Comment on A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco
barsoap@lemm.ee 7 months agoNo. Not securing loads is the dangerous part. You need a human in there anyway and with the current sorry state of driving automation best you can do is have them browse the delivery list while the car is handling a traffic jam.
There’s a reason you don’t see the likes of UPS or DHL get into automated cars, but venture capital moonshot tech companies promising nonsense on the one hand, as well as traditional car manufacturers with way more reasonable claims. IIRC Audi is actually leading the pack.
And it’s not like UPS or DHL know nothing about vehicles, they’re driving custom orders. DHL even was a manufacturer for some time.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Jesus christ, you’re trying to argue that driving isn’t dangerous? Ok bud, glad to see you’re approaching this discussion in good faith /s
Yeah, cause they literally started from DARPA’s moonshot program and take massive amounts of cutting edge machine learning to execute, not DHL / UPS’ strong suit.
barsoap@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What part of “DHL manufactured cars themselves” did you not understand. They know exactly what they need from their vehicles and self-driving wasn’t on the list. Electric was on the list, specific range requirements were on the list, second front seat wasn’t, instead you have comfortable loading heights and well thought through access to the load. That’s the stuff that actually matters for a delivery van. Automated driving would only get into the way of the fancy manoeuvring the vans do.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Yeah, you’re right, there’s no point implementing any road safety standards or technology whatsoever because it would be better if we all just instantly switched to public transportation! Thank god we live in a world where it’s only ever worth it to pursue the most perfect and naïve solution!
Lol, DHL didn’t specify self driving because it wasn’t an available option, and they don’t have the technical capability to build, not because they wouldn’t want it. They have an entire page on their website stating explicitly that they are closely monitoring self driving technology as it stands to have a huge impact on their business.
barsoap@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Like automated driving? Shit isn’t working, isn’t even close to working to the degree that advocates said it would ten years ago. Meanwhile, public transportation is a tried and true approach that actually fixes issues. It’s vastly more energy and resource efficient and does not create socio-economic barriers to mobility.
Yards make sense and that stuff actually is in operation in many places, it’s a controlled environment. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern container terminal without autonomous vehicles.
Long haul does not make sense as that’s train territory. Which of course can also drive automated which, unlike self-driving cars, actually a mature technology. Drivers are still used long-haul though because there’s need to do non-driving tasks that AI can’t do, automated trains are a metro thing.
Last-mile makes approximately zero sense. Parcel pickups are the right solution for standard service and for premium service AI generally won’t be capable enough for decades if not centuries to come. You don’t want a pharmacy to wait for life-saving medicine because someone put a traffic cone on the hood.