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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Unveil part 2 is "super next-level".

And the "steering controls and system feels like a spaceship"

And Musk tweeted a little while ago about getting a special team of Software Engineers reporting directly to him for self-driving that was "top priority" within the company.

And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production.

At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous? (and maybe you'll have to take over sometimes, but I'm thinking 95%+ of the time it will be driving itself)

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> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?

There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.

Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.

Why? What specifically is hard about narrow streets? That actually sounds like the kind of thing a self driving car could excel at.

The bigger problem, is imagine, would be weather. I dunno how completely they've solved that problem yet.

Oftentimes there's a two-way street when only one car can pass. Sometimes there are signs for that, but not always. And sometimes you need to check mirror to see if car is approaching from behind the corner before you can proceed.

One of many examples would be a single lane street which goes up a hill and around the corner. Although there is only space for one car you can drive both directions. Rather often than not you have two cars meeting in the middle and then one car has to drive back to let the other car pass. This is pretty difficult to do as a human and I am not sure how an autonomous car would do that.

The same way it goes forward?

2 autonomous cars could negotiate which has the shorter trip, an autonomous car encountering a human could default to timidity.

When a human messes up its a cheap accident, just bad human judgment call number one billion.

When a self driving car messes up it'll be a very expensive lawsuit for pain and suffering and psychological trauma of not being in control while the accident unfolds and surely its all the mfgrs fault for having a software bug.

Its not so much the physical characteristics of being narrow as being a location where many accidents happen compared to an interstate-class road.

I doubt that'll be anything like what the outcome of an accident involving a self driving car will be like.

I recently drove in freezing storm. Whole frontend was covered in icy-slushy mixture. Parking sensors were freaking out and working totally randomly in such conditions.

If I ever get an autonomous car, manual driving is a must-have feature :|

I once had a car that didn't work at all when it was below about 32 or above about 70.

Keeping my horse was a must for those situations.

I once rode in a plane that could only go a few hundred miles before refueling.

Keeping my car was a must for those situations.

I once rode in a train that could only go ~60 mph.

Keep my car was a must for those situations.

(hint, I'm talking about early stuff)

How will they negotiate a stalemate? Against a human or a non-human opponent? Humans will use headlights, gestures, eye contact.

I actually think that low speed driving and parking in very narrow streets is much easier for an autonomous system than for a person. All those obstacles are made of stone so nice juicy returns for the sensor systems. Carrying out a turn with a centimetre of clearance from a hard surface is much easier for a computer than maintaining lane discipline on a road with faded markings at high speed.

Except that it's much more likely for there to be pedestrians.

There is a 500 m long street in front of my house where it is customary that people cross it everywhere and cars are just expected to stop for the people. There are no traffic lights or pedestrian crossing or any special rules, its just that people started doing this decades ago and now it is just tradition to do this.

So now you have a long street where tons of people are crossing every 10 meters during the day because it's a quite busy shopping district.

Although cars are driving slow, it must be very hard for autonomous cars because there are people everywhere running in every direction.

Don't forget computers have vastly faster response times than people. A car going 5mph with 10ms reaction times can stop in ~1 foot. http://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distanc...

Do you want to be inside the car when it does that? It is not going to be much fun unless you are paying attention and bracing yourself, in which case I'm not sure I see the advantage of letting the computer do it for you.

You are probably overestimating the jerk from that. 5mph has (1/12)^2 = 1/144th the energy of 60mph. Passengers often don't pay attention to what's going on and breaking force is generally not enough to really mess with people.

That said, the default is not going to be stopping within 1-2 inches of pedestrians, rather it's going to gradually slow down to deal with pedestrians while trying to maintain forward progress. The point is a self driving car could be more aggressive than most people while staying safe instead of freaking out and just stopping because people are jaywalking.

You're right of course. It's hard to imagine any useful vehicle spending much of its time moving at only 5 mph, though, so I suppose I'm really imagining what such a stop would be like from a more normal travel speed like 20-25 mph.

I am picturing this more as an extreme edge case than anything else. If a person can safely do 20-25mph in an area then a self-driving car should be able to do the same thing.

It's the edge case where a car needs to cross a really high traffic area that's going to be an issue and people can't do 20mph right in front of a high traffic box store entrance etc. Further, going slow for a few hundred feet really does not take that long.

I would VASTLY prefer to be in that car than to be in a different car with a human driver and watch a person get killed by the vehicle I'm riding in.

Nobody is going to die from a 5 mph collision. It's not even likely to break any bones. At 30 mph, the chance of death is still only 5%!

There may still be reasons to prefer robot cars for low-speed environments but the probability of such a vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian is already very low, so that is not relevant to a discussion of a robot car's ability to stop very rapidly at very low speeds.

http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/HS809012.htm...

The "every direction" bit is actually something autonomous cars handle far better than humans since they can have eyes pointing in every direction. The hard part is noticing that someone waiting at a crosswalk wants you to stop so they can cross.

