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Transportation Power Technology

Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades 341

Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
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Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is this something people actually want, empty marketing rhetoric, or a frightening imminent example of 'manufactured consent'?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lpevey ( 115393 )

      I think this really is the important question. Tech visionaries often fall into the trap of not figuring what people actually want into their estimates of how quickly and widely a new technology will be adapted. The politicians who make these rules (or appoint the people who do) are in the business of being re-elected. They are going to go with what the majority wants on this issue, and right now, the vast majority or non-techie people are very, very afraid of self-driving technology. Yes, I agree that

      • by TWX ( 665546 )
        Pretty much. I can see cases for autonomous vehicles, but I can also see cases where one want or even needs to operate the vehicle. I don't doubt that drivers will want to cede driving to the car for their boring commutes or even for relatively boring cross-country drives on interstate highways, but there are on-road and off-road drives that are a lot of fun for the enthusiast and many such as I won't want to give up the option for that.

        This might be one area where looking at the current behavior of th
      • by aaron4801 ( 3007881 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:14PM (#49295133)
        Not only that, requirements in the auto industry move slowly. Airbags were patented in the 1950's, saw use in production vehicles in the 1970's, but were not mandated in the USA until a law was passed in 1991....which didn't take effect until 1998. Seat belts have a similar history. And these are things without the moral implications of programming a car to potentially choose *which* imminent accident to avoid. 40+ years to go from concept to federal mandate. Testing has started, but we are still very much in the conceptual phase of self-driving cars.
        Now, layer in the fact that there's a strong culture in the US where driving == freedom, and he still thinks this will be a requirement in any of our lifetimes? For the foreseeable future, it would be political suicide, no matter what the safety statistics say. I'm certainly not holding my breath.
  • I thought we'd have flying cars before we'd lose the chance to drive.

    All kidding aside, 40 years from now we'll still be driving our own cars because programmers won't be able to help a car decide if it is allowed to avoid a collision that will kill a driver by swerving onto a sidewalk and killing two pedestrians.

    • What makes you think that scenario would even happen. That would require a human mistake on one side. That might happen if one guy was self driving and not letting the computer drive.
      • Re:HUH (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pr0fessor ( 1940368 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:47PM (#49294875)

        or a mechanical failure on the part of a self driving car but anyway....

        The reason we will not have a self driving car is because we do not have the technology to do it to the extent that the manufacture will be willing to except the liability in the event of an accident. Instead we will eventually over time with many upgrades along the way get a very advanced version of cruise control that can be turned off and on shifting the liability back to the driver.

        Just like we don't have flying cars because it's not practical from production cost or for the manufacture or owner to take on that liability as a mechanical failure at altitude is immediately a costly accident. This is not the case with the cars we have now mechanical failures although they can don't usually result in an accident.

         

        • It's no more difficult to insure a machine than it is to insure a person. Sure autonomous cars may kill the odd person but so do cars now. When the do the insurance will cover the legal costs. Just like now. It may look right now like th liability moves from the driver to the manufacturer, but that's just a matter of legislation or business model. For sure the cost of that insurance will be passed on. To the car owner in one way or another. There is no hurdle there that need slow the path to autonomous cars

    • Flying cars would be too dangerous to be allowed into the hands of the likes of us. Ordinary cars are bad enough - but at least they mostly kill people on the street, and are hard to weaponise. A flying car would be basically a piloted missile, ready to hit any building the driver wants. If the engineering problems were solved then the only way most governments would allow a flying car to be sold would be with a piloting computer wrapped in anti-tamper measures - all the driver does is set a destination lan

      • Yes, because you wouldn't allow people to fly small airplanes, now would you?

        Oh, wait...

        What kind of stupid world are we coming to where this nonsense makes any sense to anyone?

        • by sl149q ( 1537343 )

          We can allow people to fly small planes because so few of them want to do it.

          It would be a nightmare if everybody who currently owns a car had a plane and wanted to fly it in the numbers we see cars on the road.

          Effectively, given the requirements for distance before and after each plane, it would be impossible to actually get everyone into the air and flying at the same time.

