[ashokrajagopal]

Since much is talked about general traffic here, I guess Bangalore can be the best case study.
Lets say 100 self driving buses stationed around Silk Board.
They start one by one at 530 AM, thru outer ring road all the way upto Hebbal.
They all stick to the right lane.
They all keep one car distance from each other.
At the bus stops, the passengers press a stop button pretty much like an elevator button to wait for the bus.
A bus with seats moves to the left lane while nearing a bus stop. Stops there, people enter and the bus moves on, to merge with the right lane.
Meanwhile the other buses carry on.
Passengers swipe a prepaid ticket card.

Effectively, we have recreated the metro system with near zero infrastructure cost.
Lets say an automated driving engine and control system would cost 50L -- ballpark based on Tesla numbers -- we build a body over it for about 50L more.
For 100Cr, you get 100 buses, that can ply 24X7.

For an automated ticketing system and a signalling system for buses with seats its around a few lakhs.
The existing roads can work beautifully well.

And two wheelers -- well they would ply exclusively on the service roads.

It is not that far. It takes one inspired leadership to make it work in a city. Or easier still in one route. With 10 buses. Costs about 20crores in all to prototype. Once it gets in action, there is no going back.

[veyron_head]

Originally Posted by smartcat

My crystal ball says self driving autonomous car technology will eventually come to India a few years down the line, but with manual override. The steering, brakes and accelerator will still be around. Just like cruise control, this is likely to be a convenience feature. The owner can use self driving feature if he feels the conditions are right.

This is the only use case I see for self driving cars in India. When it is yet another feature like cruise control, the legal liability for any accident rests with the driver.

[The Brutailer]

Self driving cars are the most repelling, upalatable piece of invention from an driving enthusiast point of view ever. Really? How lazy has this generation really gotten that despite there being an automatic transmission, you need self driving? Call me a distrustful old grandpa but I can never depend and hand over the entire reigns to an AI. Machine can’t beat human common sense and instincts. As if automatic transmission, electric motors wasn’t enough, now this nonsense comes up.

Wish I was born 50 years back in time.

[PrasunBannerjee]

Great compilation. Another point to add: sudden crowd bursts on occassions like Ganpati or Durga visarjan, baraat processions etc blocking the roads will make situations only worse.

However, my concern point is lesser towards this and more towards hackability factor. They are lesser of cars and more of computers, and hence more hackability comes into the picture. Why do you think encryption algorithms and technologies 'evolve'? Because they got cracked by someone or the other. Otherwise we would have never seen 2048 or 256 bit SSL, or even https over http. Despite running an IT startup, I have my own old school reservation of thoughts in certain segments. Just living with the thoughts that even while I can drive, someone can take remote control of my vehicle, or what if AI on it goes haywire and decided to 'punish' me sends chills down my spine. Maybe I'm wrong but even those fractional probabilities can cost lives!

[GutsyGibbon]

Originally Posted by The Brutailer

Self driving cars are the most repelling, upalatable piece of invention from an driving enthusiast point of view ever. Really? How lazy has this generation really gotten that despite there being an automatic transmission, you need self driving? Call me a distrustful old grandpa but I can never depend and hand over the entire reigns to an AI. Machine can’t beat human common sense and instincts. As if automatic transmission, electric motors wasn’t enough, now this nonsense comes up.

That same human trusts his instincts too much to be able to drive as a teenager, as a drunk, as a sick person, as an old person, as a distracted driver - to be able to see through objects, see through corners, see in the dark and what not.

Uber is all that is wrong with corporates running after market cap, and ignoring every check and balance. They hope to use their market cap to deal with all that they break at a later time. This should lead to more oversight into who gets to test autonomous tech, and where they test it.

I consider myself a driving enthusiast. I will drive on open wheel car on a race track built on a mountain any day, but leave the commuting to an autonomous car. It is a pathetic experience at best to drive a car in a city like Bangalore. Why not let a machine take over, while you watch a Nordic rail journey on a VR headset

It is the same as people letting go of horses when cars came into being. The people who love horses can still get out into the country side and enjoy a horse ride. But there is no need to commute on a horse.

[Maveryq]

I think that autonomous driving will come to India sooner than later. There seems to be quite a lot of commercial interest and there have been sightings of such vehicles.

