SoftBank Expects Mass Production of Driverless Cars in Two Years (reuters.com) 38
SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said on Friday he expects mass production of self-driving vehicles to start in two years. From a report: While in the first year the production of units won't be in millions, in the next several years the cost per mile in fully autonomous cars will become very cheap, Son said, speaking at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum. "The AI is driving for you. The automobile will become a real supercomputer with four wheels." SoftBank has stake in self-driving car maker Cruise, which is majority owned by General Motors, and has been testing self-driving cars in California. It has also funded the autonomous driving business of China's Didi Chuxing.
2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & (Score:3)
2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & criminal.
We need to work on laws for self driving before they can really take out.
How meny Elaine Herzberg's can they just pay off before they run of funds?
Re:2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & (Score:2)
That's what I tell the cop every time I'm stopped for speeding. Never works.
Re:2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & (Score:1)
"SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said...."
Who? Oh, the assclown who has lost billions because he doesn't know what the fuck he is doing.
Re: 2 years too soon for laws and liability civil (Score:1)
Go back to Mont Pelerin, neo-libertarian forum troll. And take your Trumpet and Trumpettes and corporate-feudalist hellscape with you.
Re:2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & (Score:2)
These are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
Wait, didn't you already post that same comment to another story today?
I can't even tell if that's supposed to be straight, or if you're trying to be ironic. Do you even know?
Private companies are subject to laws just like private citizens. And lawsuits.
Re:2 years too soon for laws and liability civil & (Score:1)
The hacking liabilities are horrendous. Terrorist hacks the car and runs down and murders a bunch of people. The manufacturer is automatically guilty of negligent homicide, proof, the vehicle was hacked and it is self evident the system was not secure enough, the reason it was not secure enough, greed, they did not spend enough on security.
Every single failing drops back on the manufacturer until they can prove themselves innocent, they are self evidently guilty, automated car, a robot, the manufacturer an
But won't this ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they are all EVs, it still contributes to traffic congestion and parking problems downtown. The market for just wanting to get from point A to B without hanging on to a steering wheel would be best served by other means.
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Even if they are all EVs, it still contributes to traffic congestion and parking problems downtown.
If they're truly self-driving (which is admittedly a big if), they could park in some remote lot and come back when you're ready to leave. Cooperating autonomous vehicles could probably also pack in much more densely than current parking lots. Self parking could also help with congestion because they wouldn't be driving around the streets in a futile quest to find a close parking spot.
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I'll bet that the car manufacturers will be interested in a cut of your parking savings, and will charge you dearly for a "drive aimlessly without passengers" software patch.
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In the transportation sector, an autonomous car going to find parking or driving around aimlessly is referred to "empty congestion". It's the sum of all distance driven in a vehicle when the vehicle is not transporting a person or an item to an intended destination. We only have estimates for the total amount of empty congestion, but it has recently increased due to transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft reducing reliance on transit and the self-driven car. If you're going to an event in Uber,
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Right, so you've got hundreds/thousands of cars wandering around the city looking for parking spots. What could possibly go wrong.
You've got it completely backwards. What you describe is what we have now with human drivers looking for street spots.
The self-driving cars would presumably reserve their spots at remote lots ahead of time.
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The self-driving cars would presumably reserve their spots at remote lots ahead of time.
If we had that capability, humans could use it.
Hmmm-- anybody got Elon's phone number? That would be a nice app to add to the Tesla software.
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It won't work without active enforcement. Imagine if you get to your reserved space and my car is in it. This is already a problem in some apartment and condo complexes. This can be addressed for self-driving cars by simply programming the car to not park in a reserved space that is already reserved, but I don't see any way to easily stop human drivers from doing this.
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So it takes 15 minutes for them to come pick me up, or more? Nobody would use them then.
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I don't know where you get 15 minutes from. That's enough time to drive halfway across many cities.
If you're talking about an area so congested that it takes 15 minutes to get from a nearby lot, then you probably would have spent that much time looking for a parking space in the first place, much less walking from and back to it.
Don't forget that you could also plan ahead and order the car to head back a few minutes before you actually leave.
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The car has to be able to find a safe place to stop where you can get in, and perhaps spend several minutes loading up whatever you bought. There will stlll need the equivalent of short-term parking or standing zones wherever you want to your car to meet you.
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Having a self-driving car that goes off to a remote parking lot when not in use will work in places were it is hard to find parking, but I don't see how this will be very popular if there are empty parking spaces nearby. These spaces would need to be reserved for meat-drivers because they don't have the option of sending their vehicles off to self-park.
Re: But won't this ... (Score:2)
Because of insane congestion?
Because of cost?
If all cars become rental bullshit, you will see a lot more vehicles than now. And a lot more cost too, due to the obvious lock-in monopolies and additional costs.
