U.S. to decide soon on GM’s request to deploy cars without steering wheels::U.S. regulators will soon decide on a petition filed by General Motors’ Cruise self-driving technology unit seeking permission to deploy up to 2,500 self-driving vehicles annually without human controls, a top auto safety official said on Wednesday.
I don’t understand how cars would work on their own with no input from a driver small-scale
I understand being able to type in “Drive to Walmart” and it can back out of your driveway and go to Walmart, but then what? It goes into the parking lot? It finds the first available space? What if you just wanted to go there to pick something up curbside? How can you tell it to go to a specific stall? What if you’re disabled and need to go to the handicap space? How can it tell if your authorized to use that space?
There’s so many little nuances that I don’t understand not being able to have a steering wheel to take control of and manually do things at some point.
Read the article, this isn’t talking about consumer-owned vehicles but the Cruise Origin robo-taxi service. They’re small autonomous shuttle-style cars.
Basically GM reinvented the bus but made it smaller.
So to answer “How does it park at Walmart” - it takes the passenger to the front and drops them off then continues on its way. I believe the intent/current trials using Bolts have an app similar to Uber, you put in your current location + destination, then it comes and gets you, then drops you off.
Almost 0 value in removing a steering wheel or any kind of input to a consumer-owned car like that, makes some amount of sense for robo-taxis. (They specifically wanted passengers sharing the ride to face eachother to ease safety concerns, and they probably don’t want random Joe getting up at the emergency controls and driving it off road)
I think that’s a fairly common reaction, but it’s important to remember what you’re currently trusting your life to. Right now meat machines made for hunting and finding berries are operating giant death machines at speeds that they didn’t evolve to understand, and sometimes that meat machine needs to constantly remind itself to pay attention and not shut down while driving, or to look for children, or to go the right speed, because driving isn’t natural for meat machines. Not to mention that they take entire seconds to respond to stimulus (which can be hundreds of yards at speed), and they can only see in one direction at a time. And even if they do everything right, they can have a stroke at any time and kill everyone in their car and the car they hit.
Compare that to an actual machine, built to pay attention to everything in a full 360° at all times, never drives drunk or drowsy, and has double redundancy to prevent mechanical failure. They always drive at the right speeds, and react to problems within milliseconds.
Comparing humans to robots, it’s honestly a testament to how chaotic driving is that robots didn’t take it over a long time ago. But within our lifetimes I guarantee that we’ll look at it the same way that we now look at chess. Humans may have been better at one point, but very soon computers will be so much better than us at driving that it’s not even a competition. And it’s fairly likely that they’re already past that point, these GM cars already crash less than the average human driver
Back in the 80s or 90s GM (specifically Buick) teased a car with no steering wheel. It instead used joysticks. I’m curious if GM is basically thinking of that. Something more motor friendly, but joysticks also free up space for either more electronics (bad idea) or more safety equipment. The other thing people forget about is that a steering wheel is a giant spear aimed at drivers in a collision. We’ve gotten better about breakaway systems and shears, but it’s another point of injury and failure. The more enclosed a cabin the better. Anyways, all this to say that it might be that direction that GM is thinking and not a fully no input vehicle. It could also be a fleet based vehicle that only drives on main roads which effectively makes it a train that follows a “digital track” and doesn’t allow for nuance and is built for taxi service.
You just made me realize that we created a disconnect between the driver input and the car response on most thing except for the steering that for whatever reason is still a physical column down to the direction.
At this point electronic joystick and steerings are ancient in the PC gaming space, I don’t see why that physical link is still required.
Infiniti on the Q50 released the first “direct adaptive steering” which was fancy marketing for steer by wire where no column was supposed to be present. This made it so consumers still had the same feeling, but it allowed for cool things like not having a rod aimed at your body, closed up another point of egress into the cabin for critters and water, and also gave you the ability to have it account for road undulations and wind so if you held the wheel straight even on a windy day it would adapt and steer straight. People however freaked out about steering not having a physical link and so Infiniti added in a column that would effectively reconnect if for some reason the steering ever stopped working. But it ruined the idea behind it. Anyways, consumers are kind of what holds us back. We all think of things having to be done a certain way without realizing there could be better ways of doing something. Side mounted joysticks, like a plane, would allow for people without legs for instance to drive cars. People with fine motor skills could be more precise and software could account for a shake in their hands.