A lot of impact avoidance with other vehicles and pedestrians is done by communicating with looking at each other though. The easiest solution, car always yields, would just mean it will take forever to move because people will lose all respect and just treat it like a solid obstacle. Also, sometimes cars can and do pass within a few cms to humans (ok if everyone is aware of the maneuver and it's slow), would an automated system do that?

> The easiest solution, car always yields, would just mean it will take forever to move because people will lose all respect and just treat it like a solid obstacle.

I've often wondered how self-driving cars will deal with this. Imagine we reach the point where self driving cars are perceived as being guaranteed to stop before hitting a pedestrian.

This presents a lot of problems that need to be overcome. A car-jacker could rob you simply by getting an accomplice to stand in front of your car. Teenagers might start jumping in front of cars as a high-tech game of chicken. What happens when somebody steps into the road and the car brakes so hard it gives the occupants whiplash?

I'm sure all of these problems will be solved in time, but it's going to be interesting to see how!

The problem is not necessarily "obstacles made of stone." Think about lanes in the countryside where you only see grass and the possibility of a ditch to either side... I guess that is really complicated for a self-driving car to manage in each and every case as well as human does.

Yes, walls are easily located. Holes not so much. Emptiness is quite difficult to see.

One scenario that I keep thinking about all the time: traffic in most south-east asian countries like Vietnam (Hanoi for example). The streets are occupied by a mix of cars, pedestrians (+ animals) and motorcycles. Everything moves ultra close.

Must be a nightmare for every car proximity-sensor.

Lol, yeah. Asking for a self driving car programmed to follow traffic laws that can handle Saigon or Bangkok is like asking for a smart drone that can fly safely thru a tornado.

Is it? Can an experienced airplane pilot even fly safely through a tornado?

Actually, no. Speeds are low enough that almost-zero reaction time is a huge advantage, and the rules are basic swarm-like behavior (plus bigger cars have priority).

I'm not sure. In my experience, you have traffic situations where everyone around you is trying to weave in and out through the smallest gaps. The car will need to get really good at predicting behavior or drive so conservatively that all other vehicles end up passing you by.

I agree that this is a really bad example. Especially as I was in Hanoi 5 days ago.

I witnessed 2 car accidents when I was there and both were vehicles turning (slowly) and clipping motorbikes in their blind spots. Not gonna happen with a computer.

    > and it is already difficult to navigate those places
    > as a human

I don't know why a machine that has 3d perfect vision and knows exactly how big it is relative to its surroundings would be worse at this that a human bean.

Because in a lot of situations you are not alone on the road and you have to negotiate with other cars or people and decide what to do. There are a lot of single lane streets which can be passed in both directions and the car has sonehow have to deal with the incoming var on who should drive first or who drives backwards.

Meh, again, I don't know why software that's never having a bad day, never frustrated, is trained to drive defensively, and has the actual highway code programmed in to it will struggle more than Pedro will, especially given that if the other car is also autonomous then they can actually negotiate.

People always raise these issues... "I know about a tricky street that no computer could drive!" But it doesn't really matter in terms of selling autonomous cars. If autonomous driving is only enabled for the top 90% of the most autonomy-friendly routes, then only people in those areas will buy the first round of autonomous cars. Over time, AI improves, maps improve, and people put pressure on municipalities to improve roads.

But is any of that a problem for Tesla to sell a lot of autonomous cars? No. Not even a little.

It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.

How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.

So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".

Self driving cars don't use GPS, it is not reliable or granular enough.

At all? How would it drive to the mall on the other side of town without GPS?

A map, plus the assumption that it never moves without being powered on.

(I'm sure it does use GPS for navigation. But it's hypothetically possible to do without.)

Seems like it might need GPS at times, or some other means to know where it is at certain moments. Once it establishes where it is then I could see it no longer needing GPS, as it should be bright enough to keep track of location by itself using a map.

Using just dead reckoning you would pretty quickly have issues with accumulated error.

Apparently not. There's a pretty fascinating story about Etak, who made a dead reckoning-based car navigation in the mid 1980's: http://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgott...

Directions plus a bevy of road sensors. Basically the same way you do.

It may use GPS supplementally, but never primarily.

What do you mean? Automatic parking comes before self driving. Google's cars already do all of that https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/

They don't use GPS for driving, perhaps general orientation, they use cameras and LASER based RADARs (called LIDARs)

My Model X drives itself on the freeway extremely well well. I don't have to do a thing from San Francisco to Sacramento, for example.

But the self parking barely works, and can't handle anything complicated.

Don't rule out HUD gauges projected onto the lower left of the windshield. 95% autonomy in a commercially available car by 2018 is very unlikely IMO.

This is what I'm thinking too. The lack of dashboard is not because the car will be autonomous, it will be but only on the freeway, but because there will be a HUD.

> it will be but only on the freeway

You're not thinking far enough into the future. We already had that, in 2015.

These cars won't exist until late 2017, so you have to improve on what we've got, today, by more than 2 years.

>And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production

Is that how you read it?

