9 ms·

Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

45 points by dhruvkaran 13y ago

wayne_h 13y ago
Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.
- hnriot 13y ago
  Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    I take the train from Santa Barbara to San Francisco from time to time and would even put up with a train with decent internet connectivity. Even if the train is slow, I could at least be doing some work on the ride. Unfortunately the train is currently more expensive, less productive, and slower than driving.
    - melling 13y ago
      The technology to build faster trains was invented before man landed on the moon. It has been 49 years since this technology went into production. It's older than most people reading this discussion.
- scoofy 13y ago
  While this is a good idea in theory, i'd say the autonomous highway isn't going to work well if you give grandma the option to tap on the brakes when she gets nervous.
  - marco-fiset 13y ago
    The thing is that autonomous cars should just not allow it, like in the word autonomous.
- venus 13y ago
  Meanwhile, JR East announced it intends to raise speeds on the Touhoku Shinkansen from 320km/h to 360km/h by 2020. Tell me the chance of single passenger road vehicles routinely travelling at speeds like that within the foreseeable future, because I'd say zero. And furthermore, these slow motion freeway "trains" will rely on networked, not merely autonomous, car technology, not included in the 2020 timeframe.
- tbrownaw 13y ago
  Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.
  - hobs 13y ago
    Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing... == No. You can't 'optimize' traffic away. LA is a case study.
      - hobs 13y ago
        I might have to look into this a bit more, and I would agree that adding more cars to the point of the system literally being unable to handle them cannot be optimized. However, its clear to me that individual actors in the traffic system do not behave in a way that is beneficial to considerations above and beyond their own. I do believe that this would cause some decrease in overall traffic if it was "fixed" by an automated program. (If your car can drive 200 mph and not make a mistake, doesn't that imply that you can have more traffic throughput on the road?) Either way, I am interested if you have specific examples besides the meme of traffic being terrible in LA. I assume they have done massive studies on the problem considering how problematic it is known to be.
        001sky 13y ago
        specific examples besides the meme Traffic in LA is a symptom of a social interaction, where demand exceeds supply of a scarce resource. Its not a "technical" problem in the naive sense. You proposed solution is like trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" through fertilizer. The problem of the commons is not that the quality of the commons is poor. The problem is that no matter how productive it is, it will be overgrazed. So, this is a social problem. Not a technical one in the engineering sense. The solution is ultimately solved with poltics, who keep the politically less powerful (ie, the poor) out of the commons.
- stevewilhelm 13y ago
  People fail to realize that the California bullet-train project is primarily an economic stimulus exercise.
  - jerf 13y ago
    No sale. Economic stimulus is completely nonfunctional when the lead time is in the "many years". The term "shovel-ready" was thrown around a couple of years ago for a reason. Of course, I suppose you could just hope that you start planning for the project in this downturn, but it'll only start in the next one....
    - stevewilhelm 13y ago
      Work in the Central Valley, the part of California that was hit the hardest by the recent economic downturn, is expected to start this year. [1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/Statewide_Rail_Modernization/index.html http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/Statewide_Rail_Modernization/...
      - jerf 13y ago
        For the economic downturn that happened five years ago. The fact that we still need "stimulus" is itself a pretty powerful argument against its effectiveness. Our new economic innovation, making sure the economy stays down as long as our incredible sluggishness in "stimulus".
- melling 13y ago
  It costs so much money because the land is so expensive. The land is so expensive because 40 years ago many people like yourself said bullet trains won't work in America. Is it really that hard to be convinced that traveling 220mph on a train between cities 200-500 miles apart is a good thing? California isn't getting the ideal system now but if it builds the first one, lots of people will use it, and the next generation will have an easier time building the 300-350 mph maglev.
tbrownaw 13y ago
What is "within two vehicle generations"?
- comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
  The auto industry works in cycles on the scale of approximately 5-6 years. So technology that is not practical right now is 6+ years out. They are basically promising to sell this as soon as possible. They have 1-3 years for the go or no go decision.
ebbv 13y ago
