> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion.

What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians and C-level industry people talking out of their asses to ... idk ... drive stocks? Look smart in the face of Tesla? PR? No clue.

Self-proclaimed experts in magazines and talk shows raving about how AI is going to change everything. I had colleagues telling customers about the magnificent rise of AI and none of them could even spell "gradient descent". Backed by a law or accounting degree they KNOW that self-driving is just around the corner and they are very vocal about it while easily impressed by tightly controlled demos at some international tech fair. Everyone just seems to fall into the hype trap without a single brain-byte spent on researching the actual issues and what's most sad is actual engineers/technical people not doing their due diligence and informing themselves BUT THEN GOING OUT TO TELL THEIR NON-TECHNICAL FRIENDS ABOUT THE AUTONOMOUS FUTURE. Ugh.

I held a minor internal talk at work about self-driving cars for people generally with other backgrounds but light superficial interest due to "Tesla" and "the hype". They were surprised to see that we are likely decades away from actual Level 4 (not the marketing garbage that some companies put out) because even a slight change in weather can really fuck with all systems on the roads right now.

>...without a single brain-byte spent on ...

This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular.

Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife.

We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous driving. Instead of the 'unwashed masses' saying "gee-whiz that is cool", we think "this isn't ready yet!"

We know that, but also we ought to know that pushing through the hard problems by rolling out systems operating world-wide and interacting with real people is the only way forward toward improved safety, reduced mental slavery to the menial task of driving, and the time and relationship freedom that comes with it. So yep, I let my Tesla do lots of driving. And I do it knowing that the brake pedal and the steering wheel are both manual controls that I can use to override the car at any time, no matter what. That is why I feel so comfortable.

And you know what? It's wonderful. It really is. I am free to look around and see other people on the freeway. They look so bored. So tired. So used up. Meanwhile my wife and I, we turn on the careoke machine and sing our way to the destination. It is absolutely the way to go. You can take my Tesla and its AP functions out of my cold dead hands. Maybe that's how I go, and I'm alright with it.

I wouldn't feel comfortable in a vehicle that may, or may not react to some situation on the road ahead. Because one day it will decide to do $something_really_stupid and you won't be able to react in time/correctly because you'll be too busy singing karaoke. With some extra bad luck, you'll die/kill someone else because of that.

Yeah, but is that a bigger risk than some dumbass in a truck blowing a red light and plowing into my door? Based on where Tesla is at I don't think it is. They're already reasonably below the median risk we all accept for driving at all. After all, my butt can feel that the car is doing something seriously unexpected way before my eyeballs can. So I'm going to keep singing, with my thumb gently on the wheel and one eye on the road.

With all due respect, that is just as likely to happen with human drivers as well.

> is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA

I have seen this too much. People who have a deep understanding of how things work are busy learning and doing. People who can spent their energy with politics and marketing can do it because they are not busy learning and doing. I which there was a solution for this. Corporate IT departments are particularly full of this.

I wonder why the self-driving car hype folks don’t simply lobby to make more trains.

(I mean the ones who have been successfully marketed to here, not the marketers).

We had self driving vehicles for 30,000 years. I’ve thought about just getting horse brains hooked up - but people probably don’t want their cars spooked by plastic bags.

How do you know the people bullish on self driving cars haven’t also lobbied for trains? There’s a lot more standing in the way of trains being built in the US, unfortunately. To me, self driving cars are just the second-best thing, and one that might actually happen. It’s a bit too late for trains to take over in most of the country.

Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.

I think autonomous driving advocates would do well to look at the history of computer handwriting recognition, an easier technical problem with lower consequences that received significant investment over decades. But it has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives.

Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate of 99.9% means multiple errors per day for most people. Consumers expected approximately zero errors, despite not being able to achieve that themselves, sometimes even with their own handwriting!

Because handwriting is made by humans, there is some percentage of it that simply cannot be reliably recognized at all. But people hold that against computers more than other people because computers are supposed to be labor saving devices.

Likewise because roads are made by people, and other cars are driven by people, so a self driving car will never be able to be perfectly safe. But that is essentially what advocates are promising.

That’s especially true if people expect the same level of convenience, especially in terms of time. People speed and take risks all the time when driving, in the name of saving time. I think it’s likely that an autonomous car optimized for safety would also be a car that just takes a lot longer to get anywhere with.

Speed matters. It’s a big reason we all use touch keyboards on our phones instead of handwriting recognition.

> [comparison to hand writing recognition]

Excellent point, stealing that. I work in automotive and an engineer, traveled around the world, think the realistic possibility of self driving cars without major changes in how we make roads, everywhere, is extremely low.

My error rate in recognizing handwriting would be much higher than a free, open-source recognizer. I am very bad at recognizing other people's handwriting. I don't understand your need for 0 errors. Real life is full of errors and imperfections, there is chaos everywhere. Seems like you expect unachivable.

Handwriting recognition works very well if you can capture the actual strokes used while writing and not just the end result.

I doubt it. My handwriting is at least average neatness, and stroke based recognition systems still make multiple errors per sentence. It's just a frustrating waste of time and now that we have touch screen keyboards there's no longer any point to handwriting recognition.

The only handwriting recognition system which ever worked correctly with a low error rate was Palm Graffiti. It forced the user to learn a new shorthand writing style designed specifically to avoid errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

The secret to Palm Graffiti's market success was that it hacked user expectations.

Because it asked users to learn a new way of writing, when the recognition failed, users were more likely to blame themselves, like, "Oh, I must have not done that Graffiti letter right, I'll try again."

But when it came to recognizing regular (i.e. natural) handwriting, users believed inherently (i.e. somewhat unconsciously) that they already knew how to write, and the machine was new, so mistakes were the machine's fault.

While we're sharing anecdotes, my handwriting is remarkably terrible, and the iPadOS Notes app does a good job of transcribing it.

I think this supports the grandparent's point about using the actual strokes, including angle and azimuth, to reconstruct intent.

I was also fairly proficient with Graffiti, back in the day, but I consider that an input method, not handwriting recognition. I was facile with T9 as well.

Analyzing the individual strokes works flawlessly with Chinese and Japanese, where the stroke order is fixed (occasionally with a few variants). If you have the stroke information and the user writes correctly you can recognize characters that even humans would fail to read from the finished glyphs.

That's great, but I would wager that nearly 100% of all writing ever done in human history was done without capturing the strokes while writing. Therefore, while this added accuracy is great, it is virtually useless for most written work.

