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Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

168 points by close04 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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ableal 8y ago
"Self-driving cars also benefit from lidar sensors, and the best ones cost thousands—if not tens of thousands—of dollars each. That's too expensive for an upgrade to a customer-owned vehicle. But the economics are more viable for a driverless taxi service, since the self-driving system replaces an expensive human taxi driver." That's probably the crucial point. For now, lidar is needed for safe operation, and too expensive for mass deployment in private cars.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Commercial (not even taxi, but transport) will be the first to be autonomous because of the larger savings possible. That we'll see useful autonomy for a $50k car driven by individuals, rather than in a $1M transport vehicle operated by a huge logistics company isn't likely.
- ec109685 8y ago
  What is your evidence that lidar is needed for safe operation?
syntaxing 8y ago
Not having LiDAR for anything over level 3 self-driving capabilities seems like a very bad idea...Computer vision right now just does not have the spatial awareness that you need for self driving capabilities. I wish Tesla would work on something similar to the Kinect v3 but for long range (above 20 m).
- close04 8y ago
  Elon insists being theoretically right is the same as being practically right. So for example he uses the theoretically perfectly functional normal vision that humans use even if the practical implementation of today simply cannot reach the same results.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    You think Elon Musk doesn't think there's any difference between theory and practice? What makes you think that? And what does it meant to be "practically right" about the future? I don't understand how you could be right in practice about something that hasn't happened yet.
- leesec 8y ago
  Having LiDAR in any car for self driving seems like a prohibitively expensive idea though. For instance: See how no company has released a commercial product with LiDAR. And I definitely think Computer Vision will get better before LiDAR gets cost competitive.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    I agree. However, suppose the opposite: Suppose LiDAR gets cheap first. Like, I don't know, $1000 per unit and compact enough to not be a big burden on the rest of the vehicle. Tesla charges $5000 for the FSD add-on. In principle, they could easily afford to retrofit vehicles with the cheap LiDAR plus maintain any advantages the full computer vision system would add (such as identifying vehicle types to assist in predictive behavior modeling and avoidance strategies). So trying to go the full Computer Vision (with ancillary radar) route actually has pretty low opportunity cost for Tesla. Another thing: I wonder how much simply much-improved geolocation could help? That failure from last year of driving right into a (failed) collision attenuator (where an off-ramp split off) could've been avoided simply by having high confidence, half-meter-or-better geolocation (from GPS, cell, IMU, etc fusion) and good mapping. And with good mapping/geolocation combined with other sensors, the sensors could focus on identifying changes to the expected road condition, perhaps increasing their robustness. (and when networked, they could use sensing from other vehicles ahead of the current vehicle to assist in navigation as well)
    - leesec 8y ago
      AFAIK all the big companies working on this problem include high-definition mapping as a major component. The problem is gathering that data without having an actual LiDAR. So some companies like Waymo will literally just have cars with LiDARs drive all around every street and map it for them. This is great but means they're limited by when they travelled the road and conditions at the time. Ideally, you have a mapping system that is constantly updating (every time your fleet drives by something new like construction on the road it auto-updates the map). Comma.ai is working on a vision+GPS Kalman filter solution along these lines up to 10 cm accuracy. I'd guess Tesla is as well. And then yes, after that the vision would be primarily for localization.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Regardless of whether cameras or lidar win out, just consider the fact that back up cameras already exist on tons of modern cars, and the solution to the environment issues of these cameras is one of: a) fold it out when you put the car in reverse, so it's always ice-free b) ignore this problem. It's covered in ice for months. This is a simple problem in comparison, and neither of the above solutions would work for a camera used for autonomous driving.
  - ec109685 8y ago
    If the camera is broken, Tesla will obviously not enable auto driving. It has a steering wheel for a reason.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      If it’s “broken” every morning for months in winter climates like the cameras I mention, then people there won’t pay a premium for the capability. And if it doesn’t keep itself ice free it will risk going from uncovered to covered in seconds. Cameras need to be ice/snow/rain proof in the sense that they stay clear of it while driving.
      - ec109685 8y ago
        What about a heated camera lens?
cbames89 8y ago
This is a (perhaps short-term) failure of first principles reasoning. Elon's known to favor thinking about things from first principles, and there's no theoretical reason that vision can't work. However, technical limitations might take a while to overcome.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Vision alone fails pretty frequently even with a human brain and 700 million years of evolution behind it. Count me as a skeptic that cameras + computer will produce a safe self-driving system.
  - munificent 8y ago
    > 700 million years of evolution behind it Sure, but only about 0.000014% of that time occurred while cars existed. It's not like we evolved to control big metal objects hurtling down artificially made flat surfaces.
    - carimura 8y ago
      ...with devices that we're emotionally and physically addicted to flashing and making noises that are designed to ignite a flurry of activity in our reptilian brains sending the message PAY ATTENTION TO ME IMMEDIATELY!
    - mikeash 8y ago
      On the other hand, while our brains did not evolve to control cars, our cars were designed to be controlled by our brains. A system designed from scratch for autonomous vehicles would look radically different.
    - jimktrains2 8y ago
      And even then, accidents where all parties are following the rules, e.g. being sober, undistracted by something in the car, giving enough stopping distance to the vehicle you're following, going the appropriate speed for the visual and road conditions, &c aren't the norm. Most accidents happen because somebody was irresponsible, usually blatantly.
whttheuuu 8y ago
ITT: people who think they know better than the company that has been working on this stuff day in and day out for years lol.
- petra 8y ago
  Well, it's a great way to inflate the stock price. Much better than saying "We'll be just another car company, when self-driving arrives".
  - leesec 8y ago
    Well they also have billions of miles of data from people who have actually drove their car hands free, feet free. No one even has close to this data.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      Do they have more data than Waymo? That doesn't seem completely clear to me. They certainly have more vehicles on the road, but I assume they are driven many fewer hours per day.
- legohead 8y ago
  This thread has like 4 posts. You're being a bit presumptuous and hostile, no?
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Maybe Tesla knows better than Google and Uber and GM and Toyota and Volvo... Or maybe they've gone down a blind alley in their rush to look like they were first to market.
- pjkundert 8y ago
