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Comment by billhathaway | Hacker News Reader

Tesla sent out an email today.

Autopilot Updates We just released the latest version of Autopilot. You can now experience Enhanced Autopilot features including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Autosteer, Auto Lane Change, Parallel + Perpendicular Autopark, and Summon. Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward + Side Collision Warning, and more advanced safety features are also active and standard.

All Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. And Tesla vehicles continue to improve with over-the-air software updates, introducing new features and improving existing functionality to make your vehicle safer and more capable over time.

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I don't really believe that the hardware is enough for what they are trying to achieve. There is almost no redundancy e.g. on sensor level except for the front radar supporting the front cameras and ultrasound for close distances, however if one of those rear-facing cameras fails due to a defect or dirt on the lens the vehicle would have to stop because it wouldn't be able to detect oncoming cars. I am also not sure about the processing power, handling video streams and doing deep learning for up to eight cameras in real time seems a little too much for a current gpu?

The processing power "could" be enough, but lack of redundancy in sensors is a lot more troubling to me.

Then again, if one of the sensors breaks. It's a small chance that the vehicle will crash when trying to find a safe spot to stop.

I'm interested how they plan to solve the problems that the cameras alone cannot solve (assuming they're just RGB cameras with no special dynamic-range abilities) - like white-out snow conditions or driving directly facing the sun (a contributory cause towards the Tesla+truck fatal crash last year) - I understand that only systems with active projection (e.g. Lidar) and beyond-visual-spectrum cameras can provide reliable data... and yet Tesla claims that their current hardware, without these more exotic sensors, is sufficient.

There are quite a few transforms HSV, HSL etc that you can do on images for doing things like lane detection in different conditions (bright light or darkness). Also typically you take the input from 3 camera sources left, right and center.

To add to it there are techniques like applying shadow to a bright image.

When we combine some of these techniques, the task does become possible, even in in adverse conditions.

Also, various techniques often complement each other. For e.g. We may derive a steering angle out of a Machine learning system, and we can cross check that against the lane detection, vehicle detection (no collision) etc.

To think of it, we when we drive ourselves, we just use the eyes. So there is a view that cameras alone are sufficient. But definitely as Radar and Lidar complement the cameras and make the driving system more robust. As Lidar gets cheaper, we are bound to see it being used more even in camera only approaches.

>All tesla vehicles

As i understand it, the newer ones use a machine learning based approach and different hardware than the old ones. Does this mean tesla is actively working in parallel to develop two completely different self driving car softwares, one built on ML and one around a more traditional heuristic approach?

> You can now experience Enhanced Autopilot features including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Autosteer, Auto Lane Change, Parallel + Perpendicular Autopark, and Summon

Scary stuff, really. No consumer wants (or needs) autopilot "features" - at least not from a marketing standpoint. If you ask me, the car either drives itself or you are driving it.

It's a bit ridiculous to expect people to use these things safely. If anyone has to think about when the car is or isn't in control, I'm sorry, but you've already lost in my book. Humans just aren't that good at switching context or remembering what a product does (or what this particular version of a product does).

In my experience, having driven or been driven by the autopilot v1 hardware and software for thousands of kilometers, it is not ridiculous to use this safely. You configure how you use it once, you don't have to remember the state of every feature.

There are moments when you have to think about what state the car is in. But in opinion it is by far offset by how much less tiring it is to drive a long way.

Having driven a long distance in the vicinity of a Tesla that was presumably on autopilot, I found it very unsafe-seeming, darting around within its lane, sometimes drifting onto the lane line. You may not realize if you aren't paying attention, but your car might not drive as well as you expect.

Having driven for years in the vicinity of human drivers, I'd say they do far worse than that. And that is before you add the DUI.

Agree that lane weaving is annoying and frequently has no good explanation - there are no tight curves, the road markings are in perfect condition, there are no obstacles ahead and no one is changing lanes in front of the car.