No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be human error. Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true. But my response to that is: 1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways. 2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car, the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car. 3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones. I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate the problem, not improve it.
- daeken 13y ago
  Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot in planes.
runako 13y ago
From no working prototype to multiple commercially available vehicles in 7 years. Yeah, okay. I hate to be that guy, but it took ~3 years to get the Leaf to production. And the Leaf uses well-known technology that had been shipped by other vendors a decade earlier. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a very long reach.
mason240 13y ago
"Work is already underway in Japan to build a dedicated autonomous driving proving ground, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2014. Featuring real townscapes - masonry not mock-ups - it will be used to push vehicle testing beyond the limits possible on public roads to ensure the technology is safe." Meanwhile Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets with their autonomous car.
- venus 13y ago
  > Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets I have got to say, I am pretty amazed they have managed to swing that. Permission to drive autonomous robot cars around the everyday streets of litigation and safety-obsessed California? An accomplishment of equal size to any one technical challenge in the car's making, I would say!
  - hypersoar 13y ago
    As I understand, they didn't ask permission. They simply announced one day that they'd been doing it for a year, and then lobbied California to legalize it afterwards. Given the potential benefits of being the state that makes autonomous cars a thing, I imagine it was an easy sell.
  - atlbeer 13y ago
    There is a real driver behind the wheel ready to take control at anytime.
- jerf 13y ago
  Still under controlled circumstances, though. This sort of mockup is necessary for full testing. I'm not sure how autonomous Nissan is shooting for, and I think they're rather deliberately not defining it. You can draw a fairly smooth continuum between "antilock brakes" and "full autonomous car you'd put your unaccompanied children into in the middle of a Midwest winter", and I imagine they're not leaping straight towards the latter. But still, to get there, you need to be able to test things like "what does the car do on a street covered in a patchwork of ice when a dog jumps out in front of it?" without waiting for exactly those conditions to emerge. If you want a fun thought exercise, imagine how an antilock brake system handles the left wheels being on ice and the right wheels being on dry pavement. And remember... torque. You can't "just" brake with the right wheels....
johansch 13y ago
Why doesn't Google just buy Tesla already?
- hydralist 13y ago
  uber is cheaper?
  - johansch 13y ago
    Uber is not a car manufacturer last time I checked.
- icpmacdo 13y ago
  I always though Tesla's were going the no-brainer for driverless cars.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  What a great idea! That way the NSA can know your real-time location on the roads too, even if you have your cellphone off.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    If the NSA wants to know your real-time location on the roads, it really doesn't need Google to do that. Or Facebook...or any other $BIG_COMPANY for that matter.
  - johansch 13y ago
    That's a bug with the american government (your?), not Google. Tesla on its own can't fight it any more than Google can, them both being american companies.
hrvbr 13y ago
Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation. I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms, especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers. This would be a huge progress for humanity.
- Contero 13y ago
  Making self-driving cars safer than people-driven cars is trivial. The hard thing will be handling the tidal wave of FUD when the inevitable happens and someone dies as a result of one. Google or Nissan or whoever will need a mountain of good PR and safety statistics to be able to push it back. That alone is enough reason to motivate the creation of "hyper-efficient safety mechanisms".
Apocryphon 13y ago
I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?) How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?
hardtke 13y ago
I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.
- uncoder0 13y ago
  The teams Nissan and Google are using to develop this technology already dealt with the problems of a highway/city populated with human pedestrians and drivers. High speed linked autonomous cars are certainly not the fist step of this transition.[1] [1]http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
- jerf 13y ago
  Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time, you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you don't have to start there. There's no need for a "big bang" event. By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car, because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.
  - hardtke 13y ago
    By simply adding autonomous cars to the current infrastructure, it doesn't improve peoples lives in a directly obvious way. They can't go any faster, and traffic does not get reduced. Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as fast. Otherwise, I rather enjoy driving.

