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Tesla Autopilot
- pilif 9y agoThis is an old microsite from last October. Most features listed on that page are not available in production (or at all).
- excalibur 9y agoI believe the claim is that all of their vehicles include the hardware required for these planned future features. They call attention to regulatory challenges, but gloss over the fact that many of these items aren't ready yet from a software perspective.
- RijilV 9y agoI think this is old, or at least deceptive advertisement. There are two packages for the model S which add up to $9k extra[0]: Enhanced Autopilot Full Self-Driving Capability The fact those are add-ons and their descriptions seems at odds with the statements made on the page. 0: https://www.tesla.com/models/design https://www.tesla.com/models/design
- EngineerBetter 9y agoThe add-ons are software unlocks. The old 60D models actually had a 75KwH battery pack, but were software-limited to 60KwH unless you paid for an upgrade.
- arikr 9y ago> Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval. I wonder what the current status is, both in terms of software validation, and regulatory approval.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoYou can look at their CA DMV disengagement report here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disengagement_report_2016 https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen.... They were very far away as of the start of this year.
- Matthias247 9y agoThe lists are interesting. And for me they are mostly telling that they are all in some super early prototyping phases. E.g. Tesla lists tests with < 600 miles with 4 cars in a year. Mercedes 670 miles with a single car. The only outlier which really seems to do serious testing is Waymo with 630k miles. To give some comparison numbers how normal series cars are tested at bigger automotive companies: There are test fleets of partly over 100 cars for a new car model, where some of those are tested all around the clock (> 600 miles per day). All in all often 2digit million kilometers.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoThe autonomous car services are going to launch in specific areas first, so they do not need to be tested in all the conditions that a Corolla would be tested in and can instead be tested in the launch markets. The key figure is miles per disengagement, and Tesla appears to be very far from having a viable autonomous car.
- theprop 9y agoCan it self-drive in snow and rain?
- ljosa 9y agoIf it will shovel its way out of my driveway, I'm in.
- DeonPenny 9y agoI've seen multiple ottos and uber self driving cars driving during the rain so I'd trust it.
- llukas 9y agoI trusted Volkswagen emissions tests!
- hoschicz 9y agoUbers self-driving cars have LIDAR. Tesla autopilot is fully based on view from cameras that can be obstructed.
- bitL 9y agoLiDAR doesn't work well in rain and it's just a ray of infrared laser light scanning surroundings, so it can be obstructed the same way as cameras; radar is what you want. But NVidia uses just 3 normal cameras and deep learning to drive in rain/snow/night and it seems to be working for them.
- jshap70 9y agoI love watching videos like the one they have on there. theres something almost hypnotic about it
- sshanky 9y agoThe car seems to stop for no apparent reason. I noticed it once next to two pedestrians just off the road, and again after turning right at a stop sign. I wonder if that is why they are showing it in a sped up format -- it certainly makes it harder to notice.
- baby 9y agoI wonder how fast the car is going as well.
- adanto6840 9y agoThis is quite interesting, I hadn't seen or heard about their intention to restrict like this, prior reading it tonight: "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."
- quotemstr 9y agoI don't think our legal system should allow car manufacturers to impose these kinds of restrictions on cars fully owned by their operators. If I have the title on my vehicle, I should be able to use it in any legal capacity. This restriction is an attack on the fundamental ideas of ownership and property.
- elmigranto 9y agoSoftware-like licenses make their way to hardware world. I wonder how soon we'll start seeing "as is" and "no guarantees of any kind" clauses…
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI mean... Autopilot is software, right?
- sjwright 9y agoIf you consider that the hardware is entirely comprised of third-party commodity parts* then yes, whatever it is that makes Autopilot a distinct product/proposition is entirely software. * It's all really just off-the-shelf cameras, sensors, processors etc sourced from various suppliers. Of course we should acknowledge that the validation and alignment of these parts plays an important role, but there's not really any secret sauce there.
- elmigranto 9y agoI wouldn't say that. It certainly not exclusively software and I don't think it is honest to divide a system like that into "soft" and "hard" components, since neither one has value for customer on its own.
- ilaksh 9y agoFrom this you can see, they are selling, and people are buying, a self-driving car. My theory is still that the demo video is actually from Nvidia's SDK and the actual autopilot they deployed is totally different and not actually in the 'self-driving' category at all at this point. But they are very aggressively rolling out updates and new features for more autonomy and yes they do intend to push for a complete door-to-door self-drive ASAP, ideally before the end of 2017 (at least as a new alpha version they can demo). Otherwise they would not sell it as such. But they do not plan to take another year to get there, based on Musk's tweets and the fact so many already paid extra for a full self-driving ability.