  ... working on this stuff day and night ... —- in California. I’ve been driving for 40+ years, millions of km, 1/2 during winter. Now, Elon is a Saskatchewan boy, so he should know better. Perhaps he’s forgotten. Winter driving is at best 1/2 vision dependent, often much less. Many times, you have to actively ignore your vision (everything you see is “moving” sideways). Quite often, you’re modulating your throttle to maintain a tiny ratio of +/- acceleration that maintains static friction; as soon as 1 or more contact patches achieve dynamic friction, you’re entering a spin due to yaw forces induced by your other driven wheels. Much of the time, the road surface adhesion characteristics are best detected by sheen, vibration, sound and guesswork/prediction based on temperature, sunlight, recent weather, etc. Unless the vehicle has sound, vibration, and vision sensor integration — it cannot hold a candle to human driving, except in the most trivial driving scenarios. Winter is a complete non-starter for any autonomous driving technology that I am aware of. I don’t know if Lidar would really help much. It can’t punch through heavy rain/snow, at least not as well as radar anyway. Maybe it would help in trivial driving conditions. I think vision, sound, vibration, and radar with a powerful ANN trained by professional all-season winter drivers in challenging conditions might be useful, and eventually even good. It should be able to perform super-challenging evasion and recovery maneuvers that could save lives!
wurst_case 8y ago
I wonder, though, if this had more to do with how much they are actually investing in AI vs electric car tech. Surely Tesla is an EV company first and an AI company second. I know they like to brag about their autopilot but it eems to me that having a lower cost car is more important than having an expensive lidar system on board.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Most car companies make lots of money on add-on features. The base model couldn't be super profitable, but the base model with the self-driving package probably makes some good money. Or it would if the didn't have to keep doing recalls to upgrade the hardware.
pascoej 8y ago
Anthony Levandowski seems to have the same opinion. I'm a big believer in vision, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Robotbeat 8y ago
Interestingly, for air travel, there's another strategy: Rely entirely on GPS and commanding from air traffic control (with systems and structure in place to minimize damage in case those systems fail or are insufficient). That's what Zipline uses for their fully operational medical delivery system in Rwanda. The drones are completely blind, directly, but they travel in pre-defined flight paths and communicate with one another and follow directions from flight control. For self-driving cars, a similar situation may be extremely good GPS geolocation combined with network-wide sensor fusion and mapping. In principle, you could even do real-time optical or synthetic aperture radar from orbit or via persistent aircraft to allow the central controller to identify hazards and obstacles and to update maps in real time without much at all happening on-board except low-latency reactions. Most highways already have much of their length covered by cameras for the local Department of Transportation, and even many intersections and sidestreets have surveillance cameras. A low latency connection to that system, upgraded with higher fidelity, could significantly help autonomous systems. Might be another very helpful public good for cities to provide, much like GPS is provided. ...and on the engineering side, you can have vehicles designed specifically to reduce pedestrian injury, such as not having those large, boxy grilles on SUV. Such things are almost entirely cosmetic and reduce efficiency, so Tesla doesn't have them on their cars. Going beyond that, external airbags may help as well. Zipline uses a foam body and a fail-safe parachute to stop the vehicle if there's a problem.
- kec 8y ago
  If a plane can only get a GPS fix to within a 15m radius that's no big deal, whereas if a car has a 15m fix it's running down pedestrians on the sidewalk. Planes also don't have a habit of flying in tunnels or urban canyons where obtaining a gps fix is even more problematic.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    Indeed. But this is an addressable problem. The new GPS satellites (GPS III) have just started launching (on a SpaceX rocket in December 2018), and they should triple the accuracy: https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/what-is-gps-iii-and-how-will-it-stand-apart/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/what-is-gps-iii-and-ho... But even before that's complete: High precision GPS (i.e. with compensation for atmospheric effects) can get better than 10cm accuracy by tracking the carrier wave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic Single-digit-centimeter-accuracy is possible near GPS signal compensating base stations (~20km). This level of precision is regularly used by surveyors. There are several options for improving geolocation beyond inside-out (i.e. vision or lidar) tracking.
EngineerBetter 8y ago
The big missing piece is not LIDAR, but causal reasoning. Autopilot and similar 'AI' cannot reason; it doesn't have a mental model to ponder 'what if' and can't use counter-factuals to ponder what would happen if it didn't do something. It's just glorified pattern matching currently. Reading Judea Pearl's The Book Of Why certainly sobered my outlook on AI.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Isn't that more of an indictment of the self-driving industry as a whole? In Tesla's case they are missing that, but they are also missing LIDAR (or some other thing to fill in that technological gap).
- andreyk 8y ago
  Well, that's not necessarily true... self driving in particular usually uses planning, which is basically all about 'what if'. But it's true this is relevant to AI in general.
CPLX 8y ago
It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called lying.
- RivieraKid 8y ago
  It wouldn't be the first.
- deleted 8y ago
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- xeromal 8y ago
  If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.
  - fastball 8y ago
    You could almost call him the successful / less pathological Elizabeth Holmes. He promises the future before it has arrived, but unlike Theranos, he actually delivers a product. That product might be inferior to what was promised, but it is an improvement on the status quo nonetheless. And once released, Musk does not lie about its capabilities.
    - lazyasciiart 8y ago
      > > "We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said during a January earnings call. That statement certainly isn't true for any meaningful value of 'self-driving'.
    - SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
      This is on the order page for the Model 3 right now: > Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. Really. Except that feature hasn’t shipped and there’s no ETA. I call that a lie. I appreciate what Tesla is doing to the industry but I wish they wouldn’t be so dishonest in their marketing.
martythemaniak 8y ago
There's a few things to keep in mind when discussing self-driving tech. 1) Self driving tech doesn't exist today. It simply does not. There's lots of people working on it and they are using different strategies, but it is not clear how long it will take, which strategy is technically superior, which strategy is more economical, etc etc. There's a lot of very strong opinions floating around (LIDAR is essential! No, vision and lots of data! No, 3D maps or bust, etc etc). It is important to keep in mind that we don't know the future, the people busy inventing it don't know how things will play out and outside observers know even less. The tech industry is littered with strong opinions which have aged terribly. 2) Musks's first principles aside, Tesla was never going to do LIDAR. They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. If they had gone with LIDAR and started a research program like Uber, they would have started years after Google, with less data, far fewer resources and absolutely technical advantage. It is far, far more likely that this program would have bankrupted them than beat google. In essence, whether Musk's first-principles is real or a sales pitch doesn't matter. Tesla's choice was their current approach, or nothing at all.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. Can you explore that a little? We have consumer products that contain LIDAR already (e.g. Neato Vacuums). The sensors no longer cost thousands of dollars, and could supplement other types of inputs to provide a broader picture of the road.
  - Gladdyu 8y ago
    Yes, but you can't install a LIDAR over a software update. They've been promising full self-driving mode and getting closer by updating the software - the owners that already have the current car won't be to thrilled if they get cut-off from the state-of-the-art in Tesla's self-driving tech.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
