All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware
tesla.com
tesla.com
So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y"
This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."
Don't we have to start somewhere?? Aren't there supposed to be a big user base here who understands that it's an evolutionary process - we build the plane before we build the rocket before we shoot people into space?
Oviously the perfect self-driving car is still some way off, but I for one am thrilled this race is on!
Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read:
> However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.”
It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.
Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market.
These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla.
You can't win.
That seems to be Ms. Caldwell's point: Without the software or regulations in place, it's impossible to know if the "equipment is ready." I don't disagree with her on this one.
(And I am long TSLA.)
He's doing what he does best: forcing a hard change on an established system.
Autonomous driving not allowed? Well, we'll give them "Autopilot"-- make sure to keep your hands on the wheel! Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot! It just happens to have all the hardware needed to be fully autonomous, and Autopilot will "gradually gain new capabilities." Questionable? Sure. Best way to make an extremely hard industry transition? Almost definitely.
It would be a chicken and egg problem if he didn't do this. Can't test the system extensively beyond the lab without regulations, can't have a system that doesn't meet regulations because it hasn't been tested enough yet. He's just sidestepping this dilemma.
But saying it's an "autonomous car" because it has the sensors and computers just isn't so. When it gets the software, then it's an "autonomous car."
To use GPs analogy to the iPhone1: If Apple had just shipped the hardware without iOS, it wouldn't have been the iPhone.
All this in spite of tremendous uncertainty not just with regards to the regulatory environment but to the not yet fully developed capabilities of their own software.
Tldr: I suspect Tesla know what they're doing with the pricing of this thing.
In a big way. They are using data gathered by the self-driving ready hardware to develop the software that will use it.
Thousands of cars out there collecting data is a huge advantage over groups working with a handful of prototypes.
I'm not sure this is true. At least for Google, it seems like the main bottleneck to progress is engineering time to fix the problems that arise. The problem is not a lack of vehicles driving and finding problems.
I say this because Google has made very little effort to expand their fleet of testing vehicles. The last big expansion, from 28 to 48 vehicles, was in Sept. 2015. Since then they've expanded from 48 to 58, but it doesn't seem to be a priority. [1]
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v0BBTDOXvD8JdhrySFy6...
It just isn't reasonable for Google to build and manage a fleet of that size for a development program. It would cost Google half a billion dollars, but for Tesla it's just a bit of cost they roll into the product.
Yeah, well... it's not really autonomous. It's a slightly better cruise control + assisted lane change. In fact the "Autopilot" marketing term makes it sound much more like fully autonomous driving than it actually is.
Elon Musk does what he does best alright: make billions. The rest is just educated guesses at best.
At worse, any attempt to "explain" marketing strategy as some sort of passionate drive to improve the technology, or similar, is just so much cold-reading yourself at for the benefit of a commercial company's bottom line.
Other manufacturers aren't simply responding to Elan.
These other car companies have had so much more time and resources, and they have not pushed the way Tesla has.
They'll cool down in a few years (or disappear).
It's probably because there is a substantial gap between what Musk spins, and reality.
Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing.
Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning.
When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.
Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks.
Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.
It doesn't have the self driving hardware, it's otherwise comparable to the Model 3.
Once it is released then we can talk about the rate of mfg vs backlog but it is pure silliness to argue against a product because lots of people want it.
By this logic, Apple is a huge disappointment because they won't give me my iPhone 8S until 2019.
In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced.
Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
> Why does the segment that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
The stock market is adjusting for a <10% market share of ICE cars in 2050. It's a Schroedinger situation: If the <10% hypothesis is wrong, then we're all dead (more precisely: Half of us are living under giant cataclisms, the Gulf Stream has stopped, the costal cities are flooded, and our economy is so disorganized that we can't plan where the money will be), so markets don't need to account for this situation. So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla, unless they adapt. It may be hard to imagine if you live in USA because they rely so much on cars for their lifestyle, but our civilization will get rid of petrol cars within our lifespan. This is also the genius of Musk: He saw a version of the future that is obvious but that no other American citizen could understand, and he executed on it. Hence the importance of travelling the world or meeting many people when we want to innovate.
By the way, maybe a sweeping change is preparing that the petrol generations can't foresee. We could imagine things like an international agreement on global warming suddenly reducing the worldwide production of cars. It's impossible today, but educated people may have good reasons to believe something like this will happen, in which case Tesla wins all.
I'm not sure how having a disproportionately high market cap indicates "beating" anyone. It's the whim of the markets.
>If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn)
Based on what, exactly? This is Silicon Valley math. Who on earth is going to pay Toyota prices for a company that you yourself say might only have a fraction of the production? What sort of investment would that be?
I know this is taboo around here, but one day high-growth slows and companies become "established" and it's about how much money they make and return to shareholders. If Tesla is making as many cars as Toyota and as much profit is Toyota, then they'll be priced like Toyota. Why would it be any other way?
>So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla
There were over 70 millions cars sold in 2015. Tesla delivered about 50 thousand, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?
But maybe Toyota will return fewer profit per car? Ah, you've already accounted for that. There are other variables: If production is equal today, but if Toyota is expected to halve its production in 2040, the Toyota share will get lower and lower until it's half of Tesla. Other variables can be the health of their distribution system (a vendor with no cardealer lock-in will save a lot on sales), customer trust, innovation methods (e.g. Toyota's methods only led to the invention of Prius, whereas Tesla's methods led to the invention of a fully-electric car with a lot of autonomy, so it's a predictor that Tesla's innovation scheme will produce better things than Toyota in the future), marketing methods (They spend little in advertising and are able to have thousands of viewers watch their keynotes without pushing ads in the newspapers), a legacy of employees that might be hard to re-train, or a forecast that huge R&D expenses will be necessary to keep being relevant in the market of 2040. It's not "a whim of the market", it's that Toyota is shrunk by default in 2050 whereas Tesla is alive by default in 2050.
> Tesla delivered about 50,000, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?
..and Tesla plans to deliver 500,000 in 2018, for about 0.7% of the market share. Then I personally think they'll become even more popular (because of law advances, both against pollution and in favor of self-driving cars, and because of social status, geeks, comfort and market-specific innovations like the air filter that will be appealing in China, etc) and that means 7% market share in 2022, etc. So I'd buy Tesla shares for a higher price than Toyota's because I'd trust them more for delivering good dividends in the long term.
Note: I'm neither a financial advisor nor an owner of Tesla shares.
Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids). GM is expected to make 30,000 Bolts for next year, for instance (and it may or may not sell all of them).
That said, I'm skeptical the Autopilot 2.0 hardware is a "Level 5 autonomous system". I think a good rule of thumb would be to subtract about "one level" from what Musk promises, as he always tends to be a little overoptimistic, even if what he creates still ends up being better than the competition.
Take the first Autopilot, which Musk said is "Level 2". It's probably more like a real Level 1. It only works under very specific situations, and even when those specific situations are met (a highway) it can still fail, because Tesla may have accounted for US highways but not European ones, or other road quirks. See the recent Autobahn accident because the Autopilot couldn't properly identify "yellow lines" as opposed to white ones.
So yeah, I expect this to be more like Level 4 ... three years from now (as ready for mainstream use, not just a demo). I don't think we'll see true Level 5 until the 2020s. I think there are still many unexpected things Musk and his engineers aren't foreseeing right now.
When we get to level 4 the game is over, it's just an adoption curve at that point.
Under those conditions, it's pretty much Level 5 or bust. But yes, that doesn't mean Level 4 cars won't start getting adopted, especially if the autonomous systems are just another "feature" on a regular car (hopefully EVs in all or most cases).
Check your sources, we're at well over a million EV/PHEVs[0] combined nowadays and the model S is a bit over 10% of that. It's been a while since I last saw an EV parking spot with chargers that was empty.
Now that I checked it, the Leaf alone is past those numbers for the Model 3.[1]
[0] http://gas2.org/2015/09/22/1-million-electric-cars-now-in-th...
[1] http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/channels/Global-Sales...
Because genuine competition in the Soviet Union was not allowed. Don't want to wait for Mr. Musk's Magical Mystery Car? Then buy a damn Honda Civic or something. A huge pre-order list is notable when it occurs in a context where people have many other options not involving a long wait. It proves the existence of real demand, not "demand-because-of-a-lack-of-alternatives". Proving this demand is important for a small company which is trying to scale up.
As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.
I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.
Whenever Tesla is the topic it's almost guaranteed every negative comment on HN will be downvoted (I just see that right now with my comment above. It's constantly gaining and losing me karma).
Besides that, the self-driving Tesla isn't news. That is the joke here. It's a press release that gets frenzied on HN's #1 spot.
Assuming that others downvote over differing opinions does paint you in the light of doing that yourself, though...
I'm both surprised and sad to hear that the downvote button's intended purpose is disagreement. This seems like it would discourage people from posting alternative points of view if their view is the minority.
As much as I tried looking for it on my own, I couldn't find one, so would you mind posting a source as to where the founders stated the purpose of voting?
http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#downvoted
That said, the author currently has karma 111515 so he likely knows something about it.
The guidelines[0] do mention "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I often upvote both sides of a polite to-and-from between two parties with differing opinions, if the discussion is interesting, since that, I feel, adds to the quality of the whole page. I frown upon learning that it is encouraged to downvote if you disagree. Isn't it an equivalent of childish sticking fingers into your ears and hoping the other opinion goes away?
They drove 50 miles on a fairly challenging road and recorded the number of times they had to grab the steering wheel. BMW and Mercedes were twice as often, infiniti about 3 times.
The #2 BMW "City streets also foil this equipment; occasionally the BMW lost the trail on clearly marked straight sections of pavement for no obvious reason at all."
The Tesla (with driving hardware 2 revisions ago, and software at least on revision ago) "the Tesla Model S locks onto the path ahead with a cruise missile’s determination and your hands resting on your lap.","The Tesla’s Autosteer performance can be distinguished from our other contenders by two words: no wobbling.", and "This system rises well above parlor-trick status to beg your use in daily driving.", "to Tesla’s credit, this is the only car capable of hands-free lane changes.", and " but by tallying only 29 interruptions in 50 miles, Tesla’s Autopilot app lives in a class of one."
So do other companies have lane following and related features... yes. Do they do as well as Tesla, not from what I've seen.
That "someone" would have to be a world leading AI research team, to "hack" something that would be a few decades ahead of the current state of the art. But alright.
Well, you can get a "not very safe" self-driving car by tying a brick to the gas pedal. It'll sure "drive" itself (in a mostly straight line).
For example with the parking would the car know if the other vehicle has a driver and when that driver moves or is about to move?
Cameras are cheap and I suspect the 12 cameras have overlap to help with depth perception and maybe even fault tolerances. I suspect as soon as LIDAR becomes a better solution for the price (if that happens) that Tesla will use them. Or maybe a hybrid of both so they can use the strengths of both as needed.
Exactly. I would go as far as saying it's simply infotainment.
Here is a test that I would use to determine the value of this. If it wasn't infotainment, it probably wouldn't need to be set to a soundtrack and would stand on it's own w/o music. The music creates an emotion and helps stave off the boredom.
Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.
It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.
I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.
"How does Edmunds make money? Edmunds sells advertising to marketers who have contextually relevant messages for site visitors. Also, car-shoppers who visit Edmunds have the opportunity to request price quotes from dealers and providers of insurance, financing and extended warranties. Edmunds is paid by the automakers, dealers and other service providers for the lead referrals." http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html
The resell value may be less than a comparable "normal" car, and there's the risk that some government regulation makes all the technology in a Tesla today obsolete or illegal to use in the future.
(and I believe Tesla quietly killed their promise to artificially inflate resell values by footing the bill themselves a while back)
Some people naturally won't care about resell value - of course, others will.
They will always say such things.
I cannot judge for myself having not read them yet.
The only people who suggest them are people who I do not respect (rich assholes or people who think they should be rich assholes) or people I not do not know mixed with people insulting them.
The classic literature (and Atlas without any doubt belongs to so called modern classic) much like classical music, is a complex and highly artificial phenomena. The word for referring to a piece of art is artifact.
In the case of classical music there is absolutely no objective criteria to judge symphonies. It is possible to compare the pieces of music, and lots of pseudo-intellectual assholes do it for living, but it will be nothing but a joggling with a metaphorical jargon. Nevertheless, one almost always could distinguish some fragments from this or that piece of classical music which he likes for some not very articulable reasons. Bach, arguably, composed most of such sources of a beautiful fragments, Mozart is the second, etc.
These notions could be applied to literature. Like a symphony, a big novel, even a small poem, cannot be judged by a single criteria, but some parts of it we might find delightful and beautiful. The question, as it is in the case of classic music, is who is the reader (or listener).
In case of Atlas Shrugged, there are too many to count arguably beautiful parts (majoring in physics and philosophy is one of them), fragments or even passages, which appeals to the mind of modestly educated reader. The best personages she created were, ironically, not the central, heroic and positive, but all the crooks and weaklings, mediocrities and minor idiots. This, perhaps, is why Rand is hated so much.
As a student of philosophy, Rand got most of the philosophic and economic aspects right. Indeed, her Hegelian professor is a true masterpiece, her bureaucrats are convincing, James Taggard is remarkable. Her main characters are overloaded with virtues.)
Certain naivety of the plot - the miraculous alloy and especially the perpetuum mobile, for which the book has been criticized so often by idiots, actually are mere nuances. The real story is about focus and persistence, accepting the challenges, adapting and evolving and never giving up - all the postulates of a sound moral philosophy, which goes back to ancient Greeks. No one takes the plot of Atlas seriously.
She is also right that the motivations which drive us should be simple and pure (the Greeks, again), should be grounded in our human nature (shaped by evolution, constrained by biology) not in some abstract nonsense, dogmas, fleeting fashions, or even social norms. Rigid social norms are always reflect the ugliness of urban societies. While her main characters are rather angular and clumsy, the driving forces behind them are clearly recognizable and proper. Let's not blame Rand for this angularity.
I could do it for hours, but I think you got the idea. Good literature requires a "good" reader to be able to appreciate what is behind the words in a sentence.
You may well be right - many might read atlas and empathise with the antagonists, and dislike rand's treatment of them. Certainly many self proclaimed conservatives disagree with her philosophy, because it doesn't agree with protecting their rusting vested interests at the expense of innovation and the taxpayer.
An awful lot of people who like rand are assholes, however. The average randroid is more representative of James Taggart than Roarke, bitter and small, scathing of those who disagree with their narrow opinion.
Ah, irony.
No, it's because she advocates for being a jerk.
Basing your entire philosophy on a cartoon is a mistake, but bashing an author when you haven't read any of their work is a grosser mistake.
Her one good book in my opinion is "we the living" - oh, and Anthem was an interesting novella - think she inspired Tom Disch's 334
Oh, rly?
I prefer her early stuff, from before she lost her ideals to her ideology.
Rand was a mundane, myopic, self righteous ideologue with the philosophical depth f a puddle and the macroeconomic wisdom of a 6 year old with a 20 dollar bill.
Randian politics are a comic strip masquerading as a political movement.
Worthless except as a study in sociology of those people who hold it up as a worldview.
IMNSHO
But what stops that iPhone metaphor for me is Design, Materials and Finish. Apple Products look and feel like luxury. Where as Tesla only achieves that on the software side - and in your pocket.
Source: I owned Windows CE / windows mobile devices since as early as 2001 if I recall correctly.
Source: I owned Windows CE/Smartphone/Mobile devices starting with the Samsung i600 and was actively using a Treo 700w when the iPhone was released.
So I think it might be from an investment standpoint; just think of Tivo they made the DVR, but once others saw what they were doing there are plenty of other DVR choices and Tivo didn't win the category.
Tesla might be forging ahead and blazing the trail for others, who will actually capitalize on it.
I think that the Tesla brand is sexy enough that they'll maintain their niche (as Tivo has to some extent), I'm not sure if that will translate into investment returns.