Vijay Shekhar of PayTM had posted a video once of an autonomous driving vehicle doing trials in New Delhi.






The Twitter URL of the video is herehttps://twitter.com/vijayshekhar/sta...95048852926466


The company in question is Altran India .http://www.altran.co.in/


The changes happening in the Indian automotive sector might crystalise faster in some sectors more than others.

[gmhossain]

I must say, it's a very interesting and thought-provoking thread! Thank you Omkar and GTO. Others have already made many valid points. I would just add two following points:

1. Need for transportation: If we look at our own life, we would see that majority of our transport needs are connected with our livelihood. Imagine, just 50 years ago there were no such jobs for the techies who commute today on Bangalore roads. So whether we would need self-driving cars or something else would be shaped by the kind of jobs that would be available in next 50 years!
   
   
2. Technological revolutions are abrupt: The technological revolutions are always abrupt. No, we simply did not improve ancient bullock carts continuously to create the modern cars. We simply dumped the old one and started from the scratch.
   
   Imagine, we could clone a human brain in vitro! It is one of the finest computing machine that we know. This is also one of the most efficient processing machine as it needs just 120 gm of glucose to run for 24 hours! So having sufficient computing power on-board may not be an issue! The future is sometime much closer than we think!
   

Originally Posted by Omkar

... At least in the short to mid-term, at best we'll be seeing high-end cars with some autonomous capabilities showing off. Think Mercedes S-Class' and Volvo XC90s. But the tech is a long way off from the mass market.

It reminds me about the comment made by the famous physicist Kelvin in 1900, who said ... "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

In the same year, Planck discovered "quanta" (led to quantum mechanics, ...) and 1905 Einstein discovered relativity (lead to E=mc2, GPS, ...) . In other words, in just 5 years after the comment by Kelvin, the physics was put upside down! None of the modern technologies would simply stand without quantum mechanics and relativity!

Best,

[Hayek]

Great thread and a very interesting set of views expressed so far.

In my view, there is no country in the world that will benefit more from the complete adoption of self driving cars than India. And the adoption of self driving cars will certainly take place within the lifetimes of a majority of those reading this post - in a maximum of 20 years from now in my view.

Why? As several people have mentioned, Indian drivers are amongst the poorest trained drivers in the world - and the selfish grasping attitude of our people (as reflected in our attitude to queues, following laws, littering or paying taxes) makes it far worse. The net result - we have over 150,000 people being killed in road accidents every year.

See this (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelea...x?relid=170577)

To put this is context, less than 19,000 people have been killed in all terrorist incident in India since 1970 (though the list has almost no deaths before 1979- so may be data before that is not accurate). We lose more people to road accidents every month and a half than we have to terrorism in the last 4 decades. 84% of road accidents are caused by driver error. In short Indians are NOT fit to drive.

I fully agree that self driving cars will find it tough to compete with thuggishness of the average Indian driver, and will end up driving much slower (and safer) than other drivers. That happens to me as well - I maintain a safe distance to the next car and often find someone cutting into the gap. But I think those worried about the rest of our third rate road infrastructure are missing what Moore’s law, parallel processing and ubiquitous high speed data networks can do. I am old enough to remember people saying computers can never beat a chess grand master - it is now almost 10 years since a program running on a mobile phone reached grandmaster level. There is no human who has any chance of beating computers at chess. The same thing will happen with cars - the cost of sensors will drop, processing power per processor will rise and we will see parallel processing where decisions are made not in an individual car but in the cloud with unlimited processing power available to take decisions in nano seconds. Despite everything people have said, self driving cars will in less than 10 years be better at navigating even Indian roads than human drivers. BTW, you forget than almost 300 mm Indian smartphones are sending data on Indian traffic conditions to Google every day - so the process of training algorithms is certainly underway.