Isn't that a bit irrelevant? If we are talking about patterns that work well for the user, clearly writing everything traditionally and then going back and taking pictures of everything is a cumbersome process. Writing on iPad or similar is clearly the medium in which this shines, at which point you do capture the strokes.

That only works if you can assume that everybody using the system you're desiging has access to the underlying technology. Sure, if you're desiging some new system (like an autonomous vehicle on a closed loop, controlled system / system purpose built to perform digit recognition as it is written on it, but why wouldn't you just have the user directly input on a keypad) then you'll get a better result, but in the general, real world, case (autonomous vehicle on city streets with other vehicles / recognizing digits from scanned input without the stroke data) then your special case optimization are impossible and for all general practical purposes do not apply, so appealing to their assistance in increasing accuracy doesn't actually do anything to help the system perform better.

While that's true, having the ability to capture strokes now allows machine-learning models to better determine what potential strokes were used to make a specific shape. Just because we didn't have it for everything doesn't mean it's not useful for adding accuracy to the past.

So by analogy, autonomous driving will work very well if we can capture all the roads as they're being built?

> "handwriting recognition... has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives."

There is little market demand for handwriting recognition, and thus little active research goes into it. Not because it is a difficult or problematic technology, but because better alternatives exist that make it irrelevant.

Even if someone were to come up with an absolutely perfect handwriting recognition system, most people wouldn't use it. Why? because the advent of multi-touch screens means that most people can type much faster than they can hand-write anyway.

This is all true today, but it was not true in the past. There was a time in the computing industry when everyone believed that pen interfaces with handwriting recognition would be a crucial enabler for highly mobile computing. Both Apple and Microsoft built major product launches around this idea in the early 1990s.

Oh, absolutely. I remember that era well. But I'm talking about today, of course.

What changed was that touch screens became better. The old capacitive touch screens were clunky, slow, inaccurate. You could put a keyboard on them, but the lag and poor accuracy meant you couldn't really touch type comfortably. Then multitouch came along and made on-screen keyboards much more responsive and accurate.

But also, Blackberry and (pre-smartphone) phones with SMS made people more comfortable with the idea of using keyboards for text entry on handheld devices. And crucially, auto-correct and predictive text entry covered up for accuracy errors and made text entry by keyboard even more attractive.

I wouldn't bet on it but I also wouldn't call it indefensible. Fully autonomous driving is a very complex problem with a very long tail. Being able to drive semi-reliably on American highways doesn't mean that you're almost done, not even close.

An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles.

Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.

Having driven in Canadian winters, I honestly agree that reliable autonomous driving in inclement weather is indeed decades away.

The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.

Isn't that just "image de-obfuscation" though? Seems like narrow AI will be able to out-class humans at that in no time. You can generate as much training data for that as you want. Doesn't really require human-type intelligence. Though I guess you might mean that the obfuscation makes the edge cases even harder, which makes sense.

There's like fifty caveats that go along with this statement, but this is the internet so I'm just going to skip all that.

Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.

There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.

The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.

Vision is not the easy part of AI.

> Vision is not the easy part of AI.

I think it is, actually. Going from raw pixels to objects is the (relatively speaking) easy part. It's the next part (using that for planning and common-sense reasoning) that's the hard part. Machine learning has already advanced past humans in this regard for many classes of problems - which is part of the reason why captchas are getting so hard.

This was several years ago, hence the move away from obfuscated text (which was getting harder and harder to read): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...

I'd be surprised if basic perception tasks as human-ness tests last more than a few more years.

citation for "half your human brain is devoted to visual processing"?

Since the internet places no weight on things like "common knowledge to anyone in the field" or "I took a bunch of classes on the brain in college", here's a random quote from someone at MIT: http://news.mit.edu/1996/visualprocessing

I have a car (Honda Pilot) where the company decided to make the lift gate window too high, probably to accommodate mounting the spare tire inside the cabin. This design makes you dependent on the rear camera for most reverse use cases.

It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving.

I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision.

Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.

It sometimes seems as if half the purpose of assistive driving systems serves to compensate for the absolutely horrible sight lines in a lot of newer vehicles.

And I have heard rumors of lobbying going on to get the requirement for rear view mirrors dropped when video feeds are provided to replace the functionality.

Here's my go-to example about the challenges of driving in a Canadian winter.

I was waiting for my bus to work one morning after a large snowfall. The snow clearing crews were hard at work, but the street was effectively blocked by piles of snow, men, and machines.

Yet, my bus arrived on time *driving down the sidewalk".

I am not sure how any self-driving system could have figured that out :)

And if it did, hollow sidewalks are a thing in some places, so...

On what grounds?

Sorry for the out of the blue unrelated reply, but I am currently stuck working as a technical consultant at one of the Big4, how did you make your way out of this? I feel like I am learning about antiquated technologies, and that pivoting to a software engineering job more aligned with my interests, skills, and sanity feels harder every day. Even something like you describe you are doing now sounds much better than what I'm doing now. Also I know exactly what you are talking about with the marketing and PR talk it is insane.

Some folks I know joined code camps/ lambda school like programs and got out. Alrernatively, if you work on clients, easy way is to accept a full time job at any of your clients you enjoy/tolerate working.

Sorry, late reply.

I got out by never really getting in I am afraid. I worked for 1.5 years in technical consulting as a student job while getting my informatics degree.

Once I obtained my degree, I declined an offer by said Big4 firm and took another offer where I got to go hands-on with coding. I had previous coding experience which helped and then amazing colleagues who boosted my start.

Yeah but speaking as someone kinda on the other side there are things like this 'actual Level 4' delivering stuff for real in Wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-soluti...

Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now.

And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, internet and so on - to works well doesn't seem to take that long. Five to ten years perhaps typically.

There's no reason to believe that's a level 4 autonomous vehicle, other than the marketing release of the company that makes it.

Going from early cellphones to smartphones was an engineering problem. All the technology was already available and it was a case of putting it all together in a way that worked and that could be manufactured at scale and for profit.

With vehicle autonomy, the problem is that we don't know how to create autonomous AI agents yet, so we don't know how to make a car driven by such an agent. Claims of level 4 autonomy should, at this point, be treated like claims of teleportation or time-travelling back in time: theoretically possible but we don't know how to make it happen in practice.

The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move.

In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car?

OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me.

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/

[2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks...

[3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...

Have you seen the roads in Alabama? They have this weird, red asphalt and rarely any edge lines. In Louisiana they have these elevated roads over the bayou that don't seem to have break-down lanes. In Tennessee they have roads that go through mountains with shocking curves and gradients. Pot holes, broken lights & signs, weird parking lots, new construction, and seeing a small ball roll near the road and knowing that a kid might be coming after it soon.