When Tivo was a simple as plugging in the analog coax signal from your cable or antenna, it made a lot of sense. But once the signal from the cable company needed digital decoding, it hurt them, despite Tivo having a better UI.
I see the opposite Musk seems to be the new Steve Jobs people are crazy over him and seem to think he can do no wrong.
Traditional car investors look at certain tried and proven market indicators to judge stocks. When new tech comes along, they don't know what to think. So they think here and there like in this case.
The real value in bringing self driving tech here is to provide cool features to the buyer, not necessarily bring the stock of the company up. If investors do not know how how to place value on this, I only shrug.
That said, if some company had manufactured bluetooth hardware last year way in advance of the release and full spec, I would argue that it was a pretty bad move. Clearly this is not a perfect analogy, but it should illustrate that this can seem counter intuitive. Building in the cost of beta tech that doesnt fully work and is not legal is a huge gamble. I just wouldn't personally bet against tesla and for the reasons i outlined; it is likely the right call
It simply isn't enough to post a video of a car driving in light traffic on a beautiful, California afternoon. That isn't what makes the problem hard. Mess up with your video-based system in the dark, or in bad weather, or...lots of people will die.
This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release. (Which, not incidentally, is why they haven't released anything other than a video.)
First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. I myself paid several customers a penalty/reimbursement, when because of our website, they suffered. And I am sure there are websites/apps which are more critical.
Second: You are assuming, they have done a half-assed job and hurrying to release. If you look at the earlier thread[1], several people have explained, how Tesla has 100s of millions of kms of their customers driving footage, using which they have trained the AI/ML algos. So I won't be surprised if these cars can do well enough in the dark.
Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of self driving cars, recently has taken a turn to self driven cars just using cameras and AI. In his own words[2] he says, that we humans also just have our two eyes, so cameras should do the job well.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfEFnYxej8 (Audio is bad for upto 20 minutes, then its Okay)
Edits: 100s of millions of kms of their customer
can't --> canThe impact of that, terrifying as it may be, is still significantly less then the impact of a self-driving-but-buggy vehicle into the side of a semi.
Perhaps that particular human was special and worth saving over the other two who were saved instead, but I am not aware of any reason to believe that.
Only after a particularly tortured interpretation of highway safety statistics.
If you exclude pedestrian deaths (Few jaywalkers on the interstate), motorcycle deaths, deaths in conditions where autopilot cannot be used, and deaths due to collisions of lighter, less safe, older, or poorly-maintained automobiles, then regular highway death statistics start looking better then autopilot-enabled ones. [1] [2]
Again, there's a great gap between the hype of Tesla, and the reality.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601849/teslas-dubious-cla...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/07/05/adding-...
As for AI, there's no magical "algo" that solves the problem of an all-black video frame. Having more black video frames than anyone else doesn't exactly solve that problem. See also: rain, snow and fog.
But finally, nobody said that web developers are stupid. Calm down. But it's completely fair to note that, however much money you lose for your customers with half-baked beta releases, you're still not killing them. The stakes are higher here. The expectations of proof are higher as well.
So do human eyes. I perhaps should have used the word night rather than dark. So basically it should work in the night also is my understanding.
And I'm totally calm, and not angered :-). Just trying to make my point. Because I don't like arguments like - 'this is not rocket science', or 'this is not web development.
How many truck routes only run across sunny roads?
And even when purchasing a car , a car that "only" drives itself when it's safe would be great, even if it's only 40% of the time, for people in the right city.
Tesla can collect data from 5 billion miles of driving already one year after the Giga Factory is full operation, if production reaches the planned 500,000 in 2018 and each car drives 10,000 miles annually. And then the miles accumulate exponentially.
Here is my guess: After a few million miles of shadow driving, i.e. a few weeks after the first few thousand new Teslas have been sold, Tesla is likely ready for the real thing under perfect driving conditions like those Google experiences in California. So Tesla is going to open for the self driving capabilities in such geographic areas during the day when weather is nice.
After a few hundred million miles of shadow driving, i.e. within half a year or so when Tesla has marketed 1-200,000 cars that have driven for a couple of months, Tesla will have collected enough data to drive in more difficult traffic conditions, like other American urban areas.
After a billion miles, around a year after Tesla has gotten the Giga Factory up in full speed and the first 2-300,000 cars have been on the streets for half a year, Tesla is probably ready for certain bad weather conditions, like rain, light snow, light fog, and for driving in the dark.
Give it another few billion miles, so still before 2020, and the streets of Istanbul or the snowy roads of Nebraska have been tamed.
Ultimately, this game is about the sensors. If your sensor suite is inadequate to detect every conceivable bad situation a car can be in, then it doesn't matter how much data you accumulate. One million miles of good LIDAR data is worth more than a billion miles of video, if the video can't see white objects during the daytime, or figure out on what side of the parking lot the car should be driving (ahem).
I have no idea how good or bad their sensors are, but instinct tells me they're not up to the task of all-condition driving, and this video provides no useful information either way.
The Teslas sold in October 2018 don't need to have the same sensors as the ones sold in january 2018. As you can see, the car is designed modularly. No other mass marketed car on the planet has any sensors integrated yet.
It's all about big numbers. Google has spent 5 years or more driving a few cars around California. It's never going to match billions of miles driven around the globe.
EDIT: Imagine the engineers working at Google's autonomous cars today. I bet many of them are preparing their resumes for Tesla. They can launch an algorithm or a new sensor type now, wait a few months and then get the feedback on how it worked. With Tesla, they will get that feedback in days. In which lab would you want to work if you want to take part in shaping the future? In the Google lab where you have a Lexus or two assigned to you that drive up to 25 miles per hour in California or in the Tesla lab where you have 2,000 Teslas assigned driving in 50 different countries?
If you mounted a forward-facing video camera on every car in in the world and gathered the data for decades, you'd still be nowhere: you're missing the side and rear views. This is a thought exercise, but it demonstrates the point. If your robot car has a blind spot, all the data in the world won't fix it.
Nobody knows how good these cameras are, but every camera-based system so far has had the same critical limitations: they don't work well at night or in poor visibility.
Tesla doesn't make a mass-market car.
>Imagine the engineers working at Google's autonomous cars today. I bet many of them are preparing their resumes for Tesla.
Uh, probably not.
Uh, yes they do, they make cars that are available to the mass market; anyone can buy a Tesla if they want to. That's what mass market means.
Uh..that's not what "mass market" means. Honda Civics are mass market. $100,000+ electric vehicles are not "mass market".
Here's Wikipedia:
"The mass market is the largest group of end consumers for a specified product. It is the opposite of the term niche market."
The sensors cover the whole spectrum of light humans can see, plus a lot more. There is also ultrasonic sonar.
And, of course, all of this is 360 degrees.
That was also my understanding for the general case, but I was also assuming that cameras were available that could at least approach human dynamic range.
If I had one of these cars, I would not put 100% faith into this technology yet. But, after 5 years, who knows? I may finally be able to drink more than 1 beer at a bar with friends and have my car drive me safely home.
Which brings an interesting point, traffic violations. What will local police do now that self-driving cars drive safely?
This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves:
There's always people with something to say.
Because folks who actually used all that stuff know that the iPod was a quantum leap, even in its first few generations. 5GB of storage, MUCH better battery life than any competing device of any kind, and FireWire 400 felt fast enough back then that it was like actually being on fire.
As soon as the ipod came out, I bought one for my girlfriend as a birthday present. She has never used any other system for listening to or acquiring music since. It obviously switched to the smart-phone, but still...
Most of the people who were shitting on the iPod never held one in their hands.
"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"
"Come on everyone, y'all are saying it sucks before you have even held it in your hand. I mean 5GB in a little tiny thing like that, it's amazing. I don't see anyone else making something like that. Do you?"
"No matter what Apple does there are always people who are NEVER happy. Give it a rest. It's a great idea and the first of many."
"The truth is that is really is revolutionary. 5 gigs? Where do you see 5 gigs in an Mp3 player?"
"This is not like any other MP3 player on the market, imagine being able to store several days worth of music at once! The iPod will be great for travelers, students, heck anyone who is really into music"
"This thing's too cool. It makes my Rio 500 (recently upgraded to hold 128 MB of songs) look pathetic. It's beautiful. It looks too easy to use. It has all sorts of cool features that I will never live without again. This is a home run, and y'all who keep complaining its not a $200 Newton device, buy a Visor. They can play MP3s, by the way, but they're still stuck in the 21st century compared to the iPod."
"THIS THING IS AMAZING!!!
It's not jus ANOTHER mp3 player. It's a BREAKTROUGH mp3 player!"
"with all the hype surrounding it, the iPod still came out looking quite good."
"I think it looks like a great toy. The price is steep for 5 GB, but everything else about it is great."
"iPod is a great idea. It has huge capacity for MP3s (5GB is much more than any other similarly sized mp3 toy), syncs with iTunes, and a nicely sized backlit LCD screen with good battery life (10hours). Recharges by FireWIre is also a neat thing."
Or the hundreds of other bad ideas that were criticized and failed because they were bad ideas. Picking a few big successes doesn't make an argument. Because, I agree, there are naysayers for everything. I'm glad; keeps people honest.
Today on Yahoo Finance: 'Tesla Falls After Announcement - Tesla Motors (TSLA) fell nearly 2% and remained in the lower parts of a six-month-old consolidation. Late Wednesday, Tesla said all of its new vehicles will be equipped with hardware that enables fully autonomous driving "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." [2]
[1] http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50...
[2] http://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/sto...
And on point, I would say.
I like Tesla, just pointing out why people are right to demand they get it at least as good as humans before pushing it to market.
Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.*
*Joke; in fact Israeli security services invented it in the '90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash). Also there aren't reported fatalities from Note 7 explosions.
This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D
To be fair, Apple got there first, although I doubt they're proud of it, and probably they were not the absolute first.
A very small number of iPhone 4 (or was it 4S?) had defective batteries which caught fire.
What Samsung can claim an absolute first for, though, is providing replacements which are just as dangerous.
A first-gen iPhone couldn't save people, but a first gen auto-driving car can certainly kill a lot of people if the software isn't working right.
It's interesting that the new Tesla software will be shadowing while the meatbag is driving: not just reporting back driving data, but also simulating what it would do all the time. There's going to be a lot of situations where it would be wrong, all nicely laid out for the developers, ready to fix.
The reality is, with machine learning, you need a lot of data, and yes, you can send a few of your own cars with employees inside like Google, but that's slow. Instead, Tesla is using their existing brand and user base to collect orders of magnitude more data, and this way, they will be able to validate their models much faster.
Again, the thing with data and algorithms is that you can test and retest them. When you have all the data, you can see the info at time X, and also have access to the data at time X+1, so you can check if your algorithm made the right choice. Furthermore, you can actually take tricky situations and replay them thousands of time while tweaking your algorithm to do better.
So yes, while getting it right is very important, I believe their approach of collecting as much data as possible is the best way of getting there
What I find really interesting about Tesla (and SpaceX and HyperLoop) criticism is that people think it will fail for what it doesn't do, instead of focusing on what it does do. What they don't realize is that all products in history that got hugely successful didn't do a ton of stuff initially. They just did some things really well.
Early washing machines were noisy as hell and got unbalanced all the time. But who cares? they washed clothes and everyone wanted one.
Early TVs were massive things with fussy screens and only in B&W.
The first iPhone was extremely slow and only had EDGE.
But rather than focus on what all of those things don't do, you only need to realize they do something really well, and that's why they are a huge success.
Even if the Tesla can't drive itself too well in heavy snow, or if the range is crap in really, really cold weather - WHO CARES? There are still tens of millions of people on earth that will lap them up because of the list of things they do so well.
Products don't fail or succeed because of what they don't do. They fail or succeed because of what they do do.
I see things differently. Anyone who criticized Theranos was met with the same reaction, "Everyone on HN is so negative!" But the questions were valid. Look what happened.
The same thing is occurring with Tesla. Yes, there is fantastic work being done, but many people here can't separate marketing from the real world. It's shocking, frankly.
I'm suggesting that there's a lack of critical analysis applied to what are, essentially, Tesla press releases. Like when it was implied that people were sexist for questioning the genius of Elizabeth Holmes, because she was changing the world and all that, according to the press releases.
Again, I have no problem with being a Tesla fan. I probably come off as a "hater" here because I like to play Devil's Advocate and it's a pretty one-sided discussion on HackerNews (expectedly). I think what they're doing is fantastic. But give some credit to other companies who are also doing good things for this space, people's safety and the planet.
This doesn't mean that the majority of people aren't optimistic about the future, just that their opinion has already been expressed.
"I wonder if Elon will go down path A...." "Interesting that the battery is now x, this is probably a result of Y technology they developed last year." Etc. I don't find it hard to discuss a topic in a positive light at all.
Time we spend bickering about whether electric cars are ready is time not spent talking about the new grid, the new architecture, the new social organization that will form around these (to me obviously) imminent technologies.
I don't think "how it could succeed" is less interesting than "how it could fail". And if I expect something to succeed, frankly the failure speculation starts to get a bit boring.
It's a bit personal for me because I am pursuing a high-setback business model in my startup and so people always want to talk about the looming dangers they see. It starts to get boring, because I expect a certain number of failures, and I intend to work through them. What's interesting to mr is whether the first principles analysis is right, and how the plan looks from a Zen perspective... Not is everything right, but am I applying pressure in the right place today given the conditions.
Sure, but there is more than one way to say it:
"I live in the mountains of Virginia and this will never work here with the snow, therefore it's crap, therefore it will fail!!!!"
OR
"It's going to be really hard for them to solve the problem of heavy snow. I wonder if they'll use <something interesting we can all learn about> or <something else>. I wonder if they've teamed up with <who knows> to research <something interesting>. I think the best approach would be x,y,z and I read the Google are using a,b,c".
etc.
I mean, we're talking about a multi-billon dollar company trying to push forward - OF COURSE there are tons of hard parts. Pointing them out it not useful - thinking about (and working on) how to solve them is what HN should be about.
With iPhone 1, people's lives were not at stake.
... and if you look back at the launch of the iPhone you'll find the response is roughly the same. A healthy degree of scepticism.
From the Wikipedia article [1] about Joseph Weizenbaum: "His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom."
So, asking "but what if ..." in a responsible way should always be a big part of any innovation. Just shouting "hey, we are hackers, lets innovate and be open" isn't always responsible.
As a bonus, there's a great archive [2] about Joseph Weizenbaum with audio and film clips for anyone interested. Most of the site and the documents are in german unfortunately, but some transcripts are available in english as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum [2] http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html
And why are you comparing iPhones to self driving cars? That's like comparing paper airplanes to commercial airliners. Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted.
Are you not simultaneously advocating and decrying the exact same activity?
It's like there are three positions:
1. Certain viewpoints or comments should not be allowed. 2. Everything should be allowed except comments which say that certain things shouldn't be allowed (i.e. tolerant of everything except intolerance). 3. Everything should be allowed.
#1 is intolerant, #2 is an attempt at enforced tolerance (which is necessarily intolerant in itself), and #3 is actual tolerance.
It seems to me that the real problem is that meta discussions are frowned upon on HN, but there is no designated place to have them instead. So whenever someone starts one, they face the risk of censure-by-downvote.
Differently from mobile phones, cars actually have the capacity to go horribly, horribly wrong. This is not something to have a "let's fix it in public beta" Approach on.
we are geeks, many happy to be early adopters (aka testers), but try to explain this to average middle class joe who sees this and thinks it's already there in point of perfection, no mistake possible.
I just hope for Tesla that they delivered an outstanding technology that will just work, too much at stake with it. For now, respect to engineering team behind this!
A cellphone isn't a car. There is a reason why people expect a LOT more perfection when it comes to trusting your life to a machine.
Step 2) Get paid
What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.
I'm not saying humans react perfectly in these situations, but self-driving cars are rule-based, and have zero ability to adapt to unanticipated situations. I'm not arguing that Tesla shouldn't push forward. However, I believe that so far, Tesla has demonstrated a lack of concern for user safety. Companies like Google, Mercedes-Benz, etc. have tech at least as good as Tesla's, but have been much more cautious about deploying it.
