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- Tesla has collected 130 million miles of autopilot data in 8 months - Google has collected 2 million miles of data in 5 years - others have collect 0 millio

- Tesla has collected 130 million miles of autopilot data in 8 months - Google has collected 2 million miles of data in 5 years - others have collect 0 million miles of data One might assume that each 10x of data doubles safety. So, a billion miles of data is perhaps 8x better than a million. It was bold of Tesla to ship autopilot, but it gives them a significant data lead while Google's caution means they may be squandering their once-thought-unassailable technology lead. My thinking is that first you eliminate the 1% problems, then the 0.1% problems, then 0.01% and so on. So each 10x of scenarios tested is roughly one step of improvement.

JshWright 10y ago
Google is operating truly autonomous vehicles. Tesla has added some driver assist features which are far from unique to Tesla... It's an apple to oranges comparison.
- paulsutter 10y ago
  Maybe, or maybe Tesla wisely shipped an MVP and Google allowed the perfect to be the enemy of thr shippable. Project those data numbers forward, do you really think Google can maintain a technology lead with such a disparity? Maybe they can, but it's a reasonable question.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    Google could build a car tomorrow that does what Tesla does. They are far from revolutionary in what they are doing... Things like auto braking and lane maintaining are pretty much standard at the price point of the Model S, they are by no means unique to Tesla. Tesla is implementing existing technology. Google is working on solving the next problem.
    - paulsutter 10y ago
      Yes and Google hasn't shipped jack. EDIT: Tesla has.
      - JshWright 10y ago
        Neither has anyone else... What's your point? EDIT: No, they haven't... They have shipped industry standard driver assist features. By your logic, I assume you think my Kia Rondo has 'outshipped' Google, since it has cruise control.
      - Joof 10y ago
        Doesn't matter. Tesla shipped a deadly and broken technology. That Google won't do the same is good. Google isn't a car company, they don't need to ship a car. They need to ship a working AI.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    A much better question is whether Tesla will be able to keep up with the new autonomous features that everyone else are doing. The new Mercedes E-class is the first to be approved as an autonomous car in Nevada, so they do have a technical edge on Tesla already. And with next years S-class, they'll start putting LIDAR on their cars. This isn't even on Tesla's roadmap. It's beginning to look like Tesla saw there was a niche where existing hardware they could license would quickly give them a more "advanced" "Autopilot" system simply by being less conservative wrt. safety than other carmakers. Will this come back to bite them? Time will tell.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    "Wisely shipped an MVP that accidentally crashes in corner cases," is that what you're saying? Because, unlike most software, people actually die in this kind of crash (Remember Therac-25? Of course not: way before agile development and MVP, ooold, booooring). Still insisting that it's wise? I would consider that position repulsive: never mind the corpses, we have a product to ship.
  - pikzen 10y ago
    You don't "wisely ship an MVP" when lives are at stake.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Depends on the middle part: is "move fast and kill people" viable? We'll see. (Which is to say, viable from a PR perspective: people are still scared of flying compared to manual car driving, despite the odds; I'm willing to take a wild guess and say that non-assisted driving is more dangerous than assisted driving, yet considered safer-because-familiar)
tytso 10y ago
Google's self-driving cars is collecting a lot more data than Tesla is --- it has many more sensors that Tesla's cars. So it's not just how many miles you have driven, but what is the quality of the data. More importantly, it's not just having more data, it's how you use it, and that's what Google has been doing for the past five years. The other reason for the caution is that people's lives are at stake. Google's self-driving cars are significantly more advanced in terms of the sorts of situations which they can handle ocmpared to Tesla's. But one of the things which Google has found is that there is an uncanny valley in terms of driver safety as self-driving cars get more capable. People will tend to trust them more, even shouldn't, and that paradoxically, makes them less safe. The first generation self-driving cars were lent out to Google employees, where they would be told that the driver would be video'ed for research purposes. And people were found reading e-mail, newspapers, etc., even though they were told to be ready to take over at any time. After all, what do you do if you lose a tie rod? Or you suddenly have a catastrophic tire blow out at highway speeds? That's why the second generation car has no steering wheel, because it's been shown that it's hopeless to depend on the human being. Instead, you need to have dual redundancy for everything (much like in aircraft design), so that even if you have a hardware problem, that the car can always bring itself safely to a stop at the side of the road, even if the driver is asleep or totally not paying attention because they are too busy watching Harry Potter or some other movie. Caution is good, when human lives are at stake. Even if they are doing something that they were emphatically being told Not to do, if they do it, maybe the designer of the Autopilot has at least some moral responsibility, even if the lawyers have carefully protected Tesla from any legal liability?
agildehaus 10y ago
You have to define what data they're collecting that's so valuable. Their system is so terrible at sensing the world around it that it will run right into construction barricades if you don't take over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSasPVYzSQ0&t=150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSasPVYzSQ0&t=150 It's a fancy cruise control, not self-driving. It doesn't understand anything but how to follow lanes (sorta, it doesn't work everywhere) and it has some ability to recognize obstructions in front of it and stop (again, sorta). Google is teaching their car how to navigate city streets, deal with human drivers and pedestrians, navigate intersections, handle construction zones, deal with emergency vehicles and cops directing traffic, etc. All with a much better sensor package than in a Tesla Model S. Their system doesn't even need lane markings on the road, as they compare LIDAR data with a pre-marked reference map. Tesla's system, and every other system that doesn't do this, breaks down when lane markings are faded or non-existent. Google's system would not have been prone to this type of accident five years ago, much less today.
- gajjanag 10y ago
  > Google is teaching their car how to navigate city streets, deal with human drivers and pedestrians, navigate intersections, handle construction zones, deal with emergency vehicles and cops directing traffic, etc. All with a much better sensor package than in a Tesla Model S. The interesting thing is that no matter how much one anticipates situations a priori and builds them into the AI/model, there will likely exist situations not anticipated by the engineers. For example, it is not clear to me how exactly a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction#Sweden will be handled. Will this be "patchable" (never mind the logistics and security issues of providing updates to a nation's fleet), or will it require a full retraining of the AI? Or more generally, how robust/modular will the designed AI be to these kinds of situations? The reason I like this example is because it is a classic instance where humans have inertia and thus have difficulty in consistently applying the "switch driving side" rule - I have seen international travellers requiring at least a few minutes at the wheel to reorient themselves. In principle one would hope that a modular software solution can handle things more consistently.
YZF 10y ago
Tesla could collect the data without allowing the car to drive autonomously. I think this case also raises the question of whether Tesla has the right sensors on the car. They may not have adequate dynamic range in their cameras and seems like their radar system isn't a true 3d mapping radar. Being able to detect a moving target that crosses the car's path seems like a fairly fundamental requirement of any driving system. Google has a lot more data than their autonomously driven miles (e.g. their street view data and presumably more) and they're still not comfortable enough with what they've got. Their initial results looked very promising but it seems they've become more cautious over time. I don't think Google is squandering their lead. I think they've just gotten to that part of the curve where they realize this is a harder problem than what they initially projected. The others haven't gotten there yet.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Joof 10y ago
There's a huge logical fallacy here; that data is equivalent and that data makes it safer. They are using different models for their data, different types of data and so on. Data itself eventually stops helping; although finding more edge cases is certainly helpful.
davnn 10y ago
What really struck me when I was seeing a presentation about self-driving cars was that Google might have over-engineered it. If Tesla gets its system right, Google will have a really hard time. Their desired lidar data monopoly would become a big pile of useless data if simpler systems could do the job at a similar safety level.

