We're excited to tell you that your pedestrian kids are involuntarily participating in this innovative experiment! They are shaping our future! Their eventual tragic accidental death will provide enough data for the Company to improve their products even further, generating even more value for our shareholders! Thank you for your contribution!
I see, you'd prefer to continue the prior experiment of humans flying around corners in multi-thousand-pound vehicles, over the speed limit, while sipping coffee and looking at the radio?
Current trend nowadays is watching tiktok, though thankfully I've only seen it at red lights, but that might just be because I'm not staring at other drivers when driving around at 40mph.
I was behind someone just the other week that was actively scrolling tiktok/reels while driving on a 3-lane road during rush hour with what appeared to be at least 2 kids in the back.
So what does this mean for Timmy (16 years old) learning how to drive? Should that also be banned, lest he runs over some kid? Or does he get a pass because he's a human and not a faceless corporation? Maybe he can repay the favor in 60 years when he gets run over by another teenager learning how to drive?
I do want safer vehicles and I do see a path to get there with this technology.
What I don't want is companies training their technologies with legitimate risk to the public, with a clear pathway to profiting off of this risk and public data, with no benefit to the public _unless_ they happen to succeed, and to some degree, unless you can afford their products. Something feels off about that.
Of course, everyone benefits if vehicles are safer, but it does feel like there is an extractive factor regardless. These companies benefit from public resources, are wholly enabled by public resources, but are trying to create a situation in which the technologies they create are more or less required to be used in order to utilize the public resource. Does that make sense? I suppose it's inferred, but, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe any car manufacturer with a working FSD technology would LOVE to have that technology mandated to be on every new vehicle. Imagine leasing that to every manufacturer who didn't develop it themselves so they could continue to sell in the USA.
On one hand, safer vehicles are a MUST because we allow an absurd number of people to die due to unsafe driving every day. On the other hand, I don't feel right about private companies benefiting so much from roads the public built, while training their technology with some degree of risk imposed on the public, and with no clear desire in these companies to give back. They tend to pay paltry sums in taxes, if any. Rivian was at a net loss of over 4 billion for 2024. I understand they're trying to build something that requires massive capital, but, I also understand that these companies are experts at operating at a loss for prolonged periods of time. Amazon is a stellar example.
This definitely cuts both ways, but I'm not sure exactly where I stand. I need more information to decide, but I'm confident that there is some degree of exploitation of public data and resources here. I'm not trying to imply Tesla, Waymo, or Rivian are the only ones guilty of this either. The tragedy of the commons is a well-known phrase because it's such a typical phenomenon. I'm also not suggesting that there's a simple solution. There can't be because the fragmentation of the polities in which these companies operate and train their technology within.
First, our current city driving environments were designed for being used by humans, so take into account human strengths and weaknesses.
Second, that kid has spent 16 years in such an environment learning how humans function there. He's got a very good model of how things work.
By the time I was 16 year old Timmy I'd spent a whole lot of time walking next to roads with cars, biking next to or in those roads with cars, and riding in cars on those roads. What was new when I was the driver was mostly learning the physics of cars and driving.
(I suppose nowadays, with the way parents can get in trouble letting kids out of their sight, we might have to worry about a generation of 16 year old Timmys who have not spent any significant time walking next to or biking next to or in roads with cars).
Third, that kid will have a pretty good model of predicting future behavior of other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists based on figuring out their intent, which can even let them make some pretty good predictions about them even when they are hidden or masked from the kid's sensors.
Fourth, Timmy has a bunch of knowledge learned from listening to other people, reading, movies, etc., that can be applied while driving. For example suppose they live somewhere where there are many cows, but no deer. If they see a cow near the road at a place with no fence, they will have an appropriate model from experience that tells them cows are generally slow moving. Be cautious when passing, maybe giving it some extra space.
If the see a deer even though they have no experience with them they likely know that deer often bolt rapidly into the road right when a car gets close due to hearing stories from people who live in deer heavy regions or from news, books, or TV/movies, so go slow and be very cautious passing that.
