Selling full autonomy before it's ready could backfire for Tesla

AP1 owners who purchased Tesla in Q1/Q2'16 are SOL as in Q3'16 they released AP2 since AP1 didn't have full self-driving h/w despite his Jan'16 tweet.

Also, I think the conversation about Lidar in this article (and perhaps among some readers here) misses a key point. Elon doesn't think merely that one can build a Level 4 car without Lidar; he thinks it's vastly preferable for a Level 4 car not to have any dependency on Lidar -- not only for cost reasons, but also for performance in degraded atmospheric conditions (rain, snow, fog, etc.). It's a difference in strategy, not merely an attempt to do more with less.

I personally am terrified of human drivers and will not walk close to the edge of a road because I don't trust them to be paying attention. As shown recently, self-driving cars appear to not yet be at that level (though I don't know the numbers - perhaps they are).

When self-driving cars reliably have same-or-few accidents per year (by volume) then I think they can claim "Full Self-Driving".

A thousand disclaimers and alerts will not be remembered 10 days later, but the word Autopilot will stick. People hear auto-pilot and they think airplanes flying 100% autonomously (which of course is not the case).

As long as that name stands, people will be doing stupid and dangerous things like watching Harry Potter, or anything-but-looking-at-the-road.

I would call it "enhanced cruise control", but hey, that doesn't sell as much as "Autopilot", does it?

(To be fair, many other cars provide adaptive cruise control too, but Tesla's is the best I've tried so far).

I wrote up my experience in slightly longer form here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773903

I use Q7 ACC pretty much all the time nowdays. I do accelerate and sometimes brake manually of course. However I enjoy the fact that I don't need to be 100% focused on driving when it is enabled. It is similar to how I operate autopilot in the plane: monitor it does the right thing but don't bother making constant minor adjustments. I am still mentally in the game, just for a different reason/goal.

On a lighter note, my dad learned to steer using his knee so he could eat while driving. I can't help but imagine how much easier his life would be with autopilot (probably safer too).

Keep in mind that most cars (including my two examples) only really have lane centering and adaptive cruise, though, as far as driver-assistance features go. Tesla's ability to change lanes and do basic highway nav is above and beyond the norm. I'd probably pay another $2k for that. Also, the way most of these packages work, you often can't get them a la carte--they're on top of another package, so the effective cost might actually be $5k depending on how that's structured.

Paying $3k for vapor that won't arrive before I sell the car/return the lease would piss me off, though.

Although at its core, that's what Autopilot is (nothing more than Lane-Keep Assist and Adaptive Cruise-Control), to leave it at that is not giving it enough credit. Tesla's Autopilot is far beyond any other manufacturer's drive-assist features that I have personally driven (and I tested quite a few before purchasing my Model S).

In fact, a lot of people are saying that how well the assist features work is part of the reason why we saw the unfortunate fatality where the Model X ran right into a median. It is so good that people (wrongly) begin to place too much trust into it, and don't pay attention when they need to. When I first got my car (Feb 2017), it was shortly after the big MobileEye departure, and TeslaVision was still in its infancy. Never in a million years would I have taken my hands off the wheel or stopped paying attention when using this early version of TeslaVision AutoPilot. That thing tried to kill me more than once. The current version works very, very well and I'm totally happy with having paid and additional $5,000 for it.

If you get all that hardware, $5,000 is a great price; back in 2005, any one of those components would have set you back that much.

Of course, if Tesla doesn't have that full complement of sensors - and from the price, they might not have all those sensors - the promised self-driving capabilities may never materialise.

Tesla claims that LIDAR isn't neccessary but yet they constantly hit barriers and stopped trucks. If they can't even get the basics right how can Musk be sure that his strategy is the right one?

LIDAR and geometry give you a 3D map of the environment, at least the part of it in range of the sensors. Anywhere the vehicle is going to drive should be verified as flat. That's the first step. Waymo does this. Tesla doesn't. Whether Uber does will come out when the NTSB dissects their vehicle that ran over a pedestrian.

Those top-mounted LIDAR units aren't primarily looking for obstacles. They're looking for flat road. A pothole, a cliff, a car, or a pedestrian does not look like flat road. The software doesn't have to know why it's not flat to not go there.

Trying to classify stuff that isn't flat road is mostly for dealing with moving objects. "What is that?" and "What will it do next" isn't a geometry problem. That's where neural nets come in. An acceptable result is "unidentified", which feeds back into the planner as "stay away from there".

Some people have gotten the idea that they just hook up a camera to a machine learning system, train it from a dashcam, and they have a quick path to self-driving. That will work most of the time. Until it kills someone.

Which would actually be a big win for safety and being able to generally deal with long, boring drives. That doesn't buy you robo-Uber or cars-on-demand but those are likely much harder problems.

better yet it can probably be paid for by people who want to use it and manufacturers who want to sell their solutions.

the elephant in the room though is that is has been marketed as a safety system and it cannot operate in the conditions we need it most. just live BEVs there are too many players going in too many directions that regulation and standards have not caught up.