The Battle for Best Semi-Autonomous System: Tesla Autopilot vs. GM SuperCruise
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Tesla's crashes on "autopilot" have mostly been in situations where the system should have detected an obstacle. Four times, a Tesla on autopilot has slammed into an obstacle partly blocking the left edge of a lane. All those crashes were in freeway situations, where Autopilot is supposed to be reliable. That's inexcusable. Tesla's radar has inadequate resolution for the job, the vision system doesn't really recognize fixed obstacles, and they don't have LIDAR. So they don't detect big things like fire trucks and street cleaning trucks that are mostly on the shoulder and partly into the lane.
Side note: I can't help but be reminded of Napoleon Dynamite's Liger whenever I see Lidar. Makes me smile.
Short version: Regular cars are vulnerable to malicious actors, too, but luckily most people aren't murderers.
I could also see sonar taking a lot more energy to use all the time as compared to Lidar.
During the time it could take for a sonar (ultrasonic) sensor to send out a pulse and for it to return, the car may have travelled many feet depending on speed and road conditions. This would impact how long it would take to perform an evasive action and return to a safe state.
That is just a guess, though - I haven't run the numbers to know if it is factual. Lidar, though, is much quicker, as you noted.
Looking at Thrun et al.'s paper on Stanley (https://www-cs.stanford.edu/people/dstavens/jfr06/thrun_etal...):
"The effective maximum range at which obstacles can be detected with the laser mapper is approximately 22 m. This range is sufficient for Stanley to reliably avoid obstacles at speeds up to 25 mph. Based on the 2004 Race Course, the development team estimated that Stanley would need to reach speeds of 35 mph in order to successfully complete the challenge. To extend the sensor range enough to allow safe driving at 35 mph, Stanley uses a color camera to find drivable surfaces at ranges exceeding that of the laser analysis."
They built a neural network to analyze terrain and find safe paths- and trained it driving at 25 mph across the environment with the LIDAR providing the control- and then let it work at higher speeds where the LIDAR would be able to panic stop but not much more.
Given that the major players like Waymo/Uber/Apple etc seem to be betting very heavily on LIDAR, one would assume these challenges are being resolved. I suspect the traditionally very high cost of LIDAR was likely a much bigger factor in Tesla's decision not to use, rather than any technical reason. Cameras plus radar is vastly cheaper to ship for now.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froude_number#Walking_Froude_n...
2D lidar is less expensive, but still isn't cheap enough for the number of sensors that would be needed (multiple sensors would be needed for proper coverage, if the the sensors were incorporated into the car body); also, they are still mechanically complex (most rely on spinning mirrors or sensors).
That leaves something like flash lidar, which isn't quite cheap enough (though it's dropped in price significantly in recent years), and I think it's resolution is still fairly low - but it does allow for 3D information about the scene, within it's field of view.
I have always understood why Tesla took the route of using cameras only. In theory, it should work fairly well, since humans have been using a similar system for 100+ years for driving automobiles. It really comes down to a software problem (vision and deep learning, etc), more than anything.
Camera sensors are inexpensive, and easy to incorporate into a vehicle. I tend to wonder if maybe augmentation with FLIR and other wavelength sensors might not improve things, but even standalone image sensors - in theory - should be completely workable.
Elon Musk is probably right that in the long term it won't be needed, but those few years count a lot.
Whatever car company exec said that humans are going to "bully self driving cars" was very wrong. I'm very scared of them and I'm not going to mess around.
I assume you mean rides [a motorcycle], which is ~35x more dangerous than driving a car according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing driving a car is already the most dangerous thing people do in a day. They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios. Even if AutoPilot/SuperCruise vehicles are 10 times safer than regular drivers they are still going to take out the occasional motorcyclist.
If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.
Eyeballing the other guy is no guarantee of anything, but it provides quite a lot of information about the risk you face in the interaction. I think we would miss it when dealing with fully autonomous vehicles, and that the vehicles might add something to tell you they see you. I've done some work on this idea in the lab with mobile robots.
This is such a garbage statement. We check our parachutes twice before jumping, and whilst not jumping is inherently safer - having decided to jump you can still protect yourself from risks inherent in the activity.
Since this is not how people really behave, we are very rarely actually assuming the worst.
And so Don Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things book fame) is at it from UCSD: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/
If we worried about safety, there would be much, much less drivers on the road.