It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense.

The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.

Re robbers, car jackers and the like in some ways you may be better with a self driving car as they seem to be covered with cameras and report back to base the whole time so the crooks would be photographed and the cops called. Already the Tesla cameras have caught a few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBWt9rRx-U

Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.

There was a movie which featured autonomously driving trucks, they were held up and stolen from by the bandits putting a cow in front of them, then just taking the cargo while it was stopped.

You can certainly have all the cameras that you need but if the bad guys have their faces covered and identifying marks hidden then you're not going to be able to do much.

> There was a movie...

I'm pretty sure there is an early scene in the movie Solar Crisis[1] that plays out similarly to what you're describing. This movie was on one of the cable movie channels when I was growing up, so I got a higher-than-normal dose of it.

I don't remember a cow, though (but then this probably isn't the only sci-fi movie out there with such a scene). I think one of the characters first parked a motorcycle in the road, but the truck plowed through it. After that, they stood in the road instead, and that caused the truck to screech to a stop right in front of them, blasting a message on a PA about how they were breaking the law by impeding it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Crisis_(film)

Yes, that’s going to be very helpful to the investigators when they finally figured out what happened to the car and to your body. Might not be helpful to you, though....

License plate can be covered (or more often - using stolen car) and balaclavas cost just few dollars.

If it is know it is stolen a hi tech truck can be remotely ... of course there is another kind of risk. But if one just ensure only one guy can open the container or the container is fixed with pin certain distance from a driver etc.

Ther is always a way.

Five years ago or so, video from "DARPA robot challenge" type events would easily give the lie to "superb autonomy" claims. I just found this[1] more impressive, but at its 20x playback speed. I imagine that playback at 1x could still serve as a reality-check and counterexample.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o

You think that's bad? Listen to sales types talk about "blockchain" sometime.

note that "gradient descent" isn't AI either. it's more computational linear algebra: a heuristic for numerical methods used to solve (usually to a local extrema) systems of equations without direct analytical solution(s).

> Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone.

Most car manufacturers have had this figured out for a long time with crumple zones and the like.

> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically

Assisted braking technology is already implemented in some cars. Hell, Tesla implements basically exactly what you're asking for...

> Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.

Teslas don't let you sleep in your car, you have to move the steering wheel periodically to prove you're still paying attention or it'll pull over and shut down.

Also, I'm not quite sure what you're expecting seat belt enhancements to be.

Far be it for me to defend the AI hype, but your "things we should be focusing on instead" don't make much sense when we ARE focusing on them.

Modern cars are deadly to pedestrians, especially SUVs.

Reading through the crash test procedure, it is astounding how little attention is paid to pedestrians.

1. Front crash test. Procedure: Crash car into stationary barrier at 35 mph. Is also applicable to face-to-face crash with car of same size, going at same speed.

2. Side crash test. Procedure: Slam concrete block into side of stationary car at 38.5 mph.

3. Side pole test. Procedure: Drag car sideways towards a pole.

4. Rollover resistance. Procedure: Compare the cars footprint to the height of the center of gravity.

The biggest thing to notice is that not one of these metrics involves pedestrians. Metrics 1-3 can be easily improved by making a bigger car, elevating the passengers and providing more crumple room. Metric 4 is unaffected, as the track width is increased to compensate.

If a low sedan hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian rolls over the car, having a lower impulse given over a longer period of time. If a high SUV hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian is knocked back, having a higher impulse given over a shorter period of time. Safety ratings need to account for the danger cars pose to others.

Source: https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings

Source (SSF): https://www.safetyresearch.net/rollover-stability

European safety rating has a category for "Vulnerable Road Users":

https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model-3/37573

> Reading through the crash test procedure, it is astounding how little attention is paid to pedestrians.

In the U.S. at least, pedestrian safety concerns mainly affect prescriptive legislation (i.e. no pop up headlights). Some countries and blocs have testing similar to crash tests, but I'm not really sure how effective something like that is: any meaningful standard would need to have exceptions for different categories of vehicle. Though honestly I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being.

This a trap we all fall into. Because you are smart but don't understand that a thing could exist, doesn't mean it doesn't. We often use this crutch when absolving someone else of an action taken or a design flaw. "I would have never thought of that!" or "How could someone have anticipated that?"

> I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_safety_through_vehi...

"Though honestly I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being."

I don't agree, there some definitive choices in car design that affect the aftermath of the collision that can have effect on the pedestrian surviving. As pointed above if a pedestrian is hit by a car he has a better chance to roll over the hood of the car vs an SUV where the pedestrian would probably would be hit and fall under the car.

I imagine any multi-ton mass moving in excess of certain speeds will be deadly to unprotected soft-bodied organisms. How do Modern cars differ from non-modern cars in this respect? We've added better brakes, back-up cameras and object detection to avoid running into people, hopefully reducing the number of incidents, but yeah you hit someone with a car moving at any appreciable speed and it's gonna do damage.

Look at European pedestrian safety regulations. There's a reason that the shape of the front of European cars is all kinda the same - they are designed to minimise pedestrian casualties.

Obviously no one is going to survive if you hit them at 70, but you can make a big difference in the 25-35 region that is the normal speed where there are a lot of people around.

Most 1-3 ton objects moving with any sort of momentum are. What is your point?

70% more likely to be killed when struck by a larger car [1]. With a higher front face, pedestrians are struck in the chest, rather than the legs. Turns out, broken legs are a lot more survivable than damage to internal organs.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/07/a-deadly-prob...

By that logic, a low slung sports car is the most pedestrian safe and Ferrari's should get a pedestrian safety rebate. I'll take one!

So long as there is sufficient space between the hood and the engine, which tends to be the main issue with very low cars. Sheet metal deforms as a pedestrian bounces off of the hood, increasing the interaction time and decreasing the instantaneous acceleration. This requires at least 10 cm between the bottom of the hood and the top of the engine. Less distance, and a pedestrian instead bounces off of the engine block, which doesn't deform on impact.

I was hoping for something mid-engine!

Crumple zones are designed to protect the occupants, not anyone external to the vehicle. Granted, the kind of basic design changes that would pretty obviously help with pedestrian harm are also.....not sexy. So seems unlikely car manufacturers will sacrifice too much on the aesthetics front when car ownership is such a status symbol.

Count me guilty then, because I am also hoping to one day take a nap while the car drives me around. Until then, I found the next best thing is booking an Uber. They'll even use venture capital to subsidize my ride :)

But wait, isn't that exactly why they are now in such a rush and cannot accept anything less than full autonomy?