    • Trouble with flying cars is that they consume more energy than ground cars for every mile they drive. And while oil is cheap right now, it' still quite a bit cheaper to roll along the ground than hovering above it. Granted, things like maglev trains technically are more efficient but they're a special case with a great number of caveats that account for their efficiency. Something as versatile as a car that can go (almost) wherever it wants will always consume less energy if it doesn't have to float over
    • You are completely wrong. Musk has already indicated that the next Tesla will have some hands free capababilities, no doubt freeway driving assist. This is basically self driving as the driver can remove their hands from the wheel and legs from the pedals. The Infiniti Q50 already has this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] . From this point forward the car is going to get incrementally more automated. Name a major car company that isn't currently involved in heavy R&D for self driving tech. If you foun
  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:17PM (#49294565)
    They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Well, private chargers are generally really slow and usually meant for overnight charging, it's rarely what you want to wait for if you are running out of juice. Here in Norway we already have several vendors that have set up paid fast charging points - not quite as fast as superchargers but 20-50 kW is overkill at home. And you'll still be paying for the same power, just not the premium but if you put any reasonable value on your time it's probably better anyway unless there's something you'd like to spend

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      The problem with private chargers is that they are slow. A 7kW charger needs a 60A circuit. In Europe houses usually have a 100A breaker... It's actually an issue for people who want two EVs charging at home at the same time. In a car the size of the Tesla a 7kW charger is a bit slow.

      Having said that, there is a scheme called PlugShare that allows EV users to share their home charger and access other's on the same scheme.

    • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.

      Well, there's PlugShare [plugshare.com] which pretty much does that, although I don't think people typically charge a fee; rather they do it pro bono on the assumption that when they need a recharge someone else will do the same for them.

  • by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:28PM (#49294653) Journal
    If you want to accurately predict the future do as Jules Verne did and write as many of them as you can possibly think up. History indicates that you will be mostly wrong and a large number of predictions will increase the odds of getting something right.
  • we may someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway.

    So on the sections of road I'm going to be most terrified to navigate I should secede control to the computer? In principal, this makes sense, but in reality this is a pee-your-pants moment that even adrenaline junkies will probably say no thanks to.
    • Just got back from a trip to downtown Philadelphia. I ahd to get around parts of a wrecked car, a stalled truck, and then run a light that was on permanent red - after waiting for the other 20 people ahead of me to realize it was never going to change and do likewise. So how is Mr RoboCar going to do THAT? How long would it wait for a green light? Would it crash into a fender in the road or stop for a McDs bag?
    • If the road is so bad that it's a "pee-in-your-pants moment" to navigate, you're better off letting the car handle it. It won't over-steer or make a mistake due to jitters.
    • The self driving and flying car have been a decade away for the last four decades so I wouldn't worry about it. Although I imagine more assisted driving features will become available notification of objects in blind spots, backing camera, proximity alerts, and maybe even a cruise control that can maintain a lane and match trafic speed.

  • Within 3 hours drive of a charging station. Seriously, when is the last time you've driven more than 5 miles out of your way to get a fill up. And he wants to say wherever you are there is a charging station within 3 hours! Err...really now?
    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      If this worries you then you must be one of those people that constantly drive around with less than a quarter tank and consider $5 to be a big expense when you put gas in the car. Your nearest filling station is of course your own garage.
  • when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

    Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.

    • by rsborg ( 111459 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:39PM (#49294773) Homepage

      when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

      Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.

      More likely, just like older folk that insist on hand-writing letters, having a land-line, and banking in person, you will not be forced to give up your driving. Instead, your costs will go up, while other more inexpensive or convenient options will become available for those who don't care to drive to get from A->B.

      Feel free to yell at those folks from your porch to stay off your lawn as they blissfully ignore you.

    • If you keep your distance that won't be a problem. A properly designed autonomous vehicle will do that by default.

    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:46PM (#49294859)

      No because you see, the other autonomous vehicles will stop in time.

      As for the manually driven cars plowing into them - well they do that today anyway, don't they?

  • by kencurry ( 471519 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:31PM (#49294683)
    i will drive it, thank you very much.
  • by chrism238 ( 657741 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:31PM (#49294685)
    First they say that drivers are obsolete; next it'll be the passengers. Then, before you know it, there's a gathering of them in car-parks and garages around the country.....
  • by zlives ( 2009072 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:36PM (#49294725)

    wasn't elon just recently warning us against autonomous intelligence?

    • He, like most rich and powerful people are, is afraid of that which he cannot or could not control. Bostrom, the philosopher drumming-up all the fear, is afraid of that which he cannot or could not understand.