1 death in 230 million miles (so far) with Autopilot v1 vs 1 death per 90 million miles for non-autopilot.
"Autopilot v1" miles are also largely on freeways and conditions favorable to the driving-assist features. The 1 in 90 million is comparing to all cars and not just other cars with driving-assist. I don't think many people would argue that driving-assist is more dangerous than without. The 1 in 90 million is across far more driving conditions, many of which are more dangerous than what the Tesla Autopilot is driving in.
The comparison between the two isn't really a fair comparison and, in my opinion, is dishonest.
E:
In addition, picking any random model car may yield similar statistics. "Car accidents involving a Honda Civic per mile driven" is probably a lot higher than "Car accidents involving a Pontiac Firebird per mile driven". Because there are more Civics on the road... Firebirds may be in fewer accidents, but my money is on the Civic being a safer car.
That's different from the previous auto-pilot version.
We don't know yet whether this is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars or the Newton of self-driving cars, a decade or more ahead of its time.
If self-driving cars don't happen in my lifetime, it will be because companies piggybacked on the media hype too readily and shipped dangerously misleading technology to consumers before it's ready. A few CNN incidents later, et voila, no one's talking about self-driving cars anymore. The whole thing can grind to a halt just like that. Every overly enthusiastic, precocious CS undergrad who posts in forums about how incredibly inevitable self-driving cars are, and how it's basically a solved problem and a done deal, are helping to set up self-driving cars for failure by encouraging overly optimistic expectations.
For people who care deeply about the technology, the possibility of a company like Tesla putting something out there before it's ready and potentially causing CNN incidents can be more alarming than no one putting anything out there at all. Maybe some people are being too negative and nitpicky, or maybe not, but I think that's where the negative attitudes come from. It's from people who want self-driving cars to succeed.
This says it all. Cars aren't phones. Cars can easily fucking kill people.
The suppliers provide (or are looking to provide) an electronics suite to car manufacturers. The car manufacturers want the system to be safe lest they be sued out of existence. One part of that will include contractual requirements for the system to have clocked n-kilometers on the highway in full (or partial) operation. For example, one project had a requirement for car(s) with full sensor data recording and partial automation enabled for 1 million kms.
The automotive suppliers will outfit a handful of, say 2019 model year test cars with the proposed sensors in the correct place and drive them around roads and highways in the specified conditions. Outfitting the cars can be expensive with prototype hardware, collecting the resulting data is a pain, and as a result the suppliers I'm familiar with run a (relatively) small number of cars for a lot of miles to record all that data.
The point of all this is to collect sensor data for resimulation as models are developed and trained. If an exceptional event occurs, they can modify the driving model, then "replay" the new model against all prior collected data to make sure the change doesn't do something unexpected elsewhere.
This process takes a lot of time (years) to pursue in this manner. What Tesla is doing is deploying the hardware in the field, then using the deployed systems to collect data to be used for the development of the automation platform. Instead of a couple of test mules they can use every single car they sell and let you drive it around for them while they record the results. Data collection that would take years can happen in weeks. This is a brilliant shortcut to the process and it puts them a couple years in front of the competition.
New hardware needs hours in the field, to verify failure rates and performance under real world conditions. Early deployment means Tesla's hardware will be ready for full service as soon as software is available. Autonomous driving then becomes "just a software problem", with hardware eliminated as a variable.
Eventually, (and with a lot of handwaving) the difference converges towards 0 and the network gives the right answer.
1. When the driver has full control of the vehicle
2. When the 'autopilot' is engaged and the driver is ready to intervene if necessary
So if the AI passes the safety test on Type 1 data, Tesla can promote it to being tested on Type 2. And if it passes that safety test it can be promoted to full autonomous control.
The 'autopilot' mode effectively does for Tesla what Google's test drivers do, but for free and on a much larger scale. Seems to me Tesla have a very strong hand here.
So if there's an accident, Tesla can check to see if the autopilot would/could have avoided it. If they can turn round to lawmakers and say that "X% of accidents could be avoided if hands-off autopilot was legal" it should help speed up the regulatory side of things.
This is why "partial automation" for the initial data collection still produces valid results. You can replay data against updated models and do "what if" testing without actually sending the car back out on the road again.
"It would have avoided this accident" (by braking, steering). It can say nothing about the future, "... but it would still have been in a collision 0.42 seconds later".
For all the collisions it would have avoided, there's another subset where it would only have "delayed" the collision. But that won't be mentioned. Because it doesn't fit the narrative.
In this case, what you need is mostly "what would most humans do?"
There would be things to refine about that (e.g. prevent speeding; analyse how humans reacted right before crashes etc. and improve on responses), but as a starting point it is immensely useful.
Which is to say, if Google wants self-driving Google Maps vans, then collecting data using Google Maps vans makes sense. But if they want general-purpose self-driving cars, then collecting data using Google Maps vans will only give them a very narrow set of data.
Definitely two data sets that should be put together.
I'm assuming that once a Google Maps van has covered an area, it intentionally avoids that area until a significant time later.
In the OP where I mention outfitting an example 2019 car, that car might be a current-model-year car with roughly similar vehicle dynamics to the proposed 2019 model. The only thing that they are paying particular attention to is the specific sensors in use and their placement on the vehicle. This apparently is critical to development of the driving model, the camera on the test vehicle must be in the precise position and direction and must react in the same way as the production model or the data is bordering on useless.
Now, with a full 3D pointcloud and enough sensor data you might be able to translate one recording into a lower-resolution resampling to model the production version, but I've not heard of anyone doing that. Test data is collected on the production sensor suite, no changes allowed.
This move sounds like a terrible idea with respect to what you say!
It's like aerospace companies deciding to forego testing and calling that a "brilliant move!"
Said another way: Is there a downside to parallelizing the collection process across a broader horizontal population of collection vehicles over a shorter period versus the traditional 1-2 year collection period?
From the positive side, they will collect and be able to evaluate a much /wider/ range of driving data from a far larger set. They are much more likely to run across 'better morons' both in operators of the Tesla and in operators of other cars.
That's a common misconception, but I believe it was debunked by snopes.
I would say that heavy rain is incredibly different from a blizzard. Snow has a much greater horizontal-to-vertical velocity, reflects more light, and flutters around. Rain mostly moves in straight lines, even in high wind. Not to mention traction is completely different on water vs. slush vs. snow vs. ice, as well as with good snow/rain tires vs. worn all-season tires.
I'm sure Tesla knows all this, but just in case you haven't driven in a blizzard before, you will need to drive very, very differently from driving in heavy rain.
Not sure what an autonomous car could have done in such a situation but anticipate that maybe we should preemptively pull over for a bit before it starts raining.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. It's raining."
"Are you kidding me?! He's dying! Go! Now!"
"Did you try applying pressure to the wound?"
Let's hope that we never have cars that decide it's not safe for us to drive, "regardless of who's driving."
The answer is: If the measurement period for the average over multiple systems is long enough that each random variable has visited a representative sample of states which make up the majority of contributions to the mean value, then the system is ergodic.
Does anybody make an antenna-level middle box for GSM phones? Something you hook into the antenna cable as a firewall/monitor?
My favorite part is that the VPN keys were called "carkeys.tar"
They still have access to the car and it's logs, however. Unless you remove the SIM card and disable Wifi, then you are truly on your own.
Besides products sold to governments agencies, the only 2 options I know of to make a GSM middlebox are OpenBTS or the osmocom stack.
You'd probably have better luck getting at that data through onboard diagnostic ports or the like.
However, this would mean adding sensors and 12 years ago, these would have cost much more along with the data requirements.
The reasons are multiple. 1) building and upgrading a car model take them at least 2 years... in the meantime, they have time to clock the kilometers anyway.
2) They have no idea how to build that type of data "massive" environment. They just don't know. Like all our "connected car" data came onto one single thread acceptor on one single machine. No load balancing, no scaling nothing, until August when the vacations congestion overflooded it. So now we have 4 threads in that single machine. I could ramble on and on on this type of mistakes they do. They just don't know. And this year, they asked the team to reduce their budget. Because it is how the car industry works. After two years to kickoff the project, you have to cut your cost by 5% to 10% every year.
After that a car is pretty much seen as completed, it will go into the factory and to the customer and probably get minor updates and fixes during the first year. However development already starts for the next model. Data and information from previous cars won't help you that much, since the systems in the new car will often be very different (as I said, most things are developed externally and from different suppliers, reuse is limited).
In the future, would Telsa use these data for other purposes? ie after analysing the data, it finds that my driving behaviour risk and has a higher chance of accident. It could trigger high insurance premiums or restriction on which car I can purchase etc.
The realistic one for me on this is when they show aggregate data to insurers to get lower premiums for their cars (or indeed provide the insurance themselves at low rates and use the data to get excellent reinsurance rates). That seems a very tesla thing to do.
What exactly is the problem with punishing people for risky driving? Or rather, let them pay a corresponding premium to cover for the (statistically expected) higher damages they will cause? Keep in mind that driving behaviour is something the user has full control of, in contrast to e.g. disabilities, for which of course no insurance premium should be paid.
I actually think this is a good idea, and would like to hear opposing opinions.
The interesting question is if it might actually be a smart strategic move to announce such a use of data. It's a bit counterintuitive as that would limit your customer pool. However I think there are benefits to limiting your customer pool to more "positive" cases. Let's say Tesla would announce that they'd collect data on reckless driving, warn the drivers and upon ignoring the warnings a couple of times inform insurers about it. That would probably result in less reckless drivers buying their cars which might actually not be horrible since that would also reduce the number of accidents etc. The big issue is of course that it would violate all reasonable privacy laws I can think of (I guess they could make it opt in).
[all assuming non-automated driving]
I don't think that is a good analogy ... many "sicker" people have played no role in their sickness which may not be related to behavior or decisions.
A better analogy would be: Why don't mountain climbers and scuba divers[1] pay higher insurance rates ?
I sort of think that they should, however I don't have a good answer as to what happens when an injured stunt skier is broke (and broken) ... do they get no medical care ?
[1] Or whatever - you get what I mean.
So stuff like a helicopter evac, access to a hyperbaric chamber and the ability to call a number and speak to a doctor who specializes in diving related illness means I already do pay more for insurance than someone who isn't a diver.
We we don't have are any legal or moral frameworks for passive, always-on methods of observation. Until we do, we shouldn't be letting private companies arbitrarily determine whether a driver is dangerous or not.
https://www.motorists.org/issues/red-light-cameras/increase-...
I believe we have established red light cameras are the cause of danger in a large number of circumstances, with yellow light time being reduced to increase government revenue.
Not to mention the lack of due process.
I don't think the government should rely on private companies algorithms to determine danger or guilt.
Statistics are obviously useful, but they are a big gun that sometimes points towards feet.
With enough data we wouldn't need to just rely on measuring speed. Reaction times, steering behaviour and lots of other driving terms I am not familiar with can all come into play. Cross reference this with actual accidents and you could come up with a fairly accurate model of what makes a safe driver.
You are correct. My problem with that approach is twofold:
1) There is no clear definition of "good enough";
2) The balancing mechanism between improving model accuracy and simplifying the model (for predictability/market competitiveness) involves actors with very unbalanced bargaining power (insurance companies vs very small subsets of customers)
If I can state the problem in another way: When you use a very refined statistical model for insurance premiums you are basically creating dynamic pricing for insurance services. Dynamic pricing hurts competition in the market through the development of an exaggerated bargaining power by one side of the market. Consumers would be worse off. What they gain in justice of their pricing (I get lower premiums because I'm a safe driver), they lose in bargaining power (via fragmentation of the consumer market).
Otherwise, we should punish you with a speeding ticket, because you will sometime in the future with some probability exceed a speed limit. Would that be ok for you?
We could determine their liability insurance premium more accurately!
Why don't we film everyone in bed to determine if they use condoms?
We could determine their health insurance premiums more accurately!
Driving like a moron in a 2T vehicle is.
Risky driving isn't a private problem. It's a public problem.
And the government already monitors your on road behavior and punishes you for engaging in risk. Speed cameras and traffic cops exist, in case you didn't know
However, presence of alcohol in sweat or by another means if detected and taken by systems to feed data to insurance companies it will make judicious decision in charging the person a higher premium.
Because, drunken driving risk lives of others on the road and yourself. If a person is not in a position to live on a agreeable consensus of social security model without putting others life at risk, jungle suits him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-brewery_syndrome
Also:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/car-insurance/credit-scor...
I think that we are talking days, not weeks, or probably that Teslas can have multiple teams testing various hardware and algorithms at the same time: Tesla plans on producing 500k cars per year from 2018. If all of them have this equipment, and they drive a conservative 10k miles per year in average, Tesla will gather data from 5 billion miles driven after a year. Next year they will have 15 billion miles. After 6 short years that will amount to more than 100 billion (B) miles accumulated.
For comparison, Google's self driving cars have driven less than 2 million miles until now and unless they team up with a car manufacturer or launch their own car, their project is soon irrelevant. I imagine this would only be accentuated as tech talent would prefer to work where their algorithms can be tested in a couple of days rather than where such test would take years.
EDIT: And just imagine how cool it is that since their cars drive all over the globe, in all traffic situations, under most traffic rules, in all conditions, and both winter and summer, day and night at the same time, a team can actually test changes to an algorithm on cars selected for certain conditions (500 cars in Minnesota's winter weather at the same time as 500 in Australia's summer, 500 during daylight in Asia at the same time as testing 500 driving at night in Europe, 1,000 cars in rainy weather, 1,000 cars in sun, 1000 cars in fog, 1,000 cars in snow, all within hours).
Any folks who grew up on a farm who can confirm?
I wasn't allowed to fell the trees but I had to use a chainsaw and cut the branches off the felled trees and then section the denuded trees into small enough rounds they were suitable for busting into firewood with an axe. I was given the option to learn to drive my grandfather's stick shift Toyota pickup truck in order to move all the wood with that, or move it by hand. It was an easy decision.
But, yes, until you're talking about more serious off-road/bad road (which is challenging in a completely different way), there's nothing especially hard about driving on a private dirt road.
Also driving the shitty back roads in Finland was a lot of fun in my old Honda Civic which didn't have power steering or ABS (let alone any kind of traction control and stabilization you have in newer cars). Driving a modern car with all the modern aids is very easy on dirt. On snow some of them can hinder you though (some automatic gearboxes just don't know what to do when none of the wheels have any traction) but for the most part it is very easy too if you have winter tires.
Driving is very easy. Too easy I think which causes people to drive way too fast for the situation quite often.
Main issue for driving on dirt roads/snow for automated cars I see is just seeing the road itself correctly not with controlling the car.
Urban really means not clearly rural. But there are a lot of "urban areas" 10s of miles outside metropolitan areas that people would consider exurban with forests and homes on significant acreage.
Humans have been known to "follow" the car in front of them when its not appropriate. Being parked on the side of the freeway (especially on a curve) is one of the worst places to be. I recall hearing that people hit those parked cars quite often.
Fun issues to think about.
I've seen quite a few Google self driving cars on Castro in Mountain View. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4082/4939372588_47979bceec_z....
That picture doesn't do it justice during the most busy hours of the evening, where there's tons of people crossing and bicycles flying about in every direction.
Given that, I've never seen a crowded street in Napoli or a crossroad in Ho-Chi Minh, but I can imagine they are a completely different level of complex all together.
As noted elsewhere, the announcement was that the necessary hardware will now ship standard. Musk has said elsewhere that the software is many times harder than the hardware.
I'm in Rome, which isn't quite as bad, but yes compared to driving in the US it's completely different. Every day I have to deal with someone cutting me up, or doing something otherwise stupid. You need to drive quite aggressively here, and in a self-driving car I'd imagine the journey would take twice as long, as it would keep stopping to give way to avoid an accident - and drivers would definitely try to take advantage of that.