I also wish that left-most and right-most lanes were special-cased, with a bit of preference towards left and right side respectively, instead of sticking to the center of the lane no matter what. Just seems safer overall, and with fairly large number of US roads not exceeding 2 lanes in one direction, seems like a pretty good rule of thumb.

In the USA are there not rules about which lanes you use? Various dash cam videos from the US seem to show drivers choosing any lane, though I could viewing then wrong.

In the UK you use the outside lane if you are a slower vehicle and use the inside lane(s) as overtaking lanes, with the inside for the fastest speeds (within the limit) . If you are using one of the inside lane and are travelling slower that traffic in the outside lane you can get stopped by the police and fined, and will certainly feel the ire of of other drivers.

The dash cam videos would be correct, outside of high-occupancy lane (2+ people) there are no lane speed restrictions, and if someone feels like getting into the left-most lane and driving 5 miles below the speed limit, they most certainly act on that impulse.

As you can imagine, anybody intending to use the left-most lane for high-speed driving is now forced to use the brakes, execute a [rarely safe] lane merge to the right, pass the slower vehicle on the right, and then aggressively execute a merge back to the left.

Roughly 100 people die in car accidents on a daily basis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths... For further context, the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 resulted in 3,000 deaths and has led to a brief but complete shutdown of air traffic, complete overhaul of homeland security, passage of PATRIOT Act, at least one major war and countless "military operations" that don't count as wars.

I only recently discovered that in the US many people driving in the left lane will not move to the middle lane to allow cars approaching from behind overtake them.

That's incredibly selfish, not least because it's incredibly dangerous for the driver that has to weave into the middle lane and back again.

Seems bizarre. Then again, you Yanks also don't have kettles, so nothing surprises me ;)

> you Yanks also don't have kettles

Mind blown. What on earth do they boil water with?

We typically don't drink beverages that require boiling water, aside from coffee which is brewed in machines. Everyone that I know that drinks tea or uses a french press has an electric kettle, though.

My driving instructor and parents all told me that driving in the left lane when not passing is illegal and that people who do it are dickheads. I see signs reminding people to stay in the right lane when not passing on a regular basis.

Is it just the state I live in (WA) or is the rule not as solid as I thought?

It seems like even in WA the "Slow Traffic Keep Right" is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. There's also subjective interpretation of the rule - someone driving 71 in a 70-mph speed limit zone might not qualify themselves as slow, while someone behind who's okay with going 80 mph might disagree.

> The dash cam videos would be correct, outside of high-occupancy lane (2+ people) there are no lane speed restrictions, and if someone feels like getting into the left-most lane and driving 5 miles below the speed limit, they most certainly act on that impulse.

Depending on state there are laws about using left lanes only for passing, which implies you must be travelling faster than the lane to your right. Those laws are rarely enforced though.

> presumably on autopilot

I don't know, that sounds like lots of human drivers I've encountered!

Side sitted at a Tesla car, it's not.

I have no experience with Autopilot v2, but v1 is better than I am at lane keeping on a motorway except for special circumstances, like when there are no lane markers.

I supervise the car and pay attention. I am very aware of what the car is doing. It may be a big difference between v1 and v2 though.

"Mode confusion" is a major cause of CFIT accidents in aviation. And these are trained operators with partners and checklists.

this is probably one of the most ignorant and short sighted comments i've ever read on HN and reaks of competitive shilling.

It's like saying we shouldn't have released seatbelts because people moght not have used them. Or maybe we shouldn't have released vaccines because you still need booster shots.

Safety features, even incremental ones, make the world safer for everyone.

I think his concern is that it's unsafe because you might trust it when you weren't supposed to because it's too complicated to figure out who's in control at any moment.

However, since the number of features is quite small, I'm sure owners will quickly get used to what the car does and doesn't do. The autopark and summon is surely going to run over far fewer children than human drivers do in those situations. That leaves just adaptive cruise control and lane changing. Well, if you forget to change lanes because you trusted the car, you still won't crash since the front crash detection (and your eyes) should protect you from that. So I don't see any safety issue there.