As for two wheelers and cost, the beauty of self driving cars is that the shift to them (together with electrification) will reduce the cost per km of commuting by car to levels comparable that of any motorbike owned by an individual. How? Let’s assume the typical motorbike costs about ₹60000, runs about 7500 km per year, lasts about 10 years with service costs of ₹3000 per year. So there is a fixed cost (depreciation + interest + service ) of using a bike of about ₹2 per km, and a variable cost of about ₹ 2 per km (₹80 per litre divided by 40 kmpl) or total cost of ₹ 4 per km. This is for an intrinsically unsafe product where you breathe the pollution from other vehicles. Traveling by Uber Pool costs about ₹ 8 per km today, using cars with IC engines that are still not utilised fully as their human drivers need to rest. Autonomous electric cars would easily last a million miles, recharging in off peak hours and will almost certainly bring costs below those of Uber Pool today while operating as shared services. In short, the vast majority of motorcycle riders will shift to using autonomous electric taxis once they become available. At some stage, you will reach a tipping point - where a majority of Indians feel that having unsafe human drivers and riders on roads is socially unacceptable - and we will see some politician or judge announce an overnight or phased de-driverisation in India. I am willing to bet that stage is not more than 20 years from now and do hope that at 65, I will be around to see it.

The fact is that most executives in the auto industry are aware of this - and are planning for a world where they stop selling under-utilised white elephants to individuals and instead either start providing transportation services or selling to large scale transport service providers. In short the car maker of tomorrow will be more akin to Boeing than to the consumer goods companies they are today. And driving cars will become a hobby - carried out by the old and rich in closed tracks or may be in specific hobby roads.

[V.Narayan]

Hayek, beautiful piece. Thank you for writing it so well. I agree with you 100% and with your assessment that at some point it will come as a diktat - as we know that's the only way things work for us.

Originally Posted by Hayek

In my view, there is no country in the world that will benefit more from the complete adoption of self driving cars than India. And the adoption of self driving cars will certainly take place within the lifetimes of a majority of those reading this post - in a maximum of 20 years from now in my view.

Why? As several people have mentioned, Indian drivers are amongst the poorest trained drivers in the world - and the selfish grasping attitude of our people (as reflected in our attitude to queues, following laws, littering or paying taxes) makes it far worse. The net result - we have over 150,000 people being killed in road accidents every year.

See this (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelea...x?relid=170577)

To put this is context, less than 19,000 people have been killed in all terrorist incident in India since 1970 (though the list has almost no deaths before 1979- so may be data before that is not accurate). We lose more people to road accidents every month and a half than we have to terrorism in the last 4 decades. 84% of road accidents are caused by driver error. In short Indians are NOT fit to drive.

I fully agree that self driving cars will find it tough to compete with thuggishness of the average Indian driver, and will end up driving much slower (and safer) than other drivers. That happens to me as well - I maintain a safe distance to the next car and often find someone cutting into the gap. But I think those worried about the rest of our third rate road infrastructure are missing what Moore’s law, parallel processing and ubiquitous high speed data networks can do. ....BTW, you forget than almost 300 mm Indian smartphones are sending data on Indian traffic conditions to Google every day - so the process of training algorithms is certainly underway.
..... At some stage, you will reach a tipping point - where a majority of Indians feel that having unsafe human drivers and riders on roads is socially unacceptable - and we will see some politician or judge announce an overnight or phased de-driverisation in India. I am willing to bet that stage is not more than 20 years from now and do hope that at 65, I will be around to see it.

The fact is that most executives in the auto industry are aware of this - and are planning for a world where they stop selling under-utilised white elephants to individuals and instead either start providing transportation services or selling to large scale transport service providers. In short the car maker of tomorrow will be more akin to Boeing than to the consumer goods companies they are today. And driving cars will become a hobby - carried out by the old and rich in closed tracks or may be in specific hobby roads.

[mvadg]

Originally Posted by ashokrajagopal

Since much is talked about general traffic here, I guess Bangalore can be the best case study.
Lets say 100 self driving buses stationed around Silk Board.

May be a little OT, but since driving is really commuting to work and back for the most part:

Why not automate the metro? This would be a cakewalk compared to self driving buses.

[Lobogris]

We will certainly see autonomous vehicles in India over the next two decades. However, initially, their use will be limited to certain sanitised corridors like access controlled expressways, well maintained roads in city centres and so on.

