Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by idreyn on Saturday January 18, 2020 @04:13PM (#22087260)

Self-driving cars cannot plan an entire exchange in a dense urban areas because there will always be actors like pedestrians, cyclists, and stray plastic bags that do not participate in planning and act adversarially to their shared model. Optimizations will be highly local, spatially and temporally, and I suspect they will end up looking a lot like humans trying to coordinate on the same problem. And even if AVs can technically plan and execute faster, their actions will need to be artificially slowed to be legible to humans. Likewise with their raw speed — cars, self-driving or not, are already moving too fast in urban areas. Reaction times might improve but braking distances will not.

So if AVs can't increase the throughput of city streets, I'm skeptical that they can increase the throughput of off-ramps which are bounded by city streets, or urban freeway segments which are bounded by the off-ramps. And even imagining that significant (2x?) throughput is achieved, it's not going to meet the induced demand ceiling; there would be the same amount of congestion, only with more cars.

L5 is dead on arrival as congestion-mitigation technology and I hope at least some of the billions earmarked to be spent on researching and deploying it are redirected towards better walking, cycling, and transit amenities instead.

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by mattlutze on Saturday January 18, 2020 @06:59PM (#22088303)

Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic.

Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.

Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by bobthepanda on Sunday January 19, 2020 @02:24PM (#22093352)

In a dense urban area, the speed limit is generally not dictated by road design but by the simple physics interaction between a person made of meat and bones, and a multi-ton metal vehicle.

Follow distances in urban areas with low speeds are already really small. I don't think AVs would make them meaningfully tighter.

> Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

This was supposed to be what Waze and Google Maps were set to achieve, and they did not, but they did piss off a lot of people when cut-through drivers started jamming up their formerly quiet residential neighborhoods.

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