I would like to respectfully disagree with you here. While I believe that self driving cars are infinitely better than human drivers, in this case I'd exercise caution. The issue here is that the vehicle is not fully self-driving–it still requires a human to be paying attention. The problem is that the system appears to be automatic and as such reduces the driver's focus; I've heard stories of people simply tuning out while this "autopilot" on, not knowing that they must be alert for any exceptional circumstances. In this case, the autopilot may actually make it slightly less safe–not from its inherent design, but by human psychology.

if the driver allows themselves to lose focus, they are just bad drivers. autopilot won't change that. what it will do is reduce the number of collisions by people who are shitty drivers and are currently driving unprotected.

the data already demonstrates that autopilot reduces collisions and fatalities. to argue that it doesn't put you in league with climate change deniers.

> if the driver allows themselves to lose focus, they are just bad drivers

This needs empirical support. All of us are human, and are susceptible to false senses of security. Most of us are not good at assessing real-world risks and probabilities. If the autopilot software is good enough to drive the car successfully for months on end, drivers will start to trust it. It will be very hard to stay vigilant and aware, with eyes on the road at all times and an alertness level on par with manual driving.

In other words, an otherwise “good” driver can easily be lulled into complacency by a system that’s really good, but not perfect. It’s an uncanny valley that is worth discussing.

its only worth discussing if you can prove it exists. you've just offered supposition, not fact.

the fact that safety features such as seatbelts and airbags save lives is undeniable. they didn't lead to uncanny valleys of complacency for anyone but drivers who chose to abuse those features with wreckless driving. the data for AP already indicates this trend will continue with ML drivers.

I never claimed anything more than supposition. I think these autopilot features are probably a net safety gain. But that's just a gut feeling.

The difference between autopilot and examples you mentioned is that autopilot can decrease safety. If it works correctly 99.9% of the time, you get used to it and when 0.1% arrive you will cause accident, because you weren't paying attention.

the same can be said for the examples i gave. if you get used to being vaccinated but forget your boosters before traveling to a new part of the world, should you have forgone your vaccinations altogether? of course not. if you have technology that makes it safer to drive 99.9% of the time but you expect it to cover for you when you're not paying attention, should you disregard the benefits of the other 99.9% of the time?

This is not a good analogy. Being vaccinated is strictly better than not being vaccinated, even if you don’t get your boosters. It’s not settled yet whether a three-nines level of automation is strictly better than zero automation. It’s entirely possible that this level of automation is good enough to convince most users of its infallibility, but not good enough to reduce the statistical accident or fatality rate.

Perfectly safe 99.9% and highly dangerous the other 0.1% may be overall more hazardous than human-level safe 100% of the time. Or it may not. I’m not making a claim either way. But it’s not a crazy notion that it may not be.

More data is needed. I’m cool with that data being collected in the real world with real drivers. Gotta crack some eggs...

more data IS needed. but some automation is indeed better than no automation. this has been settled time and time again. computers are more accurate, more precise, and don't get tired, sick, or drunk.

The airplanes of this world demonstrate this.

Airplanes generally somewhat safer than driving. By quite a margin.

Without consulting the literature, it just seems easy to believe that machine-like consistency 99.9% of the time is more important to safety than confusion in the 0.1%.

It really depends on what 0.1%.

If the car fails to detect one in a thousand cars in front of you, or one in a thousand corners, I can see that being highly dangerous.

Let's say you change lane 5 times while commuting. That's 50 times per week. Now, are you going to pay attention well enough that you catch it twice a year just before it pulls out right into another car?

Perhaps likening it to having another person driving you would be good. If you were given a perfect chauffeur, except with the knowledge that they'll drive straight through one in a thousand red lights with no warning, are you confident you'll catch them?

IMHO airplanes demonstrate the exact opposite. A plane can not only potentially fly the entire flight path on its own, it can also autonomously land. The reason why pilots still hand fly planes is 1) because the whole process is not automatic and you are still receiving directions from an ATC, and 2) to keep their proficiency in controlling the plane.