      Look how the powerful record and media companies reacted (and continue to react) to file sharing. Look how a chess champion reacts to being beaten by a computer.

      I think that the powerful don't want something more powerful than them and the smart don't want something smarter than them.

      But
  • I'm thinking back in the days when I first got a car so I can go cruising and also for going on dates. With drivers obsolete how would it impact this kind of social behavior? Or young people don't do this kind of thing anymore? Just wondering.
    • Young people live their entire lives on Facebook when they're not being mall rats
    • I'm thinking back in the days when I first got a car so I can go cruising and also for going on dates. With drivers obsolete how would it impact this kind of social behavior?

      More time to make out in the backseat while the car drives itself?

  • by grimmjeeper ( 2301232 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:37PM (#49294747) Homepage

    jalopnik article [jalopnik.com]

    '"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'

    As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.

    Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.

    • I'll go with Elon on this one. Cuz.. well.. he's Elon Musk.
      • He's been a successful entrepreneur, no doubt. But he really doesn't have the background in actually building safety-critical systems to fully understand the complexity of the problem. Sorry but I'm going to go with actual engineers who have done the actual work instead of the flashy business guy with no real experience actually building it.

        That being said, I'm 100% in favor of him putting resources into developing the technology. It's good that he has many engineers working on the problem because the lo

    • by Rhys ( 96510 )

      Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers. The bar here is not high. How do the bottom 50% of drivers handle random system failures? Say ice on the road. If he doesn't implement 'panic' as an option, its probably already above a good chunk of those folks, judging by accident rates in winter storms.

      • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers.

        That's great for the bottom 50% of drivers. No so great for those of us who've been driving for decades and never caused an accident.

        Why would I want to travel in a self-driving car that drives worse than I do?

        • by jdunn14 ( 455930 )

          Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers.

          That's great for the bottom 50% of drivers. No so great for those of us who've been driving for decades and never caused an accident.

          Why would I want to travel in a self-driving car that drives worse than I do?

          I and 80% of the other drivers on the road agree completely.

      • Yeah, I added that thought in the follow up to the first response to my comment. If we can get fewer accidents per mile driven than we get now, it's a win. The more we reduce accidents the better. Which is why it's good to see accident reducing technology showing up in cars long before the cars actually drive themselves. And even if that's all we ever really get out of the effort to have self driving cars, we're still better off

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      Musk's secret with Autopilot is that it doesn't cope with difficult conditions, it hands back to the human driver. If there is snow on the road and it can't see the markings it won't engage, simple as that. When he says it could do 90% of a long journey he doesn't mention the caveat that it can only do so in good conditions on good roads.

      It's still a useful feature, but Musk does tend to exaggerate. He said you could own a Model S for $500 a month, but when you look at it that includes savings on fuel and m

  • Robert A. Heinlein (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) * <treboreel@live.com> on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:42PM (#49294815) Journal

    He wrote about teens jumping in front of convoys of automated big rigs a long time ago, out of sheer boredom and an innate desire to cause chaos. Even in Methuselah's Children the long lived had methods of switching off auto drive to avoid being tracked everywhere at all times. It has been pointed out previously what about people on farms driving completely off the grid, not to mention the totally unresolved issue of whose at fault when my auto drive car is involved in an accident, or the choice HAS to be made between saving MY life, the driver or some stranger on the side of the road who wants to commit suicide by being run over...

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:45PM (#49294845)
    But these people who say that self-driving cards work, and who live in the wonderful, sunny climate of California, have to venture out a bit more and see what driving is really like.

    .
    Show me a self-driving car that could navigate the snow-choked roads of Boston this winter.

    • Who cares. If it can drive for six months out of the year that's still an improvement. Moreover you should see a decrease in accidents for those 6 months. It isn't wise to initially shoot for 100% coverage over all conditions. It's much smarter to cherry pick just the sunny days with no snow/ice.
  • Except sit at home with their tablet / laptop which is all that most people including most politicians do these days. We'll be living in a curated idiot-proof society soon, where the overlords decide what pre-packaged entertainment you're going to soak up today. All the old adventurous hobbies like driving sport cars and other vehicles, hunting and even things like doing certain DIY work on your own house are slowly being regulated out of existence to protect people from themselves.