peeters 8y ago
I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. On an airplane, autopilot means you can take your focus off of both the physical and mental act of moving the plane through the air, and if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you wouldn't have a few seconds to react. In a car, Tesla's Autopilot simply doesn't give you that. If you are reading and your autopilot exits, you could be dead before your focus can return to the road. Planes fly in wide open spaces far from hazards. Cars drive in busy, tight spaces where a fraction of a second lapse in control can be fatal. I get that Tesla's implementation is analogous to what you find on a jet. But the environments make them very different. So start by dropping the name. It's not auto pilot, it's handsfree driving.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. ...In a car, Tesla's system simply doesn't give you that [taking your focus off] Yes, exactly. It's a level-2 ADAS - it's about helping you deliver correct inputs to the car, not about autonomous driving in any real sense - regardless of how advanced it might be in a technical sense, or how well-behaving in a best-case scenario! More like the fly-by-wire system in an aircraft than the "autopilot". And I know that the users are supposed to be aware of this, but Tesla's marketing on this issue is far from consistent, in all sorts of ways. They're doing their users a pretty big disservice.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    I think the issue is that most people have a misconception about autopilot in a plane due to movies. Real autopilots don't work like that, they are typically extremely simple and in many cases, mechanical PID loops. 99% of all autopilots have almost zero intelligence nor electronic sensors of any kind. Only the best of the best, like CAT3 autoland systems are anything close to what you see in the movies.
    - threeseed 8y ago
      The term autopilot was first used in 1914. Over a hundred years of the general public being educated about what that word means. So pretty sure it predates its use in movies.
Animats 8y ago
Waymo keeps plugging away. Each year, for the last few years, the number of miles between disconnects they report to the CA DMV has doubled. Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product. Nobody else is even close. This problem is slowly being solved, by normal engineering practices. The "fake it til you make it" players are being left behind. Uber has been shown to be totally incompetent. Tesla really just has a good lane follower and an mediocre car follower. Apple has been trying to hand-wave by talking about "significant disconnects" vs. the all disconnects DMV requires them to report. The LIDAR industry is struggling, but there is progress. Quanergy seems to have been mostly hype.[1] Continental, the big European auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes and sells a good but expensive flash LIDAR used in DoD and space applications. They packaged it up for automotive use, and are waiting for the self driving industry to catch up. That technology uses exotic indium-gallium-arsenide sensor ICs, which are expensive in small quantities but would probably be affordable if they could sell a few million a year. This looks like a problem that's being solved. Just not fast enough for startups used to quick payoffs in software. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-billion-dollar-autonomous-vehicle-startup-lost-its-way https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product." I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra-rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse. I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity
  - cbhl 8y ago
    I'm way less worried about this than when Waymo was originally called the Google Self-Driving Car Project. If Uber and Tesla continue with their current plans, they will have enough accidents that self-driving cars being in accidents will cease being headline news. They just become an actuarial math problem, just like regular car insurance is today. (This is my opinion and not that of my employer.)
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
> "We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said during a January earnings call. Except for obstacles that coincide with whitelisted locations their sensors can't handle. It's only a matter of time before someone dies because of that hack.
devy 8y ago
The top editor promoted comment[1] on the article summed up very well. The attention problem is well known in engineering. It is very hard to get a human to concentrate on something that will turn up good more than 99% of the time, even when there's serious or fatal consequences of failure. Trains are the classic example - tracks are amost always clear, signals are almost always correct which means you have to devise all sorts of systems to keep the driver alert. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-strategy-is-outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/?comments=1&post=36970595#comment-36970595 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-str...
- justapassenger 8y ago
  Sadly, Silicon Valley companies don't think that best practices of engineering apply to them. It's all about disruption, both with products and safety.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    "We're going to apply well known engineering to an existing problem" doesn't sell VCs as much as "We're going to disrupt things and launch satellites illegally"
- ec109685 8y ago
  I am not sure how Tesla’s system is much different than Waymo’s. In both cases, the cars can steer themselves under limited circumstances. Getting to full auto driving in crazy situations like single lane roads or unprotected left turns will take a long time. But using it in the situations it can handle today is very useful. At least with the Tesla, you can actually drive in places it doesn’t support auto pilot, unlike Waymo. The Tesla autosteer won’t engage.
  - devy 8y ago
    > I am not sure how Tesla’s system is much different than Waymo’s. Waymo's ultimate self-driving vehicle will not have a steering wheel (as seen in their early prototypes) as the vehicle will take human out of the driving equation. Tesla will probably always have one in the foreseeable future (as they are tackling autonomous driving an drive-assist system). That's the big difference to me.
haberman 8y ago
I got a Tesla last year. I love it. But it's been painfully obvious to me that Autopilot is nowhere close to something that will let you take a nap. Often when I'm stopped at a light, cars that are standing completely still will appear to be constantly moving forwards and backwards on the display. My best theory so far is that the Tesla's spatial model is getting thrown off by the other car's turn signal. This does not inspire confidence. In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice in bad traffic), but autosteer is flaky at best.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  > In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice in bad traffic) Which is great but hardly unique to Tesla. Every major manufacturer out there offers adaptive cruise control. My car even recognizes the difference between in traffic stop-and-go/rush hour, and "queue" mode (exiting parking lots after events, etc).
zaroth 8y ago
