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The author is only comparing production ability and basic mechanical stats with the Bolt and Leaf. I am on the Model 3 waiting list for the Autopilot. Heck, it

• rtpg 9y ago
  Don't the BMWs of the world have this tech integrated into their cars too? I get Tesla's cars are really good, but my understanding was that it wasn't "miles ahead".
  • eclipxe 9y ago
    Yes many other's have autopilot-like tech. BMW's system on the 7-series and newer 5-series is about as good as Tesla's AP1 and better than AP2. AP2 is still far behind the curve.
    • carlivar 9y ago
      I compared Tesla Model 3 to Bolt and Leaf. 7-series and 5-series are simply too expensive. If BMW can get it in the 3-series at a Tesla Model 3 price, things will get interesting.
      • mantas 9y ago
        Even VW Golf has (as options) quite a bit of these things. obstacles radar(adaptive cruise control/city safety), blind spot and lane departure warning, self parking...
  • ucaetano 9y ago
    Yes, actually, most of the "Autopilot" features have been available in production cars for over a decade. Tesla is really late to this game, although people can't seem to realize it because of the distortion field. And that's before we get into disengagements per 1000 miles, where Tesla trails most of the industry by far. No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI. Self-driving is a race to the bottom, with its development slashing car sales by an order of magnitude. That would be bad for an established, mature, car maker, but would be crushing for a company relying purely on future growth. Not only Tesla is behind most in self-driving, it is the most exposed to the downsides of it.
    • r00fus 9y ago
      > Self-driving is a race to the bottom, with its development slashing car sales by an order of magnitude. This isn't bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth. Steve Jobs was also famous for denouncing something right up until Apple had "the best on the market" of that same thing. It seems like standard CEO playbook.
      • ucaetano 9y ago
        > This isn't bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth. Fixing it: This isn't too bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth. But you won't be the only one for long. And then the entire industry will downsize. And Tesla is (1) the most susceptible to it, since most of the enterprise value comes from expectation of future growth and (2) it lags behind other makers in self-driving tech.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI. Ockham's razor suggests it's more likely Elon Musk simply got convinced by the Yudkowsky/Bostrom view on the problem of Unfriendly AI (I particularly recall Musk starting to talk about AI only after reading Bostrom's Superintelligence, but that might have been just a coincidence). Also note that Musk is "demonizing" advanced AI that doesn't exist yet, but is huge on self-driving.
  • prostoalex 9y ago
    It’s not an off-the-shelf sensor one can buy, integrate, and congratulate oneself on the job well done. The learning systems need to be fed data to improve their models, so that they can understand bad lane markup, merging lanes, diverging lanes, lane splits and highway off-ramps, construction cones and barriers, motorcycles and trucks being obstacles and flying plastic bags and garbage not being an obstacle. Unless they’re buying this data some place else, it needs to come from millions of miles driven by the current owners.
• IcePenguino 9y ago
  I have to agree completely. Autopilot is miles ahead. While I'm waiting for my 3 preorder, I took a test drive a Model S. I haven't felt as moved by a technology like Autopilot since I first swiped on the first iPhone. Coincidentally, we're in the market for a 2018 Odyssey as our family car too.
  • siavosh 9y ago
    Off topic - but curious of why Odyssey > Sienna? ...as I'm having a hard time deciding.
    • carlivar 9y ago
      Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is in Honda (and lots of other cars). Toyota is currently in a state of rejecting these integrations, which I think is foolish.
    • IcePenguino 9y ago
      Haven't done serious research, just reading some reviews online and going to the car show. I think I read that the Odyssey rides more quietly. I also like the 2018 Odyssey's visual refresh. Sienna hasn't changed in eons it feels like. Inside, I wasn't a fan of the second row seat tracks on the Sienna.
  • robotresearcher 9y ago
    Did you test a Mercedes and Audi as well?
    • IcePenguino 9y ago
      I did not. I don't foresee these two with a car in the $25k (after incentives) price range with semi-autonomous driving. And unlike the top level comment, I really want something fully electric (for the planet).