My three tests for self-driving cars would be:
1. Drive through Milan on a Saturday afternoon, from the outside of the city, and park on the opposite side of the centre of the city.
2. Drive through London during a weekday, similar thing... cross the centre and find a parking space and park.
3. Drive through Paris during a weekend, same deal.
Those three cities are the most stressful to drive through for various reasons.
With Milan it's speed and decisiveness, small spaces and tight navigation.
With London it's the mix of traffic with a high cycling % along with a good mix of motorbikes and heavy goods vehicles as well as a phenomenal number of pedestrians who will walk out at any moment.
With Paris it's the speed of the ring-road (and the challenge of handling variable speed traffic on and near it) as well as the tight spaces on the streets and the numbers of scooter riders.
I also like the diversity of traffic signals and signs across those cities.
When I see a self-driving car manage those cities I am going to be impressed. It will exercise so much of their systems to do any one of those.
PS: I like that they are all fashion capitals... it would be a good marketing campaign to throw in Tokyo and NYC and present an accessible and fashionable angle to a set of super complex technical achievements.
Having recently returned from Paris, I was completely flabbergasted by the driving patterns. It was surreal. I am excited about Tesla and this self-driving car, I really am. If it can in fact navigate around the city of Paris on a Saturday I'm not sure how I would react. Probably wouldn't believe it.
I ranked them in order of crazy. Milan is the most crazy of crazy. As are the motorways around Milan. I am pretty sure that the shared philosophy to not use the brake is that if they just go faster they can be ahead of any trouble about to occur.
It knows where it is, it knows where it needs to go and they already have an "aggression" where they'll pull out a bit to signal to other drivers they're going.
The really complex part for us is that we can't easily keep track of all the things around us and have very slow reactions. The computer knows the distance of all things around it accurately and can respond in milliseconds and doesn't get flustered or angry. Or am I missing something, is there a lot of complex reasoning?
Say Dakar for example (2.5M people): no road signs, pedestrians on the highway, constant honking from every directions, more varied "vehicles" like horse carriage and "car rapides" (small buses).
Why don't some of the teams impress me and try driving somewhere with black ice, strong crosswinds and blowing snow. If their systems can't drive in negative environmental conditions, they will be largely worthless in many locales.
In my opinion, the fully autonomous vehicles shouldn't need to handle those situations. Leave that up to the human to navigate.
Fully autonomous should be able to handle the NORMAL day-to-day driving responsibilities. If you're going to require those situations that you mentioned, we'll never have fully autonomous vehicles.
NOTE: when I say fully-autonomous, the car will still have a steering wheel and someone sitting in the driver seat. The google car that had no steering wheel would never happen in the "real-world" only tightly controlled environments.
They may be difficult conditions, but people drive in them all the time. Something like 30-40% of the US population drives in snow and wind for months at a time. They're not uncommon. What's the great utility of a car that can only perform its function in ideal circumstances, i.e. on a closed track.
I'd compare it to having a convertible car---it has one lovely feature, that only really proves it worth during elusive weather conditions.
This will make driving in those conditions even more dangerous. If people start relying on self driving cars, their driving skills will deteriorate. If computer can't drive the car safely, rusty driver won't do better job.
If we never see a car that can actually drive itself without human intervention, I will be severely disappointed. All that work and hype just for some driving assistance systems?
At the same time, it would beam this data back to HQ and to other cars, telling them to avoid the area of uncertainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM
Edit:
This video from a motorcyle gives a nice first-person perspective:
Except the Google car is in the wild, collecting miles every day (as are the Uber vehicles), while Tesla's miles using this technology are all theoretical.
And should there be places, terrains, urban conditions etc. that Tesla doesn't cover, they will see it and can hire a number of chauffeurs to drive around there. Even if they hired 1,000 drivers to gather data in certain geographical areas at certain hours or weather conditions that they lacked input from it would be a drop in the ocean compared with the cost other car manufacturers face to keep up with Tesla now.
You can't just install autonomous driving systems in any combustion engine car without changing lots of systems. Tesla is electric fist. Everything is already wired, ready to be measured and in feedback loops.
All I'm saying is that the claim of N million miles should be taken with a grain of salt as long as you do not know the entropy that these miles contain.
I think a combination of LIDAR and cameras is probably going to be required for a truly autonomous car, at least for the first decade or two.
https://www.tesla.com/nl_NL/videos/full-self-driving-hardwar...
The video clearly shows a fully autonomous vehicle in a range of driving conditions. How about accepting that the sensor suite is adequate?
The video shows a fully autonomous vehicle in a range of (relatively) easy driving conditions.
1. There is not a single "sticky" situation in that video. Handling 90% of situations is (relatively) easy; it's the last 1% that is extremely hard.
2. It's not clear how many tries it took to record that video, but likely more than one.
3. At the end of the video, the car drives in the opposite lane of where it's supposed to. That smells of a highly-staged demo, not a general purpose solution.
In short, this video in no way proves that the sensor suite is anywhere close to being sufficient. Can that car repeat the same trip at night? In rain? Can it drive down Castro St. in Mountain View or University St. in Palo Alto at lunch time? Etc. etc.
I wonder what safeguards the manufacturers have in place to determine that those tests are not gamed and are honest as presented. I am thinking of VW emissions scandal. Given the stakes it would be interesting to know what level of trust is involved vs. verify.
That's a better, but still weak sensor suite. It's probably enough for freeway driving under good conditions. It's far below Google's sensor suite. Or Volvo's.
Now they just have to write software smart enough to not plow into stationary vehicles on the shoulder. There are videos of three separate Tesla crashes where the Tesla plowed into a vehicle partially blocking a lane.
There have been several announcements of low-cost solid-state LIDAR units for automotive. Quantergy announced last year, but didn't ship.[1] Innoviz announced this year to ship in 2018.[2] Advanced Scientific Concepts can't get their costs down.[3] (They have a great unit that costs $100K; the Dragon spacecraft uses it during docking.) Those are all-solid-state devices. There are also some companies trying to use MEMS mirrors, like TV projectors. Eventually somebody will get 3D LIDAR technology working at a low price point, but it hasn't happened yet.
[1] http://www.quanergy.com/products/ [2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens... [3] http://www.advancedscientificconcepts.com/applications/autom...
All you have is two overlapping cameras with poor resolution and they let you behind the wheel, right?
This is a software and processing hardware problem only. Human beings drive OK for the most part and we don't have lidar/radar/sonar/etc.
With 8 cameras providing 360 vision and an advanced NVIDIA hardware suite, this problem is entirely solvable and this is a very reasonable solution to it.
I actually don't know a single expert who thinks we're anywhere close to having a stage 4 autonomous vehicle. Most of the people I respect are pegging it at decades instead of years.
If you're only reading article after article hyping the technology instead of talking to the people actually building it, of course you're going to believe the journalists instead of the engineers.
I don't know anybody actually writing the code that thinks we're close. Of course the PR teams and managers are going to hype everything up - that's their job.
The guys you spoke to, was this before or after they went to Google/Uber? As I understand the approach at Tesla would be (a) collecting an enormous amount of real-world driving data that possibly others are not or have not done yet, (b) do as little "coding" as possible, but rather take a deep-learning approach. I.e. the "algorithm" gets better the more data you throw at it, it doesn't depend on human intelligence, but rather on how much data you collect. Similar to how Google Translate got so good (it's not good because of any linguistic model or because a team of linguists "coded" it, it's just good because of the sheer amount of data it was trained on). (c) they have enough money to throw at any hardware requirements for a platform that could train on such an amount of data.
Are the conditions above not different perhaps from what you experienced whilst working at NREC and perhaps different from the way you guys approached autonomous-driving? I'm trying to think from Elon Musk first-principles. If it was technically possible, what are all the lego blocks you need to go about building this?
My skepticism is in the leap towards a fully autonomous vehicle, safe for driving on real roads in harsh conditions. Very few people have attempted anything in bad weather yet, although Ford has actually done some work on it.
If we are talking about incremental improvements - sure that will happen constantly. What I'm saying is I don't believe you're going to get into a car without a driver anytime soon.
Tesla is planning to have their factory produce 500,000 cars in 2018. Even if they only meet half of that they'll still be collecting a lot of data.
I would guess most major cities and freeways will have full autonomous support by 2019.
Once you reach a certain critical percentage of fully autonomous vehicles regulation will probably change to such an extent that car insurers will void your insurance if you drive it manually, or give a significant discount to your insurance premium if you don't ever put it in "manual" mode, etc.
I think the problem is really difficult right now because humans are still allowed to drive, but as that ratio goes down it becomes less of a serious problem.
At higher speeds, prediction becomes more of an issue. Will that car on the side street drive into the intersection, or not? At slow speeds, you can wait and see what they do. At higher speeds, you have to predict behavior. That's hard, but a machine learning problem.
I'm not arguing against progress. I think it's great people are working on this and obviously you have to start somewhere. I'm just pointing out the fully autonomous vehicle is not a few years away.
https://www.tesla.com/nl_NL/videos/full-self-driving-hardwar...
AFAIK deep-learning hasn't really brought much change to this manner of doing things - the mapping part esp.
And the best that all that processing power can come up with is: tailgating someone. No thanks.
Sure LIDAR is more expensive but the data quality is very stable and good. Cameras won't work that well or at all in night or when the sun rays blend in morning / evening or in bad weather conditions like heavy rain or snow. All other self-driving cars I know of have at least a small LIDAR beside several other types of sensors.
The rotating Velodyne thing Google uses is an interim research tool. In production, expect to see better design.
With enough LIDAR units, full-circle coverage can be achieved. This is already being done with cameras. The rear and side units need less power and range than the front-facing units, so they can have a smaller collecting aperture, making them easier to place. For the front-facing units, the emitter can be spread out, allowing higher power. The rules on eye safety are concerned with the maximum power coming through a 1/4" hole (human eye pupil). If the laser emitters are spread out over the width of the windshield, the maximum power per unit area is reduced.
The CMU/Cadillac demo a few years ago managed to conceal all the sensors. It can be done. It just costs too much until one of the three companies claiming to be building low-cost automotive LIDARs Real Soon Now manages to deliver.
> ...expect to see better design.
> ...costs too much until one of the three companies claiming to be building low-cost automotive LIDARs Real Soon Now manages to deliver.
All I see is future promises. Tesla wants to do this now, that too at mass market costs, independent of whether those promises materialize or not.
It also depends on how much you trust their R&D team. If they thought this was a week sensor suite and something else was just around the corner, they won't risk fitting their cars with inferior technology which would be obsolete in a couple of years, making all the collected data worthless. Yes I am aware they did this to existing cars lacking the full autonomy hardware, but I find that OK, since, for them, they never promised full autonomy to begin with.
R&D doesn't make top-level budget decisions.
If the product fails, that's on Musk and Musk alone.
He takes credit for its successes. He can take responsibility for its failures too, as we would expect from any respectable CEO.
Low-cost LIDAR is a problem that can be solved with money and a customer ready to buy a lot of units. So far, no car company has said "we'll take a million units a year at $100 if they meet these specs." It's lack of demand, not lack of technology. It's a risk for the LIDAR maker. There are automotive radars available better than those currently on cars, but they don't have a volume buyer yet.
Statement A: Tesla is just hyping autonomous driving since no technology can deliver fully autonomous driving right now.
Statement ~A: Low-cost LIDAR is available to any high-volume customer, of which Tesla is one, given Model 3 demand. And LIDAR can deliver fully autonomous driving.
The point simply being, I have a hard time believing that even with good-looking, cheap LIDAR being a possibility, as you claim, Tesla chose to go with an inferior sensor suite, for no apparent reason.
Volvo already has a concealed LIDAR in their self driving car.[1] Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars in the hands of ordinary drivers in Sweden in 2017. This is self-driving by the pros. Makes Tesla look amateurish.[2]
And Volvo is way ahead on marketing self-driving.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q00jIBhkq4 [2] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA
http://www.sae.org/dlymagazineimages/web/516/11702_15456.jpg
Spinny LIDAR on top is never gonna look cool unless your aesthetic is "Ghostbusters", but it's also already looking technologically obsolete.
>> then the car doesn't look cool anymore.
>> There are videos of three separate Tesla crashes where the Tesla plowed into a vehicle partially blocking a lane.This is actually common problem not only for Tesla. We won't see LIDAR in production cars (you will certainly see them in prototype cars as usual) until its cost drastically reduced
This is something we'll probably see in second-generation self-driving cars. With range-gated LIDAR and millimeter radar, self-driving cars will do far better in fog and heavy rain than humans do.
[1] http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-... [2] http://www.obzerv.com/en/range-gating-technology/core-expert...
It might rule out driving in fog or snow, but if the weather is OK then the sensor suite is probably enough for driving on any paved road.
I think you are underestimating how quickly Tesla's AI software can improve. The AI will always be running and checking to see if the driver does anything unexpected. For example if you brake or swerve suddenly when the AI did not expect you to do so, all the sensor data and state of the AI will be sent back to Tesla headquarters. Tesla will amass millions of these 'significant events' and be able to back-test updates to their AI logic against every single event. It will be test-driven development on steroids, allowing rapid software improvement while maintaining high quality.
Do you have any basis for that statement, other than that you like Elon Musk, and read an article about "big data" once?
I have actual experience in this field. The parent is right: the sensors matter more than hypothetical gains from "big data". Because right now, sensors suck. There's a reason every serious player in this game is plopping pairs of $10,000 lidar units on their test cars (and still failing to work in the rain). You can't distinguish signal from noise by collecting more noise, and until you have a decent sensor suite, "big data" is just garbage-in, garbage-out.
Reading this discussion, you'd almost forget that the reason Tesla is doing this is because its existing sensor suite was proven to be a total joke in actual use...but hey, here's to the emperor's new outfit! One hundred percent less naked than the old one!
What irq11 has said is valid and important. You cannot just handwave actual engineering problems with some buzzwords
It's valid and important to say, "I have experience in this field and sensor quality will always be more important than a suite of regression tests, no matter how large".
It's not valid and important to say, "You're just saying that because you like Elon Musk, and read an article about 'big data' once"
It would be a perfectly reasonable response to my comment to say "why yes, I do, and here's my evidence (along with a great reason that I didn't provide it in my original comment!)"
It stands to reason that if the parent had a better argument than "test-driven development on steroids", then they'd have provided it. But asserting that someone's well-informed comment about sensor quality "underestimates" the power of big-data-AI-TDD-learning-rapid-innovation-foo, well, that sounds like magical thinking.
In any case, this is a meta-discussion about voting, which is definitely not okay, so I'll leave it at that.
The existing sensor suite was is sufficient for the existing driving assist functions. The existing suite was never expected to be sufficient to provide the predicted, future levels of autodrive.
What do human sensors cover? Primarily our eyes. Have we had sensors that provide about the same dynamic range as our human vision?
I am NOT a part of this field, so please excuse my presumption.
I believe that most/all(?) current/previous 'automated control' systems used sensors that were lower resolution than our eyes, but that also provided some indication of range data.
Do our eyes provide distance data? I think that data is calculated with quite a bit of accuracy in our brains.
Again, I'm not part of this field, so this is just speculation.
In theory, given a fast enough computer and advanced enough algorithm, given nothing but visual input streams no more advanced than are available with existing optics, could a car autopilot not be just as good a driver as a human?
Here's Mobileeye's CTO talking in detail about their technology.[1] They use a a deep neural network that recognizes cars. Just cars. Look at this point in the video.[2] There's a stationary obstacle on the left, and it doesn't recognize that. Maybe this is why Tesla, using Mobileye hardware, plowed into three different stationary vehicles at the left of a highway. They were all trucks (one was a street sweeper), and seen from the back while stationary, may not have matched the trained model of "car".