See, society have decided that practically every adult is perfectly capable of controlling a several thousand pound piece of metal while practical evidence points to somewhere else: some or even most people drive so badly they shouldn't be doing so.
We build a world where the motorist rules and we are paying for this with a huge amount of dead and disabled people. Is it truly worth it? Could we live another way (sure, once we did, but we want to do better now)? Transit and such is mostly sold on the merits of climate change these days and noone dares to say this: you should be on transit because you can't drive.
On my Model S test drive the salesperson-not-called-a-salesperson used the language “It changes lanes for you”
What you're describing is more like assisted, user initiated lane change.
As a driver, this makes sense to me. I've definitely had cases where someone driving quickly "has appeared out of nowhere" while I'm changing lanes. I'd much rather be fully engaged in the lane change process and prepared to immediately back off than to have given an autopilot a thumbs up and let it handle the details.
Tesla themselves muddle the waters. On https://www.tesla.com/autopilot, it states "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."
Further down, it talks about "Full Self-Driving Capability", "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go.", "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.", etc.
It's not shocking folks have gotten the impression it's a self-driving feature instead of a fancy cruise control.
"Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot software has begun rolling out and features will continue to be introduced as validation is completed, subject to regulatory approval. "
"Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. 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."
The latter paragraph is very vaguely worded and certainly not very clear that it is non existent as yet.
But at any rate, this thread isn't about whether it's clear that the Full Self-Driving software is vaporware. The question is whether people are buying Teslas under the misunderstanding that regular Autopilot is the same thing as Full Self-Driving.
Modern autopilots are actually fully capable of handling takeoff, flight, and landing without interaction from the pilot. However, pilots continue to handle takeoff and landing procedures to maintain skills in those areas as generally an autopilot failure during those times would not be recoverable.
Self-flying isn't as difficult as people think it is. There are fewer obstacles and risks to deal with.
If you're claiming a feature exists "in the Dreamliner and the Airbus 380...over a decade" - well, [citation-needed], then: all the sources that I've managed to find are unanimous that it doesn't, e.g. http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/
To quote the pilot above: "That fantasy insists on outpacing reality is perhaps symptomatic of our infatuation with technology, and the belief that we can compute our way out of every dilemma or complication."
No they're not. The pilot needs to initiate the sequences first, and good luck when something unexpected happens - a Tesla (or any truck/car with auto-distance-control) will brake when a car changes lanes right in front of it, a plane will blare sirens (okay, to be fully correct: it will tell the pilot a preferred course of action to avoid a collision) if another plane comes too close for comfort but not do any evasive action on its own.
Even in a perfectly ordinary flight there are always the ATCs to serve as master controllers for all airplanes... something you also have in railways, but not at all on the road. On the road everyone is on his own.
When a computerised voice in a sci fi movie says "Autopilot engaged" what does that usually mean?
They are not doing their utmost. They're doing the minimum necessary to avoid getting sued. Their sales people and marketing material are pushing autonomous hard, and being very quiet about the limitations. If you're not following the tech news on these issues and only going by what the sales guy at the dealership told you, then the confusion is very reasonable.
So, I don't buy into their disclaiming of responsibility if the car fails in what it is doing autonomously.
That is, it's one thing if a safety measure fails to engage (for instance, the car fails to brake to avoid an accident while still under the human's control). However, it's a different matter when the car offers to actively perform a function in lieu of the human, then fails in properly performing it.
By the mere existence and offer of the function, the company is essentially making a claim as to the vehicle's fitness for that function and asking the human to trust that claim by assigning control to the vehicle. No amount of verbiage that tries to assign responsibility back to the human can offset the fact that the vehicle was under its own control when it failed.
I've always thought the model itself represents a fundamental design flaw. These systems should either be fully autonomous and responsible, or engage only as active safety measures in accident avoidance.
Tesla has been particularly ambiguous and irresponsible in its messaging/positioning. Naming the product "Autopilot" and really playing up its capabilities, then disclaiming responsibility in the event that the system fails.
While it can be argued that GM should received kudos for releasing a feature that can work reliably, I don't see it as innovative.
It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They're going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won't take risks with technology.
Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads.
As someone in a big city who drives a bit, cycles a bit and walks a lot, I can't help but feel we're still a long way off high autonomy in cars outwith constrained environments.
