Consider that at the time, an engineer told him that the car was dependent on a level of mapping detail that was impractical at a nationwide level, that the car would run a red light if it wasn't on the car's map.
The article also cites that the cars would have issues in bright sunlight, particularly determining the color of stoplights, that they couldn't handle construction sites consistently, etc.
Also, consider the Slate article mentions Google Self-Driving Cars don't know how to park, two full years after the PR stunt which shows a blind man doing so in a Self-Driving Car. (Which was almost certainly a heavily staged operation.)
It's safe to assume Google has improved upon some or probably all of these issues in the last couple of years, but I think that article shows a stunning difference between where a press team says a technology is and where it actually is.
The point of not having a steering wheel was to experiment with a platform where it is assume disengagements where user intervention is needed in an emergency won't happen, because Google's own research indicates that relying on disengagements is dangerous.
Level 2-3 cars are frankly, too dangerous for the road IMHO, and the rush by automakers to ship these out to the public is, I predict, going to lead to some serious disasters, class action lawsuits, and regulation, that imperils the whole enterprise.
If there's anything that you don't ship "until it's ready", it's a device that's lethal to human life when something goes wrong. Tesla already killed someone, and while you could argue he violated the beta test agreement, shipping cars which requirement drivers to be attentive and keep their hands on the wheel while self driving -- ready to be aware and take control at a moment's notice -- effectively are engaging in bullshit marketing, because we all know that people who use self driving don't want to sit there "engaged" but want to be free to do somethings like check their phone.
Public data on disengagements shows Waymo is far far ahead. Are disengagements important? Yes. Every disengagement is a failure of the car's automation to handle road conditions that would require emergency intervention by the driver. But keep in mind, Waymo drives off the highway as well, whereas many of the competitors with worse disengagement figures are triggering them on mostly highway driving.
Taking time to do this right might be frustrating to those who want products shipped immediately, but the first time a level 2-3 car runs over a schoolyard, people's minds will change very fast.
Yes, but computer vision has moved forward by leaps and bounds since 2014, and so have GPUs.
AD pipelines uses object-detection for traffic-sign detection. RCNN was state of the art for this back then and ran at what 0.2 fps and ~40 mAP ? SSD came out in 2016 and ran at 60+ fps at ~80 mAP. Google's mobilenets implementation probably runs atleast twice as fast and apparently has no noticeable loss in accuracy.
There are more performant and more efficient network architectures than mobilenets. Don't get me wrong, Google's DL research is good, but it's not significantly ahead of field SOTA like they would have you believe.
I don't think mAP on VOC is indicative of real-world performance - especially given COCO mAP is just now cracking the 40s with similar architectures. But the gains in proposal based detection/instance segmentation from 2014 to now have been staggering for sure.
Consider that at the time, an engineer told him that the car was dependent on a level of mapping detail that was impractical at a nationwide level, that the car would run a red light if it wasn't on the car's map.
The article also cites that the cars would have issues in bright sunlight, particularly determining the color of stoplights, that they couldn't handle construction sites consistently, etc.
Now, in contrast, this is months after Google said it "didn't need pedals or steering anymore", in articles like this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/tech/innovation/google-self-dr...
Also, consider the Slate article mentions Google Self-Driving Cars don't know how to park, two full years after the PR stunt which shows a blind man doing so in a Self-Driving Car. (Which was almost certainly a heavily staged operation.)
It's safe to assume Google has improved upon some or probably all of these issues in the last couple of years, but I think that article shows a stunning difference between where a press team says a technology is and where it actually is.