I’ve read so many of these articles obviously written by someone who has no hands-on experience with the Tesla Autopilot and what it actually does for the driving experience. Maybe Tesla will get to a point where my TM3 will drive me to work while I nap, or use my phone. One thing that’s pretty amazing is that if they can get to that point, it will come as a free automatic software update or an available for purchase hardware upgrade on my current car. This month my car will be getting 5% faster acceleration from an OTA update - how cool is that? But right now, the reality is that I can engage AutoPilot on the highway and it immediately and dramatically changes the driving experience. Instead of focusing on steering the car, I am focused on situational awareness. I am not just looking down my lane, I am looking at the cars around me, who is passing who, what might be coming up around that bend, that guy on his phone next to me, etc. I can look at over drivers and assess whether they are paying attention and avoid them if needed. Because the car is actually lane keeping — not what everyone else calls lane keeping which (surprise) is a total lie - but actively steering the car in the lane around curves and centering the car in the lane probably more precisely than I would be if I were steering manually. I strongly believe, if AutoPilot never truly advanced much beyond its current capability, and as the currently functionality becomes more widespread, we will wonder 15 years from now, how did people operate their vehicles without this level of assistance? How could you be properly aware of your surroundings if you had to be so preoccupied with minor steering inputs? If you use your phone and watch a movie or put on makeup while driving, you are breaking the law and endangering yourself and those around you. Every time a new technology comes to cars people say it will distract, or hypnotize, or lull drivers into distraction (see wipers, radios, automatic transmissions, original cruise control) and anyone who has actually driven with AutoPilot knows this feature is no different. As a Tesla owner I enjoy and appreciate Tesla’s real-world approach to self-driving and it makes my life better and my drive safer. Thank you Tesla.
- ypzhang2 8y ago
  Issue is Autopilot is more of a feature that is geared towards convenience. You are doing all of the driver attention work, but someone who activates Autopilot isn't required to. I think a lot of the argument against Tesla is that Autopilot isn't doing enough in that arena. GM's Super Cruise is a lot more feature-full with regards to driver attentiveness. It might not be as useful in terms of being able to be used everywhere, but its definitely more well-rounded in terms of forcing driver attentiveness.
jaimex2 8y ago
I'm confused. The article seems to extrapolate that Tesla has failed in autonomous driving because it removed some lines from its Autopilot page. It's still very much in progress and progress is routinely confirmed by the company. Musk is known for blowing timelines but they do get delivered. When it talks about "old approach" I'm again confused. No one else crowd sources driving data from a real world fleet. They have a unique unsupervised learning datasource from shadowing drivers. As for attentiveness. I don't see how drivers not paying attention is any different to mobile phone use. Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an assistant. Saying it will kill people is like blaming phones for drivers texting while driving and getting killed. These people die because they are breaking the law and not in control of their vehicle.
- g6nhe9twPd66 8y ago
  > Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an assistant. Yep, hence why this article is just clickbait for Tesla haters. Every Tesla owner is fully aware that it's not self-driving in the sense that you can take a nap.
  - jaimex2 8y ago
    Arse Technica indeed.
- deleted 8y ago
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woodandsteel 8y ago
Tesla has taken on so many things that have never been done before and succeeded, it would not be surprising if it failed at one of them.
agumonkey 8y ago
Are there efforts to invert the problem ? instead of fully independent vehicles, having a bit of road signaling system (a reincarnation of 50s US embedded radio track).
Shivetya 8y ago
TM3 owner, car has EAP. I have the option to buy FSD for two thousand but haven't jumped. I not only don't believe it but I don't have a need for it. Now it might be useful down the road for resale. That being said, two thoughts. First, if they want me to buy it then demo it in passive mode in my car. That is, there is space where the current speed limit is shown. Use that space and below that to show what signs and signals it has seen recently and the order of importance. Currently it does not see speed limit signs and it that is wholly FSD territory then Tesla is overcharging compared to other systems. Second, just at a stand still cars around me jump and I am not sure it sees stationary cars when I am driving. The best example I have is a two lane road through a subdivision I usually take, the outer lane is a long turning lane but people tend to stop there to let kids out for the water park. I cannot recall my car showing a car when someone is loading/unloading kids but it does see cars moving in that lane when I over take them. So is it just going by too fast for the stopped car in the lane over to register? It knows its a lane. I am not sure but I will wait to see how it develops.
jayess 8y ago
If self-driving can navigate US streets fully autonomously, even in bad weather, that will be impressive. Now transplant that to just about anywhere else in the world, and it will be impossible. Mexico City, Rome, Buenos Aires. Hah, no chance.
abbbacccus 8y ago
I am still trying to figure out what started and sustained the enormous self-driving car hype of the last few years. I understand why people who don't know much about technology would buy into it, but I don't understand why so many relatively tech-savvy people have bought into it and why huge amounts of money have been invested into it. It should be obvious - and should have been obvious when the hype started, as well - that to create fully self-driving cars that can operate as well as a competent human driver in a full spectrum of real road situations would require solving extremely difficult technical problems that are nowhere near solved and that cannot necessarily be solved any time soon simply by throwing money at them. So what explains the hype and the investment money? Out of the people responsible for the hype, what fraction were/are merely deluded and what fraction were/are lying?
- justtopost 8y ago
  We desprately want it to be true, so we ignore the truth long enough to try earnastly to make it so. It the brave and ignorant charge of the new generation. Which begs the question; Is it enough to mean well and act in earnst, or is ethics reserved for those who have the luxury of self-reflection?
  - deleted 8y ago
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tbabb 8y ago
IMO Tesla does not have the hardware on the Model 3 to do full self-driving. I believe that stereopsis (multiple cameras using parallax to solve for per-pixel depth) is necessary to get a practical, well-functioning self driving system working. LIDAR is just too expensive and not good enough, but stereopsis is extremely flexible and can have extremely high angular resolution. Combine naive stereopsis with temporally-coherent sensor fusion (e.g. a well-designed Kalman filter), and I think you could have very robust ranging. Humans are already very good at this with two narrowly spaced eyes (stereopsis to 1/4 mile range is not unreasonable for a person)-- but a car is not limited to a 1.5 inch stereo baseline; it could have a stereo cameras on opposite sides of the windshield. That would hugely increase the depth sensitivity, even at moderate resolution-- parallax can be detected well below the Nyquist limit (since Nyquist cuts off frequency, but does not destroy phase). Tesla is totally failing at even the basic level of environment awareness (c.f. cars which have been driving into exit dividers), which is what I consider to be the easy part of self-driving (the hard part is getting the machine to participate in a nonverbal social environment, which is what the roadway is). Rumor has it that Teslas can't detect obstacles far enough ahead to avoid them at more than 30mph-- absolutely abysmal, if true. If it were me, I would put cameras on the Tesla windshield in this pattern: xXoO OoXx Where x and o are long-range and wide-field cameras, and caps and lowercase are dynamically exposure-adjusted to capture both brights and darks. Each pair has the largest possible parallax baseline. And I would do a big, fat sensor fusion on all eight of them to get a high-res, depth-augmented HDR map of the surroundings. No fancy, expensive sensors. Just a large number of cheap cameras and sophisticated software. Maybe do some tricks with cycling 'attention' or multi-res hierarchies to keep the computation load down and realtime. Tesla has only three cameras with different FOVs and a very narrow baseline-- I doubt they are doing stereopsis. And I don't think they can do the job without it.
_pmf_ 8y ago
It also has a factory automation strategy that other companies abandoned decades ago.
skwog 8y ago
ITT: Hacker News devolves into Slashdot https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spent/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spe...