What history told us is that people's lives really isn't a concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
Every day that goes by without a shift to autonomous driving, we lose 70 or so people in the US alone. Why this isn't being treated as a Manhattan- or Apollo-scale project, I don't understand.
A conservative approach is not what's called for here. We can afford to break a few eggs on the way. Sounds heartless... but sorry, that's what the math says.
But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0]
Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion.
But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
I expect that if every car in the US were replaced with a new one with most of the available modern safety features, you'd reduce the current fatality rate by a very significant percentage.
One of my vehicles is quite old. But I'm not going to replace it just to get new safety features.
Slowing down the deployment of self driving cars is likely to cost far more lives than it saves. The difference is we don't create national news for the several people that will be killed today on America's highways.
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/02/09/a-v-safety-2018-upd...
But who cares about data, if it is all about AI singularity religion?
Here's a better study from the NHTSA that measures the safety impact of Tesla's autopilot features. They found that Tesla vehicle crash rates dropped by almost 40 percent for cars equipped with autopilot: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
And BTW, I'm not saying I'm measuring what is available on the market. I simply point out, that there is no evidence yet that _fully_ autonomous vehicles had exceeded human safety level by any stretch of imagination.
Now, driving a semi may be more dangerous than a car, but it's hard to argue it's vastly more dangerous. Further, people are not uniformly good drivers, a self driving car is vastly better than someone that so drunk they have trouble standing.
However US is not the only country, they have easily passed the accident rate in Brazil.
Current autonomous cars still have a backup driver. So what we are measuring here is a compound safety level of autonomous tech + attentive, professional, sober human. The real data of interest is the safety level of autonomous vehicle alone. We don't have that data. We can proxy it, by looking at the numbers of disengagements and their severity, and that data currently does not look particularly good. But nonetheless it is just proxy data. Once a larger scale tests without backup drivers are concluded, we will get a better picture. Until then, I advise to withhold from any statements such as "autonomous vehicles are much safer than humans", because they are simply not supported by any data.
As for you final statement, I bet there are many undeveloped countries or particular cities with huge number of deaths per mile. But exceeding their death rate on US roads is not anything to be celebrated.
While it took the company 18 months to reach one million, then 14 to reach two, then 8 months to reach three and finally six months to reach the four million mile marker.
Call it 4.7 to 4.9 million miles today.
Uber went from 1 to 2 million miles in 100 days and where over 2 million in December. So they are likely around 2.5 million today unless they slowed down significantly.
However, their are actually a surprisingly large number of self driving car initiatives world wide. Though apparently EasyMile which sells slow level 4 automation busses to 20 countries is only at ~100,000 miles which surprised me. Sill there are several competitors in that space.
Still if you want a real comparison my parked cars have been hit 5 times, most of which does not show up on accident data, because I only reported one of those the rest caused minor damage. Similarly I know of multiple cases of people driving off the road and not reporting anything because they did not cause significant damage. I even know of several cases of road accidents not being reported due to minor damage.
PS: Tesla's self driving cars get a lot of flack for not being ready but they have dramatically lower accident rates than non self driving Tesla's.
So, your argument falls flat.
Some people may take that view, but I don't. It's not great, but good enough for deployment and easily qualifies as autopilot.
Really, aircraft is autopilot not designed to be used without pilots. Yet, it's still good enough to both be used significantly more than 50% of the time on commercial flights and increase overall safety. So even a highway only car autopilots that's plenty to be useful. Now, if you mean it's not designed to be level 4 automation then sure, it's got a steering wheel unlike several buses in production.
I'm interested in seeing the stats for this if you have them, because I've previously looked and been unable to find anything to back this up.
To be properly comparable, we'd need to be comparing human drivers in the same situations in which people use autopilot - i.e. less challenging situations like highway driving.
This article covers some of the problems with Musks pronouncements on this matter: https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/1014/How-saf...
Yes and no.
Part of the reason why Tesla is behind is because they're gimping their engineers by focusing on optical-only solutions.
IIRC, Cruise Automation uses LIDAR, which gives better sensory data. IMO, this is where AI really has an edge: when they start to use sensors that humans don't have. LIDAR accurately maps the distance between the LIDAR and every physical thing in a certain radius.
Solving the problem with LIDAR isn't "revolutionary" per se. Its kind of the obvious way to do autonomous cars. It is a more expensive approach however.
