Social Science Why didnt driverless cars pan out?

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TheBrownDog
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For the past 9 years elon musk has said driverless cars are only a year away.

in 2017 Lyft said half its fleet would be driverless cars by 2019

6 years ago all major car manufacturers were investing massively in driverless cars. Now only one is.

what happened?

how could a new technology be so close to mass production and yet the whole thing has completely fallen apart and it now looks many decades away if at all.

Were we all lied to about how good the tech was? Did we just not realise how scared humans would be to drive them?
 
Because it's very, very hard. Musk was overstating to the public how close they were.

For things like FSD, the last 0.1% of the problem will take years.
 

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Seeds said:
For the past 9 years elon musk has said driverless cars are only a year away.

in 2017 Lyft said half its fleet would be driverless cars by 2019

6 years ago all major car manufacturers were investing massively in driverless cars. Now only one is.

what happened?

how could a new technology be so close to mass production and yet the whole thing has completely fallen apart and it now looks many decades away if at all.

Were we all lied to about how good the tech was? Did we just not realise how scared humans would be to drive them?
Click to expand...

Lots of humans like driving.
Lots of lies about how good the tech was.
Realising the cost of development probably isn't worthwhile right now.
 
A better question for this thread is, should tech companies and other businesses face consequences for making promises to shareholders which don't pan out?
 
The benefits are massively overstated. If everyone had a private autonomous vehicle, the roads would grind to a stand-still. (Think about the empty vehicles driving home or parking themselves near busy destinations.). Plus, it would give priority back to pedestrians who would be able to cross the road at any time and bring traffic to a halt (that feature would have to be foolproof for these cars to get approval).

The response to that would be road user charging, which would result in a massive impact on lower-socio economic areas, relative to those who live inner-city have much better PT access and could afford the additional charges.

I'd put my money on drone-flying private vehicles before on-road autonomous vehicles.
 
Saint said:
The benefits are massively overstated. If everyone had a private autonomous vehicle, the roads would grind to a stand-still.
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Nah. If all cars were driverless roads move much faster. Speed limits at the moment are as you've thousands of independent cars, with no idea of what others are going to do, so you need lower speed limits. If all are driverless you could have every car going down streets at 100km an hour. If your car needs to move over it signals to those around it needs to and they'd all subtly adjust to let you in. With the higher speeds from the fully connected network of cars, if there is an accident, they'd be able to seamlessly split traffic around alternate routes (still going 100+ km/hr).

The issue is legislation. Driverless cars are going to be safer, but there'll still be accidents. Who is to blame? When a driverless car inevitably hits and kills someone (either a pedestrian or other car), there'll be who is to blame? Was it avoidable at all? And if so then is the owner, the car manufacturer or the government that set the limits the cars can go to? Who gets to decide rules like a kid steps out in front of a car going 80km when there's cars behind and in the other lane, where you couldn't stop in time, so it's hit the kid and kill them or swerve into traffic and potentially kill the passengers or another cars passengers?

You can bet lawyers are salivating at the thought of getting on the first deaths to sue Telsa, GM, Ford etc. for money they couldn't get when 'Joe six-pack' is drunk and swerves into oncoming traffic to take out a family. Over a million die in traffic accidents worldwide a year, but get driverless cars and the unavoidable one's down to in the thousands and there'll be too many saying they are unsafe and not trustworthy.

The science isn't there yet, but it's not the science that is going to hold it up from going mainstream quickly once it is.
 

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I wish driverless car technology was way more advanced than what it is. I find driving stressful because it’s dangerous.

It’s not necessarily that I lack faith in my ability (but I am not the best driver imo, all I can do is follow the rules as best as I can but I’m not great at executing some skills). You’re at the whim of others and that’s terrifying.

If driverless cars were ever proven to be safer and more efficient then logically that is the best way forward, but it’s true that the backlash is going to be greater every time there’s an accident. You could always argue that the accidents are preventable if the driver had control even if the data tells a different story.
 
Coolangatta said:
I wish driverless car technology was way more advanced than what it is. I find driving stressful because it’s dangerous.

It’s not necessarily that I lack faith in my ability (but I am not the best driver imo, all I can do is follow the rules as best as I can but I’m not great at executing some skills). You’re at the whim of others and that’s terrifying.

If driverless cars were ever proven to be safer and more efficient then logically that is the best way forward, but it’s true that the backlash is going to be greater every time there’s an accident. You could always argue that the accidents are preventable if the driver had control even if the data tells a different story.
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These are the key bits. Whilst many people would (in time) agree driverless cars are safer than most drivers, many of them would say they are in the few that are safer so they should still be in control. Ask 100 drivers if they are in the top or bottom half of drivers and you'd get 90+ of them saying they are better than average (not necessarily that they are great, but better than more than they are worse than). The full benefit of driverless cars comes when, at a minimum, there are driverless only lanes, so they can travel faster, whilst maintaining safety (you get 10 cars at 100km, 1 metre apart, if the lead car brakes hard, within 0.01 seconds all 10 are equally doing, so you don't get a pile up for example).