    The thing is, governments see us only as tools to keep the economy going, the economy and creating jobs are far more important than getting people to extract enjoyment out of their lives so it is in their interest to keep us as dependent on the economy as possible and since in the West we don't manufacture much anymore it also means coaxing people to use as many services as possible
    • by jmkaza ( 173878 )

      I'm going to extract a shitton of enjoyment out of going to sleep in my pod in Denver and waking up at the beach in San Diego!

  • by Lab Rat Jason ( 2495638 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:47PM (#49294879)

    That's dangerous talk from someone who has built his car business on a reputation for performance and quality... when cars drive themselves, they won't need to be fast, or good looking, because nobody will be looking. They could look like the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile and nobody would notice.

    Oh well. Fun is always short lived.

    • Fast is something that will be a major selling point of autonomous cars. With great computer controlled precision I'd want highway speeds to be much higher in good conditions. The point on good looking was already addressed, and I can only state that a good looking car will be a major concern for the majority of the buyers.
      • Fast means different things to different people though... I'm all for fast self driving cars that get me to remote places while I nap... but white-nuckle driving fast is only enjoyable to the person who's hands are on the wheel. When that goes away, many enthusiasts will go away also. A 100hp car is as fast as a 1000hp car when you're talking about getting between cities in the western US. The 0-60 numbers are part of why I love Tesla (I'll never afford one BTW). But without that... I'm way more likely t

  • by DrTJ ( 4014489 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:48PM (#49294891)

    ... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".

    Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.

    But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done?

      It's pointless, anyway. Half the year, you can't see the lane markings here because they're covered in snow. The other half, you can't see them because they've been scraped off by snow ploughs. Maybe for two days a year you can see them, because they just got repainted before the snow started again.

      Any system that relies on seeing lane markings is doomed, unless it's restricted to open highways in good weather.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".

      We prefer the term AI Complete [wikipedia.org].

    • by jmkaza ( 173878 )

      Yep, it's really hard. That's why you develop a system that doesn't need to detect 100% of the lane markings. If you can optically detect 30-40% of them, and add that data to lidar mapped concrete patterns, medians, satellite imagery, gps, and other data sources, the software can accurately construct the proper path to follow. It's like a circle, you don't need to see the whole thing to draw a copy, you only need three points from it.

    • All of that is true however in 50-60 years all those drives and processing will likely fit in a cellphone size, cost and power form factor. I doubt it will even be 100 years before we can have true autonomous cars, I'll guess under 50 for the commonly held idea of the capabilities(city driving, etc). Probably another 30 for people to accept them on top of that. But eventually they are pretty likely.
    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      we havnt even fixed the train crash issues yet... and how hard could that be :)
      perhaps we should start with fixed lane issues like planes, trains and then perhaps automobiles :)

      • we havnt even fixed the train crash issues yet... and how hard could that be :)

        Not that hard. Automatic train operation [wikipedia.org] is a solved problem; a properly installed, modern ATO system is safer than the best human driver, better at following time tables, and even has significantly lower energy consumption. In fact, many ATO mass transit lines cannot be run manually (without cutting down on the number of departures); human drivers are not able to keep up with the amount of traffic managed by the ATO.

        An ATO will not stop the train if there's an unregistered person or vehicle on the tracks (

    • Seriously? It's called OCR. That's being done for things way harder than lines on the road. To the point that the Teslas today will display what the speed is on the road that they read from the sign off towards the side.

      As others pointed out, you don't just use one signaller. You use multiple ones, chained. The odds that all are wrong in the same exact way will be much, much less than 10%.

      Furthermore, you don't need to be perfect to improve road safety. You just need to improve on the average driver. Which

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road?

      As you are from this area, I'm sure you already know what I'm about to say, but maybe you have an answer:

      The goal is not 100% detection rate. The goal is a detection rate that is equal to or better than that of most human drivers. I've driven roads where the line markings were so difficult to see (maybe just in the particular conditions of that day) that it was more a matter of guessing than actual detection.

      So what is the detection rate of human drivers? Probably much lower than intuition would make us thi

  • Like acess to freeway lanes, or much lower toll freeway lanes.
    Like much cheaper insurance.
  • ... I requested.

    My 35 year old car just looked back at me and said, "Dude! What?"

    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      my old cavalier would sometimes turn on by itself... but i think that was a feature test for the GM ignition rollout.

  • Cost the cost in half and I'd ditch my car in a heartbeat.

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