Comment by Amorymeltzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Amorymeltzer | Hacker News Reader

For those reacting to the headline and first few paragraphs:

>Tesla’s engineers initially test new self-driving software against those records. Any that perform well can also be tested by secretly installing them onto customer vehicles and watching how they respond to conditions on the road, although the software doesn't actually control the car.

>“We will often install an ‘inert’ feature on all our vehicles worldwide,” said Anderson. “That allows us to watch over tens of millions of miles how a feature performs.”

The article is sparse on details, but this little bit buried in the middle certainly seems to allay the fear I (and others here) immediately felt. It looks like Tesla tests software, then pushes it out without giving up any control of the car; the software simply logs what it would have done.

This is huge. No matter your in-house testing, there will always be bugs, but if Tesla can test software across 2 million miles a day, and in varied conditions, without any risks, I'd imagine a faster, less error-prone pipeline, leaps and bounds over the other teams.

As Sterling Anderson mentions at the beginning of his talk, all updates are opt-in. There isn't anything "Secret" about that part. Video: http://events.technologyreview.com/emtech/digital/16/video/w...

It's secret because the car doesn't tell you what's in an update until after the update is complete, and even then the release notes generally don't get updated unless there are new user-facing features or UI changes.

Yep, whenever someone say that GM/Ford/VW is going to destroy Tesla with their better mfg experience this is one of the things I drive home as Tesla's real advantage(along with the supercharger network).

Seeing the changes in the ~1 year we've owned a Model S has been incredible. For each new feature they add/improve they increase the value across the whole fleet(assuming AP hardware/etc).

Heck, they've said they already have a huge mapping network, you could start giving some of the major mapping companies a run for their money just with that data alone.

The networked transportation sensor suite is insanely valuable and it seems to completely be overlooked by both competitors and investors. Between this, the energy storage business, and obviously the vehicles, I am excited to see what they can do.

Doesn't matter if you can't get cars on the road.

Thank you for the substantive summary. These click-bait headlines make me want to tune out entirely.

Yes, that's great. I do hope that Tesla nor any other car maker ever pushes a silent OTA update while the car is in motion, though. In fact, there should be a hard rule embedded into the code that prevents any such in-motion update from happening.

As Anderson mentions in the talk, these features are rolled out in regular opt-in updates. Updates are not happening behind the scenes at some random time, although the article seems to imply that might be the case.

I wonder how it works though. Who checks the logs to make sure what it would've done is the correct thing. And if it's done by software. Why isn't that software "driving" the car?

Quite interesting, I've always wondered about pre-migration through on the field duplicate-logging. Any other company doing this ?

Sure, this is a pretty typical way to field-test algorithms that you need more data about but are worried about handing over control to.

Google does it, for example.

Sorry I wasn't precise enough, I meant in critical businesses (medical appliances, procedures, transportation, ...).

Why does it have to run on the customers vehicle? Why not just let customers opt in to sending telemetry, and test with that data. It seems like a pointless risk to run the tests live.

Because the amount of data on the CAN Bus is many orders of magnitude larger than that which is sent as telemetry. Presumably the new features need to run on the raw data stream. I fail to see the pointless risk of logging what the computer would have done.

They still should let you opt out though. Once I drive my car off the lot I want to control what software goes into it.

I imagine it's a pragmatic consideration, if they're installing it on that many vehicles- that's a shitload of telemetry to stream over whatever data connection these cars have, and then have tesla devote however much computer power to post-processing;

vs. current approach of distribute the processing among all those scads of nodes, and have them only upload the interesting parts.

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