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Having trouble accepting Elon Musk’s claim that Teslas will be capable of fully autonomous driving in 3 years. One of the difficulties I am having is that I’m

• jjoonathan 11y ago
  I thought fully autonomous cars had already existed long enough to have racked up statistically meaningful (and impressive) track records?
  • aetherson 11y ago
    They have, but there's a big list of caveats that go with that. Google's cars are very clearly extremely safe on dry highways in good visibility when humans are ready to take over if there is construction on the highway and so on and so forth. That's where they've got hundreds of thousands of miles. The cars may well be substantially better than that right now, but they don't have a million miles of experience in more challenging conditions.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Provided the roads are also very well-mapped. Google (as well as some auto manufacturers) have made impressive progress. I'm actually encouraged that full autonomy (as in I can legally read a book) on a subset of limited access highways in appropriate weather conditions is something we might see within 10 years on a mainstream luxury car. I am sadly far more skeptical about the general case.
      • redwood 11y ago
        I've been thinking about this. What do humans do when they don't know exactly where they are or there are detours/other off map difficulties? They mindlessly follow the cars in front of them. Waze at at small scale! The autonomous cars just need to a) not be willing to crash and b) follow the car(s) in front of them when in doubt...
        • maxerickson 11y ago
          The problem can be separated into navigation and situational awareness. The autonomous car won't ever be lost, and I guess it would be easy enough to prompt the passenger for input if it got stuck deciding where to proceed.
      • baudehlo 11y ago
        Not just well mapped but also what do they do when there are temporary detours? I can't imagine a situation where an automated driving car copes well with a temporary human based stop/go situation (without signs - I'm talking really temporary here like a construction site with a vehicle backing up). Maybe I'm wrong.
• mortehu 11y ago
  > we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving If you had lived and owned a car in Mountain View, you would have been used to driving alongside fully autonomous cars for years now, and the move wouldn't seem nearly as instant.
  • ericd 11y ago
    Yeah, they're everywhere around here, including the tiny pods that can only go 30 mph and don't seem to have a steering wheel.
    • austenallred 11y ago
      I legitimately can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment... I don't live in Mountain View, but haven't seen any of these on my visits.
      • ericd 11y ago
        Not sarcastic :-). I see one or two almost every day. Their number seems to have been increasing rapidly in recent months, have you visited recently?
        • austenallred 11y ago
          It's been about a month. I guess I just missed them. As a side-note, I love that I can't tell if a comment is true or sarcastic-faux-science-fiction, and it ends up being true. We live in a really cool time.
          • ericd 11y ago
            It might just be where I walk vs where you walk - I usually see them on Shoreline and between Shoreline and Castro, sometimes on El Camino in that span. A few weeks ago I saw one of the slow pod cars holding up a bunch of traffic in he right lane on El Camino because its top speed is too low for the flow there. :-D
• flycaliguy 11y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if his public/private financing model lends itself to a politician's style of promises.
  • gutnor 11y ago
    Well Musk has not a good track record with announcements like that. That said, not quite sure what else he could really do. Car production cycle are long and capital heavy. The buying cost is also very large, so to maintain a media presence you can't really iterate every year like with other tech widgets. Other manufacturers make prototypes between model refreshes and go to various car shows, so far Musk is able to that by just talking to the press. Good for him, saves Tesla a bunch of money until the competition in electric car market really picks up !
    • vectorjohn 11y ago
      Tesla doesn't make prototypes and go to car shows because they did away with the yearly update model. Instead they are constantly adding new features and improvements to the car instead of waiting for some big update. So you might get a car today that has something a car made yesterday doesn't have.
    • flycaliguy 11y ago
      "Well Musk has not a good track record with announcements like that." Yup, very much like a politician. You get the sense that he is playing their game. They'll give him a hand but he has to speak their language. Promises made to the public are more like optimistic goals in which potential complications aren't accounted for and instead reserved as explanations for revised promises. I'm a Musk fan, don't get me wrong, but there is a level of dream fuelling manipulation behind his approach that feels political. That whole [i]warning the public about dangerous AI thing[/i] actually felt like a big political money push to me. Designed to overwork the imaginations of the public and get government more interested in throwing money at the tech.
• eljimmy 11y ago
  My biggest gripe with hearing about fully autonomous cars is northern climates and their inability to handle bad weather.
  • Tloewald 11y ago
    To be fair, as a human I don't feel particularly adept at driving in bad weather, so an autonomous vehicle that simply slows down to where it "feels confident" and uses some kind of radar to avoid collisions won't be doing too badly.
  • mikeyouse 11y ago
    In theory, as storage costs approach 0, computers get faster and and vision becomes more sophisticated, road conditions shouldn't matter too much. These cars are going to be scanning constantly in nice weather, it shouldn't be a stretch to then figure out relative position with GPS and then use the distance to 'known' trees / signs / landmarks from previous trips to determine lane position. I'm sure there are barren areas where this would be tough (I've driven I-80 through snowy Nebraska about a dozen times en route to ski vacations in Colorado) but "stay between the snow banks" should be a decent start for autonomous driving.