When driverless cars become mainstream, then for city driving (and main highways) at least, all the cars should be driverless, leaving driving cars for tracks for people to do, or if going off-road.
 
Andre said:
Nah. If all cars were driverless roads move much faster. Speed limits at the moment are as you've thousands of independent cars, with no idea of what others are going to do, so you need lower speed limits. If all are driverless you could have every car going down streets at 100km an hour. If your car needs to move over it signals to those around it needs to and they'd all subtly adjust to let you in. With the higher speeds from the fully connected network of cars, if there is an accident, they'd be able to seamlessly split traffic around alternate routes (still going 100+ km/hr).

The issue is legislation. Driverless cars are going to be safer, but there'll still be accidents. Who is to blame? When a driverless car inevitably hits and kills someone (either a pedestrian or other car), there'll be who is to blame? Was it avoidable at all? And if so then is the owner, the car manufacturer or the government that set the limits the cars can go to? Who gets to decide rules like a kid steps out in front of a car going 80km when there's cars behind and in the other lane, where you couldn't stop in time, so it's hit the kid and kill them or swerve into traffic and potentially kill the passengers or another cars passengers?

You can bet lawyers are salivating at the thought of getting on the first deaths to sue Telsa, GM, Ford etc. for money they couldn't get when 'Joe six-pack' is drunk and swerves into oncoming traffic to take out a family. Over a million die in traffic accidents worldwide a year, but get driverless cars and the unavoidable one's down to in the thousands and there'll be too many saying they are unsafe and not trustworthy.

The science isn't there yet, but it's not the science that is going to hold it up from going mainstream quickly once it is.
Click to expand...

It's a physical impossibility. Where are all these cars going that there's capacity for them? They'd still have to physically stop at every other set of signals. Which, according to human physiology can't happen instantaneously.

You seriously think there'll be inner-city streets with cars doing 100 km/h on them? They also still need to be foolproof for non-autonomous cars on the road such as dogs, kids, bikes and broken down autonomous vehicles. THere's not going to be cars doing 80 km/h where there might be children. There are also places without signals where people need to cross the road.

This is the kind of wishful thinking which sounds good on paper, but in practice just isn't going to happen.
 
The less a person has to do to drive a car, the more I worry in one sense.

A decade or so ago I hardly ever saw people driving at night without lights - I see it often now. Folks so used to auto lights that if it isn't enabled, they don't turn them on.

Also people looking at phones whilst driving and drifting out of their lane - 'lane keeping' technology can mitigate this but what if s**t drivers become too reliant upon it and it inevitably fails?
 
kickazz said:
The less a person has to do to drive a car, the more I worry in one sense.

A decade or so ago I hardly ever saw people driving at night without lights - I see it often now. Folks so used to auto lights that if it isn't enabled, they don't turn them on.

Also people looking at phones whilst driving and drifting out of their lane - 'lane keeping' technology can mitigate this but what if s**t drivers become too reliant upon it and it inevitably fails?
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Mate, you make good points, but the cat is out of the bag already hauling its arse out of sight at a million miles an hour. Strap yourself in and hang on, its a race to the bottom now.
 
It’s really not that far from happening. It depends if the governments allow it.
 
Flog111 said:
It’s really not that far from happening. It depends if the governments allow it.
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It depends if they can prove themselves safe on public roads.

Given the recent submersible disaster, I don't think short-cuts or promises are going to cut the mustard.

Also, I'd want to see what the disclaimer looks like first. Is the company going to be responsible if the car kills a person, or the occupant?
 
I have no doubt in the near future we will have self driving cars that are safe and reliable but there is still a way to go. More smarts on board maybe part of the solution, we already can collect enough sensor data from a suite of modestly priced sensors. Which leads into the article below which looks at a very bad decision made by Tesla a number of years ago to use only visual data rather than a suite on sensors - such as lidar, radar or sonar. It was decision by Mr Musk and it's meant Tesla has lost it's leadership in self driving car race - pun intended.



Not only has decision caused Tesla to fall behind, the self driving software has led to deaths due to over promoting it's capabilities. Mr Musk is facing some serious lawsuits.

'Musk’s greed and cosmos-sized ego have caused Tesla to lose one of its keystone technological advances, and the aftermath of this could potentially plunge the company into disrepute.'

The dangers of ego & hubris.
 
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