Mobileeye's algorithms are good at recognizing moving cars from most angles, and that's valuable for feeding into the model of "what's the other player doing". But it's not enough for the "where are all the obstacles" and "where is the road surface" questions. Those questions have objective answers, which can be answered with a LIDAR, and maybe millimeter radar if it has the angular resolution.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCMXXXmxG-I [2] https://youtu.be/GCMXXXmxG-I?t=1758
I'd advise others on this thread, who tend to dismiss the difficulty of vision, to realize that techniques in ML and Deep-learning are very problem specific and not the holy grail of AGI they're made out to be.
>Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.
Interesting decision.
Implementing logic in an ASIC which cannot be modified and implementing logic with an embedded processor where the software can be modified but this feature is disabled is the same thing. Both are intended to be black boxes that just do one thing and nothing else. Yet for some reason you expect to be able to modify the embedded processor.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
"You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation"
In the case of Uber, the driver is there as a witness to dispute their account. In the Tesla case, nobody saw it.
And if there are, and if Tesla can monitor them, that's a whole nother set of problems...
Edit: Though you can have your car join that network sooo. Mostly just means they don't want to sell to Uber, heh.
People need to fight this BS.
This seems like an appropriate quote here. If we want to protect our rights we should not settle for conveniences. The software world in 90s is a good example of what happens.
One company does something to fuck over consumers and the others hold their breath for a minute to see what happens, then stampede to do it too.
It's why we have binding arbitration agreements and no right to class action lawsuits in EULAs for game consoles.
It's why we have every company around trying to extract their 30% cut by sticking themselves in as a middle man.
It's why we will end up losing the right to use our cars as we see fit. I don't the buy the argument that it's a "software platform" now. The amount of software in cars has been increasing for decades and this being a bit smarter doesn't suddenly mean that Tesla should get to take this step.
They need to be stopped. It's not some Stallman-esque FOSS zealotry, it's just wanting to preserve the basic concept that I own my car.
If you buy a self-driving Tesla in the future, you do own it. Drive it anywhere you like. But the software is under license and may not be used for certain things. Demanding that they open up their software to interfacing with who-knows-what is to demand that they introduce new security measures and functionalities, dependent on unpredictable third parties with unknown properties.
Also, there's an easy way to avoid not feeling like you own your Tesla: don't buy a Tesla. I mean, as of now you really have to go out of your way to get one - so if they're "fucking over consumers" so bad with this, why would you buy it? This isn't something they're springing on you after a purchase, they're warning you years in advance.
I won't, but did you read what I posted? Allowing this to pass unchallenged will hurt everyone.
Being able to read and modify your car's software is hardly an "essential liberty". I'm pretty sure the source of this quote had things like freedom of speech, non-oppression, etc. in mind, not copy-left.
Edit: I take it back. See reply.
It's certainly the case that most off-the-shelf EULAs aren't open to negotiation because the Customer is often inconsequentially small to the software "manufacturer". Larger Customers (particularly governments) certainly negotiate for license terms with major software "manufacturers", however.
Absolutely monstrous.
Presuming that such "EULAs for cars" are not legally binding, the next step will be cars that simply will not do the "forbidden" action, because their software detects and prevents it. Thence comes the next round of lawsuits...
> Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist.
So, you will likely be accessing a service to use the self-driving features. At that point, I think it's technically within Tesla's rights to dictate how that service is used.
I can understand (and fully agree with) limiting usage that can hurt them (like you cant use their object db in your own non-tesla car, and you can't use it as free storage for images or something), but limiting how you USE the system in a way that it's meant to be used?
I've only ever seen this kind of stuff in shitty B2B programs, and even there it was a big enough issue to deter us. This is a big deal and could really open the floodgates to some really shitty practices.
Slightly exaggerating of course, this means that if there are a few locals that routinely blast through a given stop sign, your future Tesla will happily do the same. So much for better safety through automated driving.
All those years marketing departments have preached about the "personality" of car brands, now we might finally get it (an aggregation of driving patterns of the worst of the brand's customers, if it was strictly a whitelist algorithm which I sure don't hope it is)
The issues with not being able to modify your own stuff is already really shitty, but its not something that the average Joe really can understand easily, and even less care about it.
But not being able to USE your car for some things? That just screams easy headlines and it's a reason I might not get a Tesla in the future.
There is also the entire liability and planed obsolescent issues not being dealt with. Will Tesla support these cars forever? Will 10 year old models still get software updates?
Cars are already extremely risky to modify, but it is still possible (and it's even a protected consumer right). I can go out and accidentally cut the breaks on my own car while changing the tire, if it causes harm, we already have a system in place to deal with it.
Why should software be any different?
I don't think that is the same for self-driving software if you were allowed to hack it. It is easy to test if your brakes work, I think it may be harder to test modified software with the huge number of interactions it must deal with.
Tough. We have liability law to cover that.
You'll be screaming to allow modification when your trip is 20 minutes longer because a bunch of rich assholes paid Tesla to route all traffic around their neighborhood.
People can already modify their car hardware in dangerous ways, yet no one is welding the hood shut. You may weld spikes on your car to keep prying eyes away if you wish, but when you inevitably impale someone, Ford will not be liable.
Why should software be treated differently? All Tesla has to do to avoid liability is to say "The vehicle was running firmware with aftermarket firmware installed by the owner". They won't even need to run diagnostics, they can simply look at the logs they collect.
Because it will be obvious that it was modified, even to journalists, the public and a jury of your peers. Also the cops, who will arrest you for it.
But there is no such visibility for software.
> But there is no such visibility for software
Software modification has a lot of visibility, especially since Teslas log everything - why not log when new firmware was loaded? They could also checksum post-facto, but even that is not necessary: Tesla could implement something similar to Androids "fastboot oem unlock" option
What I mean by visibility is that you can't fudge it, that reality is plainly visible to all actors.
Income is not visible directly (although what one's house looks like for example is visible and is a good indication of income). If you meet a well-dressed guy in a Starbucks, you have no idea whether he's crippled with debt or whether he has so much money he doesn't know what to do with. And that's true regardless of the fact that income is regulated by the government, that banks keep records and all that.
Software is NOT visible in that sense: whether your microwave is running code that will make it explode when you type in 9999 or not, is not something that can be known by everyone but the first person who has access to the device, let alone the public who couldn't understand how to compare two hashes anyway.
As far as any third party is concerned, Tesla could just be faking logs and no one would know. Actually, you may not see it still, so imagine that say, GM, suddenly releases an autonomous car and it crashes. Do you trust them when they tell you that the logs say the driver was at fault?
It's a bit like when people used to modding their own hardware tools encounter a GPU or a RAM card that won't fit into a PCI slot, so they "cut it to fit", and then are surprised it doesn't work.
When you modify a car physically with spikes or to make more engine noise, or to have looser suspension you are dealing with isolated newtonian environments.
When you tweak software that involves massive machine learned models, you can cause absolutely unpredictable horrific consequences. There are good reasons to restrict this.
Its your car. It's Tesla software. You don't own it, just like you don't own any of the other commercial software you use.
I can't really find fault in it; they deserve the lion's share of the revenue (not Uber, Lyft, or you) if you put the vehicle into their shared ridesharing fleet for profit.
You don't have to put it into their fleet though. But if you do, them the terms.
It's not unprecedented to have severe restrictions on software in EU. E.g. you can't use le Windows you legally obtained in France on two PCs simultaneously. Some vendors charge per-CPU/core licenses, some network software (e.g. certain PABX) charge even by the number of connected endpoints.
A car, on the other hand, is not copied after purchase, so a copyright license is not relevant. A “license” (as stated above) is not a general list of conditions you have to agree on; it is simply a list of permissions for you to do what copyright law (and trademark law, etc.) would otherwise not allow you to do. No such law restricts what a buyer is allowed to do with a car after a purchase is made, unless a contract is signed. A contract can state arbitrary restrictions, but for something to be a contract, it has to fulfill a number of conditions: it must be knowingly and willingly entered into by both parties, it must not be unilateral or even, in some jurisdictions, too beneficial to only one party. Clearly your standard so-called “license agreement” does not qualify. Ideally, and usually, a contract is something on paper which both parties sign. Do you sign such a thing when “buying” a Tesla? If so, does this contract allow resale? Does the contract require the reseller to require the second-hand buyer to also sign it?
Software has, by the way, always* been this way. I've been "buying software" for twenty years and I've never actually not gotten a license with it rather than the software itself, with all ownership rights conferred to me.
*within the scope of my knowledge and experience
And if you're in the tech industry, that "legal bs" is what allows you to have an income.
Your income is physically earned, not 'allowed' to you by insidious and underhanded legal means.
So what you’re saying is that just because his salary depends upon his not understanding the arguments for this to be “legal bs”, he therefore should voluntarily choose to abstain from understanding them? Upton Sinclair would turn in his grave.
What's next?
A blender has some kind of timer software in it so you can't use it in commercial unless you are on blender network? A TV has software for programmable channel in it, so you can't use it in your bar unless the TV vendor allow it?
Software is their implementation detail, I buy the resulting whole product.
Tesla is not prohibiting ridesharing. They are requiring the vehicle be in their ridesharing pool if you use their autonomous driving software.
Again, you own the car, not the software. Don't like the license, don't buy the car. Others will.
and I should be able to use it as I see fit.
Edit: It's worth clarifying my opinion. I'm totally alright with software "manufacturers" leasing software to end-users (or, in the case of Tesla, leasing the software inside their rolling computers to drivers). What I take issue with is the notion that there is a "sale" when a license is involved. It's a lease, and I'd like to see the force of law involved in reflecting that fact in the marketplace. Maybe it's splitting hairs, but I think consumers need to be clearly told that they do not own virtually anything that they've purchased that contains a general-purpose computer, and that they should not expect the benefits of ownership (ability to modify, to continue using even when the "manufacturer" has decided to no longer "support" the product, ability to resell, etc) in such a transaction.
Why? I paid them for the car. I should able to use the car however I want.
Honestly, this doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Self-driving functionality is presumably a piece of functionality that's heavily dependent upon lots of data that Tesla owns, dependent upon regularly getting software update, etc. Why should Tesla give its data and continued work on software upgrades to you for the purposes of using that for the benefit of one of Tesla's competitors?
Just face it. If you're buying a Tesla, you're not just buying a car, you're buying a software platform and access to lots of data and engineering work that Tesla provides on an ongoing basis. If you want just a car, then don't buy Tesla.
That said, if you are looking to buy a self-driving car and using that self-driving functionality for Uber or Lyft, good luck figuring out how. It would not surprise me if other self-driving cars had similar restrictions (though I guess if Uber sells self-driving cars to the general public then presumably you could use those with Uber, but probably not with Lyft).
This does not leave much room for speculation regarding a), this is basically an announcement of intending to introduce "the Tesla Network" as a player in that market.
"You acknowledge that Software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility"
I think I'll wait 15 years until a GPL autopilot comes out. AutGNUpilot?
For a time, new Tesla buyers again become early adopters. But unlike traditional early adopters, who take a trade-off (on price, or features, or polish) for being first, these adopters are promised the features when they are ready.
The nay-saying around Tesla is immense, even in these early HN comments. Obviously there's some risk here, but man. Tesla is sowing the seeds of the future.
But some of the risks they're taking are just completely stupid and unnecessary, such as calling their assisted cruise control "Autopilot." That's like waving the proverbial cape at the proverbial bull.
If you ask anybody today, "what company is interested in self-driving cars?" Their answer is going to be Tesla. They're not gonna say Apple, or Ford or Volvo or Mercedes or Mobileye or Intel. They're gonna point straight to Tesla.
A big part of that is their "inaccurate" word choice. From a PR perspective, the name was a solid gold decision.
I doubt it. It creates false hopes and probably hurted/hurts them when crashs happen. The Tesla autopilot death in June was a really big thing, yet other crashes where assistant systems of other manufacturers are never in the press. Maybe because of the name, maybe because the drivers use them better?
Also look at what happened recently in Germany:
1. Basically the head of the DMVs sending a letter to all Tesla owners to RTFM that it is not in fact an autopilot.
2. Department of Transportation pushing Tesla to stop using the term "autopilot" in marketing as it is misleading.
Then enhance the frequency of it happening by three orders of magnitude given that Tesla drivers are generally not professional drivers, let alone trained in the quirks of an autopilot in the beta release stage...
You're correct that most do not, but there's now one that does.
Also, the comparison would be more relevant if you had as much time to correct problems that occur eight feet away from an oncoming lane of 70 MPH traffic, and as many degrees of freedom in which to do so, as you do when something goes wrong with nothing but 10,000 feet of air around you.
Air safety is an intimidating engineering problem, but it's utterly trivial compared to what it will take to build safe self-driving cars. Make no mistake, it's about time we tried... but we just need to not be stupid about it. Calling a glorified cruise control "Autopilot" is stupid.
Autopilot is the correct term. I'm tired of always having to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Combine ignorance with misguided self-righteousness, and we get...this mess.
It seems like an airliner flying at altitude has quite large safety margins compared to a car on a highway.
There is just no excuse for using that particular term for this particular technology.
How are the consequences much more dramatic while flying? I can think of plenty of scenarios while driving where you go from perfect autopilot conditions with no visible risks to death of passengers or pedestrians in <5 seconds.
Pilots typically have more time to react, though (astronauts lie even further away along this axis; in cases where astronauts can take action to save their lives, they typically have even more time, but also, in many cases, there's no action that will save them)
As to the "take control at a moments notice": that's where the problem lies.
The arguments in "Ironies of Automation" (https://www.ise.ncsu.edu/nsf_itr/794B/papers/Bainbridge_1983...) such as "By taking away the easy parts of his task, automation can make the difficult parts of the human operator's task more difficult" haven't lost any of their power in the 30+ years since it was published.
Because of that, I doubt the typical driver will be able to handle emergency situations, as it will require frequent training.
When I'm using the Autopilot, I feel like I'm in my airplane, always on guard, and in a practice of recovery from unusual attitude in flight.
There are a few times also where being an engineer has helped a lot. You can pretty much predict the situations where the car will run into issues and conflicts ahead of time, just by looking at the scenario in front of you.
It's something that the majority of population is not trained to do.
Now having said that, I used to own a BMW X5 with Adaptive Cruise Control, and that car was also doing some pretty stupid things at times, especially when cars in front were moving out of the way. The car would suddenly think the way was clear and floor the accelerator...
I really want to hack the can bus and give it more smarts. What is the legality of that?
Further, it makes the bulk of motorway driving less fatiguing. When you're not having to personally intervene to slow down when the driver in front chooses to go a few kays slower than you, it's nowhere near as irritating.
Ask 99 out of 100 people who aren't pilots, but who might be Tesla customers, and see if they can recite what you wrote below:
While on autopilot you are still expected to be monitoring the flight and take control at a moments notice. Autopilot does not allow the pilot to take a nap or go in the back and party with the flight attendants.
And how do you know all that? Because you were trained accordingly.
I'm not saying Tesla shouldn't offer the feature in their cars. I'm saying they shouldn't have named it after a feature that people think allows pilots to party with the flight attendants.
Human factors are a thing. And it's a little scary that some guys who build rockets and plan Mars missions on the side don't seem to understand that.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that it's a lot more complicated than what Tesla decided to name the feature. I think the accidents that have occurred would have occurred regardless of what they named it.
Your argument fails as the analogy of car drivers with airplane pilots fails on various grounds.
a. The airplanes, which provides autopilot facility, their pilots have to undergo more rigorous and stringent training than what a ordinary car driver has to undergo
b. for different types of airplane autopilot systems the pilots have to undergo different types of trainings (you have not mentioned what kind of autopilot you have used, but I'd doubt if your autopilot training on one type of plane will automatically certify you to drive all kinds of auto-pilot planes out there, even within the same airplane category)
c. what Tesla is doing is on one hand it is saying (in fact, screaming in its adverts) that "we are bringing autopilot in cars", "we are bringing autopilot in cars" but when it actually is bringing just a driver assistance system and when that causes accidents, Tesla is putting blame on the customers for not understanding what is autopilot. This is not fair, as Tesla does NOT put any requirement for more rigorous and stringent training for its drivers the way airplane manufacturers/airliners put. So, Tesla is playing with the lives of not only its drivers but also of the other road users.