      • Animats 9y ago
• BoorishBears 9y ago
  It's not that your Honda can't (edit: actually their specific model can't, others from Honda can), its that Honda didn't want to enable it under 20 miles an hour because they want to discourage use off highways. I wouldn't be surprised if your Honda has a similar to AP1 Mobileye sensor in the mirror, I know my Volt does and Chevy intentionally limited engagement to 15 mph and up even though once engaged, it can work down to 1 mph. There are Hondas with AP style autonomy via comma.ai and that's just supplementing the sensor set with an Android phone and some basic CAN bus access. Tesla's "innovation" is being willing to ship "beta" features for better or for worse. It's not like Chevy couldn't have used the same data it uses for LKA to do lane centering, by as Tesla has shown, doing that can cause "wrong" steering outputs (I.e. ones that would put you in a ditch), and opens up the system for abuse by the driver. Where as only using it for LKA means when the sensor is "wrong" the worst case is a wrong LKA warning instead of doing what Teslas do on "fail road". And you can't abuse LKA easily. I've noticed my Volt seems to be tuned so that if you try and abuse LKA and let go of the wheel, it'll take longer and longer to apply corrective steering, causing the car to "ping pong". But if you hold the wheel and intentionally try and pass a line with firm, but wrong steering input (as you'd expect with a distracted driver), it will smoothly guide you along the lane as precisely as a human driver would. To me Super Cruise is a more major innovation than Autopilot. AP works in more situations but the situations it works in, that Super Cruise doesn't, are situations where AP is notorious for having bugs that vary from inconvient to downright dangerous. It reminds me of how people compare AP to other equivalent systems like Distronic + based on disengagements, ignoring the fact that more disengagements can be preferable if it means avoiding events where there isn't a disengagement but the system is wrong
  • carlivar 9y ago
    I live in Southern California. On highways is exactly where I want to use it under 20 mph!
    • BoorishBears 9y ago
      I thought yours was like the one on my Volt and many other cars from various manufacturers in that you can't enage under 20-15mph, but you can resume from a stop, if you already engaged it previously. But it looks like Honda is the odd man out, as some of their cars have ACC, but don't have what they call "Low Speed Follow" which is the ability to slow down to a stop, then resume with the push of a button or the accelerator
• thrav 9y ago
  My subaru’s adaptive cruise control has been pretty amazing. I still have to do most of the steering, but that’s probably a good thing in terms of keeping me engaged. I can easily go hundreds of miles from stop and go to 80 and cruising without touching the gas though.
  • avar 9y ago
    I spent all of 5 hours in a new Subaru Outback I rented this summer and wasn't impressed. I could set the cruise control to a certain speed and it would normally slow down if there was congestion, which was very nice. But it wouldn't work at bends in the road, because the system was seemingly just directly ahead line-of-sight. I wanted to see if it would slow down itself in that situation before I had to slam the breaks, it would have plowed into the much slower-moving car ahead of me. So my experience is that while these systems help in bumper-to-bumper traffic on congested highways they're still to dangerous to rely on.
    • rconti 9y ago
      Huh, I have relatives who really love the system in their outback. I know the system in my VW impeccably follows cars in front of it, in bad weather, at imprudent speeds, around sharp bends, perfect.
• KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  What makes you think Tesla has the best system? The managers in charge of autopilot keep quitting. The media says they are quitting because Elon is making deceptive claims about autopilot. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
  • tgtweak 9y ago
    Also they've disabled autopilot for the time being. It's an interesting time for Tesla, they feel like the automotive equivalent of AMD - David keeping Goliath honest. How many automotive companies saw Tesla become an actual disruptive threat and then spent tens of billions on self driving and electrification? Tesla isn't going to compete with Honda or Toyota by copying their model (or even their manufacturing process). Take a minute and look at the bolt and the leaf - they're god-ugly, emotionless, unsexy modes of transportation. Buying a leaf is the result of sitting down with a spreadsheet. Need some anecdotal proof? Think to yourself how many of your coworkers, friends and family you can see driving one. How about a model 3? I see more model S's during my commute than I do leafs, volts and bolts combined. Another place to look for confirmation is the lithium ion battery line which was built in collaboration with Panasonic. Panasonic is 2/3rd the size of Toyota and are well versed in manufacturing process. If Tesla wanted to borrow a page from the incumbents they'd be doing so, they have enough brains from those companies already on staff. It's a safe bet that there are very few idiots in upper management at Tesla. Elon isn't the type to ignore a process problem, he's a modeling/simulation junkie and probably figured out something that the others are missing. That's not to say things are perfect, but I don't think they're as dire as the article makes them out to be. The shareholders have faith, and although Tesla shares are slightly bubbly, they're still doing unbelievably well on most fronts.
    • probe 9y ago
      A lot of this is confirmation bias at its finest. Not saying you're wrong, but I think it's naive to assume Tesla has some "secret sauce" - there are equally smart and competent people at Tesla competitors. I would bet that the risk and decision making process may be different (incumbents may want higher probability of success to make a bet, while Musk's NPV analysis is different), but again it's naive to assume they don't understand at all what is or isn't possible in manufacturing
• grok2 9y ago
  https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20170912.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20170912.as... -- interesting comments by NTSB on a Tesla crash that involved the autopilot. Seems like their autopilot is similar to autopilot's in other cars, but with different (my read was it was more "relaxed") settings. Tesla seems to have since adjusted their settings though.
• arve0 9y ago
  Have you seen this, https://youtu.be/PwOnsT2UW5o https://youtu.be/PwOnsT2UW5o? You might be able to DIY.