  • prawn 11y ago
    Some humans have an inability to handle driving in good weather, heavy traffic, at high speeds, to avoid drinking, to avoid driving when tired, let alone bad weather. There's a mostly straight street on my very ordinary and safe commute home. When it's raining at night and the road is wet and reflecting street lights, it's actually very difficult to see the lane markings and make sure you're sticking to your lane. And in those conditions, it's not always safe to be constantly checking your blind spot for a car beside you. This is in an urban environment, no snow, no crests or crazy curves, no risk of fallen trees, and I find that a stressful drive despite having driven that road thousands of times.
  • on_ 11y ago
    I mean, even pilots have to take control sometimes. In great conditions autonomous cars will arrive quicker than many believe. However, most people (myself included) would NOT trust an autonomous car, essentially operating in beta, to navigate a new england winter. That functionality is going to come and can even be pushed OTA later. I now wonder if you will just pay $199 for the "blizzard package" or something. I suspect Tesla wouldn't do something like this, but just like Mosaic, they get to shape a lot of the early thought behind this.
• mikeash 11y ago
  What did Musk actually say here? I have great trouble trusting TechCrunch's interpretation of them, and they don't quote him on that specific bit.
  • treyp 11y ago
    "We're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving, at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. My guess for when we'll have full autonomy is about three years, approximately three years. However, regulators will probably not allow full autonomy for maybe... at least one to three years after that. So, it depends on the particular market -- some markets the regulators will be more forward leaning than others. But in terms of when will it be technologically possible, three years." https://youtu.be/ktyMmzZ6WeM?t=474 https://youtu.be/ktyMmzZ6WeM?t=474
    • mikeash 11y ago
      Thanks! I wonder just what he means by "full autonomy" though. When he refers to "autonomous driving...for highways" that means that the car manages the steering and acceleration but the driver is alert and involved at all times, and ready to take over any time the car can't handle something. I wonder if he's referring to a similar concept that works in more situations, rather than a car that can drive with nobody in it. Or he might just be optimistic and mean full automatic driving. Hard to tell.
      • deleted 11y ago
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• ffk 11y ago
  These haven't just sprung into existence. They have been worked on consistently for at least two decades. Carnegie Mellon has research dating back to the mid 1980s on this topic. Self driving cars have been driven up and down various parts of the SF bay region for several years now. Google's self driving cars have driven over 1 million miless. They report that their vehicles have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which are the fault of the vehicle's self driving capabilities. The only reason they will appear to 'pop' into the consumer market overnight is because this technology is politically charged and simultaneously so important to society that it is being overengineered to improve success and safety. The moment self driving cars has its first accident after being released to consumers, the media will likely flip, ignoring mountains of data demonstrating how much more safe these vehicles are to provide a sensationalized report on the dangers of self driving cars. The safer they are and the more data backing this up, the less likely this will derail the technology. 1 million miles: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/iMHEMH9crJb https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/iMHEMH9crJb 12 accidents: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-cars-20150603-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-cars-20150603-s... CMU ALV: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/index.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/index.html
  • hkmurakami 11y ago
    Agreed. I saw most of the technology pretty matured in Japanese automotive almost 10 years ago.
  • georgeott 11y ago
    Serious question: What do these cars (with no steering wheel) do, if involved in an accident? How would the owner / police move the car to the side of the road?
    • glibgil 11y ago
      With a tow truck.
      • beeboop 11y ago
• jonknee 11y ago
  > There’s always a gradual evolution of a technology over time. There’s very little of that evolution seen with this technology. There’s self-parallel parking cars, there’s autopilot-style cruise control systems, but we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving? In addition to cars that park themselves and cruise control that handles full stop/start, modern cars also keep you in the lane, prevent imminent collisions, monitor blindspots, detect pedestrians and more. If you can't see autonomous vehicles coming in the near future you aren't looking.
• NickM 11y ago
  On the one hand, Musk has been known to exaggerate timelines. All of Tesla's cars have ended up being released behind schedule (the first Model X cars are being delivered tonight, multiple years late). I doubt we'll really have fully autonomous Teslas in three years. On the other hand, there is one interesting, unique aspect to the approach that Tesla is taking: their cars all have internet access, and could potentially learn from each other. Within a year they're going to have partial autonomous driving on over 100k cars in the wild, which is going to allow Tesla to generate an enormous amount of training data very quickly. I'm no expert, so I don't really know how valuable this kind of data would be for building new autonomous driving systems, but it seems like it could have the potential to dramatically accelerate their progress in this area.
  • waterlesscloud 11y ago
    Keep in mind Google's autonomous car team says they'll have a product commercially available in 4 years. So a Musk 3 years might well equal a Google 4 years.