Because I read it as Tesla feeling the pressure to get something tangible out there for people to see, so they demonstrated a car that wasn't finished (just like the battery swap tech, or "off the hook" Powerwall demand). It got huge hype, now it'll be two more years of "wait and see what we have planned!" Smart, I guess.

I wish everyone would stop framing this as Tesla vs everyone else, instead of rooting on the EV industry as whole. There'd be less pressure on Tesla to take over the world, which ain't gonna happen.

In some of the ride-along vidoes the people driving (all heads of design) confirm the lack of gauges is going into production, as-is the landscape screen.

Musk said on Twitter that Autopilot convenience features would not be included in the base model, "same as S and X." So it doesn't seem like they would be basing the interior design on an optional feature.

He says in the reveal presentation that Autopilot hardware will come standard on the 3.

Yes, and it will have standard safety features like automatic braking that use that hardware. But what does that have to do with whether or not the Model 3 design is based around fully autonomous driving?

He said the hardware would be standard meaning that Autopilot will be a software unlock. The software safety features are enabled by default.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You appear to be reiterating what I said in the comment you replied to.

When I saw no gauges the first thing that I thought was they are going to install a HUD (Head up display a la fighter jet).

"Feels like a spaceship" sounds weird to me. piloting a spacecraft isn't all that easy.

In fact, when we're criticising UX we say it's like the controls in the space shuttle.

Perception vs Reality. :)

I think most people imagine piloting a spaceship as being awesome. And are thinking of it more like sci-fi spaceships rather than a modern day shuttle packed with obtuse controls.

Sure, but not the spaceships that Elon builds. Those spaceships have controls like a single digital button that says "land" or "dock".

I think he means "feels like a spaceship from a sci-fi movie"

Is it really hard to pilot a spaceship? You maneuver it out of the solar system (should not be _that_ difficult, certainly not if your destination is in a direction outside of the ecliptic), point it in the right direction, move to full throttle, and let it do its thing for a few centuries while you sleep or watch history on earth go by.

Yes, there's a risk you may hit something and be killed, but per passenger mile, I expect it to be even safer than the space shuttle.

You don't really need gauge at all, autonomous car or not. Seriously, in every day driving you need the speed and that's it. (even on a clutch ICE car, the RPM is really unnecessary unless you have a racing driving style) They have confirmed in some video that the odometer is within the visual field of the driver and actually very visible.

The rest of the information does not need constant visual presence, actually the GPS is probably more interesting than anything else.

I would still be surprised if there is no HUD provided with the car. You still need some very visible notification area for event like running out of juice or any kind of malfunction. Also there still some stuff the car are bad at doing like fog lights, or putting the light on in a foggy situation ( actually almost had a crash because of that - so use of the car switching the light on or off, forgot that fog during day or overcast weather are the same to a light sensor ) Also if the car is not 100% of the time autonomous, you need to be able to tell immediately if it is enabled or not.

With the oblong steering wheel they mentioned and spaceship like controls, I'm thinking they just don't want the steering wheel sticking up in front of that awesome view. Perhaps an airplane-line yoke? There is the problem of the steering wheel needing to go multiple revolutions, but there do exist some variable ratio steering systems where you might limit rotation to +/-90 degrees but the wheel travel is speed dependent. There are options besides fully autonomous.

As for the lack of instruments, I rarely look at much other than the speedometer while driving, and if the car can read the signs and help regulate speed for me, I may not even need that. My non-Tesla car has an audible chime at 50 and 25 miles to empty, so I don't even need to look at the fuel gauge.

> Perhaps an airplane-line yoke?

Is there a reason that basically NO car manufacturer has EVER made a production model with steering by anything other than a wheel and pedals?

Mercedes has presented a prototype with joystick in 1999, said to have been easier to learn for beginners than steering wheels, and quicker to perform emergency maneuvers with.

They said that German legislation does not allow for cars with side-stick rather than steering wheels, and that it would be cost-prohibitive to introduce - the latter is probably no longer true...

http://www.economist.com/node/290976

My friend has a Prius and I hate driving it because the steering wheel isn't round.

Turns out the way I drive involves letting the wheel slip under my hands when going around corners, and you can't do that if the circumference of the wheel moves as it turns.

If the DOT approves this car it will not because it is safe. There is a reason cars have proper dials and buttons.

The current model S is already problematic. I have had drivers adjusting their AC almost hit other drivers because they had to look down.

Good thing you can assign the AC to the steering wheel on the Model S, disaster avoided!

Thanks, good to know, I will tell my friend to do that so I don't get a heart attack next time I ride with him.

By definition, fully autonomous means that you will never have to take over.

> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?

On American roads? Not likely.

"95%+ of the time it will be driving itself"

That's a shitty metric. Does it mean it will need intervention every 950ms for 50ms?

If you want to willfully misinterpret what was said, sure.

Reminds me of a joke:

- "I read half the book... It was completely incoherent."

- "Which half did you read?"

- "Every other word."

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