You are welcome to counter-argue my points. But this too much hoohaa about auto-pilot by Tesla and the subsequent bad publicity it is going to bring them is not good for them. People will not be subtle then because Tesla is not being subtle in their adverts now.
edit : typo
Things obviously converge with more complex aircrafts, as it would be quite difficult to find, let's say, two Airbus A320 with drastically different stacks, but some of them, like Cessna 172 Skyhawk, have been in production since 1956, with aircraft technology making quite a progress in those 60 years.
If all your training has been done on a 1956 Cessna 172, is it wise to operate a 2016 model without sufficient training? No. Legal? Yes.
> Tesla does NOT put any requirement for more rigorous and stringent training for its drivers
Beyond saying "Don't take tour hands off the wheel and be prepared to take over any moment" what kind of training would you envision them offering outside of [insert state name] Driver's Handbook? Most states already offer free defensive driving courses as well.
But I'd like to bring counter-argument to your points (a) and (b): taking away the autopilot feature from both airplanes and cars, an airplane pilot still has to undergo substantially more training than a car driver does, so imho the increased training for pilots compared to vehicle drivers is largely coming from the difficulty in controlling the machine and the more deadly consequence of control-loss to the driver / pilot and to the others.
That being said, the term autopilot is being used opportunistically. There's no way Tesla will back away from the term now, so the next best thing is to warn the user, in every step of the way, that "YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD IDIOT", to the point that if they can detect your hands not on the wheel a warning sounds.
I do believe the Tesla Autopilot and the autonomous mode in the future will save lives, what we're experiencing is the growing pain till we get there.
But part of the training that a pilot of an "airplane with autopilot" has to undergo has to do with understanding what the autopilot can and cannot do and what the pilot has to do.
Tesla is not making this mandatory for their drivers to undergo rigorous training regarding this very feature that they taut so much. Then as you have pointed out they are opportunistically advertising that very feature and then when the unsuspecting user is caught off-guard, the Tesla is shouting "Gotcha, you didn't read the fine print. See, it is clearly mentioned here". If then the customer says that but that thing was mentioned amongst thousand other things and that too in font so small, Tesla will counter him/her "see, that's your problem not ours." If that's what they want then be it so. If that's what is making them happy then be it so.
It may help Tesla win some law-suit. But they will clearly and surely lose big on the customer trust.
>>"YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD IDIOT"
Btw, It's not fair to say the user an "idiot" when the larger idiocy (and not just idiocy but a cruel practical joke on the customers bordering on criminal activity as it may be at the cost of customer's life) is committed by Tesla manufacturers.
Sad, I was a fan of Tesla but no more.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24296544
Over half of pilots admit to sleeping while on autopilot. These are people who had to take months and years of training to fly.
Meanwhile,to be a driver you need to drive for 15 minutes and do some basic manouvers. In some places of the world, not even that. And we hope that those people will "keep an eye on the road" while the autopilot feature is running? It sounds great in theory, but it's not going to happen. We need a system that can operate completely without human supervision - but that ain't happening any time soon either.
Unfortunately fighting how the words end up used is pretty hopeless.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss
EDIT: no idea why the downvotes, I'm all for self driving cars, but pretty obviously they could be scared of PR issues and lawsuits.
They've been clearly working on AP 2.0 for a long time - this sort of hardware upgrade isn't something you roll out in a few weeks. This capability was even pretty strongly hinted at for the Model 3.
Sorry, but I seriously doubt they will have sufficient hardware installed to take it to level 4 or 5. It might be a stretch to get to 3 with anything they can deploy today simply because no one has demonstrated a real world working solution for these tiers. Oh you might be able to track demo one or controlled loop it.
So you mean there is no advanced hardware in the new cars?
Actually, in regards to Tesla, they always stated (and were very open about it) that early-adopters pay premium to support research/growth/etc. First with Roadster, now with S (not sure about X). It can be expected that the same extra features (same hardware) on model will cost less. So the trade-off here is just that, being "first".
You have to be kidding. The Tesla cheer-leading is immense. This is a competitive space within which Tesla might be a leader, but you make it sound as if everyone else around them is stagnant.
The majors are building this stuff, the large tech companies are building this stuff, and even big component providers are building this stuff. This is obvious if you look outside of the SV echo chamber.
1. It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion).
2. Despite knowing about and following news about driverless cars for a while, there was something surprisingly (to me) compelling about watching the video. It's like you get a little taste of the full A to B that it can give you (door to door).
Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I need to know how long I have to save..!
I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.
> Maybe it will have technology to not go on that street until it is good to do so.
It's not technology that's required, barring perhaps flying car technology.
If every way is busy, you can't just wait eternally, you have to communicate with other drivers as parent commenter said, maybe let a couple of people go, and then realise when you just need to go for it and 'force' someone to wait for you if they're not otherwise going to.
It will be really awesome to see a car do that safely and autonomously.
There'll come a time, perhaps, when two cars are flashing their headlights at each other to communicate, for no real reason other than "that's how human-driven cars did it in the old days"!
People seem to hand-wave and make up what these supposed future self driving cars will do - and worse, they hand-wave and assert they'll be objectively better at X than humans, without any evidence to backup the assertion.
Self driving cars are made by fallible humans using fallible programming languages and constructs. They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.
Sure, one day you'll be able to sleep in the back seat of your car or read a book while it precisely weaves you between traffic only to navigate you right off a cliff. Or the neighbor's kid with a laser pointer prevents your car from turning into the driveway.
Driver-assisted cars are the real future.
How many other sectors have abandoned human interference after computers surpassed human performance?
So far, society seems to not be OK with this (as-in we'd rather a person do the killing, even if we think that killing was wrongful).
We aren't OK with autonomous robots having weapons, even though they might be objectively better at guarding prisoners, military bases, killing "bad guys" in bank robberies, etc. We freak out when a fatality occurs at an automotive plant, and those robots only pivot in place!
If society is going to agree we're all OK with a bug left by some short-sighted engineer being responsible for people's deaths - then OK. However, I wager people aren't really OK with this, most just haven't really considered this aspect yet.
Sure there will be legal issues (in a crash who is responsible, the driver, the manufacturer or the programmers) but they will get resolved with time and case law.
The economic advantages to self driving cars are huge (unless you drive for a living but then progress is what it is), 35,000 people a year die on American roads an order of magnitude improvement would save ~32,000 lives a year (and that's just accidents resulting in fatalities, many many more experience life changing injuries), this generation of drivers might not like it but as the cars get better and better at driving themselves the next generation will hand over more and more of the responsibilities until a human driving a car manually on the road will look like an anachronism.
Also people aren't ever going to be happy with a bug in hardware or software killing someone but we are currently 'happy' with allowing tens of thousands of people to die from car accidents, if the motorcar had been invented in 2000 many people would have wanted to ban it immediately.
"You want to operate a 2500KG metal box at 40mph in proximity to people!? oh hell no!"
Google's road tested self driving car is already safer[1] than a human driving. Suggesting that a computer will be a more reliable processor of data and computer of maths than a human is not something which needs data to back it up. The ability of drivers is so variable and in the aggregate there are so many of them that it's almost self-evident that a self driving car which crosses a very low threshold for entry ("being road legal") will be better than a human.
> They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.
Nobody is saying that they will any more than people argue that autopilot on a plane will. It's very plain to see that right now, as of this second, there is a self-driving car which is safer than a human driver. It is not yet legal to buy, but it doesn't change the fact that it's safer. It may be that a bug crops up which kills a few people. But that doesn't make it less safe, it makes the cause of death for some of the users different to "human error".
[1]http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/googles-self-driving-car-is-rid...
tl;dr: don't trust the client (or other drivers).
Simple scenario to illustrate this: car X enters a narrow bidirectional road which is lined with cars. There is enough room only for one car to pass at a time, safely. Car Y enters from the other end. Several more cars enter behind car Y (we'll call these Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4).
One car must reverse back down the road from the midway point, in order for any cars to pass through.
Car X and its driver cannot see what is behind car Y, but for car Y to reverse it must rely on Y1, Y2, Y3, and Y4 reversing. In order for this to happen, Y4 must first reverse despite not being able to see why it needs to reverse (either through meat or tech sensors).
The optimal solution is that sensor data reviewed in the aggregate by each car leads to a cooperative decision that car X should reverse until it can pull over, and allow the other cars to pass before proceeding.
In an emergency situation it's also possible to envisage scenarios in which shared data analysis and cooperative decision making are optimal. For example, consider cars X and Y now destined for a high speed, head-on collision. The right lane of the road (car X's right, car Y's left) is clear and the left lane (car X's left, car Y's right) is a deep trench. A primitive or non collaborative AI might suggest that both cars swerve to the same direction to avoid collision, which results in a collision of similar magnitude. A better solution than swerving the two cars into each other might be to swerve one into the ditch and one into the road. The optimal solution is likely to swerve only one car and hard stop the other, knowing that the other car is going to move its direction of travel significantly. This can only be done by giving the cars the ability to make decisions collaboratively.
Not as tight an example as yours I'm afraid, but humans make cooperative decisions all the time where we use information and continue to be suspicious of it and hedge against lies. I think any realistic cooperative tech system where there are untrusted components needs to stay skeptical as well.
I'm probably super naïve, but I think there's probably a way of digitally signing hardware components so that we can trust sensor data from other cars.
And on the other hand there is plenty of opportunity to include encryption with gov/mfn signed keys, crosscheck received data with sensor values, etc.
The benefits far outweigh the risks.
In the case of cars some radio comms (uhf, wifi, or even bluetooth?) is probably sufficient since there is no reason for a car in New York cares about the opinions of a car in San Francisco. You'd probably even see performance gains under a distributed system since latency is effectively taken out of the equation (time of flight for local radio being effectively instantaneous).
NB I'm sure "proper" behaviour can be programmed - I'm just keen to see it! (And who waives if it is a self driving car?)
And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?
There is even a showroom selling them + the X in the local shopping centre (mall) and 3 (I think) super-chargers in the car park.
After Model S, most common is the Leaf. (also right-hand drive)
There will be a huge public to-and-fro about negligence versus freedom, with driving manual being the new driving drunk, but the insurance premiums will settle it.
It's worth mentioning - which I already hinted at in another comment - that self-driving cars, awesome as this is, will be yet another area where our privacy gets compromised, same as with mobile phones. This will push governments to favour it in the long run and eventually outlaw "regular" cars altogether as too anarchic (or make using them so expensive and cumbersome that it's going to amount to the same thing).
When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers, that owning a car is completely passé, they'll panic. That will be their DVD -> streaming moment, but it will already be too late.
I'm sure they understand that. Some even do moves in that direction, like Ford ackuiring chariot, the shared ride provider, and Mercedes collaborating with Via.
I predict that many in bigger cities will give up on owning their own car, and join car sharing services.
Then you can choose between a private car just for you, or a shared ride where the car optimizes routes and picks up multiple people.
Other benefits: it's just you? take a small 2 person car. On the way to a party with some friends? Get a nice Mercedes to drive you there. Need to transport some furniture? Get a pickup.
Of course this only holds for cities and densely populated suburban regions. Or if you don't have to drive long routes on a regular basis.
Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future.
We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ?
I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people.
Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it.
[1] That is not hyperbole.
[2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.
But this is much more likely to actually happen. A grid of self driving cars powered by renewable energy. I will take it over the current state.
While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down.
The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.
And income inequality means that people can literally afford to pay for other people to not be near them as they travel.
Busses and trains and other mass transport will return when income inequality is reduced to the point where the amount it costs people to pay for their own space is no longer affordable for them, but if you're earning 500 times the person next to you, you'll happily pay what it takes for them to disappear.
Public transport only works inside of cities, and there's a lot of infrastructure already built to support sprawling metropolitan areas where everyone has 1/4 acre of land surrounding their detached home. There's not a lot of push to tear all that up and forcibly relocate the residents to inner-city apartments.
You know the benefit of electric, self-driving cars, though? An intelligent car isn't going to run you over on your bike. Be happy about that.
What matters is if the 82% of Americans who live in cities are forced to crawl through sprawling car-choked landscapes, or are able to live in a walkable environment. High reliance on cars prevents the latter.
By the way you were wrong about that Japan vs US comparison as well. USA has a higher proportion of urban residents than does Japan. And they have plenty of trains in Japan.
Yes, I'm guessing that many of those urban areas are within half an hour of a freeway--though this may be less true in the West. But the vast majority of those 82% don't live in places that are remotely walkable.
/s obviously.
God I hate the responses on threads like this that insist on the impracticality of public transport worldwide because it doesn't work in the US. It's like mass Stockholm Syndrome or something!
Notice how I even said "it works in places like Japan"? Notice that? See it? Good. Now quit acting like like you're being oppressed every time someone mentions the US. Yes, the world is a big place, but guess what? The US exists and a lot of people live there. Deal with it.
Jesus christ it's like I insulted your mother or something.
According to my Google search, Japan's urban population is 90%+. The US is around 80%. That's why I mentioned the two places.
Three of the best public transit systems in the world are Berlin, Tokyo, and New York, which are both amongst the densest large cities in the world (Berlin is almost exclusively 5 story apartment buildings). The Berlin subway is largely self-supporting without public subsidy, Tokyo's system is composed of two competing but interoperable systems, the larger of which is privately run, and New York's system was privately run until 1940. The lifestyle, weather, and zoning of the cities where it works kickstarted the construction, and there exists enough demand that they would have great public transit systems even without government initiative.
Space? Roads take up way more space than tracks.
Efficiency of cost? Roads are very expensive. Often more expensive per passenger mile than railroads.
Efficiency of energy use? Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.
Efficiency of through-put? Roads even with autonomous cars will never have the throughput of a train-line.
Also I think you significantly underestimate the cost of road building and maintenance.
>Space? Roads take up way more space than tracks.
Highways can now be minimised to two tracks, the standard width of a vehicle, vibration reports can tell the councils where pothole repair is most needed.
>Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.
Car's are 2000kg in part to protect the driver, as crashes trend to 0 there's no reason they need to be so big.
>Roads even with autonomous cars will never have the throughput of a train-line.
Trains are rarely full. Cars can get smaller, we can mitigate traffic jams.
Eletrics cars are 2000kg because a the battery weighs a lot.
Trains get smaller too when it's not rush hour. France regularly runs one carriage trains the size of a bus.
Mitigate and smooth flowing aren't the same thing. On way to work I see cars backed up for miles. Doesn't matter if they're self driving or not when cars move bumper to bumper already.
That depends on how you are defining efficiency (doesn't it always), an electric motor with a good battery backed by a good powergrid (nuclear/renewables) is about the most efficient solution to "one person going from Point A to Point B" in many ways, I'm in favor of public transport but even in a European country it can let you down.
Also in the future with electric self-driving cars I'd happily not own a car (I don't now) and just rent one as and when it's needed from a pool of cars, that would take cars off the road compared to now.
Roads are indispensable and essential for last mile connectivity. No matter if trains and subways become 10 times more popular they will always exist in addition to the road infrastructure. Thus autonomous electric cars are a huge boon, its just common sense.
[1] public transit is great for when you have a lot of time and aren't carrying a lot of things. Doing, say, your weekly groceries by bus or walking is annoying af. Source: living in a European city without owning a car.
PS: I live in the US now and not having a car is much more convenient than it was in Europe. Uber and zipcar and getaround are magic. We didn't have that in my city
Heck, to a certain extent we're already in that scenario, with some sharing services are cheaper than cars(@ridewithvia, @ridechariot, and maybe uber pool and lyft line) - and yet people prefer cars.
