Thread: The race to the finish for self-driving cars

Companies around the globe are racing to be the first to officially step into the world of self-driving, fully-autonomous cars. The level of autonomy, however, will vary across the board. SAE International defined the self-driving levels from level 1 automation (cars perform minor tasks, but everything else is controlled by human drivers) to level 5 (fully autonomous vehicles.)

These 10 companies are the ones to watch for self-driving vehicles:

Tesla, end-of-year 2017: The tech giant's CEO Elon Musk is continuing to assure consumers that Tesla will have a coast-to-coast autopilot demo by the end of this year. At a Ted Talk in April, Musk said, "We should be able to go from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey."

General Motors, 2018: Reuters reported in February that GM plans to have "thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets...beginning in 2018," in partnership with Lyft. Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise Automation which was bought by GM last year, did not confirm this with Forbes in March, but said they plan to "deploy in a rideshare environment, and very quickly."

Hyundai, 2020: According to Forbes, the South Korean motor company is "slated to release highly autonomous vehicles by 2020...and fully autonomous vehicles by 2030," meaning level four and five automation.

Renault-Nissan Alliance, 2020: The partnered companies plan to "introduce vehicles that can navigate city intersections and heavy urban traffic without driver intervention" by 2020, according to a report from Fortune.

Toyota, 2020: Toyota "plans to be on its way to full autonomy starting in 2020," according to Business Insider. However, Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt said that while level five autonomy is "a wonderful, wonderful goal," the auto industry is far from reaching it.

Volvo, 2020: The Guardian reported in June that Volvo still plans to to have its first autonomous car by 2020, although currently they're experiencing problems testing their Large Animal Detection System — the system isn't detecting kangaroos.

Dailmer, 2020-2021: The German manufacturer entered into a partnership with engineering company Bosch, and plans to bring both level four and level five autonomy vehicles "to urban roads by the beginning of the next decade."

BMW, 2021: Joining with Intel and Mobileye, BMW plans to bring "solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production" by 2021, meaning level four and five automation.

Ford, 2021: Ford Motor CEO Mark Fields told CNBC in January that he hopes to have a level four vehicle by 2021. Ford announced in February a five-year plan for a $1 billion investment in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company founded by former Google and Uber veterans.

Honda, 2025: Honda plans to have a vehicle with level four automation on the market by 2025; a car with less automation is set to be available by 2020, according to a USA Today report.

https://www.axios.com/the-race-to-th...454991741.html

Elon Musk: "There will not be a steering wheel" in 20 years

Elon Musk predicted that within 10 years nearly all new cars made in the U.S. will be autonomous, and half of those will be fully electric vehicles. "China is probably going to be ahead of that," the Tesla and SpaceX chief said Saturday, speaking at the National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.

Within 20 years, he said driving a car will be like having a horse (i.e. rare and totally optional). "There will not be a steering wheel."


more https://www.axios.com/elon-musk-says...459839252.html

Driving is the most common job in the United States and those guys are not going to be retraining to write machine-learning algorithms for self-driving cars. So if Musk is right, that means there's maybe a decade to work out what to do with all those newly unemployed (and probably permanently unemployable) people and to put those policies into effect. 4 of those 10 years are going to be with Trump as President. Good luck fellas.

A policeman stopped me going home from the pub the other night, he said "I think you're drunk, you're all over the road".

I said "Thank fuck for that, I thought the steering had gone".

rat-a-tat-*ching*

How will autonomous cars handle Somchai coming the wrong way on an off ramp? Or India where there is no room for door mirrors as the cars are so close.

We will have to adjust society around that.

Obviously, society will change. That's an absolute given. The question is how it will change and given the level of insanity which currently prevails in many countries (not least in the United States), I can't really see any reason for optimism. Still, climate change will start to bite really hard not too long after automation starts to fuck everyone, and that's going to be a significantly grimmer prospect so this will be something of a passing problem, I suspect.

Originally Posted by VocalNeal

How will autonomous cars handle Somchai coming the wrong way on an off ramp?

I don't know, but surely better than Somchai II.

Musk also said:

“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said.

“AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”

“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he continued.

“It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

Elon Musk just told a group of America's governors that we need to regulate AI before it’s too late
https://www.recode.net/2017/7/15/159...regulations-ai

Originally Posted by SKkin

Elon Musk just told a group of America's governors that we need to regulate AI before it’s too late

He also said the government needs to aquire competence first that it is totally lacking right now.

Seems the natural thing to say in front of a conference of governors.