45 points by dhruvkaran 13y ago

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

hnriot 13y ago
Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.
- stevesearer 13y ago
  I take the train from Santa Barbara to San Francisco from time to time and would even put up with a train with decent internet connectivity. Even if the train is slow, I could at least be doing some work on the ride. Unfortunately the train is currently more expensive, less productive, and slower than driving.
  - melling 13y ago
    The technology to build faster trains was invented before man landed on the moon. It has been 49 years since this technology went into production. It's older than most people reading this discussion.
scoofy 13y ago
While this is a good idea in theory, i'd say the autonomous highway isn't going to work well if you give grandma the option to tap on the brakes when she gets nervous.
- marco-fiset 13y ago
  The thing is that autonomous cars should just not allow it, like in the word autonomous.
venus 13y ago
Meanwhile, JR East announced it intends to raise speeds on the Touhoku Shinkansen from 320km/h to 360km/h by 2020. Tell me the chance of single passenger road vehicles routinely travelling at speeds like that within the foreseeable future, because I'd say zero. And furthermore, these slow motion freeway "trains" will rely on networked, not merely autonomous, car technology, not included in the 2020 timeframe.
tbrownaw 13y ago
Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.
- hobs 13y ago
  Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing... == No. You can't 'optimize' traffic away. LA is a case study.
    - hobs 13y ago
      I might have to look into this a bit more, and I would agree that adding more cars to the point of the system literally being unable to handle them cannot be optimized. However, its clear to me that individual actors in the traffic system do not behave in a way that is beneficial to considerations above and beyond their own. I do believe that this would cause some decrease in overall traffic if it was "fixed" by an automated program. (If your car can drive 200 mph and not make a mistake, doesn't that imply that you can have more traffic throughput on the road?) Either way, I am interested if you have specific examples besides the meme of traffic being terrible in LA. I assume they have done massive studies on the problem considering how problematic it is known to be.
      - 001sky 13y ago
        specific examples besides the meme Traffic in LA is a symptom of a social interaction, where demand exceeds supply of a scarce resource. Its not a "technical" problem in the naive sense. You proposed solution is like trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" through fertilizer. The problem of the commons is not that the quality of the commons is poor. The problem is that no matter how productive it is, it will be overgrazed. So, this is a social problem. Not a technical one in the engineering sense. The solution is ultimately solved with poltics, who keep the politically less powerful (ie, the poor) out of the commons.
stevewilhelm 13y ago
People fail to realize that the California bullet-train project is primarily an economic stimulus exercise.
- jerf 13y ago
  No sale. Economic stimulus is completely nonfunctional when the lead time is in the "many years". The term "shovel-ready" was thrown around a couple of years ago for a reason. Of course, I suppose you could just hope that you start planning for the project in this downturn, but it'll only start in the next one....
  - stevewilhelm 13y ago
    Work in the Central Valley, the part of California that was hit the hardest by the recent economic downturn, is expected to start this year. [1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/Statewide_Rail_Modernization/index.html http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/Statewide_Rail_Modernization/...
    - jerf 13y ago
      For the economic downturn that happened five years ago. The fact that we still need "stimulus" is itself a pretty powerful argument against its effectiveness. Our new economic innovation, making sure the economy stays down as long as our incredible sluggishness in "stimulus".
melling 13y ago
It costs so much money because the land is so expensive. The land is so expensive because 40 years ago many people like yourself said bullet trains won't work in America. Is it really that hard to be convinced that traveling 220mph on a train between cities 200-500 miles apart is a good thing? California isn't getting the ideal system now but if it builds the first one, lots of people will use it, and the next generation will have an easier time building the 300-350 mph maglev.

tbrownaw 13y ago

What is "within two vehicle generations"?

