The update corrects an error in the software that “assigned a low damage score” to the telephone pole
[…]
Waymo vehicle was driving to a passenger pickup location through an alley that was lined on both sides by wooden telephone poles. The poles were not up on a curb but level with the road and surrounded with longitudinal yellow striping to define the viable path for vehicles. As it was pulling over, the Waymo vehicle struck one of the poles at a speed of 8mph
It seems the vehicle treated the polls as road debris, etc. This is the plastic bag dilemma. Do you treat something you don’t recognize as a sacred object that must be avoided, or drive through it. This comes up a lot with machine learning based identification of objects - everything is given a percentage of assurance of its identity and nothing is ever 100% guaranteed. That’s a statistical property. Also, every item must have a closely related set of images to model that object in that situation. In this case, a bunch of telephone polls with yellow striping around them seem to have confused the car.
Yeah, or you use actual 3D scene reconstruction from lidar or else and absolutely do know "there's a big massive thing in front of me, 101% a good action is not to drive into it".
Instead you softmax some random BS and fingers crossed.
This is the plastic bag reference. LIDAR cannot determine mass. A lot of cars were jamming on the brakes several years ago every time a plastic bag floated in front of their field of view. The algorithms were then tweaked in an attempt to prevent a 20 car pileup because the car freaked out about 1 oz of air-filled plastic. Humans make assessments like this on the fly based on our knowledge of physics, an understanding of real-time conditions, and some level estimation. We may even choose to ignore road markings and normal driving rules if we deem the risk too great vs. the risk of causing a secondary incident (pileup, attention of police, etc). This is not to say meat sacks are exactly perfect in these types of analyses either.. This is the tweaking the ML engineers are trying to perfect, for all possible scenarios. A difficult undertaking for humans and machines alike.
For now. I'm sure it's only a matter of months until they far exceed the capabilities of a human pilot. For one, they can pull off maneuvers that would kill a human pilot. For two, they can pull from the combined history of every combat mission ever flown.
For three, it doesn't ever get tired or emotional. And if the plane gets shot down you don't lose a valuable experienced pilot. You can copy-paste this thing infinitely.
I wonder how long it will be before we see people purposely create these so they can influence their descendants. There might be a future where people have "relationships" with a collection of long dead people.
AIs controlling money is the application that scares me the most, honestly, not weapons. It's flexible and attached to every section of life by design; there is no such thing as sandboxing.
The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance. With far fewer moving parts they will also have much cheaper maintenance costs. Added to that EVs are cheaper to buy.
China has reached the point where 50% of new car sales are EVs much quicker than anyone expected. Most people thought that was years away, but we're already there. How soon before people start talking about a "death spiral" when it comes to gasoline cars?
Relevant Data
Per 1,000 vehicles of 3 year old cars
ICE 6.4
BEV 2.8
The ADAC even noted a growing lead for electric cars in recent years. The analysis was based on the more than 3.5 million call-outs made by ADAC breakdown services last year
Citation please. I have an EV and a gas powered truck. My truck is a hole in my wallet that bleeds money. In the entirety of the time that I've had my EV, I've had to.. get the breaks done.
Same manufacturer (Nissan), same-ish years.
Also have you had an ICE vehicle repaired recently? They too are extremely expensive to be worked on.
Thanks. So if we take that headline statistic of a repair being 29% more expensive for an EV.
Lets call the average cost of a repair 1k (just for easy math). The same repair on an EV would be 1290.
This is the cost disparity for an individual repair.
We can update that with the data from this article, that EV's need to be repaired half as often. Lets say you need to do a 1k repair approximately once per year for an aging vehicle.
The EV cost per average repair per rate per year would be at ~645, while the ICE vehicle would be 1k, and would represent a 35% savings over the lifetime of the vehicle.
What would be particularly interesting to me would be more understanding of when in the lifetime of a vehicle these repairs need to be made. Are EV's more 'steady' than ICE in terms of repairs? Are they more 'frontloaded' and random? Like a bad battery controller, or whatever, and the thing just goes in short order.
Ice vehicles are predictably 'rear loaded' in time when it comes to repairs, just because you have a big hot box of shit slamming around needing lubricant and heat dissipation, and that can only go on for so long before something wears out. Just having fewer moving parts with lower heat dissipation requirements seems like such a significant advantage in the shorter and longer term.
Even without a source I can see how ICE vehicles are cheaper to repair (assuming you don't have some high-end expensive car. I had a relatively "new"-ish engine replaced in my ICE vehicle (I'll let you guess the make/model) for just under $2,200, this is including labor.
ICE vehicles are "old tech" and everyone knows how they work and where to source cheaper (new or rebuilt) parts. All bets are off if you're working directly with a dealer when trying to save money.
I'm looking forward to owning an EV at some point, but will definitely need to find someone who's competent whenever any major issues appear. Hopefully by then they're significantly more common and the industry has more people that are competent at that type of work.
If you just look at sticker price, it seems dumb to think of buying an ev. Think about all of the money you spend on top of that 10k initial purchase for an ice vehicle for maintenance and energy. Add up all of the expense associated with the car over the amount of time you use it. Now look at all of the cost associated with an EV. If the cost of the ice vehicle is less, buy that. If not, buy an ev.
I’ve saved around 2-3k a year on gas alone since I bought my ev. My electric rates are less than a third of what I was spending on gas. Never have to change the oil or flush a radiator either. If I drive it for around 1 more years, I’ll be saving money on the total purchase. If I drive it another 8 years, I’ll have saved more money than the total cost of the vehicle.
It’s all dependent on how much you buy it for, the tax incentives you can get, how much you drive, and where you can charge on whether it’s right for you. It’s not right for some and is a no-brainer for others.
That's.. that's not a car. Don't get me wrong I like that thing a lot! But it's not a fair comparison, even Citroen calls it a 'light quadricycle' or something like that, and I would say 8k€ is a bit expensive for a comfy electrical scooter you need a parking spot for.
Well, look, I don't know what the French car market is like, but Dacia Sandera starts from €16k here in the UK (£13,795), so I have no clue which car you can buy for €10k. Ami is pretty much the only choice and it's fully electric, even if it's a quad bike. Also the new Dacia Spring EV is just £1k more expensive than Sandera. So yeah, no excuse to drive an ICE car.
I'm not French, nor I live there, either, but a friend of mine bought a Hyundai i30 like 1-2 months ago under 12k€. There are plenty of second hand cars under 10k.
And I would say there are some excuses for ICE cars yet, for example virtually everybody in my country lives in an apartment, so unless charging stations are set up every 5 meters on all sidewalks (and in my neighborhood sidewalks are VERY narrow, some of them barely half a meter) most people are just bound to our polluting metal monsters.
I think it's fairer to compare new cars to used cars than new cars to new not-cars like the ami. Also I missed the part on the thread where it was specified anything about the car being brand new.
The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance.
Yet I see a future where EVs will account for a rise in T-bone accidents. You are saved from red light runners more often because ICE have a slower acceleration. Now imagine everyone has an EV with massive acceleration from a stop. We will see many more people being hit by red light runners.
Are you saying the victims increased takeoff speed will increase their chance to be struck by someone running a red light?
My understanding is that most the time someone runs a red light, they didnt stop first and then accelerate at top speed through it before it turned green.
I could be wrong about that though
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