From what I heard, Uber has been burning billions of VC money to capture market share. And their model just won't work financially if they need to pay drivers a living wage. So they attempted trickery to pay them less as "independent" contractors, but now that governments are stepping in to prevent that, there is only one option left:

Uber needs self-driving cars or else they'll go bankrupt.

At least, that's my theory.

I'm not certain self-driving cars are going to save them. Right now, what they pay their driver's is the all-in cost for their fleet. When they switch to fleet Management, they are going to be paying capital costs and maintenance instead. I don't think the latter costs are much lower, if at all, than what they pay drivers now.

There is this other technology called "chauffeur"

And in the third world (e.g., Mexico), they are an order of magnitude cheaper than a Tesla.

> Uber needs self-driving cars or else they'll go bankrupt. > At least, that's my theory.

I believe it--at least, I hope it would take an existential threat to make them push kludged-together pedestrian-killers into use on the roads.

> So they attempted trickery to pay them less as "independent" contractors

An Uber driver is the very definition of an independent contractor. Many drivers also drive for Lyft. How can they be “employees” of Uber while also driving Lyft? Or doing Door Dash?

If Uber drivers were employees, they would have to work where and when assigned. As it is now, Uber drivers come and go as they please.

I am not sure how an Uber driver is any different than a freelance journalist or musician.

You are aware that people can have multiple jobs, right? It's very common for poorer people especially

And those usually have set, non-overlapping hours, even if those hours can vary from week to week. An Uber/Lyft driver can switch back and forth from ride to ride and has no set hours at all.

I'm very excited about the possibility of self-driving cars. Let the car drive while I take a nap or read a book.

But I have a hard time believing that the technology is anywhere close to being mature. You need a lot of contextual knowledge to drive safely in unusual circumstances. I totally believe that within well-defined limits, AI already outperforms humans, but traffic has no well-defined limits. Anything can happen.

You probably could get self-driving cars if you really wanted to, provided that the self-driving traffic doesn't mix with regular traffic. And ideally without humans in the self-driving cars.

Not sure that's what the self-driving cars proponents envisioned though.

Let the car go park itself while I walk into the restaurant. Let the car go fill itself up with gas at night while I am soundly asleep.

> Let the car go fill itself up with gas at night while I am soundly asleep.

I'm bearish on both self-driving and the universal adoption of electric cars, but everyone will be plugging their car in at home long before they can make one that drives itself to the gas station.

>everyone will be plugging their car in at home

Absolutely not. Having to wait for hours to get a few kms of driving distance is way too much of a friction point for EVs to ever be more than a novelty, in addition to the usual complaints of people with only street parking, garages without outlets, etc. Either we'll get the battery-swap situation rolling or invent a faster charging tech, but either way there'll be some sort of "station" in the picture.

> everyone will be plugging their car in at home

I realize that a lot of people here are privileged enough to own a single family home, but the majority of humanity lives in apartments and parks on the street. Trickle-charging at home is not a universal solution. The only practical solution seems to be some form of rapid charging of the car's energy storage. Either by pumping huge amounts of amps into a huge battery pack, or adding some kind of chemical fuel that gets reacted in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

Slow charging still works fine overnight, even if you slow charge on the street, instead of on your own property. Of course it would be nice if every parking spot came with rapid charging, but it's not like that's the only solution.

At the moment, policy in Amsterdam is that if you own an electric car, you get a charging point in your street. I don't know how fast those are, but they don't have to be fast. They're still useful for overnight charging, especially if the city continues to add more when more people get electric cars. I don't understand the argument that this is not in any way a solution. It is.

yeah, everyone is missing my point with this statement which is pointing out that it's never going to happen

I often fall asleep on the bus, while reading a book.

What's really annoying to me is that we've been sold computer vision as the current solution, when it's obvious that if it is the eventual solution it's a long time out because our understanding of the field just isn't nearly as strong as it needs to be, but it's edged out a lot of interim solutions that could have been a lot safer, even if they have downsides.

For example, we could have embedded special markers (or spikes with RFID, or more active wireless, or any number of things that could have provided far more accurate lane detection as long as we were willing to require some up-front work to deploy it for special routes. Combined with very reliable lane detection and restricted to specific deployed areas where it could be tested, computer vision and/or radar/lidar for vehicle and large object detection (which would be mostly sufficient for most highway/freeway use) could likely provide a very safe system. The lower requirements for achieving safety might mean we could actually get some busses outfitted as well.

But that would require some actual state action, as no private company would (or should, if they were to keep it proprietary at least) deploy along large stretches of highway freeway. Covering I-5 from Northern California to Southern California would provide many opportunities, but be an enormous cost.

It is a religion, nothing "faux" about it. It fills the same needs, and uses the same mechanisms within the human mind as more traditional religion.

It is also completely bonkers, as it makes bold assertions about the real world, with which reality will eventually disagree, whereas older religions tended to keep their most dogmatic positions unfalsifiable (the afterlife, the soul, vague prophecies, ...)

Calling it a religion makes about as much sense as calling efforts to cure AIDS or vaccinate Polio prior to the success of Salk a religion. There is a clear and obvious good to achieve, one which is theoretically implementatable and has predecessors for success. Reality can only disagree if it is outright proven impossible due to something - say in this counterfactual Polio has a 5% of turning any unique adjacent molecule it into more polio. otherwise they are literally Just like how taking the spit of a polio patient and putting it in saline with a sprig of mint will spread instead of vaccinating but it doesn't prove a polio vaccine is impossible because "we tried and people got sick".

It is clearly a goal and a realistic one within even a few decades pessimisitcally given that its ability is creeping upwards.

There is zero proof that autonomous vehicles can be safer than human drivers.

There’s lots of proof that autonomous vehicles are technically possible, but the leap to “definitely better than humans” is a very big one and it’s really being taken on faith right now.

In contrast, treating disease directly affect the incidence of that disease.

There's "proof" that computers can be safer than humans. Faster reaction times, don't get tired, don't lose focus, can perform computations much faster than humans.

All that goes to show that a computer can make mistakes much faster than humans. You didn’t say anything about how that guarantees the computer only makes safe decisions.

But that's kinda the whole point of AI, isn't it? It's a circular argument, computers currently can't make safe decisions, therefore they will never make safe decisions.

Computers don’t exercise judgment.

The point of AI is to have computers exercise some form of judgement. What is there to suggest that they can't do that?

Heuristics.