168 points by close04 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

"Self-driving cars also benefit from lidar sensors, and the best ones cost thousands—if not tens of thousands—of dollars each. That's too expensive for an upgrade to a customer-owned vehicle. But the economics are more viable for a driverless taxi service, since the self-driving system replaces an expensive human taxi driver." That's probably the crucial point. For now, lidar is needed for safe operation, and too expensive for mass deployment in private cars.

alkonaut 8y ago
Commercial (not even taxi, but transport) will be the first to be autonomous because of the larger savings possible. That we'll see useful autonomy for a $50k car driven by individuals, rather than in a $1M transport vehicle operated by a huge logistics company isn't likely.
ec109685 8y ago
What is your evidence that lidar is needed for safe operation?

syntaxing 8y ago

Not having LiDAR for anything over level 3 self-driving capabilities seems like a very bad idea...Computer vision right now just does not have the spatial awareness that you need for self driving capabilities. I wish Tesla would work on something similar to the Kinect v3 but for long range (above 20 m).

close04 8y ago
Elon insists being theoretically right is the same as being practically right. So for example he uses the theoretically perfectly functional normal vision that humans use even if the practical implementation of today simply cannot reach the same results.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  You think Elon Musk doesn't think there's any difference between theory and practice? What makes you think that? And what does it meant to be "practically right" about the future? I don't understand how you could be right in practice about something that hasn't happened yet.
leesec 8y ago
Having LiDAR in any car for self driving seems like a prohibitively expensive idea though. For instance: See how no company has released a commercial product with LiDAR. And I definitely think Computer Vision will get better before LiDAR gets cost competitive.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  I agree. However, suppose the opposite: Suppose LiDAR gets cheap first. Like, I don't know, $1000 per unit and compact enough to not be a big burden on the rest of the vehicle. Tesla charges $5000 for the FSD add-on. In principle, they could easily afford to retrofit vehicles with the cheap LiDAR plus maintain any advantages the full computer vision system would add (such as identifying vehicle types to assist in predictive behavior modeling and avoidance strategies). So trying to go the full Computer Vision (with ancillary radar) route actually has pretty low opportunity cost for Tesla. Another thing: I wonder how much simply much-improved geolocation could help? That failure from last year of driving right into a (failed) collision attenuator (where an off-ramp split off) could've been avoided simply by having high confidence, half-meter-or-better geolocation (from GPS, cell, IMU, etc fusion) and good mapping. And with good mapping/geolocation combined with other sensors, the sensors could focus on identifying changes to the expected road condition, perhaps increasing their robustness. (and when networked, they could use sensing from other vehicles ahead of the current vehicle to assist in navigation as well)
  - leesec 8y ago
    AFAIK all the big companies working on this problem include high-definition mapping as a major component. The problem is gathering that data without having an actual LiDAR. So some companies like Waymo will literally just have cars with LiDARs drive all around every street and map it for them. This is great but means they're limited by when they travelled the road and conditions at the time. Ideally, you have a mapping system that is constantly updating (every time your fleet drives by something new like construction on the road it auto-updates the map). Comma.ai is working on a vision+GPS Kalman filter solution along these lines up to 10 cm accuracy. I'd guess Tesla is as well. And then yes, after that the vision would be primarily for localization.
alkonaut 8y ago
Regardless of whether cameras or lidar win out, just consider the fact that back up cameras already exist on tons of modern cars, and the solution to the environment issues of these cameras is one of: a) fold it out when you put the car in reverse, so it's always ice-free b) ignore this problem. It's covered in ice for months. This is a simple problem in comparison, and neither of the above solutions would work for a camera used for autonomous driving.
- ec109685 8y ago
  If the camera is broken, Tesla will obviously not enable auto driving. It has a steering wheel for a reason.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    If it’s “broken” every morning for months in winter climates like the cameras I mention, then people there won’t pay a premium for the capability. And if it doesn’t keep itself ice free it will risk going from uncovered to covered in seconds. Cameras need to be ice/snow/rain proof in the sense that they stay clear of it while driving.
    - ec109685 8y ago
      What about a heated camera lens?

cbames89 8y ago

This is a (perhaps short-term) failure of first principles reasoning. Elon's known to favor thinking about things from first principles, and there's no theoretical reason that vision can't work. However, technical limitations might take a while to overcome.

deleted 8y ago
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ForHackernews 8y ago
Vision alone fails pretty frequently even with a human brain and 700 million years of evolution behind it. Count me as a skeptic that cameras + computer will produce a safe self-driving system.
- munificent 8y ago
  > 700 million years of evolution behind it Sure, but only about 0.000014% of that time occurred while cars existed. It's not like we evolved to control big metal objects hurtling down artificially made flat surfaces.
  - carimura 8y ago
    ...with devices that we're emotionally and physically addicted to flashing and making noises that are designed to ignite a flurry of activity in our reptilian brains sending the message PAY ATTENTION TO ME IMMEDIATELY!
  - mikeash 8y ago
    On the other hand, while our brains did not evolve to control cars, our cars were designed to be controlled by our brains. A system designed from scratch for autonomous vehicles would look radically different.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    And even then, accidents where all parties are following the rules, e.g. being sober, undistracted by something in the car, giving enough stopping distance to the vehicle you're following, going the appropriate speed for the visual and road conditions, &c aren't the norm. Most accidents happen because somebody was irresponsible, usually blatantly.

whttheuuu 8y ago

ITT: people who think they know better than the company that has been working on this stuff day in and day out for years lol.

petra 8y ago
Well, it's a great way to inflate the stock price. Much better than saying "We'll be just another car company, when self-driving arrives".
- leesec 8y ago
  Well they also have billions of miles of data from people who have actually drove their car hands free, feet free. No one even has close to this data.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Do they have more data than Waymo? That doesn't seem completely clear to me. They certainly have more vehicles on the road, but I assume they are driven many fewer hours per day.
legohead 8y ago
This thread has like 4 posts. You're being a bit presumptuous and hostile, no?
ForHackernews 8y ago
Maybe Tesla knows better than Google and Uber and GM and Toyota and Volvo... Or maybe they've gone down a blind alley in their rush to look like they were first to market.
pjkundert 8y ago
... working on this stuff day and night ... —- in California. I’ve been driving for 40+ years, millions of km, 1/2 during winter. Now, Elon is a Saskatchewan boy, so he should know better. Perhaps he’s forgotten. Winter driving is at best 1/2 vision dependent, often much less. Many times, you have to actively ignore your vision (everything you see is “moving” sideways). Quite often, you’re modulating your throttle to maintain a tiny ratio of +/- acceleration that maintains static friction; as soon as 1 or more contact patches achieve dynamic friction, you’re entering a spin due to yaw forces induced by your other driven wheels. Much of the time, the road surface adhesion characteristics are best detected by sheen, vibration, sound and guesswork/prediction based on temperature, sunlight, recent weather, etc. Unless the vehicle has sound, vibration, and vision sensor integration — it cannot hold a candle to human driving, except in the most trivial driving scenarios. Winter is a complete non-starter for any autonomous driving technology that I am aware of. I don’t know if Lidar would really help much. It can’t punch through heavy rain/snow, at least not as well as radar anyway. Maybe it would help in trivial driving conditions. I think vision, sound, vibration, and radar with a powerful ANN trained by professional all-season winter drivers in challenging conditions might be useful, and eventually even good. It should be able to perform super-challenging evasion and recovery maneuvers that could save lives!