Autonomous cars have a big advantage in reaction time, so if a bad situation starts to unfold they are likely better at saving the day than Timmy (or an experienced human driver) would be, but at least the systems so far deployed so far don't seem to be up to Timmy's understanding of other actors and their intent. They also seem unlikely currently to have that widespread non-driving knowledge that can be called upon to understand novel situation involving things that was not in their driver training.
Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid. Self-driving models and the companies that create them have not been banned so far, even after they cause accidents.
>Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid.
Realistically no, unless he was hilariously reckless.
> SMITH: There’s the case that happened with the little boy on the Upper West Side, Cooper Stock. He and his dad were crossing the street. And a driver was making a turn, and he just ran over the little boy, didn’t see him.
> SMITH: So right now all that is is a summons to the driver for failing to yield. But it does not rise to the level of any kind of manslaughter or homicide charge. There was a study that showed that between 2008 and 2012 there were something like almost 1,300 fatal crashes in New York, and there were like 66 drivers arrested.
>Smith says that New York has some of the narrowest standards for conviction in the country. It’s called the “rule of two” — you need two significant violations of traffic laws in order to bring a charge, including some incredibly reckless or criminally negligent act. Otherwise, it’s just … an accident.
When they say "narrowest", they mean that New York is one of the most difficult places to convict a driver. Right above what you quoted:
> Our neighbors have different vehicular laws than we do. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have vehicular manslaughter statutes that punish traffic fatalities or serious injury that occurs because of simple negligence. New Jersey doesn’t have the same statute as Massachusetts or Connecticut, but even they have vehicular manslaughter statutes that encompass more behavior than what New York has, which is absolutely nothing other than drunk driving. So around the country — in Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, California — all over the country, there are states with vehicular statutes that punish a failure to yield as a traffic fatality, that punish the driver.
So this seems to be a peculiarity of New York, I guess. Also, this is from 12 years ago on a podcast that has been widely criticized for inaccuracy and cherry-picking. I'd be curious if this was even true at the time, and if so, if it's still true or if the laws have changed.
Obviously local laws differ and I'm sure there are many exceptions, but it is very common to have your license suspended if you run over someone with your car.
Self-driving cars also operate at a far larger scale than individual human drivers. Over 300 people died in Boeing 737 crashes, but the entire aviation industry has not been shut down as a result.
the 737-max was grounded for almost two years, Boeing paid a $2bn+ fine and the CEO was fired.
To be fair, actual self-driving car business units have suffered similar fates. Uber's autonomy team was shut down after they killed Elaine Herzberg, and GM's Cruise was functionally destroyed after they contributed to a major bodily injury crash and tried to cover up their errors.
It's the level 2 consumer car companies that have mostly skated under a liability shield. Tesla FSD has been shit for a long time and paid very little price for it.
Civilized countries have the concept of a driving school, where you have to take 20 one hour lessons with an instructor who can override everything as well as theory lessons, followed by an independent state run exam, theory and practice.
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.
At first I was skeptical, but reading the article, they do track object across video frames which for me it's the minimum a system like this should do. All previous FSD systems are just Fake self-driving.
"That proprietary AI driver identifies features in images and point clouds, groups them into objects, and tracks them across frames, time-stamped to the millisecond to account for differing frame rates. The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame."
> 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.
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.
For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K. For a Waymo, the same estimates are ~$25K (down from $125K!!!). There's not a clear timeline for Waymo-style kit at a price consumers can afford and in a form factor they'd accept.
(FWIW, the business story for Waymo has never been about its hardware making its way to consumers. It's always been about whether Waymo continues to run its own taxi service or leases out hardware and operations to other taxi businesses).
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 follow
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).
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?
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.
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.
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 license
This is the move that will win. Once available at that level, it will get adopted into smaller vehicles. There would be a huge market for self-driving golf carts or similar size vehicles in gated and retirement communities.