Auto breaking technology deployed in japan has already started affecting insurance because so many vehicles have it that the accident rate has fallen significantly. This is one facet of autonomous decision making.

I mean fully autonomous AKA Level 5. I agree that there is plenty of proof that driver-assist safety technologies can prevent accidents.

SAE Level 5 is completely transformative, it will utterly change the market and the use of cars. Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

This is Uber's endgame - get humans out of the loop. As long as cars still need human drivers this cost savings can't be realized.

> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically.

This already exists: Mercedes, for example, first rolled out "Active Brake Assist" to a production model in 1996. Moreover any fully self driving vehicle will definitely need to be able to apply the brakes.

Why is it transformative? Especially in cities. You have Ubers/taxis/private cars/etc. today. So you hypothetically cut the costs (maybe) in half of hailing a ride. Which is speculative. Does that really transform your use of transportation? I doubt it would change my use of cars one bit.

There are tipping points. If always taking the taxi everywhere is more expensive than the cost of owning your own car, then most people drive their own cars and taxis are for special occasions. If after a tech change always taking the taxi everywhere is less expensive than the cost of owning your own car, then most people would do just that, and only a minority would own a car.

A switch from 20/80 to 80/20 is transformative, changes the default attitude and has further societal effects.

> has further societal effects

Like parking or more specifically - not parking. Here's an example development: "And parking clocks in at a full 29% of the developed land here, taking up twice as much total space as the actual buildings."

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/6/movie-set-urban...

Parking may be reduced but the flip side is that we will have hoards of always cicuclating cyber cabs or we’ll have private owners returning and summoning their private vehicle from free parking at home, thus doubling the trips taken

Not to mention sending a car out for errands. Self driving will free up parking garages, but fill up the roads.

Uber has no relevance once level 5 exists. Vehicle manufacturers will run the vehicles directly if there is any profit to be made from a taxi service.

I doubt it. Vertical integration only works so far.

I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company. This is, and will remain a race to the bottom because competition is fierce: people buy price and first to get to them.

They will also sell cars to normal people. Most people don't think about how convenient it is to have the storage of their personal car. If parking is free or cheap (which is it in the suburbs) having your golf clubs in the trunk or a spare diaper in the glove box are worth the little extra cost, not to mention your car is always there so no need to wait for the taxi to in busy times.

Of course there is also the city, but if you live in a city self driving cars still suffer from congestion and so public mass transit still has big advantages. In fact because the self driving taxi is spending time empty waiting for the next rider it adds to the problem meaning for even more people public transit is worth the hassles with it (which in turn means more demand to make transit better)

> I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company.

A self-driving car is software and hardware... you can sell hardware but software only gets licensed. Software is really where the value is, and that won’t be owned by anyone but the company that made it.

Look at the history of mobile phones, which were originally sold to consumers only by the carriers. As the phones got better and better software, the business model attached more and more to the manufacturer.

Congestion problems are dramatically alleviated if you can convert your city over to self driving only. Once the cars can drive in platoons they are packed in tight, no more accordion effect.

On the way something like UberPool would be needed. Or the taxi can just drive me to the nearest train station and I can take mass transit into the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(automobile)

Platoons help, but there is only so much space on the roads. In short even allowed 5 times as many cars won't put New York subways out of business. Environmentalists will still want to put everybody on the bus (pick any mass transit technology) even in smaller cities.

> Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

I doubt it. One of the biggest obstacles you have is families and the need for infant car and child booster seats. Car ownership is here to stay for a while.

What's the problem with families? My local Uber-equivalent will have and provide child booster seats if requested (as did many but not all "pre-app" taxi service providers), and for infants there are also a bunch of solutions depending on their age; one of them (perhaps not the best, just anecdotal example) is the combo carriage+car seat, where I can put the "carriage wheels" in the trunk and put the baby in the car safely without even waking them up, crucially, it can be done in any car or taxi, and I've taken taxi rides with a baby this way.

It does require some planning (and some support from the service providers) but it's definitely a solvable issue, if the people would want to do that, then it can be arranged.

I suspect that most of the people ready to ditch car ownership don't actually use cars much. In addition to the families/kids gear, a lot of people I know have their cars/trucks setup for various types of outdoor activities such as carrying canoes.

How likely is Uber to kit their entire fleet out with snow tires in winter? That’s an easy example of something a lot of private owners do for safety during the winter. I did that so I could drive to snowed-in trailheads. What about chaining up? And how will the self-driving cab handle getting stuck in the snow? Will there be sand available?

Even without doing any real off-roading, it's one of the things I always feel a bit uncomfortable with when I take rentals to relatively remote areas out West. If it were my own vehicle I'd carry a lot more gear to handle potential problems than I realistically can carry on a plane and throw in a rental.

> Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

As a passenger, there is no difference to me whether my car/bus/train is self-driving or not. As long as I'm not driving, it doesn't matter if a meat, or a silicon neural network operates it.

Given the above, how does this make self-driving a transformative technology?

In addition to all the hype-sters and scammers, you're probably seeing a lot of the often young urbanites with dreams of never owning a car and getting chauffeured around by super-cheap robo-Ubers all their lives. Many of them are either in denial or are feeling pretty betrayed at the moment.

That said, there are legitimate issues with incrementally improving assistive driving. People text and drive today without assistive driving. If a car can mostly make its way in rush hour down the highway autonomously, does anyone think that people won't routinely watch Netflix on their commute?

We could have achieved "self driving" in a sense, even back in the 80s, if we had the will to spend billions (maybe over a trillion) on putting monorail power line tracks on roads, having designed electric cars that latch onto them, and have a national traffic control system that controls/drives them. The traffic control system would have perfect knowledge of where every car is, and could direct traffic in a highly optimal manner from point A to point B for each vehicle. The vehicle's themselves would have systems in place that prevent collision (similar to the system that NYC subway has). Altogether, it could have been achieved, but would have required an unprecedented level of public spending.

Exactly. For anything but open highway, self driving is so far into the future, that we should be focusing on making smaller pieces safer, ultimately building up to the end goal. If there is a self driving car in my lifetime that will drive up the windy mountain road to Yosemite, in the winter, then I'm the Pope. This all or nothing shit has to stop.

I honestly don't understand why there isn't more attention paid/focus on the fully autonomous limited access highway driving in "good" weather use case. That would be hugely attractive for a lot of people. Read a book/watch a movie while heading up to the mountains for the weekend or, for many, take a nap for part of their morning commute.

I suspect it's because it's less interesting to the demographic that's more concerned about being driven to and from bars on their night out or who just don't want to own a car period. But highway driving seems like a huge convenience and safety enhancement even if you just punt on city driving for at least the next few decades.

