Search Engine Presents: Are you a good driver?

“The two thousand and four Grand Challenge is an utter hysterical disaster. Like one vehicle drives up onto a burm flips off. One vehicle, drives straight out, does an inexplicable U turn and just drives back to the starting line. And the rules are that once your vehicle starts, you can't do anything. Carnegie Mellon's entry Sandstorm got stuck on a burm. Poor thing was trying to get going, but its wheels were just spinning on the gravel and tried so hard that it actually melted the rubber of the tires.”

“I saw that all the teams treated this like a hardware problem. They looked at this and say, we have to build a bigger wheels and bigger chassis and so on. And I looked at this and said, about wait a minute. The challenge really is to build a self driving car that can drive for the desert. I can get a rental car that can do it just fine, provided as a person insight and the challenges we need to take the person out of the driver's seat and replace it by computer. That is not a problem with bigger tires. That's actually be a software problem.”

“They open up Google Maps and they just click around and they look for ten separate one hundred mile routes that are really tricky. They say to the team, you have to drive each of these one hundred mile routes without one human takeover of the system, without one failure of the car to get off to your running start. Once, when they fail a route, they know what the car can't handle, so they go back and say they have to be better at doing XYZ. They do it in a little bit more than a year, nearly twice as fast as they had expected.”

“Waymos says, and I think this is correct, that it's roughly eighty brass safer in terms of crashes are severe enough to turn down an airbag. Crashes severe enough to cause an injury, and also crashes involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicyclists. For every one hundred million miles humans drive, we cause a little over one fatal crash. The Waimo driver has driven two hundred million miles without causing a fatal crash, but statistically speaking, that could still be a fluke. So far it's been better than human drivers.”

“The main difference in their approach is how quickly they want to move. Anthony is very okay with risk. He's just enjoying his self driving car and taking it all over the place. Chris comes from an academic background. He's that Canadian, very nice, very careful, very risk averse. Chris didn't think that philosophy was an option for their team, even if their cars were statistically safer than human drivers. He knew that the first news story about a self driving car in a fatal accident, it was going to be a huge deal.”

“Four point eight million Americans drive for a living. It's one of the most common jobs we have, and these workers do not plan to surrender to the California tech companies. They're doing this because they stand to make an unfathomable amount of money if they eliminate driving jobs for working class of people. These drivers are represented by unions backed by politicians and in cities across America they're organizing. Humans drive the city, lot machines, labor drives this city, keep the workers in the workforce.”

“The lateral acceleration is two meters per second squared but the surprising thing is that number only applies on the on ramp. If I put you at a col de sac in a neighborhood and you were going to do a U turn, even though the speed is significantly slower, if you did two meters per second squared of lateral acceleration around a cul de sac, you would tell your driver they were crazy. It would be incredibly uncomfortable. The contextual awareness of the situation of speeding up to get on the highway versus making a U turn in a residential street tricks your brain into feeling opposite about the situation.”