I've had the impression it's pure chaos over at Tesla's autopilot division for quite a long time. They have so much to gain if they get the pieces right, but I'm not sure it's guaranteed to happen.
> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
It seems somewhat irresponsible to promise that you have enough hardware to achieve something that nobody has ever achieved before, with any hardware.
Tesla has plenty of impressive-looking videos on their website of autopilot working well, but if you Google for "Tesla autopilot fail" you can also find plenty of stuff like this, which is just surprisingly bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg
Tesla strikes me as over-promising and under-delivering here. I wouldn't want to work in a division like that.
It's also the wrong bar to meet, because lawmakers are going to be much tougher on AIs than on human constituents. It's not enough to be better than a human, you have to be so much better than a human that it'd be irresponsible not to mandate self-driving cars.
Personally, I would trust a human driver over a Waymo car until strong statistical evidence shows that Waymo cars are safe in a wide range of conditions.
Adding vehicles operating at a higher skill level than the median to the pool of vehicles driving around should reduce incidents per mile driven.
And then if autonomous vehicles become prevalent, it becomes less punitive to raise the standards for licensing humans.
Marketing. The western world is mostly afraid of robots so they'll need to be at least 10x safer in a hybrid (human/autopilot) environment in order to gain adoption.
If someone wants to claim there's a problem with any auto pilot they better have a camera view showing they are not interfering with it in any way.
The idea that one can do things that are not seen on the various reflective surfaces isn't a new concept, television shows rely on camera and object placement all the time to ensure the camera and crew are not visible.
If I were to make a claim about the auto pilot I would have both my hands in plain view in a "look ma, no hands" stance right above the steering wheel for all to see. I would also have a second camera shooting from the side or farther back in order to make it visible that nothing is interfering with the steering, like my leg for example or someone pulling on strings from the back seat.
I don't have a problem with the idea of issues with any auto pilot software. I simply want to make sure claims are not falsified through the use of trickery.
https://www.tesla.com/modelx/design
"Enhanced Autopilot" as a $6,000 option. "Full Self-Driving Capability" is another $4,000 option.
/autopilot page seems very disingenuous.
That's interesting. I've heard this too from people at three different self-driving car companies ("Tesla's autonomy group is melting down; we get a ton of resumes...blah blah").
But...it's from their competitors, and you're probably always getting resumes from folks at your competitors all the time (and your colleagues' resumes are heading in the other direction, perhaps yours too). So, though I'm no fan of Tesla, I have discounted such comments. Though perhaps I shouldn't have been?