I guess the end results are all that matters however. At which point, I am more bullish on any LIDAR approach. If LIDAR makes it easier to code and more reliable for AIs to detect where they are in 3d space, it should be used (and then you try to solve the mass-production problem to bring down the cost of LIDAR units).
I think we've seen the limits of the optical-only approach from Tesla: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
Solving the problem in any capacity would be revolutionary. Autonomous vehicles operating in a commercial capacity on public roads technically don't yet exist.
There's the old saying 'it's easier to optimize a working system than it is to get an optimized system working',
Outfits using Lidar (and using about an order of magnitude more compute than what's going into Tesla's HW2) are much closer to solving autonomy than Tesla, and in time these systems will get cheaper.
With Waymo's robotaxis, who are the closest to a pilot commercial deployment, they spare no expense, they're riddled with sensors, they have giant computers in the trunk, there's an air-gapped backup computer that can take the vehicle to a minimal risk condition should the primary fail. They are maintenance intensive and require careful maintenance and oversight; Waymo (and GM) are building call centres filled with remote human monitors who can intervene when the vehicles get hung up, and they're geo-fenced. They are far away from being cheap enough or idiot-proof enough to put in the hands of private owners.
Assuming Tesla sticks to it's guns, I'm thinking maybe in 2025 we can revisit that and see how far Tesla has come towards full autonomy.
During the Waymo vs. Uber trial Judge Alsup asked Waymo CEO John Krafcik if Tesla uses Lidar.
"Not yet" he replied.
SpaceX wants to go to Mars. Why haven't they yet? Do you consider them uninnovative? Or maybe they're just taking their time getting the technology right, because they know (1) they're leading the industry already, and (2) if they fuck it up, it would be a highly expensive mistake they probably wouldn't recover from.
If your definition of "innovation" is "irreparably risking your business and customers' lives in the pursuit of profit", I sincerely hope I never have to interact with you in any way in the future.
Why do you think that? Can you explain how this would happen, when the car appears to lack the physical hardware (e.g. LIDARs, computing power) to do so in anything but clear conditions on highways?
Moreover, why would Tesla be interested in doing so? They gain nothing, reduce a customer's desire to upgrade to the latest model, and put themselves into major extra liability if the system ever fucks up.
Remember, Elon doesn’t think like other industrialists. I fully believe that he views profit as little more than a tool to reach his other goals.
Also, having worked on autonomous vehicles, my opinion is that LIDAR is really overrated, and if compute power is an issue, that can be a straightforward modular upgrade.
After all, it's already got the hardware and hardpoints for installing hardware. Swapping out existing LIDAR arrays for newer arrays, or current processors for optimized self-driving processors, would be a piece of cake. Especially with GM's extremely large supply chain, capable of producing more cars in an hour than Tesla can produce in a year, and the corresponding parts for all of those cars.
Fair enough, although it does have better range than ultrasonic and it can see through rain/fog/snow better than cameras.
All car makers would love it if they could reduce the lifespan of their car. I'm just old enough to remember my parents getting calls because a car was about to turn 100,000 miles - they would fill the car with people to see that event - they had to put oil in before and after that 10 mile drive, and you could see the road through the floor boards. Today even the worst cars are expected to make it to 200,000 miles with just minimal maintenance, and still meet emissions - this is to the auto makers loss. However if anyone tries to go down the road of planned obsolescence they rightly believe that will catch up to them. Gm still hasn't complete shaken that reputation - you can see it when they put a GM name on a Japanese car and it is rated lower in reliability than the maker's version.
You're thinking like the Javascript Generation. People do impossible things all the time on so-called "outdated" gear. And a Tesla is far from outdated.
It could very well be a hardware problem that can be solved in software.
This keeps the vehicle resale value high, which constrains demand, which keeps their margins higher than all other auto manufacturers.
I'd rather wait 5-10 years for someone like Waymo to figure it out and then roll it out than see a car I really want today get crapped up with features that are incidental to its raison d'etre. Honestly this and the delays may be enough to make me cancel my res.
Tesla claims that they can do it with the sensors they have, but please do note that none of the other autonomous vehicle players -- many of whom appear to have much more sophisticated offerings than Tesla -- think it can be done.
I know I'm in the minority, but both of my cars that I drive are almost 20 years old (one's a 1999, the other a 2004). Prior to the 2004, I owned a truck from 1996 (ran great until I spun a journal bearing for no good reason).
