4 ms·

An L2 driving agent was never the goal. An L2 car isn't a self driving car no matter what Elon says.

ajross 6y ago
Seems like an "L2 car" is what the market wants and can get, though. Elon may not say what you want him to say, but he's selling these things like hotcakes. Broadly: that's seems like senseless pedantry to me. Tesla owners, even numerate serious ones who understand the problem area, know when their car is "driving itself" and when it isn't. Quoting industry jargon to explain to people how the product isn't akshooally doing what it clearly is isn't going to win many arguments.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Tesla is L2 because it's 99.5% safe and requires supervision for the last 0.5%. People are bad at that kind of supervisory task-- they see it work a couple of times and stop paying attention. And it doesn't get to me taking a nap in the car and ending up at Disneyland-- at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    A long drive slightly less fatiguing is better than a short drive in a limited area of operation. This, I think, is why Tesla will eventually succeed. Every Tesla sold is gathering data about its environment and phoning home - we already know that. So whether you have Autopilot or not, Tesla gets data for its Full Self-Driving Capability; when you swerve to avoid a possum at 12:47 a.m. because you've been working all day and night and into the morning and you really need some Whataburger, or, if you must... In-N-Out..., some engineer somewhere at Tesla can look at that event, see why you swerved out of lane, recognize it was a possum, and then jot that down into his or her notebook... twwooo... forrrtty-seeeven... ayyy emmm... driver swwwerved... to avoid... possum..., integrate possum-avoidance behavior into Autopilot for next release...
    - mlyle 6y ago
      That would be valid if Tesla is really collecting all of that data. But the people who have done analysis of what the cars sends back say that what is actually sent is very limited statistics on times, locations, and general characteristics of disengagements (speed, direction, list of detected targets, etc). This is doubtlessly useful but it's not something you can just drop into training a neural network or even be sure exactly what the issue was. They can write query strings for very specific situations they're interested in, too, and receive video frames. On the other hand, Waymo is gathering vision data on every drive, and ground truth LIDAR data.
    - lupire 6y ago
      If it were that easy then Tesla could have just bought dash cam video from drivers of all cars, and have far more data.
  - ajross 6y ago
    > at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing ...which sounds like kind of a killer feature to me? (Like, it really is -- I may be within days of pulling the trigger on a Model Y). Can you walk back and explain how making long drives more fun is somehow a disappointment?
    - mlyle 6y ago
      It's a win. But-- if it's just driving freeway miles and lanekeeping and doing basic collision avoidance-- there's a lot of cars doing that and Tesla is in first place but not strongly differentiated from GM, etc. Other cars can provide you this "less fatiguing road trip" experience. If you want it to actually drive and be able to remove your attention, well, something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI makes the present limits rather clear.
      - tibbydudeza 6y ago
        Pretty crappy results even for a beta - left turn into oncoming traffic in a clear highway seems like a standard test case.
- michaelt 6y ago
  The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) Pretty much every car vendor already has L2 autonomy [1] - Google's not going to extract tens of billions of dollars by selling the industry something they already have. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level_2_automated_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level...
  - ajross 6y ago
    > The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) On the contrary, it proves that the other thing doesn't exist. Which is sort of important to analysis. I know that's glib. My point was the pontification about what "self driving autonomy" is or should be or might be or is supposed to be or (my personal peeve) "is supposed to be called" is essentially meaningless when we could be discussing what is actually happening in a vibrant and interesting market. I get it. People think about this stuff in the abstract. But it's not an abstract problem anymore, and I think arguments like yours are very much missing the forest for the trees. Roll back the clock to, say, 1985 and let's imagine we're talking about network technology. Elon is selling a working TCP/IP stack while you're yelling about the fact that akshooally it doesn't conform to the proper OSI layers and so can't ever be a successful network. How did history work out for the OSI pedants? Same principle.
    - davidcbc 6y ago
      Elon is selling a "Full Self Driving car" that is not full self driving at all by Tesla's own admission. It isn't doing the thing it is advertised to do. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo... https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self-driving-beta-is-just-laughably-bad-and-potentially-dangerous/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self... Calling an L2 car "full self driving" is incredibly irresponsible. I personally hope Musk faces consequences when yet another Tesla kills someone because of false advertising.

