> but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary.
Do you have a citation for that? I often see this asserted, and I see many assertions the other way. Whenever I personally see self-driving cars in the wild, I'm astounded at their effectiveness on uncontrolled access roads. What makes you think controlled access roads will be much more difficult? Or to be more specific, why is industry consensus that we are decades (or more) away from this goal? Or is this just your personal opinion?
> It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America
The actual quote is:
Venture capitalist Bill Gurley thinks it will be more than 25 years before the majority of rides in any major American city are performed by autonomous vehicles with no steering wheel.
Note that this is actually an argument against us being "still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary." (to quote the OP).
If in 25 years time more than 50% of trips are in autonomous vehicles with no steering wheel, and assuming the average age of the car remains roughly the same (11 years)[1], then completely autonomous cars will have to be available much earlier than 25 years.
However, I'd note that he said "more than" (so who knows exactly what he meant) and also self-driving long-haul trucks are a different subset of the problem. It may be easier to make long-haul trucks which just drive between cities and drop off items at depots than cars which drive though city streets.
TRI's association with UMich and MIT makes them more biased towards issues about the difficulty of running self-driving cars in adverse weather conditions because that's the problem that all the researchers at UMich and MIT have had all the time and it's a problem that Google/Stanford have never had in always sunny California.
I have personally heard of the complaints of John Leonard (MIT) and Edwin Olson (UMich) about the severe lack of research of self-driving car robustness in weather conditions. The issue is real.
Ok then, how about Waymo's ex-lead Chris Urmson. "If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both."[1]
He goes on to explain that easier domains may come sooner (so maybe level 4), but his comments certainly pour some cold water on level 5.
How is Toyota behind? Don't they have an entire robotics division? Google, Uber, and all the other guys had to cobble together something that looks like a robotics division but Toyota has all of that already figured out.
Robotics has little to do with self-driving cars at this point, which is heavily ML dependent while the former hasn't been so far (yet, that's changing).
So if you were a betting man what would you go with. A bunch of software folks that don't really understand robotics. Or a bunch of robotics folks that learn some ML.
I think the ML is the easy part. The real engineering in making these things truly production ready is the hard part. Only few places in the world have that kind of production expertise. Toyota being one such place.
You keep assuming a self driving car strongly resembles a traditional industrial robotics at all.
The actual actuating part of a self-driving car is fairly easy (just turn the wheel, apply the breaks), it is the control system and sensing that is key to success, the former being software, and the latter (LIDAR) that Google is heavily invested in while Toyota is very late to that game.
Right now, if I was a betting man, Google will beat Toyota. Of course, Toyota could always flip the table and take some risks, but that isn't what Toyota is known for. If it happens great! But I don't think any smart money sees Toyota having a clear advantage ATM.
I think you're downplaying the actual engineering required. Robotics is more than just actuators. Robotics folks have been doing sensor fusion, control, and learning for much longer than software ML folks have been doing those same things.
I'm saying a software company is not gonna crack the market. Software companies neither have the expertise nor the engineering discipline. Boston Robotics and Google have been famously not getting along and their self-driving division seems to have been horribly mismanaged for a long time and we are now seeing the fallout in the form of lawsuits.
Industrial robots, and humanoid robots for entertainment purposes. Whereas Google has many of the founders of ML, not to mention its experts. Is Toyota, who already seriously undervalue software, willing to pay top dollar for those people when their average SDE makes < $60K/year (not just a problem with Toyota, but Japan in general)?
You also seriously misunderstanding the amount of engineering discipline needed to build modern software systems.
Misunderstanding? Given that my day job is to literally build tools and infrastructure for "modern software systems" I don't think I'm misunderstanding things at all.
But whatever I can say on "modern software" has already been said much better by Alan Kay so I'm going to defer to him for the rest of this conversation.
I'll buy Toyota stock. You buy Google stock. We'll compare notes in a decade and see who managed to make self-driving cars commercially viable.
I guess you'll find Toyota stock to be incredibly undervalued with a P/E of just 9.5 vs. GOOG's 30.26. The market isn't treating Toyota like a tech company. The market has already spoken, they've placed their bet on Google, which means that boat has already sailed. If you believe TM will make a tremendous comeback, then you could make bank, but that is a risky bet vs. a safe one (given today's information).
Is that industry consensus? Also, I think closed-access freeways are very well mapped, is level 5 needed to disrupt the trucking industry, or will level 4 do?
Yeah, my guess is that for trucking, we'll be looking at two drivers per N trucks, moving as a convoy. (Two drivers means one can sleep, and the convoy never needs to take long breaks.) You have to have someone there to take over if a truck goes down half way between Boise and East Nowhere. All the better if they can keep an eye on the monitoring systems for the convoy; taking over driving the lead truck will presumably also be an option for as long as it needs to be.
Gurley says 25 years until majority of trips with self driving cars in the US, and that's because of legal hurdles, not technological ones. I don't have time to watch the video with Pratt.
Why are we limiting ourselves just to the states? Markets like China with severe traffic and parking problems and authoritarian governments to push through changes are more likely to adopt self driving cars than developed markets with plenty of roads and parking.
Ya, it seems like the last place! But the need is strong, the will is there. Baidu and many other Chinese companies are making big self drive car investments.
Self driving cars are just a toy in the USA, but in china they could optimize infrastructure that is extremely limited and unable to grow to meet demand. They are also not above changing the rules as needed (like when they put up fences in our office so we couldn't easily cross the street to our other building, all in the name of keeping pedistrians off what was otherwise a very untrafficed road.
I think that was Gurley's point. In many Asian countries the need is greater and the ability to sue lower, so self driving cars will be on public roads much earlier than in the US.
At the point of level 4, the roads and conditions will change to better accommodate, likely pushing cities and villages farther apart (particularly in America).
Do you have a citation for that? I often see this asserted, and I see many assertions the other way. Whenever I personally see self-driving cars in the wild, I'm astounded at their effectiveness on uncontrolled access roads. What makes you think controlled access roads will be much more difficult? Or to be more specific, why is industry consensus that we are decades (or more) away from this goal? Or is this just your personal opinion?