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Well I see this issue has been brought up on the Employee Forum. Also noted that Fields made a speech recently in which he mentioned Ford's ongoing commitment to this issue.

 

I have to wonder, while current energy prices have a lot of attention diverted from fuel economy, that can change overnight-and probably will-think about it-a loon in North Korea, an Iranian regime dedicated to regional dominance-and probably beyond "regional". You can go on and on about the forces that can impact the world scene when it comes to energy costs.

 

In any case, with unrealistic CAFE standards staring at us, why is the industry spending so much money on this issue. Seems to me in terms of priorities, this should be far down the list.

 

Economy, crash worthiness, component durability, these for starters in my book should be ahead of driverless technology.

 

Fields is joining the rest of the sheep IMO in pursuing this currently "correct" thinking.

 

 

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Because it's being pushed by Google and Tesla and Ford doesn't want to be left behind if buyers embrace it down the road. I suspect they're only doing the bare minimum to say they're working on it and so that they are able to respond to the marketplace in a reasonable amount of time.

 

Also some of the technology is useful with or without a driver.

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Driverless cars are an outgrowth of crash prevention technology such as sensors for airbag deployment, blind spot, rear cross traffic, pedestrian safety devices, active impact absorbers, automatic brakes, and cruise control. Electronic power steering provides a slight improvement in fuel economy as well as allowing the car to steer for self parking, maintaining Lane, and avoiding crashes. Self driving cars will greatly reduce accidents and deaths by at least an order of magnitude, with the more optimistic predictions of ~90+%. No other technology can do that. Once vehicle to vehicle communication comes on line, self driving vehicles will be able to draft greatly reducing traffic as there will be less space between cars and greatly improve actual fuel consumption due to the drafting cars driving in a low pressure area (less wind resistance) and less traffic in general allowing for driving at a constant fuel optimized speed. In short, self driving cars will improve fuel consumption and safety.

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When you look at Millennial and even the younger Gen X group they don't want to drive, they will take mass transit, walk and want to live in urban centers, the suburban concept to many of them is dead. That is where the market is going, many of them don't even have a drivers license. In the industry there is a huge push for Car Sharing Maven(GM), ZipCar, GoDrive(Ford) and for Ford to be a mobility company. For the OEM it gives them a market to sell cars. While this change won't be over night it will happen over the next 15 years; a lot of them do the math and they can't afford a car, or even if they can it makes no financial sense, even if they spend $350 a month on Uber/Lyft rides and Car Sharing rental fees it is still cheaper than ownership. Long term GM sees Lyft to be driverless, you will summons a car it will come pick you up and drive you to your destination. Also by some estimates 20-25% of traffic in City's is vehicles looking for parking, your car could drop you off and then go and park itself to a spot that the car already has reserved itself.

 

Once you drive a car that has Traffic Jam assist, or even stop and go adaptive cruise you never really want to drive a car without it in traffic again. You bring up crash worthiness but driverless cars avoid an accident all together and the systems even at level 1 can give warning to the drivers. There was an interesting article yesterday about Lincoln and how they might be going down the better route because they are touting 30 way power seats vs great handling and 0-60 times, when the car is driving you don't really care what the feel is. http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/lincoln-future-luxury-autonomous/

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When you look at Millennial and even the younger Gen X group they don't want to drive, they will take mass transit, walk and want to live in urban centers, the suburban concept to many of them is dead. That is where the market is going, many of them don't even have a drivers license.

 

As they age and start families, I think that will change to a point.

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As they age and start families, I think that will change to a point.

I don't know--a lot of it depends on what happens in this space in the future. If you don't like to drive and you can just call an on-demand self-driving car to take you and the family wherever you need to go, why would you buy one?

 

And with some of these special snowflakes, I think we'll be better off if they don't drive...ever...

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Because it's being pushed by Google and Tesla and Ford doesn't want to be left behind if buyers embrace it down the road.

If you listen to the tech journalists, it's a matter of when, not if (their opinions on the automakers are often laughable at best, but I think they're right about the inevitability of self-driving cars). With the distance-keeping cruise, lane-keeping, and self-braking systems they currently have in production, it's not like Ford is all that far from a self-driving car, anyway.

Edited by SoonerLS
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I don't know--a lot of it depends on what happens in this space in the future. If you don't like to drive and you can just call an on-demand self-driving car to take you and the family wherever you need to go, why would you buy one?

..

Isn't that pretty much the same thing as a taxi? I don't see the self driving market In the suburbs making that big of a impact. Living in the city with a family of four seems pretty tough to do.

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Isn't that pretty much the same thing as a taxi? I don't see the self driving market In the suburbs making that big of a impact. Living in the city with a family of four seems pretty tough to do.

I think it's more like Uber, which has seen some explosive growth. This just removes the driver from the picture.

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If you listen to the tech journalists, it's a matter of when, not if (their opinions on the automakers are often laughable at best, but I think they're right about the inevitability of self-driving cars). With the distance-keeping cruise, lane-keeping, and self-braking systems they currently have in production, it's not like Ford is all that far from a self-driving car, anyway.