I'm not sure what you are saying actually maps to reality.

Frame and chassis have never been safer and manufacturers continue to improve. Many (most) new cars have automatic emergency braking that continue to improve. New cars seem to have an ever increasing number of air bags to protect passengers.

All these things are happening at the same time that self-driving is taking place. Tesla FWIW is pretty good at all the above despite their focus on self driving as well.

I agree it is just as ridiculous to say we need level 5 to be make something useful. Will it be decades before we have cars without steering wheels? Sure, maybe even longer. But what exists is already pretty great in most environments and only getting better. (IE, crawling along in a traffic jam at ~15mph is something I would really love to never do again and it seems self driving systems can handle this with aplomb these days)

All of the other solutions you mention is where engineering resources are actually going, save for maybe the seatbelt enhancements. Every new car effectively comes with pedestrian crash prevention[0]; also, Volvo had a car with a hood airbag in 2013, and it looks like other auto manufacturers are looking into it[1].

Self-driving is only as hyped as it is due to the futuristic lure of the idea.

0: https://youtu.be/6owYPHpmDLU 1: https://www.autoblog.com/2017/12/13/patent-gm-external-airba...

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion.

Just follow the money. The near future financials of companies like Uber and Lyft (and to a lesses extent Tesla), rely on fully autonomous self driving.

And that is why they will fail. You heard it here first.

technology has made good progress improving safety, to the point that it's mainly a social problem at this point. we've allowed cars to be all sorts of things (status symbols, entertainment centers, etc.) other than transportation devices requiring high skill and attention to operate safely, at the expense of life and limb.

for cars to be safe for drivers and riders, we need to optimize two things and strip away the rest (especially an over-reliance on technology as savior):

1. minimize distraction and maximize attention on the act of driving 2. maximize the skill of the driver in controlling the vehicle in all sorts of (unexpected) conditions

technology can actually reduce safety, either because it allows drivers to pay less attention or it lowers the skill bar. driver assist technologies--lane assist or automatic braking--fall into this category.

that's not to say safety technologies shouldn't continue to be developed--structural crash safety improvements, for example, don't have the same detrimental effects on driver attention or skill (with the caveat that ever-increasing weights can decrease control and increase lethality).

it's important to distinguish technological advancements that acually improve safety rather than our perceptions of it.

Comma.ai kind of follows the "improving lane detection until it drives you completely" line, at least according to what I get from this interview with Hotz: https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/

He's still a bit too optimistic for my taste.

I bought in to Comma.ai at first and even started porting my car over. But I quickly realized that the whole comma.ai crowd is way way to cavalier with safety. One day I was driving down the freeway and saw a small fender bender occur in front of me. I looked up at my dash and it was all ripped up with wires hanging everywhere because I was working on the Comma.ai stuff. If it had been me in that fender bender you know that insurance would definitely blame me for that given that I was messing with the OBDII and radar sensors.

As cool as Comma.ai is, I really believe that their approach to allowing so much community involvement with little to no oversight is highly irresponsible.

That being said.... If they do succeed, and get some sort of government approval or oversight.... You bet I'm putting that stuff back in. Its cool A.F.

For selected use cases, self driving makes a ton of sense to me.

example: stop-and-go traffic - instead we could unlock millions of hours of human productivity (or provide entertainment).

example: self-parking and come-to-me, esp in closed garages. Parallel parking is hard for humans and we're poor at space utilization.

example: environments where obstructions are unlikely... airplanes have had auto-pilot for a long time... why not highway 80 in the middle of nowhere? why not trucks queuing to load/unload containers at port (or conference centers) - just drive up your incoming truck, grab your personal effects and take over the next outgoing truck while it queues for hours delivering a load and getting the next load.

There's lots of uses for self driving vehicles even before we deal with the hard cases. But they're not sexy and of course a tiny fraction of the labor savings and freedom-making.

> airplanes have had auto-pilot for a long time... why not highway 80 in the middle of nowhere?

You don’t get a stalled car on a Victor airway in the sky. You also don’t have to worry about obstacle avoidance for the most part, in the sky. If an aviation autopilot can’t hold the altitude or heading (such as in turbulence or in mountain up and downdrafts,) it will simply keep the wings level. Airplane autopilots follow explicit instructions: fly heading 143 at 14000 feet; descend at 500 fpm. Hold over a VOR using 1 minute legs at 200kts.

A car autopilot on the other hand, has to react to the physical surroundings. Not only “follow the I-10 at 75mph,” but also, watch out for incoming traffic, lane closures, or some kid on a bicycle that wanders into the road, or a dead animal in the road, or wet roads, icy roads, etc. There is no such thing as Instrument Flight Rules for driving, meaning a car autopilot has to be aware of the visual, while an airplane doesn’t: it just flies the precise route programmed without any awareness that the route might fly through a flock of geese. An airplane autopilot will fly you right into the ground if you let it. There is a lot of skill and training around airplane autopilot, and while it’s amazing and useful, it’s a lot more than simply turning it on and it flies you automatically to Denver.

Actually one of the biggest obstacles to Level 5 is expectation of Zero Deaths for Level 5 autonomous operations. The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars.

When you have thousands of machines traveling in close proximity at speeds exceeding 50mph there will be deaths, this is unavoidable. We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic

That said, Just because some people are working towards Level 5, does not mean all of the other things you are asking for are not also being worked on, it is not a zero sum game. There are enough people that we can have teams working on both.

This complaint is repeated for everything, "Well if people were not working on X drug that I don't care about they could cure cancer"

We can have a better braking system, better frames, etc AND still try to achieve level 5 autonomous driving. It is not an either-or proposition

One of the problems with merely fewer deaths than a human operated car is that technology tends to fail in 'silly' ways.

Also at the very least an self-driving car should reach the level of a good driver, having self-driving cars cause as many deaths as drunk or inattentive drivers do nowadays isn't defensible. Especially since there's usually no explanation and nobody to hold accountable.

> technology tends to fail in 'silly' ways

And a scenario we can easily imagine is that a buggy update goes out to the whole fleet overnight that starts killing people all over the place.

The common case of accidents being on par with manual human driving goes out the window until the software is rolled back and for 12 hours, 24 hours, however long, we get a number of deaths that far outpaces what humans are capable of. The "worst case" would never apply to a manual/human population as a whole, at once.

This might be one of the few cases where it'd be better to not try to have all devices have the latest update all the time.

