A writer for Electronic Design magazine named Lou Frenzel opines “that the driverless car is not a good idea.” His argument comes down to, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can think of lots of problems that I don’t imagine anyone at Google has ever thought of.”
For example, he asks, can self-driving cars operate at night? Can they handle rain, fog, and snow? Can they find a parking space in a garage? Can they make left turns?
The fact that all of these questions have been asked and answered by Google, Volkswagen, and other companies developing self-driving cars makes Frenzel’s article pretty insipid. For example, most of these cars rely on radar, infrared, and/or laser beams, none of which care whether it is day or night. Infrared can also “penetrate smoke,rain, snow, blowing sand, and most foggy conditions,” though in heavy fog, a self-driving car would slow down, just as a human-driven car should do.
We’ve already seen cars that can navigate parking garages and park there. Google’s cars have no problem turning left “across five lanes of traffic.”
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The good news is that self-driving car technology is advancing as fast as proponents have predicted. The latest car to enter the market is the Volvo XC90, which has a “Pilot Assist” mode that is the next step beyond adaptive cruise control. In this mode, the car not only mimics the speed of the car in front, it mimics the steering, allowing the car’s driver to go hands-free for as long as they are willing to follow the car in front.
The only drawback is that Volvo has programmed the mode to only work at speeds under 30 mph, so it’s great in traffic but not so good on the open road. This limit is probably due to liability concerns: auto makers know they can make cars safely stop before hitting anything at speeds up to 30 mph, but don’t want to get sued if the car in front comes to an abrupt stop from, say, 70 mph. Still, it is a step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, a company called Cruise Automation says that it can convert any car to become a self-driving car, at least on highways. The $10,000 package includes radar, optical sensors, and processors to allow the car to navigate a highway lane, avoiding other cars and obstacles. The company says it is working on cars that can drive city streets or pass slower vehicles on the highway by departing the lane the car is in.
Last year, Cruise said that it would soon have a self-driving car package for certain models of Audis. Now it is saying it can add adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane tracking to any car (though I suspect they mean any late-model car). The point is that, as new self-driving technologies are perfected, companies like Cruise will make them available for existing cars, thus allowing the self-driving car revolution to take place that much faster.
” Infrared can also “penetrate smoke,rain, snow, blowing sand, and most foggy conditions,” though in heavy fog, a self-driving car would slow down, just as a human-driven car should do.”
None of these detectors is fool-proof. Optical and infra-red detectors can be dazzled. Radar detectors can become confused.
“The $10,000 package includes radar, optical sensors, and processors to allow the car to navigate a highway lane, avoiding other cars and obstacles. ”
At last we have an estimate of price. What we are supposed to believe is that people will do DIY to save a $40 fee, but would not drive themselves to save an up-front cost of $10,000.
I think it’s a niche product at that price.
Self-driving cars may not become common at an added cost of $10,000. $10,000 personal computers weren’t an everyday item either but look where we are now.
So we should restructure our way of life and cities–again–to accommodate motor vehicles? We already did that for when motor vehicles actually WERE a transportation revolution, and the result has nearly as many negative impacts as positive ones.
As usual, The Antiplanner missed the point, which is antithetical to his a priori conclusions and ideological wet dreams: [Frenzel’s money quote]: Just because you can so something technologically doesn’t mean that you should.
So many limp-brained and cliched objections to autonomous vehicles, my favorite of which is that they can be “hacked” and that “terrorists could have a field day.”
Fear. FEAR! FEAR!
Change is oh so scary to the limp-brained.
One of Frenzel’s stupidest questions (which shows he has not been following autonomous car tech and/or cannot use Google) is related to semi-trucks:
Scare! Scared! Fear. FEAR! FEAR!
Autonomous semis wreaking havoc on the freeways, squishing smart cars like bugs. Flattening little old ladies in crosswalks. Oh! My! God! The horrors!
Never mind that, yes there are self-driving semi trucks, as reported by Wired, a real publication with people capable of actual research.