- PinguTS 9y ago"All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That claim is strong and false. What about Roadster and the old Model S with the old AP1 hardware?
- tehlike 9y agoWhat factory were they produced at?
- EngineerBetter 9y agoFremont is where Tesla builds all vehicles currently.
- function_seven 9y agoIf GM claims that all Chevys produced in their factories have airbags, do you reject that because the ‘86 IROC-Z doesn't have one?
- erikpukinskis 9y ago"All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory" is present perfect tense, implying an event that happened at an unspecified time in the past and continues to the present. You would have to add "ever" to include all vehicles ever produced.
- billhathaway 9y agoTesla sent out an email today. Autopilot Updates We just released the latest version of Autopilot. You can now experience Enhanced Autopilot features including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Autosteer, Auto Lane Change, Parallel + Perpendicular Autopark, and Summon. Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward + Side Collision Warning, and more advanced safety features are also active and standard. All Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. And Tesla vehicles continue to improve with over-the-air software updates, introducing new features and improving existing functionality to make your vehicle safer and more capable over time.
- mattybrennan 9y agoAll the necessary hardware? Do Teslas have lidar?
- throwaway-1209 9y agoLidar is not "necessary" hardware. Humans drive just fine without lidar.
- rpedela 9y agoThe human visual cortex is still far more advanced than a computer's. Maybe that will change some day, but asking about non-camera sensing equipment is a reasonable question until it does.
- throwaway-1209 9y agoSure, and it's not only cortex. Humans also know a lot about the world, and can predict things much better. There are areas in which humans are limited, however, such as reaction time, spectral sensitivity, the fact that humans can only see well in the center of where they're looking at and fake the rest of their visual field, etc. It's not at all clear to me that a human pair of eyeballs is better than 8 high quality, wide spectrum cameras feeding into the system at once. That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.
- EngineerBetter 9y agoThis is not news. Current Tesla vehicles with Autopilot 2 hardware can do nowhere near this aspirational list. My AP2 Model X cannot even tell when to turn the windscreen wipers on. This is a statement of intent, and production vehicles are a long way from having software that enables this.
- sjwright 9y agoDo you mean the X doesn't have rain sensors, or it does but they aren't hooked up in software yet? Surely it has rain sensors, they couldn't do Autopilot using cameras behind the windscreen without them.
- revscat 9y agoFrom what I have read, the Model S, at least, had this before Tesla and MobileEye had their falling out. This implies that they can do it, but the software cannot at the moment.
- EngineerBetter 9y agoYep, exactly right. The hardware is capable, but the software hasn't been created. Just like the original link - the hardware will (probably) provide enough input data to allow software to do all these cool things, but it's not been done yet and production code is a very long way from what is outlined.
- EngineerBetter 9y agoIt will use the Autopilot cameras (there are no additional sensors), and the Tesla Vision software on AP2 hardware does not support detection of rain on the windscreen. The driver has to turn the wipers on manually. My Renault Zoe, which costs about 25% of my Model X, does this automatically. Tesla Autopilot is cool, but the software is very limited at present. The original link is essentially what Tesla think they can achieve with the AP2 hardware, but the production software is nowhere near capable of these feats.
- madengr 9y agoWill I get a DUI if I'm drunk and my car drives me home? Say I'm in the back seat.
- mcbutterbunz 9y agoI would guess that if you gave the command to drive home, you would be seen as the operator of the vehicle and would probably receive a DUI. If there is an emergency and the automobile needs human intervention, then you would be responsible.
- cwp 9y agoYeah. When I was in J-school, I covered a court case where a man was convicted of DUI when the cops found him asleep in the back seat of a car with the engine running. He knew he was too drunk to drive and decided to sleep it off in the back. It was a cold winter night so he turned on the engine to run the heater. He got convicted because being inside the vehicle with the engine running met the definition of "operating" it, and nobody wanted to start down that slippery slope.
- cookingrobot 9y agoThat's terrible.
- baby 9y agoThat is a pretty bad judge, one quality for judging cases is to also be human and flexible.
- Alex3917 9y agoYes. You can get a DUI if you're in a car that's either turned on or has the keys in the ignition, even if it's parked.
- gwicks56 9y agoTeslas don't have ignitions. And what defines "turned on" for an electric vehicle?