wurst_case 8y ago

I wonder, though, if this had more to do with how much they are actually investing in AI vs electric car tech. Surely Tesla is an EV company first and an AI company second. I know they like to brag about their autopilot but it eems to me that having a lower cost car is more important than having an expensive lidar system on board.

Skunkleton 8y ago
Most car companies make lots of money on add-on features. The base model couldn't be super profitable, but the base model with the self-driving package probably makes some good money. Or it would if the didn't have to keep doing recalls to upgrade the hardware.

pascoej 8y ago

Anthony Levandowski seems to have the same opinion. I'm a big believer in vision, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Robotbeat 8y ago

Interestingly, for air travel, there's another strategy: Rely entirely on GPS and commanding from air traffic control (with systems and structure in place to minimize damage in case those systems fail or are insufficient). That's what Zipline uses for their fully operational medical delivery system in Rwanda. The drones are completely blind, directly, but they travel in pre-defined flight paths and communicate with one another and follow directions from flight control. For self-driving cars, a similar situation may be extremely good GPS geolocation combined with network-wide sensor fusion and mapping. In principle, you could even do real-time optical or synthetic aperture radar from orbit or via persistent aircraft to allow the central controller to identify hazards and obstacles and to update maps in real time without much at all happening on-board except low-latency reactions. Most highways already have much of their length covered by cameras for the local Department of Transportation, and even many intersections and sidestreets have surveillance cameras. A low latency connection to that system, upgraded with higher fidelity, could significantly help autonomous systems. Might be another very helpful public good for cities to provide, much like GPS is provided. ...and on the engineering side, you can have vehicles designed specifically to reduce pedestrian injury, such as not having those large, boxy grilles on SUV. Such things are almost entirely cosmetic and reduce efficiency, so Tesla doesn't have them on their cars. Going beyond that, external airbags may help as well. Zipline uses a foam body and a fail-safe parachute to stop the vehicle if there's a problem.

kec 8y ago
If a plane can only get a GPS fix to within a 15m radius that's no big deal, whereas if a car has a 15m fix it's running down pedestrians on the sidewalk. Planes also don't have a habit of flying in tunnels or urban canyons where obtaining a gps fix is even more problematic.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Indeed. But this is an addressable problem. The new GPS satellites (GPS III) have just started launching (on a SpaceX rocket in December 2018), and they should triple the accuracy: https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/what-is-gps-iii-and-how-will-it-stand-apart/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/what-is-gps-iii-and-ho... But even before that's complete: High precision GPS (i.e. with compensation for atmospheric effects) can get better than 10cm accuracy by tracking the carrier wave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic Single-digit-centimeter-accuracy is possible near GPS signal compensating base stations (~20km). This level of precision is regularly used by surveyors. There are several options for improving geolocation beyond inside-out (i.e. vision or lidar) tracking.

EngineerBetter 8y ago

The big missing piece is not LIDAR, but causal reasoning. Autopilot and similar 'AI' cannot reason; it doesn't have a mental model to ponder 'what if' and can't use counter-factuals to ponder what would happen if it didn't do something. It's just glorified pattern matching currently. Reading Judea Pearl's The Book Of Why certainly sobered my outlook on AI.

Skunkleton 8y ago
Isn't that more of an indictment of the self-driving industry as a whole? In Tesla's case they are missing that, but they are also missing LIDAR (or some other thing to fill in that technological gap).
andreyk 8y ago
Well, that's not necessarily true... self driving in particular usually uses planning, which is basically all about 'what if'. But it's true this is relevant to AI in general.

CPLX 8y ago

It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called lying.

RivieraKid 8y ago
It wouldn't be the first.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xeromal 8y ago
If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.
- fastball 8y ago
  You could almost call him the successful / less pathological Elizabeth Holmes. He promises the future before it has arrived, but unlike Theranos, he actually delivers a product. That product might be inferior to what was promised, but it is an improvement on the status quo nonetheless. And once released, Musk does not lie about its capabilities.
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    > > "We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said during a January earnings call. That statement certainly isn't true for any meaningful value of 'self-driving'.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
    This is on the order page for the Model 3 right now: > Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. Really. Except that feature hasn’t shipped and there’s no ETA. I call that a lie. I appreciate what Tesla is doing to the industry but I wish they wouldn’t be so dishonest in their marketing.

martythemaniak 8y ago

There's a few things to keep in mind when discussing self-driving tech. 1) Self driving tech doesn't exist today. It simply does not. There's lots of people working on it and they are using different strategies, but it is not clear how long it will take, which strategy is technically superior, which strategy is more economical, etc etc. There's a lot of very strong opinions floating around (LIDAR is essential! No, vision and lots of data! No, 3D maps or bust, etc etc). It is important to keep in mind that we don't know the future, the people busy inventing it don't know how things will play out and outside observers know even less. The tech industry is littered with strong opinions which have aged terribly. 2) Musks's first principles aside, Tesla was never going to do LIDAR. They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. If they had gone with LIDAR and started a research program like Uber, they would have started years after Google, with less data, far fewer resources and absolutely technical advantage. It is far, far more likely that this program would have bankrupted them than beat google. In essence, whether Musk's first-principles is real or a sales pitch doesn't matter. Tesla's choice was their current approach, or nothing at all.