 

I can see it working in controlled circumstances but not 100% of the time especially in a large city. It's easy to make it work on well marked empty streets or with uniform traffic. But throw unexpected obstacles, poor roads, accidents, construction, bad weather, etc. into the picture and it becomes exponentially more difficult.

 

What if a stop sign was knocked down or the traffic light is completely out? How does it know when it's your turn at a 4 way stop?

 

I have an intersection near my house where 3 sides have a stop sign but one does not. How does the self-driving car know that the other lane isn't going to stop?

 

Too many border conditions and error conditions to make it 100% self-driving all the time everywhere. But I can see driver assisted automation in stop and go traffic and on the expressways e.g.

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One of the reasons Ford stock price is down so much this year is because it’s considered a dinosaur. Some Wall Street analysts have called Ford another Kodak, in that they are not ready for the future. Autonomous driving is coming whether we like it or not. Ford has no choice but to be at the forefront of this new technology. A car manufacturer that ignores autonomous driving does so at its own peril.

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One of the reasons Ford stock price is down so much this year is because it’s considered a dinosaur. Some Wall Street analysts have called Ford another Kodak, in that they are not ready for the future. Autonomous driving is coming whether we like it or not. Ford has no choice but to be at the forefront of this new technology. A car manufacturer that ignores autonomous driving does so at its own peril.

 

"Some analysts" being the key words. What these analysts think or predict frequently has no basis in sound business principles. Ford will still be around making a profit 10 years from now, but I wouldn't bet a dime on Tesla.

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Self driving cars will greatly reduce accidents and deaths by at least an order of magnitude, with the more optimistic predictions of ~90+%

 

An order of magnitude is a reduction/increase by a power of ten.

 

Thus a 90% reduction would qualify as one order of magnitude (going from 100% to 10%).

 

--

 

Ambitious almost sales-man-ish language like this, IMO, does a real disservice to everyone involved.

 

In eighty five years, from 1925 to 2010, the fatality rate per mile driven decreased a little over 90%, and that time period encompasses a staggering variety of safety improvements.

 

Projecting a 90% decrease in fatalities based on technology that hasn't even been invented yet is, IMO, not smart. Even projecting a 50% decrease, again, based on technology that does not currently exist, is unwise, IMO.

Edited by RichardJensen
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Autonomous driving is coming whether we like it or not.

 

No it's not.

 

I am so tired of people buying into a very carefully constructed long-term demonstration by Google.

 

Let's take that cute little Google car and see how well it does driving down a freeway during a snowstorm--especially one where the state decided to skip a year striping the lanes. Let's see how well it does going through a curved intersection where the pavement markings are missing and the lanes do not follow the seams in the concrete in a small town where the roads have been restriped but Google hasn't re-mapped the area.

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What if a stop sign was knocked down or the traffic light is completely out?

How does a person know to stop if the stop sign is knocked down? I'm not sure about Georgia, but in Oklahoma, if the stop light is off, it's a 4-way stop.

How does it know when it's your turn at a 4 way stop?

The same way a person does--according to the rules of the road and by observing the other vehicles.

 

I'm just not sure how the driverless car would wave another car to go. ;)

I have an intersection near my house where 3 sides have a stop sign but one does not. How does the self-driving car know that the other lane isn't going to stop?

The same way a person does--by observing the motion of the vehicle.

 

 

Those, IMHO, are the "easy" problem, the ones that computers are actually pretty good at solving. The thornier questions are the ones that require a value judgment (f'rinstance, what happens when you come around a blind corner on a mountainside to find a child in the road--does the car go off the road killing the passengers, or does it kill the child?) or the question of liability (if the car saves its passengers at the expense of the child, who is liable for that?).

Edited by SoonerLS
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No it's not.

 

I am so tired of people buying into a very carefully constructed long-term demonstration by Google.

 

Let's take that cute little Google car and see how well it does driving down a freeway during a snowstorm--especially one where the state decided to skip a year striping the lanes. Let's see how well it does going through a curved intersection where the pavement markings are missing and the lanes do not follow the seams in the concrete in a small town where the roads have been restriped but Google hasn't re-mapped the area.

Of course autonomous driving is going to happen. 50 years from now, maybe less, I would wager that nobody will be driving their own a cars.

I also agree that autonomous driving is not yet ready for prime time. Your snow example is a good one, living in the Lake Michigan snowbelt, I constantly wonder how an autonomous car will deal with snow. But someday, somebody will develop an algorithm and associated technology to handle a snow scenario. Guaranteed.

As for me, they're going to have to pry my cold, dead fingers off the steering wheel of my old 1994 F-150 before they get me in an autonomous car.

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someday, somebody will develop an algorithm and associated technology to handle a snow scenario. Guaranteed.

 

 

They already have the algorithms.

 

The problem isn't logic, and it isn't processing speed and it isn't sensor technology.

 

The problem is the upper bound on artificial intelligence: Abstract reasoning.

 

You are able to understand 'road', 'lane', 'traffic signal', etc. in both abstract and concrete terms. Computers cannot reason abstractly. That's why the "garbage in/garbage out" principle holds.

 

Machine learning allows computers to simulate abstract reasoning in very narrow circumstances, under very controlled scenarios.