- rvalue 9y agoI don't think these autopilot systems will work well in crowded cities or cities with poor infrastructure for roads. The amount of objects for detecting and avoiding will be way too high. The tests shows almost clear conditions for driving. This should be tested on streets of NY or a busy city like Mumbai
- rvalue 9y agoAlso, why isn't there a test for night time ?
- jklinger410 9y agoWhat a controversial opinion /s
- akira2501 9y ago> I don't think these autopilot systems will work well in crowded cities or cities with poor infrastructure for roads. I would _love_ to see some serious "read team" testing of these exact issues with driverless cars. Pedestrian issues, weather issues, mixed-use roads, roads with construction crews, roads with simulated accident scenes, roads with physical damage/flooding/large debris. I'd also be interested to know if the car drives differently between the rear-wheel only and the all-wheel versions and if environmental factors can frustrate these different control modes.
- wazoox 9y agoCheck GM autopilot demos in the streets of San Francisco. Much more impressive than this one. Pedestrians, bicycles, delivery van stopped in the middle of the street, etc. daytime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSc8AHIEG9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSc8AHIEG9o night time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHIq0MMViZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHIq0MMViZg
- joeblau 9y agoCruise is also using Lidar which provides depth sensing[1]. You can do depth sensing with cameras, but that requires building depth maps from multiple cameras (like eyes) and still being able to interpret the depth map with computer vision. Capturing depth is definitely possible with monocular cameras (because humans can do it), but it seems like lidar works a lot more accurately. [1] - https://www.getcruise.com https://www.getcruise.com
- Animats 9y agoWatch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what's going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can't quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference. The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven. Object recognition is limited. It doesn't recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge. Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge. It probably can't drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video. This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That's nice, but it's not good enough that you can go to sleep while it's driving.
- madaxe_again 9y agoYou had to reverse early cars up hills due to their gravity fed fuel systems. Yet here we are, driving forwards up hills.
- Animats 9y agoCompare Chris Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 about Google's system.[1] Look carefully at the graphics which show what the sensors are detecting, and compare with Tesla's. Watch Urmson discuss hard cases, problems, and failures. Not seeing that with Tesla. Or Uber. Or Cruise. Or Otto. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik
- jonah 9y ago"All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar." -- that'll teach you to make sure your schedule is up-to-date!
- manav 9y agoI have an AP1 car and a AP2 loaner (for the last month). This is just reaching parity to AP1 autopilot capabilities. AP2 has been crippled since launch. There a few new features that my AP1 might not have like Perpendicular Autopark, but I won't know till I get it back. From what it seems it's just gotten to the level that they were with with the previous generation that was developed by or in conjunction with MobilEye. I think they will need a hardware revision for actual full self driving perhaps 2 years away.
- bjelkeman-again 9y agoBut they are only using two of the eight cameras in AP2 at the moment. There is more capacity in AP2 hardware to tap into. https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-1-update/ https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-...
- manav 9y agoThere are rumors they might want to use Lidar. People have seen Tesla's equipped with Lidar, but it could be a 3rd party testing it or even Tesla doing some comparison research. Since newer sensors are become more cost effective I could imagine them incorporating them into future hardware revisions.
- taneq 9y agoCould be using the LIDAR for ground truth for training a depth-from-stereo system?
- tigershark 9y agoThey reached feature parity with the Mobileye solution starting from zero in something like 8 months. If this is not impressive then I think that we have very very different perspectives. And from now on things will only improve, and if they maintain the same fast pace I think that they are perfectly on track for their first coast to coast full autonomous drive before the end of the year.
- vosper 9y agoI sure hope it works, for the sake (and lives) of people who own them. And for the people who have to drive alongside them (everyone).
- bshimmin 9y agoI love the idea of Smart Summon - it reminds me of one of the Assassin's Creed games where you would whistle and your horse would magically appear a moment or two later!
- johnbellone 9y agoI was thinking of Red Dead Redemption, same feature!
- redthrowaway 9y agoThat car is driving oddly. It stopped for pedestrians who were on the sidewalk, and several times it stopped after making a turn. I could see that being really frustrating for other drivers and even dangerous if it's doing unpredictable things no human driver would do in those circumstances.
- EngineerBetter 9y agoCurrent Autopilot tends to brake abruptly in slow-moving queueing traffic, which I'm sure annoys the people behind me.
- aerovistae 9y agoI don't think this is a new page on their site-- why is this suddenly at the top of HN? There's no new info here; this isn't an update or press release.
- NuDinNou 9y agoI don't know if there is or not something new with that page, but Elon recently tweeted this "Radar-only braking on HW1 is getting better with every release. We're hoping to do the demo where it brakes for a UFO in the fog soon." So maybe that has something to do with it.
