If you recall, there was an explosion of self-driving car efforts from startups and incumbents alike 7ish years ago. Many of them failed to deliver or were shut down. [1][2][3]
Article about the difficulty of self-driving from the perspective of a failed startup[3].
Waymo came out of the Google-self driving car project which came from Sebastian Thrun's entry in 2005 Darpa challenge, so they've been working on this for more than 20 years. [4][5]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/business/ford-argo-ai-vw-shut...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
[3] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
[4] https://stanford.edu/~cpiech/cs221/apps/driverlessCar.html
[5] https://semiwiki.com/eda/synopsys/3322-sebastian-thrun-self-...
The features listed on the wikipedia are lane-centering, cruise-control, driver monitoring, and assisted lane change.[1]
The article I linked to from Starsky addresses how the first 90% is much easier than the last 10% and even cites "The S-Curve here is why Comma.ai, with 5–15 engineers, sees performance not wholly different than Tesla’s 100+ person autonomy team."
To give an example of the difficulty of the last 10%: I saw an engineer from Waymo give a talk about how they had a whole team dedicated to detecting emergency vehicle sirens and acting appropriately. Both false positives and false negatives could be catastrophic so they didn't have a lot of margin for error.
They have either shut down, got acquired or were sold off and then shutdown. Even Uber and Lyft had their own self-driving programs and both of them shut theirs down. Cruise was recently taken off the streets and not much has been done with them.
The only ones that have been around from more than 7 years are Comma.ai (which the author geohot still owns), Waymo and Tesla and Zoox, but they ran out of money and is now owned by Amazon.
If the damages/externalities caused by cars were internalized by the system car ownership would already be unaffordable for most. We just choose to sacrifice/maim X-number of humans every year so folks can continue to zoom around and structurally increase sprawl/pollution (which in turn have their own massive un-internalized costs).
All of us pay for these subsidies via significantly higher healthcare prices.
Look up what happened to the Michigan laws/policies that required drivers to actually pay for insurance that would compensate accident victims for their death and suffering. It was lobbied/voted out of existence almost immediately because the costs are simply too high, and we love our cars.
I've personally known at least five people who have been in a car accident and then received a windfall of cash after paying off their medical bills and having their car repaired/replaced.
I don't know if this is still the case but years ago my friend, who was in a collision with a drunk driver, was told by his attorney that the insurance will just settle for 3x your total expenses (medical, car repairs, etc). He was being encouraged by his attorney to see chiropractors and specialists because of this.
Law describes this as the thin skull problem. If you accidentally tap someone that had a thin skull and their head explodes you are still guilty of manslaughter even though the action is both completely benign and unintentional. The extreme alternative is to eliminate high risk people until no risks remain in the system. Insurance is a nice balance in the middle, but that doesn’t mean ownership is otherwise unaffordable for most people.
Some studies show that pedestrian friendly centres actually lift economic activity
aka Forced Labor Facility.
> I googled him, and turns out that the author is that guy who begged Elon Musk for a chance to work fore free to fix everything and failed, and it really explains a lot.
Comedically, it landed much like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eVVaDxaOJ4
I was wondering why the author was writing like a giant piece of shit, and then I googled him, and turns out that the author is that guy who begged Elon Musk for a chance to work fore free to fix everything and failed, and it really explains a lot.
> In 2022, shortly after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Hotz announced that he had joined the company for a 12-week internship, with the task of fixing Twitter search as well as removing the pop up log-in screen displayed to users scrolling without being logged in to an account. On December 20, after less than 5 weeks at the role, he resigned, stating “appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there”.
Furthermore, I don't agree with this articles assertion that the existence of robotaxis would lead to an increase on insurance premiums.
It all smells very “they’re coming to take away our guns” to me. A rambly incoherent argument in favour of worse times.
Was thinking it’s more likely to age like cream cheese left in the sun
Hey: if you never lived outside your city, let's avoid talking about car ownership? Robotaxi make no sense in 80-90% of all locations.
Sure, not much call for an Uber in the Tanami.
They do, however, make sense in the vicinity of at least 70% of people in G20 countries.
Those with the money to afford RoboTaxi's are highly urbanised populations.
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