Mercedes-Benz is first to get approval for Level 3 autonomous driving in US
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[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-well-be-liable-for-sel...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/magazine/tesla-autopilot-...
Excerpt from [2]:
"The Autopilot kept Riad’s Tesla at a steady speed as it approached the stoplight that marked the end of the freeway and the beginning of Artesia Boulevard. According to a witness, the light was red, but the car drove straight through the intersection, striking a Honda Civic. Riad had only minor injuries, but the two people in the Civic, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves, died at the scene. Their families said that they were on a first date."
> There are few federal laws addressing automated driving. So, Mercedes Vice President of Automated Driving George Massing tells R&T, “we will probably have to deal with each individual state.” But the company plans to accept legal liability for what the car does while Drive Pilot is engaged.
Uh.. is there any actual documentation about them taking liability? Some headlines are fine but not a webpage for submitting a claim or a legal document you can show to a court for why you'd like to introduce Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC as a party to a liability case.
Meaning, this is the first stock car you can actually buy where you do not need to hold the wheel anymore when it is self-driving.
The difference, as I understood it, was in this system the driver’s full attention isn’t needed, unlike the systems above.
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...
Unlike Mercedes.
And I'm not picking on Tesla in particular. There are lots of level 2 systems that don't reliably detect stationary objects. But nobody suggests relabeling them as level 3.
> A Level 3 traffic jam feature performs the complete DDT on a fully access-controlled freeway in dense traffic, but requires a human driver to operate the vehicle upon ODD exit (e.g., when traffic clears, as well as before entering the congested freeway, and again upon exiting it).
Essentially, Tesla's EAP.
Waymo is WAY beyond this, as is cruise.
I don’t know why more manufacturers don’t focus on this.
It seems like something that other manufactures could also easily obtain with fairly little innovation.
This system doesn’t require that, the driver can pay attention to other things.
The Mercedes system only operates in narrow conditions, but you can watch Youtube videos while the car is driving.
The Tesla system operates in almost any conditions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, and when FSD crashes the car Tesla will claim it was an operator error.
Waymo, Cruise and co are working with sensor stacks worth more than these vehicles with the idea that their vehicles will first be used for ridesharing. That already precludes most comparisons: it's a completely different model with completely different challenges.
Meanwhile Tesla does not have a single product that allows you to do other things without liability. Their product is downright primitive compared to what Mercedes is shipping with this.
When a Tesla murdered a man by slamming him into a highway barrier, the fact his phone had run Candy Crush at some point during the drive was dragged out against him.
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Maybe people are misunderstanding because Mercedes says you need to be awake and able to take over? They don't mean Tesla's joke steering jiggle to indicate you're watching the road: they literally mean you only need to be awake and able to take over in 10 seconds. Other than that you can be checking your email, playing Candy Crush, even whip out your laptop and code.
This is the first time you can legally use your time in traffic for something other than driving. If 30 minutes of your 60 minute commute are in rush hour traffic, you can now spend 30 minutes doing something else.
(Also for those who won't read the article, Mercedes has a separate lane keeping product that activates above 40 mph, the distinction is that below 40 mph, Mercedes is taking full responsibility of the vehicle's actions and letting you take your eyes off the road)
Look, I know this is a trope that people like to bring up a lot when hating on tesla. However, you have to consider a two points.
* This happened in 2019, 4 years ago. Quiet a bit of development has gone into telsa's autopilot stack since then.
* The car was going 70MPH. Mercedes's system only works up to 40MPH. For good reason. A telsa keeping the lane at 40MPH is fairly safe.
These are not "miles ahead" systems, they are comparable.
Now, what I'm not saying is whether one system is better/safer than the other. IDK because mercedes hasn't released their yet (I suspect you don't either).
Mercedes being the "first" to apply for this in NV doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. The fact that they are limiting it to low speeds (40MPH) where a wreck will pretty much just be a fender bender should also tell you something about how confident they are in the system.