I also once owned a 1979 Ford Bronco...
General purpose cars are used in too many situations for general purpose autonomous systems to operate in. Moreover, the addition of autonomous systems means that the human behind the wheel will be less vigilant about keeping themselves and other drivers safe. I very strongly believe that autonomous systems beyond L2 actually do not make the car safer, except in situations where the driver is impaired; they just make the car more convenient.
L4 has definite possibility for things like uber where pickup and dropoff are within the same city. But it seems increasingly unlikely that we'll see L5 within our lifetimes, at least from any ethical company who doesn't oversell what the system is capable of.
I believe it's called "Level 4" autonomous driving. It's meant to drive only on safe routes for which the carmakers have already tested their technology.
In theory, all self-driving cars should be classified as Level 4 right now, because I don't think any of them is good enough for being classified as Level 5.
Please don't be rude here. Your comment would be fine with just the two last sentences.
They do not quantify the domain a car can be level 4 in one domain and level 3 2 or 0 in any other.
The domain specific qualification is what all car manufacturers are essentially going for with the exception of Tesla which will all due respect is using a system which is borderline level 3 according the the manufacturer with a single sensor type that was designed primarily for ADAS and calling it an autopilot.
The MobilEye powered Tesla’s will never be a level 4/5 certified even the NVIDIA ones, in fact with how the current regulation is brewing current Tesla Autopilot actually might regress considerably more than some of it's competitors like Audi and GM because Tesla wants to provide full autonomy but doesn't have anywhere near the hardware to do so, and as regulation will eventually catch up to them they are quite likely to lose it.
Is it? It sounds like "If you can't think of an answer, change the question."
That's like Microsoft saying "We can't keep viruses out of our computers, so we're not going to try. Instead, we just won't let them access the internet anymore."*
(*Yes, I know that pre-internet C-64's and Apple ]['s had viruses, too. Work with me here, people!)
The proper analogy is "SpaceX wants to go to Mars, and is pushing aggressively to do so" while a "Competitor sees SpaceX's cost cutting for LEO, and is aggressively copying that feature while completlely ignoring Mars"
In this case, Tesla is shooting for Mars (Complete autonomy in all situations) and is rolling out each phase.
GM, on the other hand, noticed that Tesla's phase 1 autonomy was marketable, so they copy pasted a profitable feature without copying the overall goal of getting to mars (of making an autonomous car).
Every single GE car with this feature will have THIS feature and nothing else.
Every single new Tesla will have todays features, AND tomorrows features, through software updates, because Tesla is attempting to achieve FAR FAR MORE than GM, and is willing to backport those enhancements.
Today GM looks better. In five years, it might look archaic.
So, GM has decided to go to Mars as Tesla did. It has acquired the tech to go to Mars and started testing it. In the meanwhile realized it could copy a page from Tesla's book and put some semi-autonomous vehicle on the road. And, according to this article, did an excellent job.
I'm no way a GM fanboy (do they even exists), but could we be fair?
You didn't even read my post, and you want to talk about fair?
I very clearly state that Tesla is updating new features into cars, while GM is not.
That Tesla gets phase 1, phase 2, and beyond, while GM merely labels phase 1 by a marketing name and will never update it ever.
There is a massive chasm here between buying a car today that will "may take you to mars", and buying a car today that "will absolutely, never, ever, ever be capable of going to mars".
So let's be fair.
GM has a Level 2, maybe Level 3, self-driving platform in its current generation of self-driving cars. It's not claiming that current cards will be able to achieve Level 4 or 5 self-driving functionality. But it is expecting that future generations of their cars will, especially once low-cost LIDARs are incorporated into their platform.
Tesla has, being charitable, a Level 1 self-driving platform. Current Tesla cars don't have the sensors or processing power to handle the demands necessary for Level 3 self-driving, let alone Level 5 (i.e., truly autonomous functionality). Hell, Tesla's current hardware platform does't even have the same level of functionality as their original self-driving hardware (using MobiEye), which was just glorified lane-keeping and self-parking, i.e., Level 1 self-driving.
Tesla is playing a dangerous marketing game and deserves to be called on their bullshit.
