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Ex-Uber Engineer Claims a Self-Driving Car Drove Him Coast-To-Coast (theguardian.com) 114

Posted by BeauHD from the road-trip dept.
"Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the heart of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, claims to have built an automated car that drove from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention," reports the Guardian. Levandowski told the Guardian that he completed the 3,099-mile journey on October 30th using a modified Toyota Prius, which "used only video cameras, computers and basic digital maps." From the report: Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver's seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel. "If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked," he said. If true, this would be the longest recorded road journey of an autonomous vehicle without a human having to take control. Elon Musk has repeatedly promised, and repeatedly delayed, one of his Tesla cars making a similar journey. A time-lapse video of the drive, released to coincide with the launch of Levandowski's latest startup, Pronto.AI, did not immediately reveal anything to contradict his claim. But Levandowski has little store of trust on which to draw.
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Ex-Uber Engineer Claims a Self-Driving Car Drove Him Coast-To-Coast More

Ex-Uber Engineer Claims a Self-Driving Car Drove Him Coast-To-Coast

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  • I still want my flying car!

    • Get a Tesla and find a highway off ramp with a drop-off instead of a concrete wall.

    • I still want my flying car!

      Then go buy one, they DO exist, although I seriously doubt you can afford to purchase it and keep it airworthy. There have been a number of designs, some actually built and flown. Come to think of it, you might have better luck building your own experimental aircraft/car and it might be something you could actually afford to kill yourself in.

      Flying isn't hard under ideal conditions, if I can do it, almost anybody can. However, knowing how to stay out of trouble when conditions are not so nice or when some

      • I was an aircraft mechanic for 45 years.
        I don't want to do any work on it, I don't even want to fly it. . . .
        I just want the flying car I was told we would all have by now ;)

      • There has never been a flying car, and there probably never will be. There are only roadable airplanes. A flying car wouldn't require a preflight check, and it would be able to take off from your driveway, or the interstate. Nobody has ever built such a vehicle, and limitations of physics suggest that they never will — not because we'll never get enough energy into the vehicle, but because getting it out would crack pavement, flip over neighboring vehicles, roast pedestrians, etc.

        • There has never been a flying car, and there probably never will be. There are only roadable airplanes. A flying car wouldn't require a preflight check, and it would be able to take off from your driveway, or the interstate. Nobody has ever built such a vehicle, and limitations of physics suggest that they never will — not because we'll never get enough energy into the vehicle, but because getting it out would crack pavement, flip over neighboring vehicles, roast pedestrians, etc.

          Oh, right... Um, If you let me define a "flying car" anyway I choose, I could prove my point too.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocar

          It flew as well as drove on roads. No airworthy and road legal examples are for sale, but they do exist, or, if you wanted to license the plans you could build your own and fly it as an experimental aircraft and drive it as a home built car in some states.

          Your "I don't want to have to do the conversion or tow the wings in a trailer" and the "Operate off a road" are but re

          • "Your "I don't want to have to do the conversion or tow the wings in a trailer" and the "Operate off a road" are but regulatory restrictions."

            Completely false. Those are physics considerations.

            " But the fact remains, there are vehicles that can fly in the air on their own or drive on roads on their own, and they've been around since the 40's."

            And the fact remains that you have to stop and do a bunch of stuff to them before you can fly, in fact literally converting them to airplanes before you can fly them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rriven ( 737681 )

      I still want my flying car!

      Neil deGrasse Tyson explained why we don't have them yet.

      https://twitter.com/neiltyson/... [twitter.com]

      Sometimes I wonder if we'd have flying cars by now had civilization spent a little less brain energy contemplating Football.

  • Color me skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattyj ( 18900 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @07:18PM (#57827476)

    This guy is mostly famous for being a big liar and a thief. Not buying it. Also not sure why anyone would care about this.

    • Re:Color me skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @07:23PM (#57827500) Homepage Journal

      This claim contains an obvious lie. The car does not have 3000 miles range. It can't refuel itself. Even if it could, it can't clean all its cameras if they get dirty (Tesla has the same problem). And one illegal run doesn't prove general capability anyway.

      • "aside from planned stops to rest and refuel."

        He did stop to rest and refuel. He could have cleaned the cameras at the stop. Seems very plausible. Oh wait, no it doesn't, because "autonomous driving" is a joke.
      • Dozens of valid criticisms you could have gone with and yet you chose to post something stupid.

