I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.
Same - living in a region where it gets below 0°C in the winter and also snows, you really see that those cars were designed for sunny california. It happened multiple times now that the trunk or door handles were frozen so hard, that I couldn't use the car in the morning. Also when opening the frunk while its partly covered in snow just made it slide into the frunk...
I don't think either solution is going to be the eventual winner. I expect the eventual rollout of 5G+ to be the game changer.
Much like how a pilot captain boards a ship to steer it into port, traffic systems will be able to be a bit more 'hands on' when it comes to getting traffic through junctions safely, regardless of the weather. Hence, on the final journey through a city, the city traffic systems will be directing your car.
For the journey on highways between built up areas, variants of today's self driving systems will suffice.
He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
And if the US government operated with 10% of the agency or spine it ought to operate with, the entire feature would be banned and tesla fined for costing so many lives already. And the cyber truck wouldn't be coasting the roads with no safety sense whatsoever.
He is very obviously wrong since Waymo cars drive millions of trips with 0 drivers while every single robotaxi still has a safety driver in it at all times.
Lots of people manage to drive in poor visibility without radar, lidar, etc. If that's safe and normal for people, the principle that self driving should work with just cameras isn't such a strange one.
I wouldn't call things like radar and lidar unnecessary but in principle a good AI vision system should be able to operate at the same level as a human eventually. Of course if you don't have such an AI just yet, you need a stop gap solution. But I wouldn't bet against AI getting there eventually. Probably not on Mr. Musk's accelerated and optimistic schedule though. But give it another five to ten years and things might look a bit differently.
What Waymo is doing now with much less than perfect AI is of course completely pragmatic and very impressive. I'm kind of eager to see them start operating self driving outside a few restricted zones in the US and for example in European cities. I live in Berlin, so probably we'll have to wait quite a bit for people to finally let go of their fax machines though apparently there are some trials with self driving buses about to kick off here now.
Just vision is a very reductive way of describing how we drive. We use sound to hear if something else is coming and where from, or if we're losing traction on the road, or if the road surface has changed. We can judge acceleration and deceleration in all directions using our inner ears. We can feel if the car's performing differently to usual indicating an issue with the car or different conditions. In addition when we are using our vision, if it gets obscured (i.e. snow covers the windscreen) we know how to get it off with wipers, and most importantly we're very adaptable to new conditions in a way that computers aren't, if we experience something completely new to us, chances are we'll make a reasonable in the moment decision.
> Lots of people manage to drive in poor visibility without radar, lidar, etc. If that's safe and normal for people, the principle that self driving should work with just cameras isn't such a strange one.
No camera system comes close to the capabilities of human eyes, combined with general intelligence.
I am one of those who drive in bad weather from time to time. I'm 'good at it' - but I cannot honestly call myself safe. I've been in the ditch. I've spun a 360 and only didn't hit someone else in the process because it happened nobody was there.
i grew up where bad weather was common enough that we cosidered it not worth shutting down for bad weather so we risked driving in it - but it was always a risk and many do die from taking that risk.
I remember, back in the day, when first driving assistance systems rolled out - you know, keep lane, speed assistance according to road signs, etc. - I thought to myself "I bet you haven't seen our roads".
When I was getting my driver license I had to perform a series of tasks as part of the process. On of first was driving a 50m narrow curve forth and back. I had my exam in the middle of winter. The training yard was fully covered in snow. I was young and didn't knew better, so I got in the car and begin my test to quickly realize I couldn't see shit. I tried my best, but next moment I was told I got off the curve - the examiner knew it by heart - and I failed the test. Back to school and see you next semester.
A learning experience on so many levels.
Anyway, since then I always come back to that single experience when I read about self driving vehicles.
Heh this must be Europe. In the US the driving test I took involved taking a right hand turn. Another right. Execute a 3-point and then drive back the half a mile to the testing center.
You have to pass theory exam - when I was doing it it was 30 questions with four possible answers out of ~500 pool [1] now the pool is 3700. If I'm not mistaken you could make two mistakes and still pass the test. The questions are either road diagrams, ie. intersection with three cars, road signs and/or lights and you have to tell in which order cars will go or a picture from drivers POV and a question what you should do in such situation - like three lanes, car on the middle, the right is a bus lane and the question is if the driver is allowed to take the left lane.
Once you get that done you can take practical driving test.
It starts on a training yard where you have a series of tasks, like said driving forth and back on a curve in one sweep motion, starting a car on a incline without going back or losing your engine - mind you we're driving manual - parallel parking between cones [2], etc.
If you ace them instructor will take you for a 30-45 minutes ride around town. Apart from normal driving he will ask you to few random tasks like parking in normal conditions.
Any mistake will end the trial with a fail and you have to start all over again. Three failures and you need to redo your theory exam.
