix is only the 169th most congested city in the U.S. It's suburbs are presumably even less congested.

If your buses aren’t popular with old people, you have bad buses.

Public transportation sucks.

When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.

No one wants to be stuck in bay area traffic every day either. Public transit is used for a higher percentage of journeys in Europe though because it's a better option relative to the available alternatives than it is in much of the US. If we had free teleportation I imagine you'd see very few people using any other form of transport.

There is probably a degree to which public transit usage is higher in Europe not because it is a better experience than it is in the US but because driving is a worse experience. Based on my own experience it's a bit of both but clearly usage levels vary around the world due in part to varying tradeoffs between transport options based on historical, geographical, political and economic factors. There may also be a cultural element as well where preferences vary but I don't think that's the biggest factor.

I take 15 minutes crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers over one hour of solitude in a small metal box with windows any day.

Nobody has managed to explain me how self driving cars reduces congestion. It is space that is the limiting factor, and I do not understand how autonomous cars reduce the need for that.

Vice versa, rudimentary economic analysis says that if you do not need to concentrate on driving, you can spend more time in the car, thus sitting in the traffic is not that bad and more people are willing to do that -> more congestion.

Even if it works for just highway driving in good weather--which, in spite of overall skepticism about timeframes seems relatively close--it's hard to see how it doesn't put a lot more cars on the roads. I can't believe I'm unique in saying that I'd go into the city after work or head into the mountains for a hike more frequently if someone/something else were driving me.

Operating costs are still a constraint And those are higher than a lot of people assume if they don't really think about it. But easier driving will absolutely put more cars on the road.

Why those durations? I would expect a typical car trip to be faster than transit, since it takes a direct route with no stops.

If transit is even as fast as driving, I'll take it 90% of the time. But that's quite an undertaking.

Compared to buses on the same roads (i.e. without a dedicated lane), sure, but not to subways/light rail.

I am reasonably sure economics will change that.

> Nobody has managed to explain me how self driving cars reduces congestion.

It doesn't, but it allows the work day to begin at commute time. Those that don't adapt will simply have fewer "work hours" to make up the lost productivity.

I suspect the bumpiness of roads will become a public nuisance once people start reading/computing in-car.

Being on a bus/tram/train with strangers never really bothered me, to be honest. When I walk down the street or onto a shop, I’m also surrounded by strangers; what’s the issue?

I would prefer a bus or train to a private car any day, assuming it's reasonably clean and not overcrowded.

Imagine cars that refuse to tailgate, drive at excessive speed, drive with drowsy owners, drive on the right-hand side of the road in non-emergency situations, skip red traffic lights, etc...

Using US fatality rates you would expect ~34 deaths from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the... Edit, my numbers where low.

So, as far as I can tell they are close to human safty though perhaps not up to defensive driver in good conditions safe.

- Tesla’s cars are newer and more expensive than the average car on US roads (making them safer)

- Tesla’s Autopilot mostly, if not only, gets used on roads that are safer than average.

- Tesla drivers may have had to intervene a lot to prevent more deaths.

- not all those Tesla’s ended up on US roads (probably not something with large impact)

The trend of things machines can do better than people really only goes in one direction. Further people are vastly worse at driving than they think, over 1.25 million people die per year due to car accidents. That's insane.

On top of that, when you factor in the utility of driving a car, the risk/reward ratio looks stellar. Humans are better drivers than given credit for, and it will be some time (much longer than a lot of enthusiasts will admit) before computers manage to match that.

That's one of the top killers anyway you slice it and every single one of those deaths is preventable.

PS: Truckers drive up to 3,000 miles per week * 48 weeks per year * 47 years (65-18) that's ~6.7 million miles. US death rate is ~1:88 million miles on average. So if they where as dangerous as average that's ~1 death per 13 truckers. However, they are safer than this and average less miles. Still, it's one of the most dangerous US jobs.

I don’t see how that’s an argument in favor of letting today’s self driving cars loose on the road.

We don’t let people without any driving experience drive cars either because, if we let them, they “will improve soon”.

Or are you suggesting letting self-driving cars loose now is a necessary sacrifice we have to make to make progress?

Yes we do, that's exactly what a learner's permit is for.

And every single one of them is a preventable tragedy.

If you're measuring whether the actual experience of using autopilot meets the prevailing standards by which we judge "safe enough" as a country, you don't want to correct for those first three.

Especially the "the cars are new and safe overall" factor. Correcting for that is like "correcting for" the fact that all the dangerous lithium ion cells are carefully packed and armored, and coming to the conclusion that sitting in a Tesla is less safe than sitting in a bonfire.

It makes the arguments a lot worse when people don't distinguish those two questions.

If (and that’s likely) other features than Autopilot contribute to Teslas killing and injuring fewer people, we must compensate for them to judge whether Autopilot is a net benefit.

All my line of argument is trying to adress is how long until self driving cars are 'ready' which directly relates to how capable they are today. The data I looked at suggested somewhere above 'drunk driver' but below 'school buss driver'. That seems like an extreme range, but they are each human levels of competence. Which is different than they are being portrayed and IMO a sign they are very close to ready.

While the points you bring up are meaningful, we let people drive without those safty features. So, in terms of policy it seems like an ever higher bar, as for example automated breaking systems and lane following raise the bar above human competence, but again are not being installed on older cars.

Which... doesn't really make sense. The safety features are part of the package. You can't get the dangerous part without them.

No cars are sold with a big blob of naked unprotected lithium ion cells. And no cars are sold with autopilot but not high-end crash protection.

A feature being dangerous in isolation is not enough to show that it lacks net benefit.

They stopped giving mile driven statistics after that.

If you have better data than I would love to see it. But, IMO using ballpark numbers is much better than simply having a bad feeling about something.

These cars are not going to fail the same way people do. Computers really fuck up in broad daylight, people get drunk and drive down highways in the wrong direction.

Right now I would trust this over me driving tired or drunk but not sober. Give it 5-10 years and better hardware and I think it will be a better driver than I am.

I wonder if it’s mainly another way of getting access to telemetry data? Insurers definitely do give you a discount if you install a recording device. I assume that lets them filter out some bogus insurance claims. (Or maybe people just drive better when they know the insurance company is watching!)

That's probably because Tesla is liable. And it could be that at this point they don't mind operating at a loss in this area.

It will be an interesting question once systems are on the road that claim to be fully autonomous--and no one's sure how this will work yet. If I'm sitting in a car that's sold (and regulated) as completely hands off I'm certainly not going to accept liability if it does something dumb and kills someone.

That's ridiculous, they might base this on some other benifit such as type of owner, but the industry is not just going to subsidize 100,000+ plus people. I am not saying it's fool proof, but your bias is showing.

By the way, the black box recorder in a Tesla might also contribute to the discount given by insurers.