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I never believed neither Tesla nor Nvidia when they said last year that they would achieve Level 5 within a few short years. I have a rule of thumb for such ann
by mtgx 9y ago
I never believed neither Tesla nor Nvidia when they said last year that they would achieve Level 5 within a few short years. I have a rule of thumb for such announcements: subtract at least one level to get the real level and what their systems are actually capable of.
How could these cars reach Level 5 when they've only been tested for like a year or two on some roads? And I don't believe there is good enough simulation for them right now either. Even Google's CAPTCHA was asking me recently to pick the "bridge" from the pictures. There was no bridge.
- Spooky23 9y agoMost of the public testing seems to be on the West coast and Southwest as well. What happens in environments where you have things like rain and snow? My non-autonomous Honda Odyssey has cameras on the passenger mirror and rear hatch -- both of which were useless within 90 minutes of traveling from Lake Placid back home thanks to road spray and salt. IMO Level 5 is viable for some relatively limited use cases, or with roads that have embedded telemetry. I'll believe it when intercity truck fleets convert for a few years.
- soperj 9y agoTotally. There's no rain in Seattle ever.
- Spooky23 9y agoI forgot about Seattle’s long cold winters full of bitter cold, snow and salt.
- cesis 9y agoOn the other hand I don't get the obsession with level 5. There are a lot of use cases for fully autonomous level 4 e.g. - pick me up in the parking lot - drive out of parking garage and meet me there - trip from LA to SF etc
- Spooky23 9y agoLevel 5 is where the utility starts to make up for the ballooning costs. Nobody is going to be able to buy a $60k autonomous Honda Accord — you’ll pay by the drink instead.
- TillE 9y agoExactly. A lot of people are still thinking about this in terms of a cool feature to add to your private car. That's not where this is going, that's not why anybody (except perhaps Tesla) is investing in this research. We're talking about a revolution in public transit.
- exelius 9y agoI think this is why cheap solid-state LIDAR is critical to this goal. It’s currently too expensive and bulky for this kind of use, but if you can embed a few dozen LIDAR units in a car for under $1000, you get some really accurate telemetry that’s not affected by adverse weather. Cheap solid state LIDAR is gonna be the invention that powers the next industrial boom.
- nerfhammer 9y agoLIDAR doesn't really work in rain and snow. That's part of why this is a hard problem.
- exelius 9y agoAgreed, but multiplexed solid state LIDAR will up to a 99% use case for vision capture. What’s out there now solves maybe 80%. Its a hard problem being solved by incremental improvements — first you gotta make LIDAR work in concept (which is basically done), then you have to shrink it, then commercialize it, then commoditize it. So it’ll take a decade or more to realize, but that’s the ultimate thing I think we need to get these things into the mainstream.
- tambre 9y ago> Even Google's CAPTCHA was asking me recently to pick the "bridge" from the pictures. There was no bridge. That's to be expected. It even says at the top of the challenge box: "If there's no match, just click next". Negative reinforcement is reinforcement too.