Dear humans at Rivian. If your vehicle didn't look like a cartoon, I might consider one. It's not conformity, or even ego. It's the same reason I don't wear a clown outfit in public.
I don't own a lot of things, but they all look nice.
I don't like those headlights also. I think it's a case of when founders bring too much of their personality into the product. Otherwise great product and this self drive system at least has a sound start (track objects across video frames)
People complained about the Prius, but plenty of people drove Mini Coopers, which looked even more ridiculous and were far less functional. You can't please everybody.
I don't even really understand the complaint. I quite like the way Rivians look.
It's a fairly generic body shape, but the headlamp and grille shape is distinctively "happy" instead of "aggressive" (this is a real thing, and it's intentionally designed for in lamp/grille shapes on cars)
Personally, I don't want "aggressive" near my cars. They kill enough people already, and I'm tired by how common it is for manufacturers to push aggressive body shapes.
Current trend nowadays is watching tiktok, though thankfully I've only seen it at red lights, but that might just be because I'm not staring at other drivers when driving around at 40mph.
I do want safer vehicles and I do see a path to get there with this technology.
What I don't want is companies training their technologies with legitimate risk to the public, with a clear pathway to profiting off of this risk and public data, with no benefit to the public _unless_ they happen to succeed, and to some degree, unless you can afford their products. Something feels off about that.
Of course, everyone benefits if vehicles are safer, but it does feel like there is an extractive factor regardless. These companies benefit from public resources, are wholly enabled by public resources, but are trying to create a situation in which the technologies they create are more or less required to be used in order to utilize the public resource. Does that make sense? I suppose it's inferred, but, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe any car manufacturer with a working FSD technology would LOVE to have that technology mandated to be on every new vehicle. Imagine leasing that to every manufacturer who didn't develop it themselves so they could continue to sell in the USA.
On one hand, safer vehicles are a MUST because we allow an absurd number of people to die due to unsafe driving every day. On the other hand, I don't feel right about private companies benefiting so much from roads the public built, while training their technology with some degree of risk imposed on the public, and with no clear desire in these companies to give back. They tend to pay paltry sums in taxes, if any. Rivian was at a net loss of over 4 billion for 2024. I understand they're trying to build something that requires massive capital, but, I also understand that these companies are experts at operating at a loss for prolonged periods of time. Amazon is a stellar example.
This definitely cuts both ways, but I'm not sure exactly where I stand. I need more information to decide, but I'm confident that there is some degree of exploitation of public data and resources here. I'm not trying to imply Tesla, Waymo, or Rivian are the only ones guilty of this either. The tragedy of the commons is a well-known phrase because it's such a typical phenomenon. I'm also not suggesting that there's a simple solution. There can't be because the fragmentation of the polities in which these companies operate and train their technology within.
First, our current city driving environments were designed for being used by humans, so take into account human strengths and weaknesses.
Second, that kid has spent 16 years in such an environment learning how humans function there. He's got a very good model of how things work.
By the time I was 16 year old Timmy I'd spent a whole lot of time walking next to roads with cars, biking next to or in those roads with cars, and riding in cars on those roads. What was new when I was the driver was mostly learning the physics of cars and driving.
(I suppose nowadays, with the way parents can get in trouble letting kids out of their sight, we might have to worry about a generation of 16 year old Timmys who have not spent any significant time walking next to or biking next to or in roads with cars).
Third, that kid will have a pretty good model of predicting future behavior of other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists based on figuring out their intent, which can even let them make some pretty good predictions about them even when they are hidden or masked from the kid's sensors.
Fourth, Timmy has a bunch of knowledge learned from listening to other people, reading, movies, etc., that can be applied while driving. For example suppose they live somewhere where there are many cows, but no deer. If they see a cow near the road at a place with no fence, they will have an appropriate model from experience that tells them cows are generally slow moving. Be cautious when passing, maybe giving it some extra space.