Here in Europe, this shit won't fly anyway, so no worries for me. Here, public transport and bicycles have already won in cities, because the wait times and walking distances have become smaller than for finding a parking spot or getting back to it. You only use a car to transport heavy stuff.
And in rur
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Because of the SAME reasons I would not use mass transit today, even if it were a viable option in most of the US.
It goes not give me door-to-door sheltered from the elements transportation.
On hot, muggy summer days, I don't want to walk and get nasty and sweat
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly unlikely.
There is a forest of paperwork in legal wrangling to get through before this can happen on a global level, at scale.
There is also absolutely going to be a public backlash against it, even when countries around the globe start to accept driverless vehicles on the roads.
People LIKE to drive cars - under the right conditions of course! ... but isn't that what public transport is for?
We would all love the idea of a daily commute to work to be automated.... oh wait, hang on, how many of us are commuting now? Hmm.
Ok, so, yeah, we would all love to not have to worry about steering our cars and concentrating on the roads and sitting in heavy traffic WHEN we are commuting
Right, so, we would all love the idea of a daily commute ... WHEN we are commuting, but not having to share this experience with people we don't know (and share viruses) AND not to have to worry about concentrating and heavy traffic and yada yada ...
But, back to "we love to drive" - I absolutely love driving when I'm not in that commute/traffic situation.
I love the feel of it, the power, the control - it is FUN.
Near everyone loves it.
Then we get to that level of trust. ... hacking.
OK, sure, let's say AI drivers have reached a level that far surpasses what humans can do, the levels of accidents could potentially be cut by 90%...
But what about
Clearly these vehicles are going to get information beyond the computer systems onboard - they are going to require some networking.
The lessons still not learned from the IoT, regarding security, would apply in incredibly scary ways when you have millions of automated vehicles on the road.
Can we trust car manufacturers to ensure security is paramount?
Can we trust car owners to ensure their vehicle software is updated? To not hack it themselves?
In a situation like that, damn it, I'd rather not even be on the roads, or if I was, I'd want manual control.
No way am I going to trust an AI driven car to make those decisions for me.
Not Going To Happen Any Time Soon.
And I don't think it should, ever.
Public transport - absolutely!
I'd love to see cars simply become a beautiful manually driven source of fun - and all forms of transport that actually involve getting from A to B being public - and sure, automated - assuming the roads are near empty, except on weekends.
Or .. fuck. I don't know.
Just Nope.
require some networking = forced data plan? (Score:2)
and if you don't buy the car will not work or you can pay as high as $15-$20 a meg in mobile data fees at pay as go rates / non plan roaming rates
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Consider the "source" of this hollow bullshit - Softbank obviously has way too many of their eggs in the self-driving basket. Their desperation was beginning to show a long ago but this is a whole new level of stench.
I really doubt it (Score:2)
Is Softbank a major investor in driverless cars? (Score:1)
Follow the money as to why they published this. Or maybe this is part of a pump & dump.
I expect ScamBank to die in a few years. (Score:2)
What, but scam businesses have they brought upon the world?
I say pumping their scam businesses to rip people off is their ain business, and this PR release is exihibit A.
Masayoshi Son (Score:2)
Well what about his dad? What does the dad have to say?
Laws/Insurance NOT a problem, but... (Score:3)
Look, people have been saying the laws and insurance are a problem. This is not the case. Among other things, not everyone needs to worry about those issues, public busses for example. They can self-insure, when a city buys them they can change the laws quickly to test them out, and they do not need to worry about low speed or route changes. Much simpler than starting with a car. Not to mention large body to install the gear.
That said, for the past ten years I have been saying they were 5 years away.
The thing holding us back appears to be psychological. Those busses? The bus driver's Union will not like it. Same for adults, all of whom think they are great drivers and are afraid the AI will hit them. The truth is that 99% of human drivers are worse than the AI and are likely to hit them.
One of the main psychological issues is that humans break the vehicle laws all the time and a good AI will have to account for when the humans will break the laws.
If we want to actually get AI cars, the thing we need is a huge Public Relations Campaign to get it accepted, some deal with the Unions, and better programming to allow the AI not only to know the law but when a human will break it.
This is funny (Score:2)
I love how these articles popup now and then for self-driving cars. It's always the money men who are making these predictions too. But ask anyone with technical knowledge about this and they usually paint a different, less rosey, picture.
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Other than on dedicated roads with lots of sensors on either side, I really don't expect level 5 in my lifetime at this point. Which means on the vast majority of trips, a human observer of some kind will be needed. Which eliminates the primary benefit of the tech.
I keep arguing that autonomous car makers need to be focusing on the highway first rather than the city. The highway should be a much lower barrier to overcome in regards to truly autonomous commuting. In regards to governmental and regulatory hurdles I see an easier path to getting approval for dedicated autonomous lanes where cars can queue up and drive at speed to their preferred exit. Then it's back to human driving. This would accomplish a few things. 1) It would be seen as progress and a tangible
fumigation (Score:1)