        At least you're consistent.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          No, it's actually quite a valid criticism. To quote Lyingdowski:

          "If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked," he said.

          The only stupid one is you. The guy clearly claims the car could have done the trip with no one in the car which is frankly not possible.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          I've skimmed a couple of gas stops/sleeps and I can't tell if it can actually navigate to a parking spot or gas station.

          It seems to start and end on limited access highways too. If it cannot get on and off a limited access highway I'd think it's being exaggerated in its abilities.

          I'd suspect Tesla could do this too given some tries.

          I saw nothing like road work, or even stopped traffic.

          Though if it's camera only, that's something.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dkman ( 863999 )

            Yea. And I noticed a few times where it seems to start from the shoulder.
            1:20 and 1:37 of note.

            I think that the AI handled the "on highway" portion, which is the easy part. Obviously it couldn't handle the "pumping gas" part. There are a few single lane pieces where I'm not sure what was going on since they're not highway.

    • So if it only used video camera's it was not driving at night.

      Nor was it being placed in situations were there were indecipherable objects in the roadway.

      Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.

      For example, a hefty bad in the middle of the road. Now if the road is straight and the lines are dashed or even spaced so that the system can estimate paralav then it could figure out the extent of the hefty bag partially. It will not be able to separate dist

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )

        What if it had 2 cameras in the same direction?

        • it doesn't help much for distant objects.

          • What if it had 2 cameras in the same direction?

            it doesn't help much for distant objects.

            So your objection is that it can't do something that humans can't do, and that somehow renders it unable to drive? With greater stereo separation, you get greater depth perception. Our eyes are just a few inches apart. In a car, you can place the cameras feet apart. An AV's ability to determine depth from cameras alone can be superior to ours, and ours is good enough for driving. QED, this is not a real limitation.

            I'm not saying he has done it, mind you. I'm saying it's conceivable.

            I can drive with one eye

      • Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.

        It should provide at least the same possibility to judge those as a human does with only visual input, which seems to be enough to drive a car from coast to coast.

        However, I find it rather unlikely that this guy has *algorithms* that can make those judgements to the same level as a human.

  • "Nothing went wrong this time so nothing can go wrong"
    This so-called 'engineer' is a danger to himself and others and having admitted what he's done they should find something to prosecute him for.

  • Just because Uber's car had some software disabled that would have prevented collusion with a pedestrian, how does the mean this guy lacks trust?

    Uber's cars were working generally OK - on city streets mind you - until they were pulled, because of one accident.

    I actually don't find it very hard to believe this could be done myself, because you are talking about almost all city, or near highway driving which is generally straightforward. Pretty much no obstacles, maybe some construction zones which are usual

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      Are you being intentionally dense or are you just an idiot?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by balbeir ( 557475 )

      Just because Uber's car had some software disabled that would have prevented collusion with a pedestrian, how does the mean this guy lacks trust?

      Are you saying the pedestrian was in on it?

    • Actually, Uber's cars were not doing well. They would need intervention, on average, every 13 miles.

      The New York Times reports that Uber's autonomous vehicles require human intervention every 13 miles, on average, while Google's go 5,600:

      https://boingboing.net/2018/03... [boingboing.net]

  • ...as any "self driving" claim. Give it up people, it doesn't work. People 5 years from now will laugh at all these companies and wonder how they got funded in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      huh? driving is not the pinnacle of human achievement. This is a very doable task. God, I hope that in 5 years we are laughing about how people used to have to drive cars themselves. There will be a lot more of us laughing too since many of us won't be dead from the car crash epidemic that plagues us currently since humans are pretty terrible drivers.

      • Really? Very doable? You should launch a startup then. Make billions!
      • In 5 years you'll have to keep on dreaming. They are so ridiculously far from making this work, two years in. They are not on the verge of multiple breakthroughs.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I use comma.ai and their opensource platform OpenPilot. It works. It's here today. It does not know how to handle crazy events, like a deer running back and forth across the street (it will try to avoid and then it will stop and won't go until the driver takes over).