[1] https://www.postauto.ch/en/news/start-public-testing-autonom...
http://www.boredpanda.com/space-required-to-transport-60-peo...
plus in many if not most countries rail simply doesn't go where people need to be. in countries with a choice cars are winning out and with autonomous and eventual ev powered cars it won't be a bad thing
Trains are intrinsically unequal, they serve hub towns at best and cities only at worst, they are dirty, cramped, noisy, unprivate and they don't go when or where you want to go. Even with Google maps seaming together journeys out of trains and busses, you end up waiting and walking a lot. And trains are an intrinsic monopoly with a staggering up front investment, you can't make them better with market forces. I foresee self driving cars cannibalizing the train's market of people who just want to pay for journeys rather than the vehicle.
I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.
According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.
Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.
But I think saying this took 30 years is cheating a bit. There were fits and starts and long periods of no development until breakthroughs in other fields (machine learning) occured, which can now get us the rest of the way. Not to mention, the pareto principle doesn't account for Moore's law
You probably won't need to own one either, just hail one. So it may be very affordable.
I wrote a little more about this here: https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles
Not sure what to make of this. New buyers are getting less than current owners now, but expected to get much more later?
I can't think of a precedent for this as a marketing approach in modern consumer products.
Features including performance related features have been pushed via software updates for years.
Anything from navigation to cruise control to sport packages have been deployed either OTA or via a manual update.
Tesla is just pushing it to a new limit (not necessarily a good thing) and is actually advertising every change and feature update.
Can you give any examples of other feature improvements in cars that have been pushed via OTA?
Apple iOS ;) the iPhone 7 had (don't know if it has now) some camera features (autofocus and raw related) disabled that were present on the 6/6s because of software limitations.
This isn't that uncommon many times you can have a new product which comes with some features disabled/not working because the software did not catch up to the hardware yet for what ever reason.
There were also another thing or 2 that came in 10.3 iirc.
This is analogous to the Tesla example, new hardware no software.
The fact that the 7+ has a different portrait mode doesn't matter, the app had none, and in this case the new Tesla comes with new hardware that provides a different and arguably better "autopilot" but the software would trail the release of the hardware.
Autopilot 1.0 was the precedent.
They announced that at the 'D' event that all cars shipping from then on would have AP hardware in.
The capabilities were progressively rolled out depending on the tech package you purchased over the next 12 months.
This is a clear "temporary" downgrade of capabilities in exchange for a later payoff.
Do you know if MobileEye dropped them, or they chose to go with something else? How do you know?
E.g. the one here: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobiley...
EDIT: also, did it turn into the wrong lane at 2:25-2:30? is this a security risk?
Side note: People are not very strict about that rule here and nobody cares. Mainly because you're allowed to overtake other cars on both sides - not just only on the left. Isn't that dangerous? Yes, but there's everywhere a speed limit of around 65mph (104kmh) which makes overtaking other cars much easier / safer.
Yes, totally a crash collision risk! I've witnessed this happened once in a Costco parking lot. Car A made a right turn onto the left lane of the crossing road and the oncoming car B didn't pay attention at the moment and bumped into it head on.
But: in a standard right turn at a 4-way intersection in California, where neither street is one-way, when turning right, you must turn into the rightmost lane of the cross street. In particular (barring special things like dual right-turn lanes), you can't swing wide into the second lane of the cross street. By "second lane," I don't mean the lane for opposing traffic (obviously you can't go into that lane) -- I mean the left lane of the two that are going in the direction you are turning.
If you are making a left turn, you can go into either the left lane or the right lane of the cross street.
See item 2 (compare item 1) in the section "Examples Of Right and Left Turns" in the CA driver handbook (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/turns).
Yes, you're supposed to drive in the right lane when not passing - some localities are more strict about this than others. For example, here in Michigan, there's a fine for driving in the left lane and not passing anyone for...one mile? Two miles? I forget, it's never really used. And you're supposed to "FALL" into the First Available Legal Lane. But in practice, if the second lane is open, people will jump across the first lane for the second - just watch your rearview as you accelerate and make sure the oncoming car wasn't moving over for you.
This is more aggressive driving than I would have expected from an automatic algorithm, but perfectly matches my expectations for the driver of a luxury sport car like a BMW, Audi, or Mercedes - and probably a Tesla, or a compact car driven by a young driver. I would expect a minivan, hybrid, or small commercial vehicle to wait. And I would expect a bus, garbage truck, or semi truck to just pull out and force the oncoming car to merge into the left lane.
Also, it would be a safety risk, not a security risk.
Also, the left lane is only for passing rule doesn't apply like that in California. Instead the rule is that you cannot be going slower than the traffic behind you or the traffic to your right. If you are, you have to move over. But if you are going faster than the traffic around you (or nobody else is around you) you can stay in the left lane as long as you like.
However, it's not a hard and fast rule, and a lot of people don't follow it. So I have to deal with morons who drive 5mph below the speed limit, in the left lane, on state routes. Every single day. As I drive up and down a decently large hill.
RE: Wrong lane: that Tesla driveway would be confusing to even a human driver. It's definitely not a regular road, so the car didn't understand it.
That used the be the norm in the US as well, but it has broken down over the past few decades. Some studies and motorist groups blame the nationwide 55 mph speed limit imposed in the 70s due to oil shortages. Slow drivers suddenly felt safe driving in left lanes and a whole generation has learned to drive like this. [1]
There are laws in many states against impeding traffic in the left lane [2], but they aren't that enforced. You also see signs occasionally on the highway, but my issue with these signs is that they say "Slower traffic keep right" (instead of eg, "Stay right except when passing"). I strongly suspect that very view people view themselves as "slow drivers" -- rather everyone tends to believe they drive the appropriate speed and everyone else is driving too slow or too fast.
[1] http://nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/more-states-are-cracking-do...
As a German citizen, it really bugs me that Volkswagen is incapable of this kind of innovation. I don't see their roadmap play out like they plan it, because Tesla might beat them to market hard. I fear German regulation will jump in (again) to help them against Tesla.
Currently, the German government gives out electric vehicle subsidies (~5k per car), but it is limited cars less expensive than 60k. At the moment there is very low demand for this subsidy, because everyone who goes EV wants to go Tesla.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
(front page discussion of that story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 )
[0]: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Currently, Tesla is the only one who is delivering practical innovation and success!
Here's Mercedes in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_RFzC_G5BA
Tesla has the hardware in every car it sells, and will be mining super useful data with all these sensors, and tweaking it's software (machine learning based on real use cases for a year) before it puts it out to the public! The scale of data mining that can be done with Tesla's approach is near impossible with other cars (if they continue to sell the cars with and without the sensory hardware)
Again, Tesla may very well do it better than anyone else, but it's a bit early to talk like they've won anything here.
Other than the 250,000 drivers of Nissan Leafs... I think that's beyond twice as many as every Tesla ever built.
Otherwise it's inferior to Tesla model 3 in almost any aspect (not to mention the larger Teslas):
- only 107 mile range vs. 215 miles - no super chargers or own network, relies on third party generic chargers - less trunk space - less acceleration - no battery swap - no regular software upgrades over the internet - no self driving capabilities - no flat screen controls
When Tesla model 3 is out, selling at $35,000, Nissan will have to make serious upgrades to remain a viable alternative.
2. While 'more acceleration' sound nice in theory, using all this power is usually pretty bad for your range.
3. While the battery swap sounds nice, in practice battery degradation hasn't been that bad according to many EV owners I talked to. Will it actually be necessary? If you're thinking about swapping the battery for a quick 'charge' I'm not sure that's going to be available for the Model 3 (and even if available, what the costs for doing so will be.).
4. Some might like the flat screen, I'm personally not a very big fan. Plain old fashioned knobs and buttons are really easy to work with.
I agree with the rest of your list but I'm pretty sure EV sales (especially for the near future, say the next ten years) are not a zero-sum game. Plenty of Leafs, Bolts, Souls, and Model 3s will be sold regardless of the fact that the Model3 may be 'better' based on your definition.
Disclaimer: I drive a Kia Soul EV with 'only' ~100 miles real-world range.
Other than being able to charge a premium for activating later why install it on all the cars? Tesla is basically using data from sensors that'd be in a Fully Autonomous Vehicle, driven by a human for at least a year. Thats a lot of free valuable data being collected for the cost of just the hardware installation!
Instead of doing all the testing and tweaking once car is street legal for test runs as an autonomous car, Tesla benefits from putting every single piece of hardware needed for its future as early as possible, just to mine this data gold.
What innovation? Autonomous vehicles? Volkswagen is working with Stanford researchers and Mobileye (you know, the people who helped build Tesla Autopilot):
http://www.volkswagengroupamerica.com/autonomous.html
I mean, sure, if you don't leave the front page of HackerNews, you'd think that Tesla is literally inventing this stuff in real-time. But believe it or not there are lots of smart people and companies working on autonomous vehicles. They just don't market as well or as often as Tesla. And in some cases, yes, they're behind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars#199...
> Person gets out and let's car park itself
But seriously the tech is very impressive. The journey was rather simple though, and didn't cover more difficult areas (inner city driving, heavy stop start traffic, roadblocks, road accidents and so on). I hope that Tesla test these things thoroughly because they've already got one death under their belt, it won't take many more to put people off completely.
City driving, roadblocks, accidents, and other unusual circumstances definitely deserve to be called more difficult, though.
Many people are starting to realize that's the real test, especially those likely to be model S/≡/X customers.
Real consumer and public education on the nature of the problem is necessary though, especially if we want a safer self driving world.
Because of our incredible image processing ability we can deal with a lot of shit that we may come across while driving. But the computer still has a lot of catching up to do in this department. Do you really want your life to end because an AI can't distinguish between a white lorry in the way and an empty road? It is an unnerving choice to have to make I think.
Yeah this. Every demo I've seen is some suburban or sparsely populated area. As a Chicago inner city driver, I really want to see these things handle our rush hour, especially in the snow and rain before I start calling this stuff the future. Its a good start, but I imagine the 'hard' problems with automated driving haven't been solved yet. If they were then these demos wouldn't be in great weather on sunny days and in low traffic.
That, and judging by Tesla's history - if there was indeed something lacking, they might just retro-fit it for free onto people's cars. So I assume they're keen on getting this right...haha.
* http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...
This statement is based on what he is aware of at the time. The most pessimistic side of it is purely a data game, and Tesla's ability to have 100k cars collecting data for them will give them a significant advantage to accelerate their progress.
(Note: I don't really wonder this, because cops do not officially make stops in order to generate revenue, even though unofficially it's widely understood that they do.)
They could also shift to giving out more domestic or pedestrian tickets for things like music being too loud and jay-walking.
We are talking about giving people hardware for free, then paying money to turn it on or not.
Http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Golden%20Screwdriver
>It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.
>Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.
Not sure why someone would risk this money if they can activate it later on (even though for slightly more) to see how the functionality will be?
This is definitely done on start, and probably even during operation.
I don't see this really being a problem that has to be worried about.
Where this breaks down is 15 years down the line when the newest set of drivers doesn't know how to actually drive....
I've read about how hard it is to sell an aging Prius because the battery pack has to be replaced. Its apparently not easy to do and the part is very expensive. For used car buyers you're better off buying a gas civic if you want an efficient older car. ICE doesn't age like electric.
Ideally, there's a fair amount of (reliable) self-diagnosis. If you merely have to replace a camera that starts to malfunction, it might not be any more difficult than replacing a starter or an alternator (depending on construction.)
Its a bit like building a PC vs having a smartphone, which is mostly run by the OS supplier and carrier. The former is doable but the latter is way too locked down for the DIY crowd. The phone-ifcation of all things is concerning from many perspectives.
Good on you for being risk averse. Bad for all of us if you were in charge.
Risk will always be a factor when trying to push the envelope and bring new tech to life.
It's easy to put down most ideas on the basis of some risk - cars, rockets, medicine...
You have to build something and then you will discover how to improve on that eventually.
Will the new form of vandalism be any different than letting the air out of someone's tires, also rendering it incapacitated?
When Tesla shows me the same car driving in pouring rain, day or night, in snow, or such, then I will say "damn, they are truly making it work". Until then its a cheap magic trick and dishonest.
What is so odd is bragging about driving when people are least likely to need it, nice wonderful days. Safety systems have been aimed at providing control and reaction in the worst environments.
But does anyone else find this bittersweet?
I had an awesome moment of pride for what Tesla and Elon have done here. The dream is now reality.
Followed by a moment of sadness. The dream is now reality..
40 times the performance of a Tegra 3 is not particularly impressive.
Also, I sincerely hope that this new faster computer doesn't also run a web browser.
It boggles me that anyone even considers running things like antilock brakes, car security, and especially self-driving capability from an internet-connected device, no matter how nice and convenient it may be.
This is also the video embedded in the main press release (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863) and this news article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/tesla-rel...
It seems jumpy, and, for the speed at which the car is going and comes to a stop, there is not as much lurching as I would expect.
i'm not sure if it makes the car seem more capable though. if anything, i was worried that the car seemed to be accelerating and decelerating dangerously quickly until i realized it was sped up.
There's no problem with speeding up demo footage if you indicate you are doing so, like https://youtu.be/PDPrFJazD3Q?t=3m34s
> Tesla's with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on Teslas with first-generation Autopilot hardware
Which makes sense, as they'll be pulling in all that new data from the sensors. I guess people won't be too disappointed owning a car that will eventually be able to be fully autonomous!
Maybe there was enough turning angle to miss it, but I dunno...it looked pretty close to me.
Then I thought about another intersection by my old house. For years the cross street had to stop for traffic on the main street. One day I went to work, then I came home and it was all the sudden a 4-way stop. No database of stop signs could work either unless it was updated to the minute.
Did you know about it because you saw it being bent or because you drove there before and knew that there should be a stop sign?
What other players are operating in this space? And what's their approach?
What you're taught in driver ed means nothing after a little time on the road dealing with the norms of other drivers and the inconveniences they impose on you. Nobody wants to be inconvenienced any more, even if it's the "right thing" to do.
Some what related, I feel I notice in last 10-20 years people absolutely refuse to miss their turn/exit. They will create a very dangerous situation swerving across lanes and cutting people off at the last second rather than saying "oh dang, I will need to do a U-turn ahead".
Another example I notice is, the use of a turn signal is an expectation of the right to change lanes. People actually get angry with thoughts like "I put on my turn signal, everyone else should slam on their brakes so I can change lanes because I need to turn now!"
Even if undertaking is banned, you still need to check when switching lanes since people will undertake you no matter what. So there is no clear benefit.
My experience driving in the UK, Netherlands, France & Germany suggests that citizens of those countries are much much more conscientious about driving etiquette than us North Americans.
For instance if a plastic bag or piece of cardboard rolls across the highway a human driver knows it's safe to run over without stopping. Would a system like this just see an obstacle via radar and emergency brake?
Google has been working on this problem for longer and they have access to the largest image/video datasets in the world to train their models. I wonder how google and tesla systems would compare.
As of August, Google's self-driving cars have 2 million miles of real on-road experience, while Tesla's Autopilot systems have 140 million. They're beaming back data to Tesla the whole time.
It only has to be better than humans, not perfect.
I would also have proof of 10 million kilometers of simulated rides with no accident, and a third party organization not under the control of Tesla who creates some really tough repeatable challenges, both simulated and in the real world, that a vehicle manufacturer has to pass.
Challenges should include:
- thin wire tensioned over the street.
- the combination of super heavy rain with lighting, thick fog and people suddenly running onto the street
- passing by a soccer field and ball bounces over the street. Car should stop because it can be reasonably expected that a child will run blindly onto the street after the ball
- have obstacles that minimally invade into the minimum clearance outline of the current planned course. Car should plot an alternative course if it is possible or stop. Obstacles should appear in the last moment possible and car should always do the right thing.
- proof that the car can always detect street boundaries, any obstacle, and especially humans. It should be 100% correct or side on the safe side every time. At night, in a rain storm with super thick smog and hail. I'm not joking.
These are the minimum limits before any self-driving car should be able to drive on public roads, imho.
It does give a feel of bus/train when the owner gets off and the car heads to its next job.
I wonder if you need to _buy_ cars when complete autonomous cars start to roll.