- stdcall83 9y agoLook ma! No hands!
- _up 9y agoAutopilot for Batteries. What I wonder is, why isn't anyone building self driving batteries that park near the road and can follow you and give you more range if needed. They only would need to implement some kind of follow mode witch should be relatively easy. Cars could be build light and inexpensive and at the same time come with infinitive range.
- jesusthatsgreat 9y agoYeah I've thought about this too... like fighter jets being refueled by tanker jets mid-air. It should be safe for two vehicles to latch on to each other safely and for one to charge the other, then the 'tanker' vehicle goes back home to refuel itself or goes on to fuel another vehicle etc.. This seems like such an obvious step... i.e. if you're at 20% battery capacity and your car reckons it would need 40% to get to your destination, then it would send out a request to local tanker vehicles and the nearest one would come to you, connect and refuel without you having to stop or break speed. People would probably pay a premium for that service.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoSelf-driving cars' marketing pitch is that they could reduce road accidents, but if we really want to reduce road accidents, might we not have a better chance at it if we removed cars from roads altogether? We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that. I think one big selling point of cars has always been that they grant the user a great amount of autonomy (unprecedented, in their time, taken for granted nowadays). You can ride your car and go anywhere you like! The cost of that autonomy of course is that some of us will be killed or maimed in road accidents, because you can't give silly little monkeys autonomy behind the controls of big powerful machines without death and carnage ensuing. Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place. What remains would be just a mindless automatic system carting the user to and fro. Well, in that case- we don't need to wait around for full level-5 autonomy. We already have dumb machines that can do that: trains, trams, all sorts of vehicles-on-rails. Why do we need self-driving cars, then? Answer: we don't. And I haven't for a moment believed that any of this is anything to do with road safety. Note that nobody even discusses the other 900 pound gorilla in the room: pollution. Guess what? Taking cars off roads completely would also reduce air and noise pollution tremendously.
- IanCal 9y ago> Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place. A car that can drive itself does not remove the autonomy having a car gives you. The key part of the autonomy is going where you want, when you want. Not that you get to push the pedals and turn the wheel. > We already have dumb machines that can do that: trains, trams, all sorts of vehicles-on-rails. Which travel only from and to certain places, at certain times. It's why what would be a three hour drive is likely to take me closer to five hours tomorrow, for example. For another example: the train station near my friends house stops running trains at 7pm, the roads are open all night. > We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that. Building an entirely new, country wide, overhead rail system that goes to or extremely close to every house? That sounds incredibly expensive. > Why do we need self-driving cars, then? They're an incremental improvement which requires no new major infrastructure.
- welpwelp 9y agoThere's so much room for error I can't wait to see how this will turnout.
- aladine 9y agothat is amazing offer from Tesla as hardward+software upgrade as a package. I also love the design of "call to action" buttons for buying 2 new car models.
- BatFastard 9y agoNo one seems to be commenting on the fact that they are doing this all with camera's and ultrasonic sensors. No LIDAR at all, which in the short term certainly provides for a better looking car. And considering the fact that it lowers the car price by a significant factor, seems like a pretty amazing thing!
- neofromfut 9y agoStaged demo. Just driving on single lane, Occasional turns roads at best demonstrates advanced lane guidance. Do a cross country and you've shut everyone's mouth.
- neofromfut 9y agoStaged demo. Just driving on single lane, Occasional turns roads at best demonstrates advanced lane guidance. Do a cross country and you've shut everyone's mouth.
- Waterluvian 9y agoProgress will of course be incremental. But I think about the delta between summer in California and Canadian winter driving conditions and I think there's still such a long long way to go to full full autonomy.
- swah 9y agoWhat kind of hardware supports all this signal processing? FPGAs? GPUs?
- SigmundA 9y agoHopefully better than AP1: http://imgur.com/gallery/T5j32i9 http://imgur.com/gallery/T5j32i9
- perryprog 9y agoRead this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5welnn/my_car_hit_a_barrier_while_i_was_on_autopilot/de9hv3d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5welnn/my_car_...
- make3 9y agoTesla plans to restrict the use of their car AI when it is for uber-like uses to their own to-be-announced network! That's probably the biggest news here, for me at least! "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."
- make3 9y agoTesla plans to restrict the use of their car AI when it is for uber-like uses to their own to-be-announced network! That's probably the biggest news here, for me at least! "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."
- f0under 9y agoAnyone identify which road the car is driving on? Looks familiar like the area around Foothills but couldn't tell.