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Google's cars are not iPhone 1. They still just have a few dozen or a few hundred, who knows, and they have only been driving 2 million miles until now. They ar
by flexie 10y ago
Google's cars are not iPhone 1. They still just have a few dozen or a few hundred, who knows, and they have only been driving 2 million miles until now. They are not even for sale and will not be any time soon. Oor ever, if they don't market their own electric cars very soon or hook up with a car manufacturer.
Tesla can collect data from 5 billion miles of driving already one year after the Giga Factory is full operation, if production reaches the planned 500,000 in 2018 and each car drives 10,000 miles annually. And then the miles accumulate exponentially.
Here is my guess:
After a few million miles of shadow driving, i.e. a few weeks after the first few thousand new Teslas have been sold, Tesla is likely ready for the real thing under perfect driving conditions like those Google experiences in California. So Tesla is going to open for the self driving capabilities in such geographic areas during the day when weather is nice.
After a few hundred million miles of shadow driving, i.e. within half a year or so when Tesla has marketed 1-200,000 cars that have driven for a couple of months, Tesla will have collected enough data to drive in more difficult traffic conditions, like other American urban areas.
After a billion miles, around a year after Tesla has gotten the Giga Factory up in full speed and the first 2-300,000 cars have been on the streets for half a year, Tesla is probably ready for certain bad weather conditions, like rain, light snow, light fog, and for driving in the dark.
Give it another few billion miles, so still before 2020, and the streets of Istanbul or the snowy roads of Nebraska have been tamed.
- irq11 10y agoNot sure why you keep talking about the gigafactory as if that's relevant to self-driving cars. Your only point can be summarized in one sentence: they've released a senor suite into the field, and through some combination of Big Data and magical AI, they will win. This, as much as anything else, is a religious belief. Ultimately, this game is about the sensors. If your sensor suite is inadequate to detect every conceivable bad situation a car can be in, then it doesn't matter how much data you accumulate. One million miles of good LIDAR data is worth more than a billion miles of video, if the video can't see white objects during the daytime, or figure out on what side of the parking lot the car should be driving (ahem). I have no idea how good or bad their sensors are, but instinct tells me they're not up to the task of all-condition driving, and this video provides no useful information either way.
- flexie 10y agoProduction capacity is the most important factor for data collection. The Teslas sold in October 2018 don't need to have the same sensors as the ones sold in january 2018. As you can see, the car is designed modularly. No other mass marketed car on the planet has any sensors integrated yet. It's all about big numbers. Google has spent 5 years or more driving a few cars around California. It's never going to match billions of miles driven around the globe. EDIT: Imagine the engineers working at Google's autonomous cars today. I bet many of them are preparing their resumes for Tesla. They can launch an algorithm or a new sensor type now, wait a few months and then get the feedback on how it worked. With Tesla, they will get that feedback in days. In which lab would you want to work if you want to take part in shaping the future? In the Google lab where you have a Lexus or two assigned to you that drive up to 25 miles per hour in California or in the Tesla lab where you have 2,000 Teslas assigned driving in 50 different countries?
- irq11 10y agoOnce again: if the sensors don't work for the problem domain, the quantity of data gathered is irrelevant. If you mounted a forward-facing video camera on every car in in the world and gathered the data for decades, you'd still be nowhere: you're missing the side and rear views. This is a thought exercise, but it demonstrates the point. If your robot car has a blind spot, all the data in the world won't fix it. Nobody knows how good these cameras are, but every camera-based system so far has had the same critical limitations: they don't work well at night or in poor visibility.
- jfoster 10y agoBut we know that the sensor suite must be at least as good as a human; more vision, plus other sensors. Therefore we know the sensor suite is sufficient to be as good as (and likely better than) a human.
- achamayou 10y agoWe don't, a badly placed wet leaf, some amount of snow or vibrations may well impact the sensors in ways they wouldn't a human driver.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]