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- Hacker News
- The new Waymos (blue ones with sliding doors) are a dream to ride and come with built in voice Gemini.by redwood
- I see a lot of Self-driving cars hitting people vs. reckless drivers hitting people.
What I want is simple: accountability. If a human hits a human, we throw the book at them in the case of a modality of negligence. If a robot screws up, how do we remedy and discourage?
by tescreal - Hold the manufacturer equally liable. Easy.
- Point of fact: we do not treat vehicular homicide seriously in the American legal system.by hiddencost
- It should be 100% liability on the self-driving car. Only by doing that will there be enough incentive for the manufacturers to drive the accident rate down to zero (or in practice a low enough number that the cost to manufacturer of the remaining accidents is negligible). Less than 100% liability provides wiggle room, which car manufacturers will exploit to maximise profits over lives. With 100% liability manufacturers can still make a pile of money, but only if they have a low accident rate.by femto
- I’m surprised they allow open lid drinks in the lab. One wrong bump and poof 300K easy.by syntaxing
- car company != software company. Building a car gets you approximately 0% closer to knowing how to make a safe software driver. Writing AV software is exceptionally hard. We only have 2 safe functioning drivers presently: humans (debatable) and Waymo. Apple spent $7(?) billion and gave up. Uber and GM have also set billions on fire with nothing to show for it. Tesla might get there, but it could still be 5 years away.by xnx
- Rivian has actually split out the software side to a joint venture with Volkswagen Group (the group independent of the car company which the group owns with others like Audi and Porsche). I think the goal is to have a platform other brands can licenseby mikeryan
- > Tesla might get there
As of August Tesla had 80+ unsupervised taxis in operation with more than 380k miles driven total, and they are required to report incidents to the NHTSA. At the rate at which they are adding miles, if they are not now safer than human drivers, we should know soon.
by delichon - Sooo, Rivian is a chip maker now. That's cool, I guess.by rwz
- > Compared to, say, a large language model that writes news or fiction... an autonomous-driving AI is less subjective and easier to evaluate, so there’s little room for error.
That's brave. What about all the edge cases?
by ShinyLeftPad - They're talking about verification. Was there a collision or not compared to is this story good.by jayd16
- That small lidar embedded into the front window glass is very sleek looking. Overall I like their design and what they choose to focus on. Their description of what is important for an LDM is is spot on, I love a boring drive without excitement or flare.by skyberrys
- > Rivian says it will charge $49.99 a month, or $2,500 up front, versus Tesla’s $99 per month for its rival system, which is somewhat misleadingly called Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD. Mercedes, meanwhile, plans to charge $3,950 for a three-year subscription for the forthcoming MB.Drive Assist Pro
If and when FSD systems become a reality and are safer than human drivers, I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars, just as they did reversing cameras, airbags, automated emergency braking, and other once-optional safety features.
by SoftTalker - It's too cheap if it requires updates
- >I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars
That assumes that suppliers are available to affordably add it.
So far Tesla is the only company remotely close to unsupervised self-driving that doesn't add $1000s to the BoM cost of the car.
by heaney-555 - Which will pose an interesting problem; we’ll have to pay a subscription to legally be allowed to drive our car on the road. As much as I’m excited for autonomous driving I’m not excited for the legal implications that followby guywithahat
- My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
by jdross - Hmm, that would mean forcing every car sold to be controllable remotely by a corporation. Sounds like something regulators would indeed do, but also, doesn’t sound too great for consumers, to put it mildlyby dgellow
- If it gets too embedded into the revenues of the car companies, regulators are going to have a hard time making it required without a subscription. It could be that you just either have a car with a monthly payment or you don't.by chung8123
- I think given how far companies like XPeng are with their systems in China. This is more a question of "when" than "if" with the when part narrowed to a time range of perhaps 2027-2029. Xpeng seems to be planning for 2027. Not in the US of course but the rest of the world is a big place.
I expect that by the mid 2030s this will be widely used across most car markets in both L2 driver assist form and L4 style autonomous taxis active in most large cities on all continents. L4/L5 level driving for privately owned cars might trail that a bit but I think the technical arguments against that are rapidly evaporating as well. The arguments are increasingly about regulation, insurance, liability, etc. I think the Chinese are a bit more pragmatic on this front and more likely to just get this done domestically by the early 2030s and will be deploying this globally by the mid 2030s. The only question real question is whether the US and Europe will do that before or after them and whether that will be with their own tech or somebody else's.
Rivian seems to have all the right tech and strategy.
- I think insurance companies might beat the regulators, in terms of incentivizing safer vehicles via discounts.
Which would then offset these monthly subscriptions by car companies.
by elicash - Isn't Tesla already there?
I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
by dilap - Do you know how much of the drive and handling those complications was actually fully autonomous vs how much (or what key points) were handled from the remote control room by a human?
I'm not sure how you would tell, but that is a critical question for scaling and true autonomy.
by toss1 - > Isn't Tesla already there?
Those operate in constrained areas of a few cities though - with a control room, that's a long way from telling your car to drive across state unattended.
- Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't really want to be just sitting in my car tapping my knees while the car drives for me.
I'd rather these guys just focus on building a Euro spec model of the R3 and getting it over here.
by venzaspa - I think this is something that will probably change especially with younger people (or children). Once self-driving becomes mainstream, a lot of people may not see the point of doing manual driving.
Up until about a decade ago, I insisted on getting cars with a manual transmission as I wanted more control over my car. I definitely don't think that way anymore with all the advances in transmission technologies...
by rpaik - When autonomy is solved, they could put a bed or office or dining table in the car. But I agree, this halfway autonomy where you have to watch everything is kind of useless.
- I was just talking about this the other day.
When would I want autonomous driving? For longer trips. Where do those happen? On the motorway where driving is mostly straight and simple.
When on the motorway, my Tesla's lane assist gives me basically all the benefits on the motorway I'd get from full self driving. FSD doesn't let me stop watching traffic or release the wheel, and I'd still have to take over to adjust to traffic conditions.. i.e. the same exact thing I'm doing with lane assist.
I'm not interested until I can literally sit in the back and take a nap.
by IceDane - i thought the same thing but i bought a model y a few months ago and turns out that's exactly what I want. 90% self driving and really the 10% is entirely the last part of a drive because it picks stupid parking spots and doesn't know how to enter my driveway, other than that it's driven perfectly
well, perfectly is a bit much, it doesn't know how to dodge potholes yet and it sometimes misses exits/turns, but it's never done anything i would call dangerous
by jdxcode