Seems like an "L2 car" is what the market wants and can get, though. Elon may not say what you want him to say, but he's selling these things like hotcakes. Broadly: that's seems like senseless pedantry to me. Tesla owners, even numerate serious ones who understand the problem area, know when their car is "driving itself" and when it isn't. Quoting industry jargon to explain to people how the product isn't akshooally doing what it clearly is isn't going to win many arguments.

mlyle 6y ago
Tesla is L2 because it's 99.5% safe and requires supervision for the last 0.5%. People are bad at that kind of supervisory task-- they see it work a couple of times and stop paying attention. And it doesn't get to me taking a nap in the car and ending up at Disneyland-- at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  A long drive slightly less fatiguing is better than a short drive in a limited area of operation. This, I think, is why Tesla will eventually succeed. Every Tesla sold is gathering data about its environment and phoning home - we already know that. So whether you have Autopilot or not, Tesla gets data for its Full Self-Driving Capability; when you swerve to avoid a possum at 12:47 a.m. because you've been working all day and night and into the morning and you really need some Whataburger, or, if you must... In-N-Out..., some engineer somewhere at Tesla can look at that event, see why you swerved out of lane, recognize it was a possum, and then jot that down into his or her notebook... twwooo... forrrtty-seeeven... ayyy emmm... driver swwwerved... to avoid... possum..., integrate possum-avoidance behavior into Autopilot for next release...
  - mlyle 6y ago
    That would be valid if Tesla is really collecting all of that data. But the people who have done analysis of what the cars sends back say that what is actually sent is very limited statistics on times, locations, and general characteristics of disengagements (speed, direction, list of detected targets, etc). This is doubtlessly useful but it's not something you can just drop into training a neural network or even be sure exactly what the issue was. They can write query strings for very specific situations they're interested in, too, and receive video frames. On the other hand, Waymo is gathering vision data on every drive, and ground truth LIDAR data.
  - lupire 6y ago
    If it were that easy then Tesla could have just bought dash cam video from drivers of all cars, and have far more data.
- ajross 6y ago
  > at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing ...which sounds like kind of a killer feature to me? (Like, it really is -- I may be within days of pulling the trigger on a Model Y). Can you walk back and explain how making long drives more fun is somehow a disappointment?
  - mlyle 6y ago
    It's a win. But-- if it's just driving freeway miles and lanekeeping and doing basic collision avoidance-- there's a lot of cars doing that and Tesla is in first place but not strongly differentiated from GM, etc. Other cars can provide you this "less fatiguing road trip" experience. If you want it to actually drive and be able to remove your attention, well, something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI makes the present limits rather clear.
    - tibbydudeza 6y ago
      Pretty crappy results even for a beta - left turn into oncoming traffic in a clear highway seems like a standard test case.
michaelt 6y ago
The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) Pretty much every car vendor already has L2 autonomy [1] - Google's not going to extract tens of billions of dollars by selling the industry something they already have. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level_2_automated_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level...
- ajross 6y ago
  > The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) On the contrary, it proves that the other thing doesn't exist. Which is sort of important to analysis. I know that's glib. My point was the pontification about what "self driving autonomy" is or should be or might be or is supposed to be or (my personal peeve) "is supposed to be called" is essentially meaningless when we could be discussing what is actually happening in a vibrant and interesting market. I get it. People think about this stuff in the abstract. But it's not an abstract problem anymore, and I think arguments like yours are very much missing the forest for the trees. Roll back the clock to, say, 1985 and let's imagine we're talking about network technology. Elon is selling a working TCP/IP stack while you're yelling about the fact that akshooally it doesn't conform to the proper OSI layers and so can't ever be a successful network. How did history work out for the OSI pedants? Same principle.
  - davidcbc 6y ago
    Elon is selling a "Full Self Driving car" that is not full self driving at all by Tesla's own admission. It isn't doing the thing it is advertised to do. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo... https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self-driving-beta-is-just-laughably-bad-and-potentially-dangerous/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self... Calling an L2 car "full self driving" is incredibly irresponsible. I personally hope Musk faces consequences when yet another Tesla kills someone because of false advertising.