Numerous times I've seen pilots complain that their employer requires autopilot to be used wherever possible, while they would like to fly the plane by themselves occasionally.

If we polished off the autopilot to also handle take-off and taxi, and installed it in every single plane that exists, I'm pretty sure the entire aviation industry could be completely automated.

That may well not be a decrease in safety, considering how poorly most people drive.

Are you new to Naysayer News?

well, it yells at you if you let go of the steering wheel and will even disable itself if you keep doing it. It's not that scary. And the features are real. At least it gives owners the confidence that things are moving forward and if they buy a Tesla today they will have full self driving some day.

What they're saying is humans can't recontextualize themselves fast enough when the system fails and it starts yelling at you.

It's still pretty easy to tune out even if you're gripping the steering wheel…

I have about 18K miles on my Model S with the first-generation sensor package. I live and drive in New England.

The lane-holding feature (autosteer) does expect you to keep slight pressure on the wheel. It has, that I can discern, four modes ...

freeway following (another vehicle in front) freeway leading nonfreeway following nonfreeway leading.

Only in the first case, you have five minutes before it starts pestering you to hold the wheel. In the other cases it's one minute.

Lane holding and adaptive cruise control in freeway following mode is a WONDERFUL feature. It drastically reduces the driver's workload in heavy traffic. And, it has speed control features that contribute to the melting of compression-wave traffic jams.

Lane holding can be a little squirrely when the road surface is dirty. I think the car sometimes mistakes tire marks for lane markings. There are parts of my regular route where I just take over from lane holding.

Snow or heavy rain? the lane holding feature goes first, then the adaptive cruise control. Snow, rain, or frost on the windshield interferes with the forward looking camera. Snow or ice on the nose interferes with the radar. Ice on the bumpers interferes with the near-field sonar proximity sensors.

Autonomous driving on the Stanford campus and up Sand Hill Road is one thing. Autonomous driving in a nor'easter snowstorm on winding Atlantic Coast roads is another. We shall see.

I admire and support people who tackle hard problems fearlessly. Tesla's doing that.

where else would the training data come from?

Speak for yourself. I love the radar cruise control on my Mazda 3 Astina, and also value the AEB. I specifically bought this car because of these systems - at the time (mid 2015) it was the cheapest such car available on the market in Australia. It's a 2014 2.5 liter sedan, manual, ex demo. Love it.

All the necessary hardware? Do Teslas have lidar?

Lidar is not "necessary" hardware. Humans drive just fine without lidar.

The human visual cortex is still far more advanced than a computer's. Maybe that will change some day, but asking about non-camera sensing equipment is a reasonable question until it does.

Sure, and it's not only cortex. Humans also know a lot about the world, and can predict things much better. There are areas in which humans are limited, however, such as reaction time, spectral sensitivity, the fact that humans can only see well in the center of where they're looking at and fake the rest of their visual field, etc. It's not at all clear to me that a human pair of eyeballs is better than 8 high quality, wide spectrum cameras feeding into the system at once.

That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.

You can have a 1000 cameras and it still doesn't matter if you don't have a good computer to process the data. That is where machine learning, etc comes in. Machine learning is really starting to come into its own in last few years especially for image recognition but it still sucks compared to humans. That doesn't mean self-driving based on cameras isn't good enough but it needs to be proven and we aren't there yet.

Dude, I work on high performance machine learning and machine vision 12 hours a day. You don't need to tell me it sucks, I know. But it's superhuman on some tasks already, and in a few short years, it'll be superhuman on a few more, and little by little it'll get there. All you get from that lidar is a depth map. You can do that without a lidar, using two or more cameras. If you also interpolate across a series of predictions, and have sensor fusion (which Tesla does, they also use radars and ultrasonic sensors) you can even make it robust. Truly, people who say it can't be done should not interrupt people who are doing it.

Humans have the computation equivalent of 38 petaflops of processing power. Does a Tesla vehicle?

If you seriously want to play the inane game of "well if a human doesn't have it then a Tesla doesn't need it" then let's play that game and talk about the things humans have that the Tesla lacks.