If the see a deer even though they have no experience with them they likely know that deer often bolt rapidly into the road right when a car gets close due to hearing stories from people who live in deer heavy regions or from news, books, or TV/movies, so go slow and be very cautious passing that.
Autonomous cars have a big advantage in reaction time, so if a bad situation starts to unfold they are likely better at saving the day than Timmy (or an experienced human driver) would be, but at least the systems so far deployed so far don't seem to be up to Timmy's understanding of other actors and their intent. They also seem unlikely currently to have that widespread non-driving knowledge that can be called upon to understand novel situation involving things that was not in their driver training.
Realistically no, unless he was hilariously reckless.
> SMITH: There’s the case that happened with the little boy on the Upper West Side, Cooper Stock. He and his dad were crossing the street. And a driver was making a turn, and he just ran over the little boy, didn’t see him.
> SMITH: So right now all that is is a summons to the driver for failing to yield. But it does not rise to the level of any kind of manslaughter or homicide charge. There was a study that showed that between 2008 and 2012 there were something like almost 1,300 fatal crashes in New York, and there were like 66 drivers arrested.
>Smith says that New York has some of the narrowest standards for conviction in the country. It’s called the “rule of two” — you need two significant violations of traffic laws in order to bring a charge, including some incredibly reckless or criminally negligent act. Otherwise, it’s just … an accident.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-2/
Maybe it's different in europe, but I doubt that'd be the case either unless there were several aggravating factors.
> Our neighbors have different vehicular laws than we do. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have vehicular manslaughter statutes that punish traffic fatalities or serious injury that occurs because of simple negligence. New Jersey doesn’t have the same statute as Massachusetts or Connecticut, but even they have vehicular manslaughter statutes that encompass more behavior than what New York has, which is absolutely nothing other than drunk driving. So around the country — in Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, California — all over the country, there are states with vehicular statutes that punish a failure to yield as a traffic fatality, that punish the driver.
So this seems to be a peculiarity of New York, I guess. Also, this is from 12 years ago on a podcast that has been widely criticized for inaccuracy and cherry-picking. I'd be curious if this was even true at the time, and if so, if it's still true or if the laws have changed.
Obviously local laws differ and I'm sure there are many exceptions, but it is very common to have your license suspended if you run over someone with your car.
To be fair, actual self-driving car business units have suffered similar fates. Uber's autonomy team was shut down after they killed Elaine Herzberg, and GM's Cruise was functionally destroyed after they contributed to a major bodily injury crash and tried to cover up their errors.
It's the level 2 consumer car companies that have mostly skated under a liability shield. Tesla FSD has been shit for a long time and paid very little price for it.
How dare you call my kids pedestrian. They're better than that.
We never blame kids playing on publicly-subsidized subway infrastructure.
edit: https://www.aap.org/en/advocacy/community-health-and-advocac...
At first I was skeptical, but reading the article, they do track object across video frames which for me it's the minimum a system like this should do. All previous FSD systems are just Fake self-driving.
"That proprietary AI driver identifies features in images and point clouds, groups them into objects, and tracks them across frames, time-stamped to the millisecond to account for differing frame rates. The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame."
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.
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.
What makes you think it doesn't? All those cameras, the expensive chips and cooling for them, and redundancy for all the systems don't come free.
(FWIW, the business story for Waymo has never been about its hardware making its way to consumers. It's always been about whether Waymo continues to run its own taxi service or leases out hardware and operations to other taxi businesses).
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).
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?
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.
I don't own a lot of things, but they all look nice.
Until then, I enjoy the tech story.
Why would someone with no ego care about looking foolish?
It's a fairly generic body shape, but the headlamp and grille shape is distinctively "happy" instead of "aggressive" (this is a real thing, and it's intentionally designed for in lamp/grille shapes on cars)
Personally, I don't want "aggressive" near my cars. They kill enough people already, and I'm tired by how common it is for manufacturers to push aggressive body shapes.
I had a coworker who sold his small lexus, because it made dating weird.