 

If you program every square inch of some neighborhood into a car, and feed it with every conceivable scenario in that range, you can approximate abstract reasoning, but the computer is still matching sensory input to pre-programmed data. It is able to pick the best possible match, per some particular decision tree, but that tends to have very narrow limits and it also tends to fail spectacularly outside those limits:

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/30/google_s_image_recognition_software_returns_some_surprisingly_racist_results.html

 

You can make machine learning better and better, but you cannot bridge that gap anymore than you can use Newtonian equations to predict relativistic results.

 

I, for one, do not believe that the 3rd largest country in the world, and the 3rd most populous, will ever be so well mapped--and computers so well programmed, and the whole thing kept so exhaustively up to date, that autonomous driving will be practical. Sure--you might reach a point where certain districts--say Manhattan--are autonomous enabled. But the idea that you'll be able to hop in your car in Seattle in January and "drive" all the way to Miami without having to do anything? That's just not going to happen.

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The one item I have not seen or mentioned is when an accident happens, and they will.

Who will be at fault?

 

The Car manufacture? (Toyota and their gas pedal comes to mind)

 

The software developers, company? (If they are Google for example,if not owned by the car manufacture)

 

The company that makes the sensors, technology?

 

The car owner?

 

What happens if the car hits a person or even kills them?

 

I'm betting the car insurance companies take on this will be a major factor.

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The one item I have not seen or mentioned is when an accident happens, and they will.

Who will be at fault?

 

The Car manufacture? (Toyota and their gas pedal comes to mind)

 

The software developers, company? (If they are Google for example,if not owned by the car manufacture)

 

The company that makes the sensors, technology?

 

The car owner?

 

What happens if the car hits a person or even kills them?

 

I'm betting the car insurance companies take on this will be a major factor.

All great points. I haven't seen anything regarding this.

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How does the car 'know' there's a signal there in the first place?

 

What happens when Google thinks there's a stop sign and there's now a signal?

The engineering way to do it is optical recognition (stoplights are well standardized and easy to recognize), but this could all be crowd-sourced, ala Waze's traffic monitoring. A mixture of crowd sourcing and engineering seems like a more likely resolution.

 

A lot of this "no self-driving cars" argument sounds a lot like the "a computer could never beat a grand master at chess" hubris, which was true right up to the point that that computers began reliably and repeatedly beating grand masters.

 

Personally, I don't know if self-driving cars are truly inevitable, but I don't think it'll be the "four way stops" and "stoplights are out" problems that will stop them. Those are engineering problems, and engineers know how to overcome engineering problems. What could very well smother the baby in its bed are the "soft" problems I mentioned above--how does a computer make a choice between two bad outcomes, and who is responsible for it when it does?

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Today in NC, I had to drive home in pouring rain through some areas with blackouts, along a road with quite a few switchbacks and Raleigh's wonderfully marked roads (sarcasm level 11).

 

An autonomous car would have at best blown through the blacked-out signalized intersections. At worst, it would have rolled down a hill due to absolutely no way to read already poorly-marked roads sitting under an inch of water.

 

Because of variables like what I drove through in addition to others that have been described, I have no faith in autonomous automobility taking over before papilgee4evaeva the 3rd is born.

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The engineering way to do it is optical recognition (stoplights are well standardized and easy to recognize), but this could all be crowd-sourced, ala Waze's traffic monitoring. A mixture of crowd sourcing and engineering seems like a more likely resolution.

 

A lot of this "no self-driving cars" argument sounds a lot like the "a computer could never beat a grand master at chess" hubris, which was true right up to the point that that computers began reliably and repeatedly beating grand masters.

 

Personally, I don't know if self-driving cars are truly inevitable, but I don't think it'll be the "four way stops" and "stoplights are out" problems that will stop them. Those are engineering problems, and engineers know how to overcome engineering problems. What could very well smother the baby in its bed are the "soft" problems I mentioned above--how does a computer make a choice between two bad outcomes, and who is responsible for it when it does?

 

How do you have optical recognition of a non-functioning stoplight at night?

 

Secondly, among those who were both well-versed in programming and well-versed in chess, only a fool would have argued that 1) chess is the ultimate arbiter of human ability and 2) that a computer could never be built capable of beating a grand master.

 

It was well established as early as the 60s that the only limitations on a computer's ability to beat a human at chess were processor cycles and memory (see any of Ken Thompson's discussions about Belle, but especially his interview with the Computer History Museum).

 

Those are engineering problems, and engineers know how to overcome engineering problems

 

 

Maslow's Hammer: 'To the man with a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.'

 

The world is full of the unintended consequences of engineers trying to solve problems that they believed were engineering problems and scientists that were trying to solve what they thought were scientific problems, etc. ad nauseum.

 

When machine learning can't even be trusted to perform facial recognition reliably, are we to believe that we're 'just around the corner' from vehicles driving themselves?

 

The hype surrounding autonomous cars today is no different from the hype surrounding AI in the 50s.

 

There was some success in very limited circumstances, which was hailed widely in the popular press, and the man who thoroughly debunked the hype, Hubert Dreyfus, was eventually proved right.

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