What's interesting about human's vision system is that the human eyeball is, relatively speaking, poor. We have digital cameras far better than that already. It is what the human brain that does with that raw data which makes us, as a species, thrive. Most of what we believe we "see" we never actually see, our brain fills in the gaps dynamically and infers information over time.

So this human processing ability, much of it automated rather than conscious, is totally relevant if you want to have this "Tesla Vs. human" debate. It is also why Lidar might be needed to make up the massive shortfall in a Tesla's processing ability relative to the human brain.

But hey, you want to keep to the "but HUMANS don't need it" then I ask where is my 38 petaflops and 1 TB of memory...

I'm curious where you get the number "38 petaflops" from.

In the same sense that your dog solves differential equations when he catches a Frisbee, I suppose.

It's memory + control driven with visual feedback, not much more. You don't have to solve anything if you already sorta know the solution, and can adjust it for the goal.

IBM researchers: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/computers-hav...

You can find other figures, but many are in the petaflop range, well above what could be realistically installed in a vehicle.

How about 60 bits/s:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415041/new-measure-of-hum... I don't think we know enough about how the human brain works yet to give a precise value, but just on caloric arguments I would say that the mean processing power of the brain is not significantly above what we have now in general purpose computing devices.

You don't need 38 petaflops to drive a car. We are wasting our minds driving. Driving doesn't need creativity, it needs the 360 degrees of awareness without any lapse in concentration and the ability to react in milliseconds.

I would peg the human brain at closer to 1 flop. That's about how many floating point operations I can do in a second, and only very simple ones.

You do more than that when calculating the trajectory of a ball thrown that you have to catch. Just not with numbers.

Humans also lose focus, fall asleep and get tired.

Teslas have multiple radars for judging distance and multiple cameras that are used for stereo disparity. Also human 38 teraflops is not the same as nvidia teraflops.

I am not saying teslas are better than humans, I'm just saying teslas can drive on I5 highway from Vancouver to Mexico better than I can.

Also Lidars are really really expensive, I applaud Tesla and commaai for breaking major ground just with cameras. Convolutional neural nets have being doing phenomenal things in the past few years.

It's pretty obvious what the poster meant. Why doesn't tesla need lidar? Cars aren't humans, so that comparison isn't really helpful.

What the poster seems to have meant is that LIDAR is essential hardware. Which is not some universal truth, so it is they who should justify it.

Visual cameras can be blinded fairly easily - even high-end cameras - simply point such a camera at the sun and try to make out a cloud in the sky. If Tesla were using true high-dynamic-range cameras (e.g. Oversampled binary imagers) then I would be more confident - but Tesla isn't saying that they are - and if they really were they would definitely boast about it.

LIDAR also does work great in the rain - provided you have multiple LIDAR units (e.g. Ford's snow-proof sensor array: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi... ).

What I like about LIDAR is that it will never give you false-negative data regarding object proximity (i.e. it will never tell you an obstruction in the road is not there) but visual-only cameras can be fooled very easily and definitely can give you false-negatives regarding road obstructions.

It seems inherently less safe to rely on a more homogeneous sensor array: conversely it makes sense to use as many different types of sensor as possible to ensure your design isn't susceptible to being brought down thanks to a weakness in your predominant sensor type.

Lidar is absolutely useless for level 5 autonomy given that doesn't work in "bad" weather. It may be useful for level 4 autonomy but for sure it is not necessary even then. Source: no car driven around the planet at the moment has any lidar apart for testing purposes.

Not really, humans are horrible drivers with miserably slow reaction times.

Some humans are horrible drivers. Some humans are good drivers. The biggest difference is often how proactive the driver is.

It's true that a careful, experienced driver will typically recognise a rapidly emerging hazard as much as several tenths of a second faster than a novice, giving them significantly more time and space to react. However, a careful, experienced driver will also anticipate places where there are likely to be hazards and adjust their driving style to compensate.

Does a self-driving car know that there's a park just round the corner and it's half an hour after the local kids came out of school, thus increasing the risk of a child chasing a ball into the road?