[1] I have really good memory and when I taking my exam I went through all questions few times - they are publicly available - and when I had my exam I only looked at the picture and double checked if the question ended up with question mark or period as some images were reused and I knew my answer. I don't think I would be able to do that again with that 3700 question database lol.
[2] before taking exams you go to a private driving school and my instructor gave me a cheat code for parallel parking - which is extremely tight, but also, as pointed by my instructor, government regulated, so all the cones have to be in very precise spots. Not only that, but you take the exam in government selected car (whoever won current bids). So he told me to back up until I saw a cone lining with door post, then full stop, rotate the steering wheel by a exact amount of degrees, etc.
PS. gun permits are given on similar grounds, plus you are required to have a regulated gun safe at your premise and it has to be permanently attached, so given the fact that many of our apartments are smaller than your garages and most people are renting significantly reduces access to guns :)
I know, I know, murka bad, but my driving test decades ago had a left turn out of a driveway, a 3-pt on a road with real traffic, parallel parking, and an intersection with right on red to return to the testing center, located in a terrible parking lot (i.e. designed in accordance with modern standards) that had a ton of stupid lines that "normal people" cut but you have to follow as part of the test.
I (1997, upstate NY) didn't even do that much. I got in the car with the instructor, we drove around the block once. I ran the stop sign because a truck was parked in front of it. The instructor didn't notice (I only noticed later).
I wish Google would use their learnings from Waymo/Streetview in Maps navigation. When I drive through a complicated intersection for the first time it's a bit of guesswork what's the right thing to do. Here in France at least since space is at a premium there are a lot of weird intersections that are hard to navigate.
At the Los Angeles Ciclavia two weeks ago Waymo's were getting stuck at the car crossings. There were police standing there waving cars through but the two I saw were not willing to drive through the intersection.
Properly responding to informal hand and voice signals from law enforcement, road workers, and other humans is going to be one of the toughest technical challenges for autonomous vehicles to solve.
Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes.
How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
People exercise coordination ability like this all the time.
I got stuck getting out of shoreline after a large concert with abnormal parking conditions, and when we didn't move for 30 minutes I got out of the car and directed traffic so both lots could empty equally. Took another 45 minutes for my family to catch up to me, which was good because that's when someone in a safety vest showed up and told me to stop.
Firemen have access keys to various things. You could have a Waymo device for the same that similarly facilitates an override. Or at the very least provides a line with a manual operator that can override on the Waymo side.
As far as I know the driverless operators already have manual operators that can be contacted by emergency services. In some cases there seem to be human communication failures on top of the driverless failures.
Nah. You're never going to get law enforcement and road workers to reliably use the same signs. My local city hires the lowest bidder to do road repairs. You're lucky if those guys are consistently awake and sober. Autonomous vehicles will have to operate in the real world, not in some idealized utopia where everyone consistently follows written rules.
Most of those problems can be handled by moving very slowly and carefully, and allowing lots of safe distance around anything that looks like an emergency. That seems to be Waymo's default. They understand some traffic cop hand signals. But most human drivers won't get those, either. There's not much in the Vehicle Code about that.
CALTRANS uses trucks with big flashing arrows and portable collision barriers on the back to protect road workers ahead. They make no attempt to make ordinary drivers do anything more complex than stop or change lanes.
The people from Pepe's Towing in LA post videos of large vehicle accident recoveries, and they often talk about road worker coordination problems. They have to coordinate with CALTRANS, the California Highway Patrol, local cops, fire departments, HAZMAT services, railroads, terminal and port operators, and the drivers involved. The pros who clean up such messes seem to know each other, at least by reputation, but the drivers are often clueless. Pepe's has two questions for drivers - how heavy is your load, and what are you carrying? The answers they get run about 80% "duh". Those are the drivers who roll over semis on freeway ramps.
When autonomous trucking gets going, that kind of coordination will be necessary. But not for passenger cars.
Waymo already operates in the real world, including construction sites with non standard operating parameters. You can always add on to what the “real world” looks like, because real world isn’t static like you rightly pointed out.
if a cop has to have a specific piece of equipment to get the cars to move then it's always going to be a problem. The cops can move every other vehicile with a standard issue piece of equipment, aka their hands, and well yelling at people. If they have to get some magic QR gloves or placards to get waymos to move then that's going to be an issue.
Quite frankly, many drivers don't do well here either since hand signs can be very ambiguous. And many times there are contradictory signals that require interpretation.
Look at Scottie Scheffler's arrest for an extreme case of how very hard this is to get right.
The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something.
I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
Crashing after hitting black ice on a hill is a skill issue. Its like skiing, or ice skating, you still have control even though the handling is very different.
It's not really though, unless you're willing to just lie and redefine "unwilling to move at absurdly slow speed for conditions so the pavement can be meticulously inspected" as a skill issue and even then you won't always be able to spot it.
Only if you have studded winter tires that are in good condition. Throw in a sprinkling of powder and there's nothing even a professional WRC driver could do.
