Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident 465
An anonymous reader writes "The automated cars are slowly building a driving record that's better than that of your average American. From the article: 'Ever since Google began designing its self-driving cars, they've wanted to build cars that go beyond the capabilities of human-piloted vehicles, cars that are much, much safer. When Sebastian Thrun announced the project in 2010, he wrote, "According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half."
New data indicate that Google's on the right path. Earlier this week the company announced that the self-driving cars have now logged some 300,000 miles and "there hasn't been a single accident under computer control." (The New York Times did note in a 2010 article that a self-driving car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light, so Google must not be counting the incidents that were the fault of flawed humans.)'"
Re:300k miles isn't much. (Score:5, Informative)
That's a 1 in 6,500 chance of *dying* in a traffic accident.
Re:what is the issue??? (Score:5, Informative)
The only accident that happened with the self driving car, was when it wasn't being self driven [wikipedia.org]. Just explains your point better.
Re:what is the issue??? (Score:5, Informative)
Why you think rich people are professional drivers is beyond me.
What? No. Rich people hire people to drive them around.
Re:Rear Ended (Score:4, Informative)
We had a neighbour when I was little who was obscenely proud of the fact that he had been driving for something like 70-80 years without ever being in a car accident. Even then, old, with deteriorating everything (but a sharp mind) he never had an accident!
Incidentally he had also been living on the family farm all those years, and aside from driving the tractor around the farm (and occasionally breaking shit with it, like one time he misjudged his angle going into the barn and tore half a wall down with his rear tire) he actually only drove into town once a month for supplies. A drive of about 15 minutes on a road where you met another car maybe once every five times you drove it, to get to a town where livestock had the right of way and everybody just kind of crawled around in their vehicles around whatever obstacles might appear, be they sheep, pedestrians, or a ninety year old half blind man driving on the wrong side of the road.
I'm just saying, sometimes good drivers have accidents, and bad drivers avoid them, because of whatever outside reasons govern their reality... rear-ended by an idiot, or spending their entire life driving in a very very safe environment. With that being said of course you are right that there are some good drivers who never cause an accident, and of course these are better drivers than an automated car... And there are drivers so bad that they pull the average right back down again.
In short, your argument is invalid - if we replace all cars with robots that have a better than average record, then the average would rise, even if we never let a good driver touch the controls again. And if ALL cars are automated, they can be patched, they can be linked, and they are over all predictable - which is the main risk in traffic today. Unpredictability. Almost every accident happens because of one of two things - 1) something unpredictable happens. 2) the driver failed to predict something obvious due to ignorance/distraction/narcissism/slashdottism/whatever.
Both of those aspects can be near eliminated by letting machines do the driving.
LIDAR cost? (Score:4, Informative)
Your point? The price figures for the LIDAR was right out of the USA Today article I quoted. Google paid $70k a pop for the LIDAR systems it put into it's cars. There's an unnamed company getting ready to produce LIDAR for cars at a 'mere' $250 each. You quote $30 each, but that's for systems mounted to vacuum cleaners - don't need the range or operating environment tolerances of a car. Besides, your Hizook article is NOT for a LIDAR system, it's for a 'laser rangefinder', which is sort of like half of a LIDAR. Actual LIDAR attempts to build an image, a laser rangefinder doesn't.
At $150k overall, reducing a $70k expense to $250 would make me concentrate more on the rest of the components. When the goal is $20k overall cost(or less), you wouldn't get there even if you got the LIDAR for free. I wouldn't refuse a $30 one, of course.
Though yes, going from hand manufacture and assembly to mass production can save oodles of money per unit.