      What is not here is autopilot for the masses. A competent driver is required to be at the controls, that is why a system like OpenPilot will never be a platform. Too many idiots raises the cost of liability. However crowd-sourced insurance

  • Of course it'll work SOMETIMES. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mal-2 ( 675116 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @07:39PM (#57827586) Homepage Journal

    Self-driving works the vast majority of the time. How many attempts were made (by him and/or others) that we're not hearing about because they had to be aborted? Just doing it once is not exactly Lewis & Clark territory here.

    • 2 other times. To be fair being pulled over by the cops for not-speeding (and therefore being the classic cautious-buzzed-driver) wasn't their fault. The other time was high-winds blowing it out of a lane. Which seems like a relatively easy enough fix. Probably exceeded its 'safe-steering' limits.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        Right, but the price of failure is not "You have died of dysentery". There is some chance the car could crash, but it's less than the risk of a human driver crashing a car on a sleep-deprived long drive. It's not even "crashing this plane with no survivors". It would take deliberate malfeasance to make a self-driving car more dangerous than one piloted by your average human. (I don't care what race drivers can do, because very few of us will ever get there.)

        Even the Wright brothers risked death or serious i

  • Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver's seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel.

    So not any different from driving with cruise control and lane assist, then.

    • But if you had cruise control and lane assist that were trustworthy and legal to NOT have to pay attention (read a book, browse the net, sleep, be prepared to take over with a 30 second warning) that would be enormously useful, even if it only worked on highways. I hope we are not too far off that. Obviously cars without steering wheels are another thing entirely.

      • But if you had cruise control and lane assist that were trustworthy and legal to NOT have to pay attention (read a book, browse the net, sleep, be prepared to take over with a 30 second warning) that would be enormously useful, even if it only worked on highways. I hope we are not too far off that. Obviously cars without steering wheels are another thing entirely.

        Well, this is what the traditional auto-makers are aiming for, and already have under legal testing in Europe. The Silicon Valley giants aim higher, and aims to pull off the cars without the steering wheel.

  • I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that running coast to coast through highway is easier than running in residential areas, where pedestrians can pop up at any time.

  • which "used only video cameras, computers and basic digital maps."

    It didn't use lasers? Sometimes a big "spot" in the road is merely discoloration, spilled paint, or a reflection. Such could easily fool camera-driven AI to slam on the breaks, risking a rear-end collision. Lasers can verify such a spot is "flat" in a more direct manner.

    I've had close calls myself over mistaken identity because reflections etc. confused (human) stereo vision, being one eye may catch a reflection that the other eye doesn't, a

    • The first two times I assume he had to intervene and take over. I doubt it has the ability to perform an emergency stop.
      This was his third attempt.

  • It's basically first-gen Tesla auto-pilot.
    There's no footage of it doing anything but staying in one lane.
    Nothing of it pulling in to a gas station, nothing of it navigating an interchange.
    It seems to not even be able to change lanes.

    • It clearly changes lanes quite a few times in the video. In the upper right corner it even says what it is doing (Driving, Merging, Changing Lanes, Construction Driving).

      Agree there is no footage outside of freeway/highway driving. Would have been especially interesting in the SF and NYC sections. It also zips through the middle of the USA ridiculously fast. I guess that was boring flat corn fields.

      Not sure if it is fair to compare it to Tesla's first-gen autopilot or not.

  • I would love to do this [xkcd.com].

  • I-80 (Score:2)

    by sphealey ( 2855 )

    It would not be difficult to build an autonomous vehicle that could drive coast-to-coast on I-80. The autonomous systems company I worked for in the oughts could have built such a vehicle in the 1970s. Except of course for those tricky bits at the endpoints, San Francisco and New York City, I'd suggest it not trying to go through the Chicago metro area at rush hour either even though I-80 is fairly far south. So yeah, possible, easy even - except for the hard part.

  • Coast to coast is all highway driving. Still impressive, but I would think that getting around in a congested city would be more challenging.

    On the highway you have no bicyclists, or dogs, jumping in front of you. No traffic lights, no stop signs. Nobody running stop signs or traffic lights.

  • He is either lying (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @09:15AM (#57829514)
    Or he should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment.
  • In 1995 Carnegie Melon drove cross country no-hands in a automated Pontiac minivan. Not quite as automated, as it was one camera facing front, a gps (for speed only, no good enough maps available), and a 486 computer. They claim in the journal (ahh, the days before blogs) that the car drove 2800 of 2850 miles across country.

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