A few companies are starting to experiment with brake by wire and throttle pedals haven’t been physically cable linked for decades at this point. Why do we still have steering wheels like that?
Because the opportunity and severity of failure of the physical steering wheel is an order of magnitude or more greater than any other system that has been replaced by electronic systems in most cars.
I think some sort of joystick would be a great solution. Maybe over 15mph it gets disabled and autopilot takes over to take you to your destination (i.e. Walmart parking lot) and then when it slows down the joystick can be used to direct the car to where you want to park.
I can see a joystick becoming dangerous at high speeds though, which is maybe why they have stuck to steering wheels.
Joysticks don’t take much to accidentally push forward or ya k back on, suddenly speeding up or stopping your vehicle, or if a kid or a pet starts misbehaving and knocks it to the side.
I think a rotary knob will be more intuitive than a joystick. Input is fuctionally the same as a steering wheel, and more likely to require less specialized training and adjustment.
No, no, no, no. This is right up there with my state wanting to let 18-year-olds carry concealed deadly weapons in classrooms with no permit. A deal breaker for my continued participation in this society.
I recently learned that the state where I’m from considers a baton a deadly weapon so it can’t be purchased as a means of defense, but an Ak-47 is perfectly fine to purchase AND open carry.
Great gods. I guess the AK is considered a hunting rifle or a paperweight?
I’m tempted to ask if you’re from the South, since this is exactly the garbage that too much of the region would champion. But honestly, the upper Midwest seems just as bad when it comes to “Muh guns!”
Yeah self driving cars are totally the same thing as giving a teenager a gun in a school.
Their track record is literally better than the track record of the average human driver. The data doesn’t back up what you’re saying at all
I wonder if this came from engineering or the marketing department.
I’m getting “Let’s do this, and if it fails (which it will), it’ll look like we’re really confident in our self-drive and are a challenger in the market” vibes.
Even if you have excellent self-drive, there is no logical reason not to have a backup steering wheel just to intervene in case. Tbh, I had no idea they were even in the self-drive market which may be their true problem. No one really knows.
I remember being shocked that my third generation smart phone didn’t have a pull out keyboard. Or that headphone jacks became a casualty. I think in the long run this is the goal.
Next step, you can’t use the car you paid for without a subscription for the self driving service. Want to drive yourself instead to save money? Nope, you bought a car without a steering wheel.
if there’s no one in the driver’s seat to pay attention, then why would you have a wheel to intervene “just in case”?
Well you know now! So it worked.
Funny thing about ai is there isn’t really a moat. Once an idea is out there it’s easy to catch up, so don’t be surprised to see the big players ahead now get caught up by competitors very quickly.
Self driving is a lot more than just AI though. Our current AI gets really smart really quickly, but fails way too often to be used in critical roles like driving, which is why most of the code in these self driving cars isn’t actually AI. They use it to predict the path of other cars, decipher data, and make high level decisions, but the actual control of the car (steering, brakes, etc) is all traditional programming. Waymo even talked about how they used to have more AI, and removed some in favor of traditional logic
From the article, the cars will be used as autonomous taxies. It is too bad. I was hoping that by removing the steering wheel, GM would have to add in the most important important self driving car feature: a release of liability. I will not fully trust autonomous car controls until I stop being legally responsible for the actions of my car.
I fantasize about the day that I could get into a self driving car and just shout a destination at it, then go there. My commute is over an hour a day and I could use that time for myself. I don’t think that day will be here soon.
These companies need to demonstrate that their vehicles are capable (more capable than MOST drivers), and they need to do it transparently. Whats more important to me, would be the manufacturer taking the liability, licensing, and most importantly take responsibility for their mistakes (again openly).
I do as well, but then I remember the insane amount of money and man power it takes to keep things working well (like airplanes, subs, etc) and realize exactly zero people would realistically do that. So it’s great in theory, but really, really far off from being something I’d trust.
For years I argued with people that with some small changes to our infrastructure and some regulation, this would be something we could accomplish in just a few short years. I still feel that way somewhat, but every time a bridge collapses, or I hit the same pothole I’ve hit for months it erodes.