Another personal favorite is driving on ice with a tiny layer of sun melted water so you can also hydroplane.
Humans are horrible at this I wonder what the limit is. I've always thought that I can tailor my speed to conditions but not everyone on the road slows down.
It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
People mostly only turn on their hazards when they're a hazard to other traffic (which is the whole point, IMO) Even if you're the slow guy on the road your speed still probably doesn't warrant this hence why you mostly only see it when people are going a speed of zero.
I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.)
The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
I remember driving past Charles de Gaulle Airport when it rained so hard we couldn't see past the end of the bonnet (hood). Everybody just stopped until it passed.
> The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others.
Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
I hate this sort of take. Humans aren't horrible, on average, they're about average. Your opinion is just a statement of "my judgement is decently far from the fat part of the bell curve" but dressed up in "and I know better" type snobbery.
The limit is much higher than human performance given enough low latency compute. [1] is probably the limit, the actual issue is being able to do that while also avoiding colliding with other road users. The challenges of state estimation and control should be the same.
Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet).
(I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
All the school buses near where I live (Sierra Nevada mountains in California) have these - it's cool to watch them lower and start spinning.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
Chains are usually not the best option. Dedicated snow tires are better than chains for most light vehicles when there's snow and ice on the road. For fleet vehicles you would think they could install the proper tires at the depot based on the date or weather forecast.
Chains shine for the case where there generally isn't snow and ice where you spend most of your time, or where you occasionally visit, but there is between those places.
I actually had chains when I lived in the Los Angeles area, which is probably the last place most people would expect someone to have chains or snow tires.
I occasionally had to take I-5 to Central California or the Bay Area in winter, and in a typical winter there are maybe 1-5 days where you aren't allowed through Tejon Pass on just ordinary tires.
There are three cases, depending on the severity of the weather. From least to most severe the requirements are:
• If you have snow tires on at least two drive wheels you don't need chains. Otherwise you need chains.
• If you have a 4WD/AWD vehicle with snow tires on all wheels you don't need chains. Otherwise you need chains.
They're required for traveling over mountain passes in the winter where I live, so I have them. But I have 3PMSF-rated tires and those are what I'd rather use 99% of the time.
It's pretty much limited to areas with both snow and lots of elevation changes like in the mountainous areas. Having lived most of my life in the midwest now, no one here uses chains except maybe some of the private snow plow operators driving their trucks around at 4AM. Most people won't use dedicated winter tires either. We tend to rock all seasons all year round. Ice and snow on mostly flat roads are just something you get used to dealing with.
As someone who has lived in New England most of my adult life I've never owned either chains or dedicated snow tires. I do try to be relatively conservative in terms of driving in winter. But I haven't invested in special equipment.
Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
Had to drive someone to the Fenway area the other day. And that was bad enough in perfectly reasonable weather :-) I'm OK with driving into the cit(ies) in general but don't regularly go into that area of town.
It's easier in bad weather because the ~10% of stupid people who traffic normally just kinda flows around slow it to a traffic jam that's pretty impossible to screw up too badly.
I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires .
I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
I don't think the cultural difference you're describing here really exists. Maybe if you mean people from the SF Bay Area who visit Tahoe. If you go to places with real winters, people know about winter / studded tires, will often carry chains, and so on.
100% this. It's laughable how many times europeans make sweeping generalizations about the US. There are various places in the US where it snows rarely and yeah, people (including me) are clueless when it happens. And then there are people in Buffalo who are more than capable of handling the snow.
where i live we get snow for a few weeks a year. still the discipline is pretty poor with tire choice. Even here people rely too much on 4wd / AWD and neglect proper tires.
some truth yes. even where I live with plenty of winter conditions, less than the midwest, still lots of poor car and tire choices. 6K# SUvs. even in the midwest lots of huge vehicles. perhaps with better tires, but still impractical.
Many large 4wd vehicles are nothing special with respect to ground clearance which mostly doesn't make much difference for snow/ice driving on paved roads anyway.
Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF).
The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
>The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires
If the benefits were truly as categorical as the internet makes it out to be then normal people would know about it.
Normal people don't care, because the difference is incremental, not categorical. An AWD SUV on all-seasons gets you 95% of the way there with a fraction of the effort, and that's the sweet spot for normal people.
> Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF).
Won't happen. Tires affect fuel economy in EPA testing. Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source.
>Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source
And instead of taking a step back and realizing that there are competing tradeoffs here and that a compromise needs to be made people will just screech harder about "the side of the tradeoff I care about is not being pushed hard enough by the .gov".
Manufacturers want to get maximum fuel efficiency, as another mentioned. Even if they do fit all seasons, the problem is that people run them much longer than they should. This is worse with higher efficiency EV tires which wear out faster... especially given the higher torque of electric engines, people accelerate too quickly.
A full set of tires can easily cost $1k, and we're in a country where most people barely have $500 saved at any moment.
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