The main issue vexing machine learning is unpredictability. We can have an algorithm to handle wrong side driving, animals and pedestrians and so on. What do we do with scenarios where multiple people are trying to muscle in inch by inch in to a small space? You honk, look at the other driver and then either he/ she or you try to intimidate each other by pretending to press on even if your cars would collide. You hope the other person loses their nerve and if not, you are ready to brake hard. This happens on crowded roads, at intersections without lights, roundabouts and many other places. Similarly, even when you have a green light, two wheelers, pedestrians and even cars sometimes try to cut across. Again you either stop or honk your horn and try to muscle them out of the road. Then there are people turning in front of you as they have made one right turn lane in to three lanes. These are the scenarios that AI would have a lot of trouble with as no absolute hard and fast rule can be programmed. On the road humans adapt and give way sometimes when the other person is too aggressive or outmanouvers you. Sometimes we make a mistake and accept that our vehicle got dented. What do we programme AI to do? If we say always yield, it would never move. If we say always be aggressive then it would often crash. Other similar issue I foresee are unmarked diversion- for instance a major two way divided highway suddenly becomes both ways without any warning or you are supposed to cross to the other side using some off road dirt path. Similarly you can have water on the road. What does an AI car do? How would it judge whether to wade through the water or not?

I do hope discipline and lane driving would improve in India as time goes on. Therefore we are likely to see autonomous vehicles at least in some cordoned off stretches.

[puneeth2]

This post gets most things right about challenges for autonomous vehicles in India. Since we don't have reliable lane makings, an autonomous car would find it hard to navigate on our roads. Not to mention the unruly nature of the majority of our road-goers. I don't think autonomous cars will be making it to India even in the future where the developed world presumably would be using them extensively.

As James May said in one of the episodes of Top Gear, "Cars that drive themselves were invented ages ago. They're called taxis"

[ghatotkatch]

Interesting topic. Though, I feel the human aspect needs to be considered as well.

While India has a large quantity of human resource, unfortunately, most of it is untrained and unskilled, and for a large chunk of the population, their livelihood depends upon unskilled jobs - like driving; may that be taxies, rikshaws, cabs, buses, trucks etc. Taking these jobs away from these people will only end up creating a lot of social unrest.

When faced with adversity, these people tend to fight it by forcing their way using their sheer head-count. And in a country where politics practically runs on appeasing vote banks, law will get bent to suit the larger vote bank. The govt will just ban self-driving cars, no matter their benefits.

If the govt somehow doesn't, then the cab drivers will create conditions to bend them. I remember when the 6-seater rikshaws, running on diesel, started plying into Pune city, the petrol rikshaw drivers, created a huge ruckus. One of them went to the extreme and commited suicide, forcing the local govt to outright ban the 6-seaters from plying within city limits.

If it still doesn't work, they will next start targetting the self-driving cars themselves. They will ram into it, they will create a mob and stone the cars wherever they see them. They will make life miserable for the fleet owners. This will not sound very far fetched, if put in perspective of demands made and the modus operandi in the ongoing ola/uber cab union strike.

All in all, I don't think self-driving cars will be a reality in India for at least a decade or two, irrespective of technological advances.

A smart govt using this menace of self-driving cars as a stick to force better road-manners on the cabbies (with appropriate carrots as well), may make our roads a little more stress free, in the meantime.

[raj981]

Interesting and timely post. My few cents on this issue is that no matter the advancement in the technology the human element in driving a vehicle is still not completely replaceable. Not even in the USA. Just a couple of days back a lady was hit by a self driven uber vehicle when the vehicle failed to detect the Jay walker crossing the street. It will surely be a wonder when the system graduates to a level where it is operable without a fault in India. Obviously more simulations that the computer is fed with the smarter it will get but a loss of human life to perfect the technology is a no no as far as I'm concerned.

[ashokrajagopal]

Originally Posted by mvadg

May be a little OT, but since driving is really commuting to work and back for the most part:

Why not automate the metro? This would be a cakewalk compared to self driving buses.

Grade 4 automated Metro systems exist already in many cities around the world.
Any metro is not anything like "cakewalk". Kochi metro cost is something like 5k Crore I guess ( its one of the smallest of the metros).
A self driving vehicle is a complication only if it is run along side human driven vehicles. Self driving vehicles alongside other self driving vehicles is really a cakewalk. It only needs inspired urban planning.

Metro systems need huge amount of infrastructure. We already have roads, self driving vehicles only need minor infra adjustments and the costs are very very less.
All thru this thread, contributors are generally not talking about the monetary aspect, I wonder why