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Google's head of self-driving cars' case against driver assistance (AutoPilot)

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I'm really excited about auto-pilot and driverless cars. I'm a software engineer, and a technologist. I'm an early adopter, and I'm really optimistic about technology. All of that said, I don't think we'll see self driving cars anytime soon. It has nothing to do with the technology; it's just society and policy.

I don't think we'll ever solve the Trolley Problem. Imagine a scenario where your self driving car detects a 5 year old girl running across the street. Your car has enough data and time to make a choice: run over the girl, killing her, or smash into a barricade, killing the occupants of the car. How should we program the car in this case, and in all of the hundreds of cases like it? How do we determine the relative value of people's lives?
What if there are four people in the car? Does that change the answer?
What if the person crossing the street is a 94 year-old homeless man?

When we make snap decisions as humans, the outcome can be called tragic, unfortunate, and "an accident".
When we program our cars to decide in these situations, it ceases to be "accidental". Now, it's calculated, reviewable, and intentional.

I wouldn't want to be the guy to explain to a mother that her child was killed because the car calculated that her life was less valuable than the people in the car.


In addition to instant reaction time future cars may also have better brake systems like this Autoliv The Torricelli Brake large - YouTube
 
So the Mobile Eye presentation was very interesting. Especially since this is most probably the technology Tesla will rely on for their driver assist now and into the future. The presentation makes clear that Tesla is a licensee of the driver assist functions presented.

Mobile eye relies on one or more cameras. It can be supplemented by other sensors, but the main sensor is a camera. It isn't yet as sophisticated as google's system in that it can't recognize a policeman holding up his hands for a stop, for instance, but there is no reason that can't be added eventually. The current rev does seem to do a good job at path recognition and obstacle avoidance.

Going forward, this is mobile eye's technology path: highway lane keeping/auto driving in 2015/2016. City lane keeping/driver assist in 2017/2018. And fully autonomous driving after that with the help of better maps, redundant sensors and car to car communication.

Their next rev of hardware, which presumably would be needed for driver assist in the city will be available in 2016, and requires three cameras.

I honest expect Tesla isn't actually programming much of the core auto driving technology themselves, but instead are licensing Mobile Eye (as are most other car manufacturers).

So what does this mean for Tesla? Highway assisted driving for end of 2015, as promised. A sensor suite upgrade for new cars sometime in 2016 for urban driving with driver assist available in 2017. Fully autonomous probably not until 2020.

2020 is when Apple will be unveiling their designed from the ground up driverless electric car, which will may use Tesla drivetrain and/or battery components.

I suspect Tesla will continue on as a car manufacturer, but realize that by 2020, lots of car companies will be selling decent electric cars, and the driver assist features will all be similar since they'll all have Mobile eye technology.

Google does seem to have boxed itself in with their reliance on lidar...