>nobody to hold accountable

Well, one of the issues is that someone more or less has to be held accountable. And that someone pretty much has to be the manufacturer. No one is going to hand over full control to a vehicle and accept the responsibility if that vehicle commits vehicular manslaughter because "software isn't perfect."

It's actually an interesting legal situation because, other than maybe drug side effects, there aren't a whole lot of consumer products which, properly used and maintained, sometimes randomly kill people and we're OK with that because sometimes stuff just happens.

What about simple speeding tickets? According to Wikipedia[1], Tesla Autopilot max speed is a whopping 90 Mph!!!

Who's responsible if you get pulled over for going 75 in a 65 mph zone?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot

>The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars.

How do we go about testing this? By tallying up autonomous deaths until there are fewer per year than human drivers?

>We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic

Human driver skill varies immensely by person. The idea that anyone who is (or even considers themselves to be) a "good" driver will never accept "average death rates" as a risk when getting in an autonomous car. I know I wouldn't.

The goal has to be zero or it will never be accepted by the public.

Everyone thinks they are "good" drivers, even the person weaving in out of lanes, even the person that has a car that has 500 dents all over it from previous impacts that were all caused by "other bad drivers not me"

What will happen is human-controlled cars will become $$$$$$ to ensure once Level 5 is better than humans. At that point, if you can afford it sure you can reject it but get out your wallet

Why should insurance be more than today? Unless you're arguing that safety systems in other vehicles make you driving one without those systems more dangerous.

Insurance is about risk pools, if Level 5 becomes a reality the risk of a human driver will go up, and has more and more people adopt level 5 (which they will contrary to what people on here think) the number of human drivers to spread that risk over will go down, small risk pools with increasing amount of risk means higher premiums

It is laughable that you don't think the goal wasn't already zero. It has been zero the whole time.

Real life and ideals are different thing. You can't promise that accidents will never happen. But you can promise that accidents will be substantially reduced.

In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success. Of course, you will still be fine tuning until you could get below 1000 and as close to 0 as possible.

> In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success.

If we were actually serious about reducing motor vehicle deaths, we would mandate that every car be equipped with a breathalyzer device. No fancy new technology is necessary, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit (Impaired driving) that we can deal with.

For some reason, though, the religion of autonomous driving does not consider this as a solution to minimizing road fatalities.

To take this further, it's been shown every year the numbers are released, that of that ~35k motor vehicle related deaths, ~20k are alcohol related.

On average, humans are actually pretty good at not dying in motor vehicle related accidents - or avoiding them altogether, given the sheer number of miles traveled per day in the US.

That, however, just isn't the narrative Self-driving followers want everyone to know.

The goal is always zero, but we all know that will never happen. Nothing is perfect. And assistance technologies may be more dangerous than level 5 because we physically cannot maintain concentration when few actions or decisions ar required from us. Some studies even indicate manual tranamissions make us safer, possibly for that reason. When level 5 is available, and it will be, because forever is a long time, good drivers shouldn't have to buy those cars. Assuming money is still a thing. Insurance comapnies may start forcing people financially towards sel drive only cars by hiking rates on humans, but if you give up your privacy with a driving monitor and they asses that you are safer, they would probably rather you drive and waive the hike.

It isn't hard to show an order of magnitude less deaths even with non-zero deaths. At that point expect government to mandate level 5 on all cars.

> Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone.

> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically. We don't need that if AI can always avoid the need for sudden stops.

> Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.

Source? I never seen anyone arguing theses things for the sake of self driving. Are you just assuming that because people that want self driving really want self driving and the auto industry couldn't possible works on 2 things at the same time?

Self-driving? It's called a bus.

Hey man, I want all of it, especially while on the way to full self-driving cars.

Would Tesla be a heretic in this religion you just modeled? They're all about boring driver assistance, and acceptance of a low number of deaths. They don't even try Level 5 for now, and get a lot of criticism for requiring that the human pays attention at all times.

No they get criticism for calling the whole thing "autopilot" and presenting it as if paying attention was optional.

Even my engineer colleagues still operate under the impression that Tesla Autopilot == Self-Driving. One of the dangerous things, to me, is a combination of PR and user experience. The PR/advertisement creates the impression (directly or indirectly) that a Tesla drives itself, and the technology enforces the sentiment by working well 'most' of the time. This article just enforces this. The driver killed was an engineer, who noted that Tesla's auto-pilot would veer into danger (in the spot he was killed), filed a report/complaint, yet still, had enough confidence in the tech to read a quick text.

> and get a lot of criticism for requiring that the human pays attention at all times

Because that's the law... and...

> They don't even try Level 5 for now

That's not what Elon has been telling us for years... Full Level 5 is just months away!

IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive.

Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) keep to a limited area). But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars, and some standard will be introduced to allow all them self driving cars to talk to each other.

At that point, Level 5 will be much easier, even obvious. All he effort invested in assistive driving will seem silly.

"But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars"

If they want to land at some point presumably they have to avoid landing on these things?

As well as trees, birds, powerlines, antennae, and even locusts!

Flying cars might or might not happen (see other discussions here). However they will never be more than a niche. Airplanes need far more safety space than cars. For a car you need a few dozen meters to the cars front and back, and less than 1 side to side. For airplanes it is thousands of meters in all directions, and you are limited as to height before you run out of atmosphere. So even thought planes run in 3d space, there is in practice less space for them than the few roads in a city.

Humans and bikes need even less safety space than cars.

I don't think safety space is a good criterion for predicting how widespread a means of transportation will become.

A fast mode of transportation, with a large safety space requirement, may be more efficient than other modes and/or become popular.

The point is there isn't enough space for all the [single occupancy] cars to become airplanes. Speed doesn't change that because speed increases the space needed between airplanes.

Now if we change to flying buses we might be able to pull something off, an express bus that picks up people for a few stops in the suburb for 10 minutes, then flys at >150mph downtown is a very compelling competitor to a car and will get anybody who currently drives 20 to minutes downtown to ride if the cost is reasonable (those in closer in suburbs will still drive). I don't think the business or environmental models work out.

>IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive.

Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of those things. Well, unless we develop "antigravity" or something...

Add the possibility of huge damage caused from a failing/failing/crashing flying car, not just to the road and other cars there (like with a car) but to any building, group of people, etc. If it was a car-replacement (and thus getting on it was laxer than flying a plane, with flight plans, airport checks, special licenses), it would also be perfect for suicide terrorism too!

Here's a funny but insightful post I've found, hammering on the topic:

Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying cars. QED! The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying cars.