Someone1234 8y ago
> They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. Can you explore that a little? We have consumer products that contain LIDAR already (e.g. Neato Vacuums). The sensors no longer cost thousands of dollars, and could supplement other types of inputs to provide a broader picture of the road.
- Gladdyu 8y ago
  Yes, but you can't install a LIDAR over a software update. They've been promising full self-driving mode and getting closer by updating the software - the owners that already have the current car won't be to thrilled if they get cut-off from the state-of-the-art in Tesla's self-driving tech.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago

peeters 8y ago

I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. On an airplane, autopilot means you can take your focus off of both the physical and mental act of moving the plane through the air, and if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you wouldn't have a few seconds to react. In a car, Tesla's Autopilot simply doesn't give you that. If you are reading and your autopilot exits, you could be dead before your focus can return to the road. Planes fly in wide open spaces far from hazards. Cars drive in busy, tight spaces where a fraction of a second lapse in control can be fatal. I get that Tesla's implementation is analogous to what you find on a jet. But the environments make them very different. So start by dropping the name. It's not auto pilot, it's handsfree driving.

0815test 8y ago
> I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. ...In a car, Tesla's system simply doesn't give you that [taking your focus off] Yes, exactly. It's a level-2 ADAS - it's about helping you deliver correct inputs to the car, not about autonomous driving in any real sense - regardless of how advanced it might be in a technical sense, or how well-behaving in a best-case scenario! More like the fly-by-wire system in an aircraft than the "autopilot". And I know that the users are supposed to be aware of this, but Tesla's marketing on this issue is far from consistent, in all sorts of ways. They're doing their users a pretty big disservice.
- aeternus 8y ago
  I think the issue is that most people have a misconception about autopilot in a plane due to movies. Real autopilots don't work like that, they are typically extremely simple and in many cases, mechanical PID loops. 99% of all autopilots have almost zero intelligence nor electronic sensors of any kind. Only the best of the best, like CAT3 autoland systems are anything close to what you see in the movies.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    The term autopilot was first used in 1914. Over a hundred years of the general public being educated about what that word means. So pretty sure it predates its use in movies.

Animats 8y ago

Waymo keeps plugging away. Each year, for the last few years, the number of miles between disconnects they report to the CA DMV has doubled. Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product. Nobody else is even close. This problem is slowly being solved, by normal engineering practices. The "fake it til you make it" players are being left behind. Uber has been shown to be totally incompetent. Tesla really just has a good lane follower and an mediocre car follower. Apple has been trying to hand-wave by talking about "significant disconnects" vs. the all disconnects DMV requires them to report. The LIDAR industry is struggling, but there is progress. Quanergy seems to have been mostly hype.[1] Continental, the big European auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes and sells a good but expensive flash LIDAR used in DoD and space applications. They packaged it up for automotive use, and are waiting for the self driving industry to catch up. That technology uses exotic indium-gallium-arsenide sensor ICs, which are expensive in small quantities but would probably be affordable if they could sell a few million a year. This looks like a problem that's being solved. Just not fast enough for startups used to quick payoffs in software. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-billion-dollar-autonomous-vehicle-startup-lost-its-way https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...

perl4ever 8y ago
"Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product." I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra-rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse. I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity
- cbhl 8y ago
  I'm way less worried about this than when Waymo was originally called the Google Self-Driving Car Project. If Uber and Tesla continue with their current plans, they will have enough accidents that self-driving cars being in accidents will cease being headline news. They just become an actuarial math problem, just like regular car insurance is today. (This is my opinion and not that of my employer.)

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

> "We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said during a January earnings call. Except for obstacles that coincide with whitelisted locations their sensors can't handle. It's only a matter of time before someone dies because of that hack.

devy 8y ago

The top editor promoted comment[1] on the article summed up very well. The attention problem is well known in engineering. It is very hard to get a human to concentrate on something that will turn up good more than 99% of the time, even when there's serious or fatal consequences of failure. Trains are the classic example - tracks are amost always clear, signals are almost always correct which means you have to devise all sorts of systems to keep the driver alert. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-strategy-is-outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/?comments=1&post=36970595#comment-36970595 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-str...

justapassenger 8y ago
Sadly, Silicon Valley companies don't think that best practices of engineering apply to them. It's all about disruption, both with products and safety.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  "We're going to apply well known engineering to an existing problem" doesn't sell VCs as much as "We're going to disrupt things and launch satellites illegally"
ec109685 8y ago
I am not sure how Tesla’s system is much different than Waymo’s. In both cases, the cars can steer themselves under limited circumstances. Getting to full auto driving in crazy situations like single lane roads or unprotected left turns will take a long time. But using it in the situations it can handle today is very useful. At least with the Tesla, you can actually drive in places it doesn’t support auto pilot, unlike Waymo. The Tesla autosteer won’t engage.
- devy 8y ago
  > I am not sure how Tesla’s system is much different than Waymo’s. Waymo's ultimate self-driving vehicle will not have a steering wheel (as seen in their early prototypes) as the vehicle will take human out of the driving equation. Tesla will probably always have one in the foreseeable future (as they are tackling autonomous driving an drive-assist system). That's the big difference to me.

haberman 8y ago

I got a Tesla last year. I love it. But it's been painfully obvious to me that Autopilot is nowhere close to something that will let you take a nap. Often when I'm stopped at a light, cars that are standing completely still will appear to be constantly moving forwards and backwards on the display. My best theory so far is that the Tesla's spatial model is getting thrown off by the other car's turn signal. This does not inspire confidence. In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice in bad traffic), but autosteer is flaky at best.

FireBeyond 8y ago
> In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice in bad traffic) Which is great but hardly unique to Tesla. Every major manufacturer out there offers adaptive cruise control. My car even recognizes the difference between in traffic stop-and-go/rush hour, and "queue" mode (exiting parking lots after events, etc).

zaroth 8y ago

I’ve read so many of these articles obviously written by someone who has no hands-on experience with the Tesla Autopilot and what it actually does for the driving experience. Maybe Tesla will get to a point where my TM3 will drive me to work while I nap, or use my phone. One thing that’s pretty amazing is that if they can get to that point, it will come as a free automatic software update or an available for purchase hardware upgrade on my current car. This month my car will be getting 5% faster acceleration from an OTA update - how cool is that? But right now, the reality is that I can engage AutoPilot on the highway and it immediately and dramatically changes the driving experience. Instead of focusing on steering the car, I am focused on situational awareness. I am not just looking down my lane, I am looking at the cars around me, who is passing who, what might be coming up around that bend, that guy on his phone next to me, etc. I can look at over drivers and assess whether they are paying attention and avoid them if needed. Because the car is actually lane keeping — not what everyone else calls lane keeping which (surprise) is a total lie - but actively steering the car in the lane around curves and centering the car in the lane probably more precisely than I would be if I were steering manually. I strongly believe, if AutoPilot never truly advanced much beyond its current capability, and as the currently functionality becomes more widespread, we will wonder 15 years from now, how did people operate their vehicles without this level of assistance? How could you be properly aware of your surroundings if you had to be so preoccupied with minor steering inputs? If you use your phone and watch a movie or put on makeup while driving, you are breaking the law and endangering yourself and those around you. Every time a new technology comes to cars people say it will distract, or hypnotize, or lull drivers into distraction (see wipers, radios, automatic transmissions, original cruise control) and anyone who has actually driven with AutoPilot knows this feature is no different. As a Tesla owner I enjoy and appreciate Tesla’s real-world approach to self-driving and it makes my life better and my drive safer. Thank you Tesla.