JshWright 10y ago

Google is operating truly autonomous vehicles. Tesla has added some driver assist features which are far from unique to Tesla... It's an apple to oranges comparison.

paulsutter 10y ago
Maybe, or maybe Tesla wisely shipped an MVP and Google allowed the perfect to be the enemy of thr shippable. Project those data numbers forward, do you really think Google can maintain a technology lead with such a disparity? Maybe they can, but it's a reasonable question.
- JshWright 10y ago
  Google could build a car tomorrow that does what Tesla does. They are far from revolutionary in what they are doing... Things like auto braking and lane maintaining are pretty much standard at the price point of the Model S, they are by no means unique to Tesla. Tesla is implementing existing technology. Google is working on solving the next problem.
  - paulsutter 10y ago
    Yes and Google hasn't shipped jack. EDIT: Tesla has.
    - JshWright 10y ago
      Neither has anyone else... What's your point? EDIT: No, they haven't... They have shipped industry standard driver assist features. By your logic, I assume you think my Kia Rondo has 'outshipped' Google, since it has cruise control.
    - Joof 10y ago
      Doesn't matter. Tesla shipped a deadly and broken technology. That Google won't do the same is good. Google isn't a car company, they don't need to ship a car. They need to ship a working AI.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  A much better question is whether Tesla will be able to keep up with the new autonomous features that everyone else are doing. The new Mercedes E-class is the first to be approved as an autonomous car in Nevada, so they do have a technical edge on Tesla already. And with next years S-class, they'll start putting LIDAR on their cars. This isn't even on Tesla's roadmap. It's beginning to look like Tesla saw there was a niche where existing hardware they could license would quickly give them a more "advanced" "Autopilot" system simply by being less conservative wrt. safety than other carmakers. Will this come back to bite them? Time will tell.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  "Wisely shipped an MVP that accidentally crashes in corner cases," is that what you're saying? Because, unlike most software, people actually die in this kind of crash (Remember Therac-25? Of course not: way before agile development and MVP, ooold, booooring). Still insisting that it's wise? I would consider that position repulsive: never mind the corpses, we have a product to ship.
- pikzen 10y ago
  You don't "wisely ship an MVP" when lives are at stake.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Depends on the middle part: is "move fast and kill people" viable? We'll see. (Which is to say, viable from a PR perspective: people are still scared of flying compared to manual car driving, despite the odds; I'm willing to take a wild guess and say that non-assisted driving is more dangerous than assisted driving, yet considered safer-because-familiar)