Let’s glance back at a little history, always the best response to this kind of futuristic cluelessness. The first actual flying car anyone seems to have built was the Curtiss Autoplane, which was designed and built by aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss and debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917. It was cutting-edge technology for the time, with plastic windows and a cabin heater. It never went into production, since the resources it would have used got commandeered when the US entered the First World War a few months later, and by the time the war was over Curtiss apparently had second thoughts about his invention and put his considerable talents to other uses.

There were plenty of other inventors ready to step into the gap, though, and a steady stream of flying cars took to the roads and the skies in the years thereafter. The following are just a few of the examples. The Waterman Arrowbile on the left, invented by the delightfully named Waldo Waterman, took wing in 1937; it was a converted Studebaker car—a powerhouse back in the days when a 100-hp engine was a big deal. Five of them were built.

During the postwar technology boom in the US, Consolidated Vultee, one of the big aerospace firms of that time, built and tested the ConVairCar model 118 on the right in 1947, with an eye to the upper end of the consumer market; the inventor was Theodore Hall. There was only one experimental model built, and it flew precisely once.

The Aero-Car on the left had its first test flights in 1966. Designed by inventor Moulton Taylor, it was the most successful of the flying cars, and is apparently the only one of the older models that still exists in flyable condition. It was designed so that the wings and tail could be detached by one not particularly muscular person, and turned into a trailer that could be hauled behind the body for on-road use. Six were built.

Most recently, the Terrafugia on the right managed a test flight all of eight minutes long in 2009; the firm is still trying to make their creation meet FAA regulations, but the latest press releases insist stoutly that deliveries will begin in two years. If you’re interested, you can order one now for a mere US$196,000.00, cash up front, for delivery at some as yet undetermined point in the future.Any automotive engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good car design. Any aeronautical engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good aircraft design. It so happens that by and large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle.

Thus what you get with a flying car is a lousy car that’s also a lousy airplane, for a price so high that you could use the same money to buy a good car, a good airplane, and a really nice sailboat or two into the bargain. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. It’s not that nobody’s built one; it’s that people have been building them for more than a century and learning, or rather not learning, the obvious lesson taught by them. What’s more, as the meme above hints, the problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of technology to enable it.

When people insist that we’ll have flying cars sometime very soon, in other words, they’re more than a century behind the times. We’ve had flying cars since 1917. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today isn’t that they don’t exist. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today is that flying cars are a really dumb idea, for the same reason that it’s a really dumb idea to try to run a marathon and have hot sex at the same time.

https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/

The question is whether the problem is one of insufficient engineering optimization or whether it requires a step-function in technology that does not exist now. It appears to me that self-driving cars are of the former type, while flying cars are the latter.

Current-resolution lidar, cameras, and radar seem to provide sufficient sensor input. The costs are too high by a long shot, but that may just be a question of getting economies of scale established. Current PC graphics hardware has sufficient bandwidth to process those sensors. I don't think you can just throw current neural net training at the problem and get Type 5 autonomy out of it - there will be lots and lots of engineering hours in figuring out what to do with that sensor data - but that's just a problem of doing many man-years of straightforward work.

Flying cars don't have adequate power from a current-gen internal combustion engine running on petroleum, and especially not enough power from lithium-ion batteries and electric motors. If you could get a power source that provided an order of magnitude or two greater power density than the best of those technologies, flying cars would be viable. Until then, no amount of engineering hours will make it work.

> If you could get a power source that provided an order of magnitude or two greater power density than the best of those technologies, flying cars would be viable.

So essentially thousands of flying nuclear reactors piloted by average joes around the city.

That sounds really safe!

> To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites

You can get around that by using an electric transmission. A turbine drives an alternator which drives 2 sets of electric motors one for the wheels and one for the propellors. As to the rest of the post it’s attacking a straw man. I don’t think people want a highway capable car that can also fly. If you can fly why drive on the highway?

A 50k to 100k VTL ‘flying car’ with maximum cruse speed of 80 MPH, maximum altitude of 10,000 feet, a range of 500 miles, room for 2+ people, and a cargo capacity of 1,000lb including people fits most people’s definitions of a flying car. Being able to move around on the ground at say 15 to 25MPH without giant spinning blades would also be a great feature.

Oddly enough I think we already have something close to flying motorcycles in autogyros, but the closest thing to a flying car is a vanilla small flying airplane and those run you 250k new.

PS: There is even something of a jet pack alternative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpwd-T2Qvbk

Agreed on flying cars, but I wanted to point out a glaring inaccuracy in the opening that undercuts the author's broader argument:

"By 2000 or so that curve had flattened out in the usual way as PV cells became a mature technology, and almost two decades of further experience with them has sorted out what they can do and what they can’t."

In fact, PV prices have dropped DRAMATICALLY since 2000 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... looks at the different trends 1986-2001 and 2001-2012), as have the prices/performance of the energy storage systems needed to make them practical.

I agree that it's not a silver bullet that will solve the fossil fuel crisis all on its own (at least not in time), but it is in line with the broader improvement in renewable costs and efficiency.

>In fact, PV prices have dropped DRAMATICALLY since 2000 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014.... looks at the different trends 1986-2001 and 2001-2012), as have the prices/performance of the energy storage systems needed to make them practical.

Can't open this, but the abstract also shares this:

"Market-stimulating policies were responsible for a large share of PV's cost decline"

This part is artificial though (subsidies, etc).

The subsidies created the scale and experience required to lower the costs; they're not included in the cost numbers. With current technology, they are cheaper without subsidies.

I read that in various places, but I'm still suspicious. There are lots of ways to hide subsidies (green tax cuts for example).

I wonder if it's possible to solve noise problem with flying cars. Maybe use active noise cancellation at the source?

No idea if it's even theoretically possible, but would be neat.

No, it's not physically possible to do any significant active cancellation of the noise caused by a rotor / propeller spinning through the air. The noise sources are too spread out (especially with multi-rotor designs) and cover too much of the audible range.

Blade shape can be tuned to an extent for minimizing noise but that also reduces efficiency (not much to spare). Larger, slower turning blades are also quieter but there are practical physical limits on size and weight.

Aren't flying cars going to be much noisier than surface cars?

Joby is using some low noise props that are very effective. Quieter than most of the ridiculous motorcycles and loud cars on the 101.

If we care about noise, we should be addressing the motorcycle industry. I can’t hear a C-130 flying overhead at 1000 feet when I am in my house, but I can hear motorcycles zipping by on the freeway behind my house.

Yes, that was my point. We will need some clever tech to make the noise bearable.