ypzhang2 8y ago
Issue is Autopilot is more of a feature that is geared towards convenience. You are doing all of the driver attention work, but someone who activates Autopilot isn't required to. I think a lot of the argument against Tesla is that Autopilot isn't doing enough in that arena. GM's Super Cruise is a lot more feature-full with regards to driver attentiveness. It might not be as useful in terms of being able to be used everywhere, but its definitely more well-rounded in terms of forcing driver attentiveness.

jaimex2 8y ago

I'm confused. The article seems to extrapolate that Tesla has failed in autonomous driving because it removed some lines from its Autopilot page. It's still very much in progress and progress is routinely confirmed by the company. Musk is known for blowing timelines but they do get delivered. When it talks about "old approach" I'm again confused. No one else crowd sources driving data from a real world fleet. They have a unique unsupervised learning datasource from shadowing drivers. As for attentiveness. I don't see how drivers not paying attention is any different to mobile phone use. Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an assistant. Saying it will kill people is like blaming phones for drivers texting while driving and getting killed. These people die because they are breaking the law and not in control of their vehicle.

g6nhe9twPd66 8y ago
> Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an assistant. Yep, hence why this article is just clickbait for Tesla haters. Every Tesla owner is fully aware that it's not self-driving in the sense that you can take a nap.
- jaimex2 8y ago
  Arse Technica indeed.
deleted 8y ago
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woodandsteel 8y ago

Tesla has taken on so many things that have never been done before and succeeded, it would not be surprising if it failed at one of them.

agumonkey 8y ago

Are there efforts to invert the problem ? instead of fully independent vehicles, having a bit of road signaling system (a reincarnation of 50s US embedded radio track).

Shivetya 8y ago

TM3 owner, car has EAP. I have the option to buy FSD for two thousand but haven't jumped. I not only don't believe it but I don't have a need for it. Now it might be useful down the road for resale. That being said, two thoughts. First, if they want me to buy it then demo it in passive mode in my car. That is, there is space where the current speed limit is shown. Use that space and below that to show what signs and signals it has seen recently and the order of importance. Currently it does not see speed limit signs and it that is wholly FSD territory then Tesla is overcharging compared to other systems. Second, just at a stand still cars around me jump and I am not sure it sees stationary cars when I am driving. The best example I have is a two lane road through a subdivision I usually take, the outer lane is a long turning lane but people tend to stop there to let kids out for the water park. I cannot recall my car showing a car when someone is loading/unloading kids but it does see cars moving in that lane when I over take them. So is it just going by too fast for the stopped car in the lane over to register? It knows its a lane. I am not sure but I will wait to see how it develops.

jayess 8y ago

If self-driving can navigate US streets fully autonomously, even in bad weather, that will be impressive. Now transplant that to just about anywhere else in the world, and it will be impossible. Mexico City, Rome, Buenos Aires. Hah, no chance.

abbbacccus 8y ago

I am still trying to figure out what started and sustained the enormous self-driving car hype of the last few years. I understand why people who don't know much about technology would buy into it, but I don't understand why so many relatively tech-savvy people have bought into it and why huge amounts of money have been invested into it. It should be obvious - and should have been obvious when the hype started, as well - that to create fully self-driving cars that can operate as well as a competent human driver in a full spectrum of real road situations would require solving extremely difficult technical problems that are nowhere near solved and that cannot necessarily be solved any time soon simply by throwing money at them. So what explains the hype and the investment money? Out of the people responsible for the hype, what fraction were/are merely deluded and what fraction were/are lying?

justtopost 8y ago
We desprately want it to be true, so we ignore the truth long enough to try earnastly to make it so. It the brave and ignorant charge of the new generation. Which begs the question; Is it enough to mean well and act in earnst, or is ethics reserved for those who have the luxury of self-reflection?
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tbabb 8y ago

IMO Tesla does not have the hardware on the Model 3 to do full self-driving. I believe that stereopsis (multiple cameras using parallax to solve for per-pixel depth) is necessary to get a practical, well-functioning self driving system working. LIDAR is just too expensive and not good enough, but stereopsis is extremely flexible and can have extremely high angular resolution. Combine naive stereopsis with temporally-coherent sensor fusion (e.g. a well-designed Kalman filter), and I think you could have very robust ranging. Humans are already very good at this with two narrowly spaced eyes (stereopsis to 1/4 mile range is not unreasonable for a person)-- but a car is not limited to a 1.5 inch stereo baseline; it could have a stereo cameras on opposite sides of the windshield. That would hugely increase the depth sensitivity, even at moderate resolution-- parallax can be detected well below the Nyquist limit (since Nyquist cuts off frequency, but does not destroy phase). Tesla is totally failing at even the basic level of environment awareness (c.f. cars which have been driving into exit dividers), which is what I consider to be the easy part of self-driving (the hard part is getting the machine to participate in a nonverbal social environment, which is what the roadway is). Rumor has it that Teslas can't detect obstacles far enough ahead to avoid them at more than 30mph-- absolutely abysmal, if true. If it were me, I would put cameras on the Tesla windshield in this pattern: xXoO OoXx Where x and o are long-range and wide-field cameras, and caps and lowercase are dynamically exposure-adjusted to capture both brights and darks. Each pair has the largest possible parallax baseline. And I would do a big, fat sensor fusion on all eight of them to get a high-res, depth-augmented HDR map of the surroundings. No fancy, expensive sensors. Just a large number of cheap cameras and sophisticated software. Maybe do some tricks with cycling 'attention' or multi-res hierarchies to keep the computation load down and realtime. Tesla has only three cameras with different FOVs and a very narrow baseline-- I doubt they are doing stereopsis. And I don't think they can do the job without it.

_pmf_ 8y ago

It also has a factory automation strategy that other companies abandoned decades ago.

skwog 8y ago

ITT: Hacker News devolves into Slashdot https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spent/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spe...