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
The auto industry works in cycles on the scale of approximately 5-6 years. So technology that is not practical right now is 6+ years out. They are basically promising to sell this as soon as possible. They have 1-3 years for the go or no go decision.

ebbv 13y ago

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be human error. Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true. But my response to that is: 1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways. 2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car, the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car. 3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones. I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate the problem, not improve it.

daeken 13y ago
Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.
- ebbv 13y ago
  If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot in planes.

runako 13y ago

From no working prototype to multiple commercially available vehicles in 7 years. Yeah, okay. I hate to be that guy, but it took ~3 years to get the Leaf to production. And the Leaf uses well-known technology that had been shipped by other vendors a decade earlier. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a very long reach.

mason240 13y ago

"Work is already underway in Japan to build a dedicated autonomous driving proving ground, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2014. Featuring real townscapes - masonry not mock-ups - it will be used to push vehicle testing beyond the limits possible on public roads to ensure the technology is safe." Meanwhile Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets with their autonomous car.

venus 13y ago
> Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets I have got to say, I am pretty amazed they have managed to swing that. Permission to drive autonomous robot cars around the everyday streets of litigation and safety-obsessed California? An accomplishment of equal size to any one technical challenge in the car's making, I would say!
- hypersoar 13y ago
  As I understand, they didn't ask permission. They simply announced one day that they'd been doing it for a year, and then lobbied California to legalize it afterwards. Given the potential benefits of being the state that makes autonomous cars a thing, I imagine it was an easy sell.
- atlbeer 13y ago
  There is a real driver behind the wheel ready to take control at anytime.
jerf 13y ago
Still under controlled circumstances, though. This sort of mockup is necessary for full testing. I'm not sure how autonomous Nissan is shooting for, and I think they're rather deliberately not defining it. You can draw a fairly smooth continuum between "antilock brakes" and "full autonomous car you'd put your unaccompanied children into in the middle of a Midwest winter", and I imagine they're not leaping straight towards the latter. But still, to get there, you need to be able to test things like "what does the car do on a street covered in a patchwork of ice when a dog jumps out in front of it?" without waiting for exactly those conditions to emerge. If you want a fun thought exercise, imagine how an antilock brake system handles the left wheels being on ice and the right wheels being on dry pavement. And remember... torque. You can't "just" brake with the right wheels....

johansch 13y ago

Why doesn't Google just buy Tesla already?

hydralist 13y ago
uber is cheaper?
- johansch 13y ago
  Uber is not a car manufacturer last time I checked.
icpmacdo 13y ago
I always though Tesla's were going the no-brainer for driverless cars.
enraged_camel 13y ago
What a great idea! That way the NSA can know your real-time location on the roads too, even if you have your cellphone off.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  If the NSA wants to know your real-time location on the roads, it really doesn't need Google to do that. Or Facebook...or any other $BIG_COMPANY for that matter.
- johansch 13y ago
  That's a bug with the american government (your?), not Google. Tesla on its own can't fight it any more than Google can, them both being american companies.

hrvbr 13y ago

Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation. I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms, especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers. This would be a huge progress for humanity.

Contero 13y ago
Making self-driving cars safer than people-driven cars is trivial. The hard thing will be handling the tidal wave of FUD when the inevitable happens and someone dies as a result of one. Google or Nissan or whoever will need a mountain of good PR and safety statistics to be able to push it back. That alone is enough reason to motivate the creation of "hyper-efficient safety mechanisms".

Apocryphon 13y ago

I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?) How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?

hardtke 13y ago

I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.

uncoder0 13y ago
The teams Nissan and Google are using to develop this technology already dealt with the problems of a highway/city populated with human pedestrians and drivers. High speed linked autonomous cars are certainly not the fist step of this transition.[1] [1]http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
jerf 13y ago
Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time, you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you don't have to start there. There's no need for a "big bang" event. By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car, because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.
- hardtke 13y ago
  By simply adding autonomous cars to the current infrastructure, it doesn't improve peoples lives in a directly obvious way. They can't go any faster, and traffic does not get reduced. Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as fast. Otherwise, I rather enjoy driving.