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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Volvo is in a much better position. They're going live with 100 human drivers next year, actual customers, not employees, with drivers not required to have their hands on the wheel.[1] This will be enabled only for well-mapped roads in Gothenburg, but they're not all freeways. Volvo's CEO has publicly taken the position that if there's a crash in auto mode, it's Volvo's fault.

Volvo uses four cameras (one of which is a trifocal 3D unit), four radars, one LIDAR, and 12 ultrasonic sensors. That's a reasonable sensor suite for this. Tesla has one camera, one radar, and some ultrasonic sensors. Not enough.

Volvo is also way ahead on self-driving car commercials.[2]

[1] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE

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How would that be a better position than Tesla's? 100 vs 100,000.

The 100 sample is supposed to be true automated driving, take me from a to b. Not just the standard Lane keeping, adaptive cruise etc, which is what tesla offers with their "autopilot".

Thats great, except Google has already done this.

Google have yet to let the public loose in their cars on their own.

Tesla offers more than that:

https://www.google.dk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2...

And better yet: their 100,000 (soon to be 500,000) autopilots will gather live information from roads from several countries, weather types, etc. even when the cars are manually driven. Every day, Tesla's 100,000 cars will bring as much data for their algorithms as Volvo's 100 cars do in 3 years.

Or put in another way: unless Volvo magically have much better programmers than the IT company Tesla, they would need 3 millenia to keep up with Tesla's current fleet of 100,000 data collectors.

Those 100 will be the ones who are using an actual finished product, I am pretty sure thousands of their currently sold cars are already collecting information from their radars.

I hope Volvo's autopilot is not a finished product. The whole point of ML is to keep improving the product from what you learn.

Also, do you have any source for Volvo's current system collecting data and sending it to Volvo? We know Tesla does it but I did not know Volvo does it.

Volvo's autopilot uses cloud architecture for traffic analysis(based on other Volvos around you). Volvo has predictive, ML-Enabled Analytics which should(I don't work for Volvo) work similar to Tesla's Fleet Learning.

4 camera, 4 radar, LIDAR, 12 ultrasonic???

That is silly overkill, and most of it is incompatible with visual cues.

I an human. I have only 2 cameras. I kick ass compared to these systems.

I can handle snow hiding the lines and edges of the road. I can handle snowbanks changing the shape of the road. I can handle cops waving and pointing. I can handle dirt roads. I can handle unmarked parking on grass. I can handle broken traffic lights, both individual and power outage. I can handle a total GPS outage. I can handle areas without cell coverage. I can handle new roads. I can handle traffic being diverted onto the opposite side of the road, or even off the road, as happens for construction. I can handle gaping unmarked sinkholes.

I hope Volvo's auto mode doesn't cheat-disengage at the last time.

What you describe sounds like a "throw a lot of hardware at it" approach. What often matters in the real world is how you integrate and use the hardware, not how powerful the hardware is.

This also isn't really fair as even if Tesla had superior "radar" and "convolutional neural nets" or even "hierarchical softmax", Volvo has a commercial with Jean-Claude Van Damme[0] and Tesla doesn't. Q.E.D.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10

Pitnicking but Volvo Car Corporation, which we are talking about here, does not have Jean-Claude Van Damme in their commercials. JCVD is the star in the other Volvo company commercials: AB Volvo, which is everything but the cars (trucks, buses, Penta motors, etc...).

TIL that Volvo Cars is owned by a Chinese company and is separate from AB Volvo.

> Volvo Cars was owned by AB Volvo until 1999, when it was acquired by the Ford Motor Company as part of its Premier Automotive Group. Geely Holding Group then acquired Volvo Cars from Ford in 2010.[0]

> Geely (officially Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd) is a Chinese multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Its principal products are automobiles, taxis, motorcycles, engines, and transmissions. It sells passenger cars under the Geely and Volvo brands and taxis under the London Taxi brand.[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Cars [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geely

Volvo and others can say whatever they like, until they bring something to market I will assume they are freaking out as how they will slowly be made irrelevant.

I have to agree because as much as I want to believe they will succeed in this regard, until they release something and we see how it really performs ourselves it is just media hype

You do realize that in Europe the same thing that Tesla calls "autopilot" has existed for years in Mercedes, Volvo and some other premium cars, Tesla's autopilot is nothing more at the moment than a line keeping and adaptive cruise control that is used in Europe for at least 3 years now

Yeah, they're the same thing. You can totally leave those cars to drive around on their own the same way Tesla's do.

Do Teslas now drive around on their own? I seem to have missed something.

You haven't missed anything, they use the same system that's available in Mercedes and other cars. Some people just misread the announcement and we've been living with the misconception that Tesla has self-driving cars ever since.

I don't know why, either, since this would presumably be very easily debunked.

They're the same thing, and require the same level of attention to use safely. The only difference is that Tesla didn't enforce that level of attention because they're more willing to feed their drivers to the undersides of trucks at 70 mph and then blame the driver for not paying attention than Mercedes or Volvo are, and the press and HN are more willing to let them get away with it.

Uh, no. The utter crap assistants used in these cars are incomparable to Tesla’s Autopilot even now. Polish and ease of use matter. Execution matters.

For a representative example, see how bad Mercedes’ latest and greatest E-Class w/ Drive Pilot is: http://www.autofil.no/936897/hands-off

It’s damning. And that is the one they advertised as being “self-driving”. That’s the best Mercedes has.

This review compares more of them: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...

The best of non-Teslas have at least twice as many autonomous mode disengagements (i.e. they suck at the lane keeping job). They specifically call out Model S for being the only one that can keep in a lane without wobbling like a drunk driver. None of the “old” car manufactures can even get that right, let alone anything more.

So yes, on paper all these components exist for 3+ years and are nothing new. Exactly like smartphones existed before the iPhone did — remember those?

I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. I regularly drive a full fledged E-Class Mercedes Benz from 2015 (company car). It offers nothing even close to Tesla's autopilot.

Volvo is bringing it to market. It all started with the XC90(up to 30 km/h) and now with the S90 and V90 is going to work up to 130 km/h which is perfect for highways. Other than that they've recently started a collaboration with Uber [1][2]. I tried myself the S90 pilot assist and it works really well, it does require you to be more "present" on the wheel than what Tesla requires nowadays but it's surely going to be impreved via OTA updates.

[1] : https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele... [2] : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-fir...

The companies that are being made irrelevant are usually "stuborn" and have a strong belief that their current busines model and products will prevail. Kodak and nokia refused to adopt modern technology until it was too late. I don't think developing autonomous cars counts as sticking with the status quo. They may be behind google or another company but they are not wasting time twiddling their thumbs.

I'm not sure that applies to Kodak or Nokia. They saw the changes coming, Kodak launched digital cameras, Nokia tried launching MeGo. The trouble is they didn't have a competitive advantage over all the other digital camera companies or phone OSs.

By the way I don't think Volvo is freaking out so much as going for it's vision 2020 thing:

"in 2008 we set out our vision that by 2020 nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car."

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