EDIT: By 'car seat' I mean a seat for an infant/toddler/child.
https://www.amazon.com/baby-infants-car-seats-booster/b?ie=U...
But mosto of us will be delighted to have access to what is effectively an Uber only cheaper and more plentiful.
so, 12M families would like to own a car for 3 years.. (approx. multiple with number of children)
http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/images/child_passenger...
Neither are church pews, why are you worried about ergonomically designed seats for toddlers? Daily 8 hour car rides?
Or is it along the lines you are worried you won't be paying enough attention to your child and something horrible could... while you are not driving?
Self driving cars don't have to drive like humans, they have to drive like 90% of the other cars. Remove the humans and self driving cars can adopt far more sophisticated traffic patterns than the simple stop/go of most city traffic.
Hyper-exotics like Ferrari or Aston Martin can rely on driving enthusiasts to keep their brand alive, the others have to get self-driving tech and think about building an Uber-esque service. I can imagine Uber has a strong position of being able to sell their software/service to the manufacturers (the "Get a ride in a Mercedes" app will be the Uber app with Mercedes-branding, and it will run with Uber's servers), for a, say 5%, cut!
The real space age will again open up hardware, but make no mistake that software will play as important or more of an important role then to.
I'm really not trying to downplay the hard work and technical merit of Tesla; sped-up video and opportune edits aside, it is very cool. But I can't help but feel that it's a bit like showing off (to the world) your shiny new web app that only works in IE with ActiveX installed, only if your name is "demo user", and only when the planets are in perfect alignment - or in other words, a functional prototype by anyone else's standards. It's a great achievement, but we're certainly not "there" yet - if that's what it's trying to communicate. And yes, the "Full Self-Driving Hardware" headline certainly seems to suggest that (at least) the hardware is "there" now, and that it's only a matter of software iteration to be done.
Before you respond with the typical "but those are just nitpicky details" or "this is only v1; v2 will be able to solve those things easily", let me say this: going from this to a system that can handle challenging road conditions is not just a matter of software iteration. Since poor road conditions threaten the reliability of sensor data itself, we're talking about a problem that gets increasingly more difficult. The most sophisticated software in the world can't do anything if cameras and sensors are frozen or obstructed, and when signage and lines are lacking, the software must rely on more and more human-like levels of AI inference - not just about driving, but about the complex world in general.
Right, so they are actually announcing that their new cars now have less automation capabilities. I can't keep track with all the "autopilot" hardware they have deployed to date, MobilEye, BOSCH Radar, own software hacks, then this completely new one..
Not to mention that they have sold thousands of cars with the same Autopilot brand and "fully autonomous soon" messaging that will now likely never get there.
This is one of the few things that excites me about driverless cars. People should be driving below the limit (and the limits should be about 10mph lower in a lot of places) for pedestrian safety. The fatality rate drops precipitously around 20mph.
Higher speeds mean a longer following distance, which might not be a win on urban highways.
Say Tesla's car could automatically brake if it sees a hazard in front of you. However, you opted out of that optional extra.
You aren't paying attention whilst driving, and hit somebody. Who's fault is it?
Yours for being cheap and an inattentive driver? Or Tesla's for not forcing you to give them money to pay for a feature you clearly didn't want?
You can unlock it at purchase as option for $X or after purchase for $X+$Y (currently X=5000 and Y=1000).
I suspect they'll do the same for Model 3.
What's even more interesting is that at times, since the feature is entirely in software, offered 30-day trials for users to try out autopilot.
Interesting really - I guess it has a nice "chauffeur" feel if you can get into the car without closing the door (I wonder how it knows you are there? Or that everyone who is about to get out has got out?) and/or just roaming off.
Personally I'd be worried about someone slipping into the car before it had closed the door and stealing anything in the car.
BUT the car was driving itself in ideal conditions, with high visibility in all directions and amidst light traffic.
What I'm really hoping to see is a video of the car driving itself in more dangerous situations, such as in the middle of heavy rain or thick fog that limits visibility, or at night on a dangerous stretch of highway with lots of trailer trucks zooming by, or surrounded by tired angry drivers on a major holiday in a popular route with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
When self-driving cars can successfully navigate those and other similarly dangerous scenarios, we will know the technology is ready.
I guess they figure that if you can afford the car, the extra wear on the tires shouldn't be a problem for you? Dunno
The amount of "stress" they put on the tires is infinitesimal compared to taking a single corner at high speed.
I'm quite certain Tesla wouldn't be doing it if they were not sure their power steering system can handle it.
Um.
https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
Not because of hero worship.
I can't say I've ever seen a video of Elon riding in a self driving Tesla before, seems like it would be very tangible proof how much he trusts the autopilot.
Offtopic: There seems to be a bug, the video being uploaded twice:
https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
The second one redirects to the first. The first contains two links to the second, below and on the right "Next video". I clicked for quite sometime until I figured what was happening.
So my question is, where can I find such images? Or can I buy such a radar and tinker with it myself? What wavelength are they speaking about?
http://jalopnik.com/teslas-proof-video-for-their-self-drivin...
Intuitively Tesla's approach makes more sense, but would love to hear someone with domain knowledge on how much of a difference it can actually make (after all, you need quality training data and Tesla may now have to navigate through significant more noise).
e.g. real world data tests that the vehicle can detect a stop sign. Simulated data tests that the vehicle stops at a stop sign.
2) What happens in the case of bugs or system-level crashes? What is it about car software that makes it "not broken" compared to the other software we write?
edit: fixed, never mind.
> To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software.
In the beginning, it's very likely some data will be uploaded in bulk, for Tesla to analyze, particularly while they are running the passive tests to correct their models.
He calls his company's technology level 3, which is more like autopilot, as opposed to level 4, which is a fully autonomous self driving car e.g. Google's.
Does Tesla aim to eventually have a fully autonomous self driving car?
With respect to your second question, yes. Tesla does aim to eventually have a fully autonomous SDC, and have stated it innumerable times.
Part of getting the software deployed will be figuring out the legal situation.
- following a path from a map instead of following a specific lane of traffic.
- turns
- recognition of stop signs and light signals
- highway onramp and offramp
- self-parking that finds its own parking spot and works without driver in the vehicle
- better music than I have on my playlist
(IGNORE THIS: The surround cameras are likely still in collaboration with Mobileye, since in their case, Mobileye doesn't just give the camera hardware but also has a fair bit of software that makes all the cameras come together. It's not too likely Tesla's duplicated this so quickly.)
Ultrasonic sensors though are dirt cheap (in the few dollars range), and they probably come from one of the many tier 1 suppliers (Bosch, Delphi, etc) that makes them. These are the technology that powered those beeping back distance sensors for 10+ years.
The real news here is that again, LiDAR is absent. It seems like Tesla's pretty confident they can get to full autonomous self driving without the point cloud data that LiDAR provides. Now THAT'D be impressive!
from
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/16/tesla-says-mobileye-balked-af...
And yes ofc, the LiDAR absence is interesting; just not what I'm asking about here.
Not sure about the cameras, but perhaps the same.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shares-just-took-dive-14...
> If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar.
Oh boy. If you get in your car, it will just assume it should start driving somewhere more or less immediately? What if you want to sit for a few minutes?
I know, I'm taking them very literally. Just saying, though.
> When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself.
Again, what if I'm unpacking things for the car, or don't want the car to go anywhere? I don't want to have to pull out my phone and tap on something to stop it rolling away, or jump in front of it or something, or open a door.
Hopefully it obeys simple voice commands directed towards it like "wait here for now."
> Oh boy. If you get in your car, it will just assume it should start driving somewhere more or less immediately? What if you want to sit for a few minutes?
You think they won't have a "Go" button on the 17" touchscreen?
> Again, what if I'm unpacking things for the car, or don't want the car to go anywhere? I don't want to have to pull out my phone and tap on something to stop it rolling away, or jump in front of it or something, or open a door.
Again—there is a 17" touchscreen right there. You don't control your car with your phone or your voice. Have you never seen a Tesla?
Have you ever seen one?
If true then I'm surprised that colour data is not used. You would have to detect a red stop light from just its position rather than it also being red.
Is there an industry-standard (or governmental) safety test that these autonomous systems have to go through to evaluate their efficacy and performance in different scenarios?
(edit: clarified the first sentence)
> Eight surround cameras provide 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range.
Previously that was just one camera mounted in front of the rear view mirror
> Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system.
Same number as before except instead of 16' of range it will be 32' of range.
> A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.
same number and position of radar sensors as before but possibly a beefed up type for inclement weather. I don't know what the prior one was capable of.
Saying it was the sensors that caused the guys death is like saying it was the powerstation that generated the electricity that ran the car causing his death.
He was told, repeatedly, to keep his hands on the steering wheel and to watch the surrounding environment. He even apparently understood the limitations of the system, having recorded a number of scenarios (many of which are situations where AP shouldn't have been engaged anyway) where the car's ability to handle the situation was marginal at best.
So, him deciding to (apparently) watch a video on a tablet while driving down a public highway isn't really the fault of the AP system.
Congrats Tesla! That's amazing.
Can you describe what's so amazing about it? They're planning to put temporarily non-functional autonomous driving hardware on their new cars, with the intention to use it when the software is ready at some unknown point in the future.
It's a small but useful step forward toward a very cool future
- hack into a car remotely
- tell the car to drive to your parking lot
- repeat - tow the car
- repeat
Because the average car thief definitely has experience breaking through secure systems.
- hack into a car remotely
- have it drive you to your destination
- let it go back to its own parking lot
Always an amusing typo. I'll take the car without emergency breaking...
Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race--and even that controlled racetrack environment isn't the same as the real world! It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track.
And yes, I am aware that AI stuff is improving exponentially or whatever, but the more I think about this, the more I think it is mostly a pipe dream to grab headlines and be a "look over here" type distraction for the purposes of raising funding.
In terms of safety, people will still lose their lives, they will just die from different kinds of car accidents than the kinds we have now.
If self driving cars kill 20 thousand people a year, it would still be a major improvement. 30 thousand people die every year from human drivers.
These people will already be using public transport. They won't want to own a car if they don't need to. They'll want the convenience of a car, without the inconvenience of parking it and owning it. As more people do it, the costs associated with doing alternate things will increase (except, probably, for public transport). As less infrastructure is available for cars that sit empty all day in car parks, that empty-car infrastructure will get more expensive. When some bright spark recognizes that the space now occupied by a car-park, in a high-density city environment, can be turned into multi-million-dollar apartments, with a small private fleet of self-driving cars for their residents, there aren't too many wealthy people that won't want to have that property and service. There will be billions to be made.
All of these reasons, and more (like the insurance thing I talked about), I think, will contribute to it overtaking traditional methods of driving quite quickly when it is introduced.
[1] Here's one that says 80% of people rated themselves above-average on a number of important driving characteristics - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00014575869.... And it's easy to find many sources saying that this conclusion has been reproduced time and time again.
Even if you word your survey question in terms of medians, people are bad at numbers. I don't think you can really decide if that's illusory superiority without more digging.
All that said, even if your premise was correct, it would allow for a simple majority to be better than average, but it wouldn't allow for 80% of people to be better than average.
Your optimism about rule-breakers' adherence to the rules is heartening. A lot of that long tail of bad drivers we are talking about have no issues driving without a licence...
If an automatic car kills a person through software error(and I would argue it has already happened with Tesla) the public backlash will be severe, even if those errors happen much less often than human mistakes in manual cars.
I have the opposite opinion. I don't think self-driving cars are going to start on ALL roads, but on specific routes that are expanded as required. Eventually all routes will be covered, but it will take time. In truth, 90% (99%?) of my driving is on the same routes, so I don't think this is going to be a major issue.
In the end, I don't think this is going to be about what you, me, or even Tesla thinks. It will be about what insurance companies think. If self-driving cars turn out to be as good as they are promised to be, having a license for driving a car yourself will get more and more expensive. As more riskier drivers have less licenses, those insurance fees will ratchet up and ratchet up, until they are prohibitively expensive.
There's a model for this type of thing... Singapore. This is the type of place that I think will use self-driving cars first. When it starts to happen, I think the transition is going to be very quick.
Each new human driver also has to be trained from scratch; when we're starting out, we're dangerous, all of us. An experienced human can't download their knowledge into a new driver telepathically. But software (including AI models trained with data from millions of road miles) can be copied into new cars, no problem.
> It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track.
Highway driving is relatively easy to automate, compared to driving on surface streets with pedestrians, bicycles, etc. Even if self-driving only worked on the highway, it'd still free up a huge amount of time for a lot of commuters. That'd be worth it even if self-driving cars didn't improve the accident rate.
Even if computers can only match humans at skill level, they will be at the skill level 100% of the time, no directions. (And they will probably exceed us in skill anyways)
Car accidents don't happen because people lack skill nearly as often as because people aren't at their best for just a moment. That's why autonomous cars will be safer.
Can you elaborate on possible causes of ~1.3 million deaths in autonomous vehicle world?
Experience is hard.
But computers can have reflexes that are enormously better than any human.
And reflexes are a huge part of safe driving.
No suspicion needed, Telsa's data already shows their systems are doing better than Human drivers.
I'm quite certain they won't release full autonomy until that also performs better than human drivers.
Aside from the obvious that you or I probably couldn't win an F1 race either, autonomous race cars are coming along - one beat a top driver at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California last year. Not F1 but give it time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1141026...
Am reminded of ebook and movie purchases - you're only just licensing the item. You own next to nothing.
It doesn't take much thought to realize what a terrible idea it would be to let people tinker with a telsa's self driving software.
When you own nothing, and license everything, what's stopping the licensor to ban you, or just increase the prices as they want?
But not software and they don't even have confidence in their current implementation?
It's not surprising considering the recent announcements by the regulators, but that's quite a step.
It gives them time to confirm a new technology and update their maps of areas with information from the new wavelengths they're just now gathering.
Fair enough. I just tried to do a diff between the versions:
Current implementation [0]
* Camera module in the front
* Front-facing Radar
* 12 ultrasonic sensors
New implementation:
* 8 surround cameras
* Front-facing radar
* 12 ultrasonic sensors (updated)
[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-sensors-does-the-Tesla-Mo...
So the difference is basically just a few extra cameras and updates to the sensors. It doesn't seem like a huge step or completely new platform - at least when looking at the components.
What techniques were they using to process the data before? Surely it was statistical learning. And if they weren't, their competitors certainly were.
I think it's quite forward thinking for them to include the hardware when it's ready, knowing they can update the software in the future. And I'd prefer them to be conservative in rolling out the software for an automobile. Not something I'd want to see beta tested on the highway.
It's not like the previous-gen cars aren't on the highway at the moment. Or has "autopilot" been deactivated in the meanwhile?
I understand their step to add better sensors for the future (even though it seems difficult without LIDAR). But disabling autopilot for new cars with better sensors and keeping it enabled for older ones seems like a strange step.
[edit] Tesla previously hired Jim Keller (chip designer) into the autopilot team. considering the kinds of things he may be working on, i'd be surprised if the differences in either the sensors or GPUs aren't significant.
Still, very cool. And the presence of cameras everywhere should help navigate insurance/accident stuff everywhere, I'd hope.
I never cared that much about self driving capabilities - I like to drive myself - and I certainly don't want to shell out $35,000 for a car with what looks like a food processor or a police emergency light mounted on the rooftop.
IMHO, one of the best features of Tesla has been that they actually made EVs look like traditional cars. It might seem trivial, but many of the budding competitors still fail to do just that:
http://www.autoblog.com/2016/08/17/vw-300-mile-ev-paris-auto...
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/design/commer...
Fashion does the same thing.
Volt, Leaf, i8, none of them look like regular cars like Teslas do.
http://i.auto-bild.de/ir_img/1/1/6/2/7/2/7/VW-E-Golf-1200x80...
There is also the Kia Soul EV and Skoda Octavia Green E Line which basically are just their regular line up with the major difference being that they are EVs.