Does a self-driving car understand that the group of people standing quite near the road up ahead are outside a bar at 11:30pm and thus quite likely to be drunk and suddenly stagger into the road?

Does a self-driving car know about the pothole in the cycle lane that you had to avoid while riding into town yesterday, and anticipate that anyone riding in that cycle lane today may move out into the main traffic lane without warning to go around it?

Does a self-driving car know that the news last night reported on a local black spot for "accidents" caused by people wanting to make fake insurance claims, and decide to take another route that is a little slower but avoids that black spot?

Better sensors, fast data processing, and the ability to monitor all sensors all the time are big advantages, for sure, but these things mostly support reactive behaviour. I've seen nothing so far to suggest that the better reactions currently outweigh proactively avoiding or mitigating these kinds of hazards in the first place. Obviously that might change in any number of ways in the future, but we seem to be a long, long way from that point yet.

a) Most humans aren't aware of these things, either, so they're really non sequiturs at best. b) Even if you accept them as valid premises, it's much easier to disperse this kind of info to every car on the road than it is to disperse it to humans (every tourist in a city needs to know where every bar / park is? Or watch the local news?)

Those were all real examples. These kinds of things happen in my area every day, and drivers are actively taught to look for signs like these before they are allowed to qualify and drive independently. Obviously not everyone gets the message, and the best anticipation skills only develop with more experience, but nothing I described was unusual or exceptional (other than the last one, which was quite a specific example of a more general idea).

On your second point, the important thing here is that you don't need to disperse much of this information to humans. Humans automatically recognise situations based on all of their experience, not just their driving experience. Of course sometimes external information sources like the news might be helpful, but much of it is just down to understanding context. See fresh horse crap on a country road? Someone's probably riding horses nearby. Horses scare easily. So, slow down and try to avoid anything noisy that could startle the animals. How many of today's self-driving algorithms take into account this kind of implied knowledge?

They don't work in bad weather conditions like rain. So auto driving systems can't rely on LIDAR what rules it out as main sensor.

Tesla's test and validation framework must be something else. I've never written code that may kill someone if it fails. Not directly at least.

A in-dept report on Teslas' code and system qualification framework would be a very interesting read, I'm sure.

"All Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

In the Model S configuration page, "enhanced autopilot" and "full self-driving capability" are still optional extras that together cost $8,000, so I'm not sure what they're talking about here.

https://www.tesla.com/models/design

My understanding is that all new Tesla vehicles have all the necessary hardware, and the features are software-locked behind that $8,000 fee.

Apparently, these features can also be unlocked at a future time, for a higher fee of $10,000.

Just new? My understanding is that all applies to every single Model S ever produced.

Just new ones, since fall of 2016. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot for more on the different hardware generations.

The 8 camera system with NVidia hardware has been built into all Model S since October 2016. Before they used a Mobileye system with one camera. Only the 8 camera system is promised to achieve full autonomy.

All Teslas come with the hardware needed. The $8000 enables the software.

If true, then it seems rather disingenuous to advertise that all Teslas are capable of self driving, if it costs eight grand to turn the sensors on. I wouldn't expect a car advertised to have 1000 horsepower to require a multi-thousand dollar software patch to be able to use more than a hundred hp.

They didn't advertise that all Teslas are capable of self-driving, they just say that the hardware has the capability. They're specifically speaking in computer terms, even - I wouldn't expect that buying a computer advertised as having the hardware to run <game> at 120fps would include a copy of that game.

But if it's a game-console that's advertised as being able to play a particular game very well... but it's also the only console capable of playing that particular game... and they're both made by the same company, seems a bit mean.

It's also equivalent to those high-end network switches with 48 ports that have soft-locks to disable ports on the switch until you fork-out $lots to unlock them: it's an artificial limitation.

I think the sensors are always on, in all cars. Just to gather data.

No. Source: owner of a 2013 Model S

I should say, all Teslas currently being made.

They have the hardware but you gotta pay for that sweet sweet soft ware

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