Tesla has been reckless with the way they've managed their autopilot program. No doubt about that. They've also lied about being able to turn their cars into robotaxis (not a chance of that happening). However, their system is fairly comparable to what Mercedes is doing.
Looking at the hardware Mercades is putting in the cars, the main difference is the forward facing LIDAR. That gives Merc an edge that telsa doesn't have, they can pretty confidently handle things like underpasses (where telsa STILL struggles and is a major issue with their hardware stack).
My main critique of tesla is their hardware stack and dogged approach here to keeping it cheap (not enough redundancy, poor cameras). But that doesn't mean it's not still in a pretty similar league compared to merc.
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As someone who works at an AV company and semi-regularly takes driverless rides, Mercedes is entirely miles and miles ahead of Tesla here because they're taking responsibility.
If you're not familiar with AVs it doesn't immediately jump out at you, but again, even for a lay person surely you realize that the fact that Mercedes is letting you do whatever you want as long as you stay awake and able to take over in 10 seconds is a quantum leap over anything Tesla has ever done.
And 10 seconds is not a normal AP panicky disengagement, they are giving you 10 whole seconds to context switch and take over. So it's not even enough that AP not disengage below 40 mph, it'd also need to never disengage urgently.
If Tesla tried to do that with AP, even limited to speeds of 40 mph, there would be absolute bedlam within a week. I've personally been rear ended by a Model 3 in slow moving traffic and while I was too angry about my car to let my inner AV geek ask exactly what configuration they had the vehicle in, but those are the kinds of mistakes Mercedes is essentially saying "we have solved"
And I mean the irony you want to talk about "confidence in a system" and here Mercedes is saying you can look down and stare at your phone and if this thing crashes we'll be liable... Elon loves to almost say things like this then ensure Tesla blames the dead person.
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This essentially boils down to you saying "Well Tesla hasn't made this quantum leap, but they totally could..." if you really think so go to TMC and make a simple poll: "Has AP ever made you react below 40 mph"
Mercedes is handling moving over for emergency vehicles so you have that full 10 seconds to take back control, meanwhile AP still likes to panic disengage because of sunlight, or a bad update, or because the planets aren't aligned with your chakras on this particular day.
When I hear that, I immediately think of this 2016 study[0]. A ten-second window is not a sufficient window to take control. At that point, you don’t have enough situational awareness to be at the level of a drunk driver, let alone to be a competent driver. Any system that expects inhuman levels of focus and context switching is not a well-designed system.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/154193121360142...
It must depend on the situation. And how drunk is their comparison line? And how long does that impairment last?
All of that is needed to know the size of the problem. Maybe it's a really big deal. Or maybe someone reaches "this wouldn't have even counted as DUI in 1970" for a few seconds and it's fine.
Tesla has no Level 3.
https://www.wardsauto.com/industry-news/mercedes-benz-takes-....
Tesla have no geofence, but only level 2 (requires constant supervision).
Which makes this is an impressive achievement! I believe it's the first level 3 system that you can purchase outright and not limited to specific cities.
Can we get past this? Practically none of SDCs rely on geofence, not like precomputed routes and paths are necessary. Those are just for safety and for managing complexity for experiments.
It’s like trying to ridicule someone in a yellow vest for having to mind safety. Just pathetic.
The first sentence seems to contradict the headline. Approval to begin testing is not approval across the board.
This seams backwards. In my experience the faster you are able to drive the easier it is to drive. Places with a small speed limit in the middle of town are much more complex to drive through compared to country roads where you just go straight.
EDIT: What I meant is that it is not a reliable indicator for identifying technology leaders.
The fact of the matter is that the gee-whiz factor of seeing their cars navigate intersections is greater than the gee-whiz factor of lacking a notification that you must monitor the cars actions.
What does that even mean? How do you "pay off the US"? The congress? The President? The regulatory agencies? Also, isn't Elon the wealthiest man on the planet? If the issue was simply about "paying off" someone, surely Elon could have already done it ages ago?
Or maybe Deimler is a serious corporation that actually knows what they are doing, and through rigorous engineering they know they can accept legal liability for their system, where other companies will not.