Even being very very friendly and interpreting your comment in the way you clarified it, there is an assumption in your comment. The assumption is that Tesla will be able to bring their car to Level 5, full autonomy, while GM will not be able to that. And let me ask you why you say so? Just because Tesla, in a marketing move, tells you they will be able to do that, and GM is not doing that? Maybe GM has a legal department that warned them not to do that?
To paraphrase your point, no there's no difference between a car that, according to their marketing "will maybe be able to go to mars" and a car that "has the hardware that could be maybe able to go to mars, but we prefer to tell you now because we could be liable if we fail". I understand the value of aspirational statements, but still...
If so, your point has merit.
If not, you are hiding behind hypotheticals in a very dishonest way.
I have NEVER heard of GM upgrading existing vehicles with significant new functionality through a FREE software update.
If that is the truth, that they have never done it, never announced it, and yet you come here and suggest that they are in fact doing something that they are not, that is supremely dishonest.
I researched GM for half an hour to find evidence that you are not being dishonest. That you are not hiding behind some really bad hypothetical.
But I found nothing to exonerate your position from the realm of "fantastical hypothetical rendered dishonestly", so I hope you can respond and help me.
- pulling of full vehicle logs, prior to any subpoena/ discovery, and publishing of press releases with Tesla's "findings" on the driver's record
- disabling of Autopilot for that vehicle, if not
- disabling of the vehicle for failure to adhere to the EULA which probably has "binding arbitration" clauses
Better you say taking risks with human lives, this is not a framework or app where you risk crashes and upseting customers because they lost some work, this is about human life and expensive damages.
Now, as others have pointed out there is a market for that, and a great many people prefer the feeling of reliability they get from GM's offering. I just wouldn't call that innovation.
I have a feeling but I can be wrong that you think Tesla innovated the AI on self driving cars and GM or others are profiting for it, self driving AI was studied and worked on before Tesla, Tesla are in the group of companies that risk the life of others where others waited for the tech to be better. Also other companies like GM already had driving assist functions, they now upgrade them with new features
I don't really want them to. They probably wouldn't be very good at the software.
What I want to see is software companies developing the software, which is their specialty. The large automakers can license that software and churn out millions of cars based on it, which is their specialty -- knowing how to consistently build millions of cars and avoid production snafus is the big advantage the big automakers have over the smaller manufacturers like Tesla.
I think that turn of events would get us the best possible software and the best possible cars running that software, and it's probably the only way that enough autonomous vehicles would be built for every driver to be able to own one.
RE: Mercedes cars have 60M lines of code. Daimler CEO said it himself. "We are a software company"
Oh come on. Not having to have your hands on the wheel, while driving at 65mph for three hours down a four lane divided highway, is absolutely "revolutionary". Is it as big as full autonomy? No. But it's no slouch, either, and it's kind of silly to claim that GM (which in this case is really the acquired Cruise team anyway) "is never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market).
The author, who has quite a bit of experience with both systems, and apparently likes both of them, writes "Tesla is vague about [deciding whether it can handle the situation], and often errs on the side of What the hell, let's give this a shot." (author's emphasis.)
I would characterize GM's domain restriction as prudent rather than innovative, but that choice is not necessarily indicative of what has been achieved in R&D.
1. Where does it say anything about the challenges that GM is trying to solve long term?
2. What about this release indicates that GM haven't set their sights higher?
If you have evidence to back your statements, please share. I don't have any insider GM knowledge, but from the outside looking in, this is a genius move by GM and the very essence of an MVP release. Rolling out with a limited set of capabilities that work as advertised is better to me (as a driver) than launching with a larger set of half-working features.
If GM can figure out a way to weave learning capabilities into their platform with their production cars providing training data for this feature, that will put them on the fast path to competing strongly in this market.
Edit: Minor word-smithing
While biking to work today, there was a Cruise car behind me, driving at about 7 mph and just randomly stopping in the middle of the road constantly for no reason at all. Lots of cars kept on constantly honking at the car the whole time.
Last week I saw a Cruise car start to make a left hand turn at an intersection, but its sensors must have thought someone was in the crosswalk, so it stopped in the middle of the other lane of oncoming traffic causing other cars to abruptly stop and start honking.
If this was a normal car, I'd call 911 to report a drunk driver. I wonder if I should just call 911 for a dangerous driver in this case. Is there any way I can report this behavior and get their cars off the road?