tytso 10y ago

Google's self-driving cars is collecting a lot more data than Tesla is --- it has many more sensors that Tesla's cars. So it's not just how many miles you have driven, but what is the quality of the data. More importantly, it's not just having more data, it's how you use it, and that's what Google has been doing for the past five years. The other reason for the caution is that people's lives are at stake. Google's self-driving cars are significantly more advanced in terms of the sorts of situations which they can handle ocmpared to Tesla's. But one of the things which Google has found is that there is an uncanny valley in terms of driver safety as self-driving cars get more capable. People will tend to trust them more, even shouldn't, and that paradoxically, makes them less safe. The first generation self-driving cars were lent out to Google employees, where they would be told that the driver would be video'ed for research purposes. And people were found reading e-mail, newspapers, etc., even though they were told to be ready to take over at any time. After all, what do you do if you lose a tie rod? Or you suddenly have a catastrophic tire blow out at highway speeds? That's why the second generation car has no steering wheel, because it's been shown that it's hopeless to depend on the human being. Instead, you need to have dual redundancy for everything (much like in aircraft design), so that even if you have a hardware problem, that the car can always bring itself safely to a stop at the side of the road, even if the driver is asleep or totally not paying attention because they are too busy watching Harry Potter or some other movie. Caution is good, when human lives are at stake. Even if they are doing something that they were emphatically being told Not to do, if they do it, maybe the designer of the Autopilot has at least some moral responsibility, even if the lawyers have carefully protected Tesla from any legal liability?

agildehaus 10y ago

You have to define what data they're collecting that's so valuable. Their system is so terrible at sensing the world around it that it will run right into construction barricades if you don't take over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSasPVYzSQ0&t=150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSasPVYzSQ0&t=150 It's a fancy cruise control, not self-driving. It doesn't understand anything but how to follow lanes (sorta, it doesn't work everywhere) and it has some ability to recognize obstructions in front of it and stop (again, sorta). Google is teaching their car how to navigate city streets, deal with human drivers and pedestrians, navigate intersections, handle construction zones, deal with emergency vehicles and cops directing traffic, etc. All with a much better sensor package than in a Tesla Model S. Their system doesn't even need lane markings on the road, as they compare LIDAR data with a pre-marked reference map. Tesla's system, and every other system that doesn't do this, breaks down when lane markings are faded or non-existent. Google's system would not have been prone to this type of accident five years ago, much less today.

gajjanag 10y ago
> Google is teaching their car how to navigate city streets, deal with human drivers and pedestrians, navigate intersections, handle construction zones, deal with emergency vehicles and cops directing traffic, etc. All with a much better sensor package than in a Tesla Model S. The interesting thing is that no matter how much one anticipates situations a priori and builds them into the AI/model, there will likely exist situations not anticipated by the engineers. For example, it is not clear to me how exactly a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction#Sweden will be handled. Will this be "patchable" (never mind the logistics and security issues of providing updates to a nation's fleet), or will it require a full retraining of the AI? Or more generally, how robust/modular will the designed AI be to these kinds of situations? The reason I like this example is because it is a classic instance where humans have inertia and thus have difficulty in consistently applying the "switch driving side" rule - I have seen international travellers requiring at least a few minutes at the wheel to reorient themselves. In principle one would hope that a modular software solution can handle things more consistently.

YZF 10y ago

Tesla could collect the data without allowing the car to drive autonomously. I think this case also raises the question of whether Tesla has the right sensors on the car. They may not have adequate dynamic range in their cameras and seems like their radar system isn't a true 3d mapping radar. Being able to detect a moving target that crosses the car's path seems like a fairly fundamental requirement of any driving system. Google has a lot more data than their autonomously driven miles (e.g. their street view data and presumably more) and they're still not comfortable enough with what they've got. Their initial results looked very promising but it seems they've become more cautious over time. I don't think Google is squandering their lead. I think they've just gotten to that part of the curve where they realize this is a harder problem than what they initially projected. The others haven't gotten there yet.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Joof 10y ago

There's a huge logical fallacy here; that data is equivalent and that data makes it safer. They are using different models for their data, different types of data and so on. Data itself eventually stops helping; although finding more edge cases is certainly helpful.

davnn 10y ago

What really struck me when I was seeing a presentation about self-driving cars was that Google might have over-engineered it. If Tesla gets its system right, Google will have a really hard time. Their desired lidar data monopoly would become a big pile of useless data if simpler systems could do the job at a similar safety level.