Speaking of misplaced, limp-brained fear, this is from the Wired article linked above:
Ignore the limp-brained naysayers. They’re the same type of limp-brained people who ridiculed the Wright Brothers and Goddard.
I’m surprised nobody on this site has commented about how self-driving cars could theoretically be stopped by the government. Anecdotally, there was a report about police using on-star to stop a stolen vehicle. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine police stopping a self-driven car with, for example, a subversive inside. Wouldn’t government potentially controling your travel be worse than the government potentially controlling your guns?
“Wouldn’t government potentially controling your travel be worse than the government potentially controlling your guns?”
Government already does both.
Next.
Self-driving vehicle enthusiasts like The Antiplanner need to reality-check what they think is likely to occur in the near future. The trouble with self-driving vehicle predictions–and most predictions about “high tech” technology in general–is that most of it is techno-utopian bullshit spewed by virtual armies of bullshitters, such as described in this 2012 article, The Naked and the TED.
However, my level of confidence in The Antiplanner’s judgement about these issues is low and declining, given his failure to supply any defensible debunking of the the myriad of empirical details of bus and BRT operations, and the related traffic engineering, that the “Amateur Planner” and myself supplied that debunked HIS claims on that very technical topic (it’s not rocket science, but there are lots of arcane details nonetheless). Not good form to question someone who has 30+ years of technical experience in transit, specifically bus, operations…I don’t presume to understand in any detail how solid state electronics, or most of the mathematics behind physics, work. But The Antiplanner exhorts his claims that everything about bus operations taught in the textbooks and experienced in the field every day by transit practioners is wrong…
Did someone fart?
I think self driving will be great. But it’s going to come in stages. Urban self driving is unlikely for quite a while. The AI problem of detecting and predicting pedestrian, bicyclist etc behavior is very hard. Think about the problem when a ball comes bouncing into the street… do you slam on the brakes? Do you know it’s a ball, and that there might be a little kid about to run out to it?
First, we’ll see it on limited access roads. It will make a huge impact, soon I predict, on long haul truck drivers. Those trucks are going to be driverless, and they will drive themselves to parking places by the freeways, where humans will get in and drive them through the city.
Later… and it’s hard to predict how long… more and more driving will be automated.
Current driver assist systems are allowing manufacturers, and drivers to learn about the real world aspects of this. I paid quite a bit extra last year to get a Highlander with some of these systems. It has lane assist – it nags you if you drift our of your lane (you can turn this off, btw). It has radars on the sides and back that tell you if someone is coming as you back out, or if you get to close to something. Those same radars allow it to assist in lane changing – by warning you (various levels of warning) when there is someone in or near your blind spot. The forward looking radar provides a cruise control that matches the speed of the vehicle in front of you. It also will activate various things if it senses an impending collision, including slamming on the brakes and tightening seat belts.
But… it has bugs. If you turn on the cruise control when you are too close to someone, it will brake pretty hard, which can cause you to be rear ended. And… heavy rain causes cruise control to disengage because the radar can’t see through it (It’s probably millimeter wave – 60 or 70 GHz).
Also, I had a crack in the windshield, and it took 4 weeks to get a replacement which cost $1200! This, apparently, because optical sensors are mounted to it and they just replace the whole thing. Yikes!
I’m all for this automation and its ultimate progress. It will be safer. It will free up vast amounts of time that we currently waste driving. It will save energy. Alternate modes, such as pooled vehicles, will become more practical.
You won’t have much choice. Autonomous vehicles will likely prove to be at least ten times safer than self-driven vehicles, cutting the annual number of deaths from ~30K to ~3k. Voters will demand that politicians write laws to severely restrict self-driven vehicles.
Besides, as another commenter pointed out car pooling will increase, reducing the absolute number of cars. Wouldn’t that be good for our way of life?
“… the result has nearly as many negative impacts as positive ones.”
This is statement that leaves me astounded. While I concur that the auto has led to profound social change, only a few have decided that the auto isn’t worth the troubles it has brought with it. I can think only of the Amish who as a group have serious reservations and even Most of them are fine with free riding in a car if offered a ride.