In case anyone wants to do some investigative reporting, all their cars come out of a garage labeled Borden Decal Co. (https://goo.gl/maps/F85WPTwkmbQ2). If you follow them around you can probably observe similar behavior.
That might actually be a good idea: call 911, or whatever the local number is for drunk drivers. See if the robo-taxi is able to pull off the road for the police.
I mean say what you will but that's just a weird way to rate autonomous driving systems.
Cruise ranks 0 (it gets out the way) but the Telsa ranks -5. (actually dangerous to use).
The Tesla dealership literally recommended leaving the feature turned off.
The reviewer also experienced frequent highway disengagements by the SuperCruise system which you can observe in the video, yet still rated it higher than Tesla, citing only one Tesla accident. That's also weird!
Perhaps the fact that I did not expect it to be good and therefore went into using it rather carefully and sceptically helped me use it safely. The feature I was specifically interested when I specified the car was normal traffic aware cruise control.
I always look in my mirrors and so on before triggering the lane change and when the markings are not clear I pay even more attention. I use it more on British motorways than Norwegian ones because the British ones have much clearer lane markings and both I and the car can see them better.
The display of lane markings in the dash makes it very clear when the system is confident about the information it has and I bear that in mind when I trigger the lane change. I treat this feature as just another feature of the car, like anti-lock brakes, etc., good when used properly, dangerous when pushed beyond its limits.
I remember when anti-lock brakes were introduced that some motoring commentators worried that people might allow themselves to get into more challenging situations than they would do without ABS and thus be at risk of going beyond what the automation could handle and lose control. It seems they worried unduly.
Lane keeping, lane changing, etc., are features that any sensible driver can use to advantage when it is safe to do so. If the driver is not sensible then I'm not sure that they will be any better or worse when using or not using the feature.
As an aside, I rather Tesla's strategy to GM's. In 10 years when the tech is there, will this Cadillac simply handle freeways better? Seems like the car is locked in to a specific subset of self driving for the life of the car.
More importantly, a review of flash performance is something that can be reasonable to perform, as another more long term reliability oriented one also can be.
You're beta testing a lot of shit on the road. I pray for the day when the only thing we're really testing, is the software, and not some idiot's brain.
I think this is wrong, we just need an AI or other tech that detects this bad drivers or distracted drivers and don't let them drive/start the car or for distraction like texting safely stop the car, maybe report the driver, there must be other solution then allowing bad rrivewrs or bad AI to drive around.
Let's assume your car won't let you start if drunk, there will be a fail-safe mode, you activate that in case of emergency and start it and drive to a hospital because there is an emergency. In case the car is broken and it is reporting false positive we could have rules so you get compensated for this issue by the people at fault for the false positive.
Your argument is like saying that forcing people to learn to drive is too much.
My point is that the bad drivers problem has more solutions not only a less bad AI autopilot.
Did you really assume I'd like more drunk people driving around?
Again my point is you can reduce the car accidents with other solutions then the sexy self driving cars solution that is better then a drunk or texting driver but worse then a beginner.
Let's assume we are not in a bad country with bad laws and evil companies and we want to reduce the fatalities in accidents starting next month, can we create some hardware and software that does: -checks if driver is drunk -checks if driver is paying attention, not texting, or having a medical problem or sleeping at the wheal
My opinion is that we could implement that, and it would be better then having AI that hits stopped trucks, or that get updated monthly with who knows what new features that could make it worse in some cases.
What I would suggest is to apply the scientific method, create this devices , find some people to use them(give them some tax exceptions or something) then look at the number. If NSA is a danger in your country then I don't think Tesla has less bad potential, I would fix the NSA problem, like find a way to make them follow the laws and not spy everyone. IF the companies are bad then make laws and not let them track you or sell your data, there are many lives lost so we should try more solutions and not give up because NSA or bad companies.
Until self driving cars are as good as a regular driver then we should not allow them drive because are better then a bad driver.
Edit , I am sorry I accused you of wanting to drive drunk, it was not ok what I said, I read your comment as I don't want some law to add a device in my car to prevent me doing illegal things on public roads, I am also against companies that collect your data, I am just frustrated about the people that want the un-optimal solution of bad self driving cars to the problem of drunk or tired drivers.
Personally, I don't really have any use for a self driving car that makes me pay attention to the road. The primary 'cost' of driving isn't that i have to move the steering wheel a bit, it's that I can't do something else when i'm driving.