Tesla's self-driving efforts rank last in study of self-driving companies
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
They have a business interest to make lesser known firms appear to be the biggest threat as it makes their services more valuable. Any manufacturer can benchmark self-driving performance on the widely available Tesla, but it will be difficult to know what all the other firms are doing as they're all, comparatively, niche players.
They fact they don't even have Comma.ai on the list suggests this is a garbage tier ranking study.
They also don't have my OS self-driving hardware and software plans. Comma.ai is a cool toy, but it's a joke in the world of real self-driving.
> make lesser known firms appear to be the biggest threat
Lesser known firms like their top four Waymo, Baidu, Mobileye and Cruise? Yeah, okay.
Edit: here it is https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
2 of the 4 don't have anything available for mass market, and they are money losing ventures.
Mobileye is the only player that matters of the lot, given Baidu will effectively be limited to CCP friendly markets.
The ability to take a 1.5K "toy" to make a standard car have partially autonomous is also pretty nice. A great toy that is pushing the industry forward to make sure self-driving is available at reasonable prices vs $15K premium for a "beta" software that will never make it to production.
"To come up with the list, Guidehouse weighs factors such as a company's vision, go-to-market and production strategies, partners, tech, commercial readiness, and more. Guidehouse sorts the companies it ranks into four categories: leaders, contenders, challengers, and followers."
Oh dear. How much mere opinion and supposition went into this one I wonder. Did the companies evaluated provide information? Where they even requested to do so? Did only some of them do so? What are the relative weightings of different factors? etc.
Another, perhaps more familiar way to this audience, to read this report is to think about the credibility you'd give to a news article with a title like "Company XYZ Comes in Dead Last in Gartner Group Study". Yes, you know others with important decision making power may weigh such a Gartner Group report in their decisions, but that the report tells you more about the thinking, biases, and objectives of the study authors than anything terribly objective or important about the marketplace itself.
...but it also takes a ton of computing power to determine how far objects are just from a moving image. A LIDAR unit would give you range + position instantly.
You need to read lane markings, locate cross streets, interpret signs, stop at traffic lights, etc. All of that requires a camera... and if you can do that, you might as well use it to not hit things.
LIDAR would be great in a belt-and-suspenders way, and it seems as if it would have saved some lives already. The other stuff is all incredibly hard; it's not ready and may never be ready. But if self-driving ever works, it would have to be able to work without LIDAR, because it has to solve the harder problem that also encompasses the things that LIDAR could help with.
Until your tesla hits a stopped firetruck at 60mph, then it's a real hard part
I don't have any idea why that happened. It seems odd. I'm afraid I'm always a little suspicious of such stories, since so many turn out to be people lying about the auto-driving.
It's entirely possible that Tesla failed to train the things on fire engines. I rode in a Tesla the other day and was a bit surprised that it didn't note ambulances as different from other trucks. If they've failed to train them on any emergency vehicles, that's a serious problem: there are laws like "pull over for fire trucks" that it can't follow.
And again, that's not a problem LIDAR can solve. Something is very wrong if it identified a big red object as a thing it was allowed to drive on. LIDAR would solve the accident, but not the fundamental question of whether self-driving would work at all.
Tesla are scared of clouds and shadows and don't see big metal boxes
It's 100% something a lidar would help with. It wouldn't hit shadows or clouds but it definitely would hit a big metal box early enough to at least brake instead of accelerating
Arguably that is not true still.
The issue with the camera-only model is it is very non-deterministic.
Personally, every accident I have gotten into is a result of some sort of inattention, distraction, or fatigue. Computers don't experience these things.
Nonetheless, Tesla's occasionally do unpredictable insane things like turn directly into a bollard, cross in front of a moving trolley (that it can see & has rendered on screen), run right into a firetruck, run over child size dummies, etc.
It's worse than supervising a teen driving because a teen will fail in somewhat predictable ways, generally in being either overconfident or over hesitant. You can verbally coach a human as a situation approaches. With FSD you either let it ride, intervening at last moment.. or you need to constantly step in proactively.
That would say a lot more about Tesla's practices than about the ability of the others to deliver a product.
>encourages dangerous behavior by untrained testers on public roads
There are idiots everywhere. The functionality has been locked behind their driver safety score to ensure only responsible drivers can beta test. There's a delusion that it is dangerous based on the amount of press coverage any Tesla involved incident gets.
Do I trust that their car is better at driving than me? No. But is is better than most people on the road. I'd rather be driving near a Tesla than a Prius.
> But is is better than most people on the road.
So says Elon. Yet he won't release disengagement data. Data speaks louder than blow hards.
* 90% won't kill your kid if 4ft+
* 70% won't kill your kid if 3.5-3.99ft
* 50% won't kill your kid if 3-3.49ft.
* All bets are off below 3ft.
Also make sure they are moving enough for the car to identify them, but not too fast for the car to be unable to react.
Make sure they wear high contrast clothing and it's not too dark (or too bright & glaring) out.
Elon has been loudly and repeatedly saying it's a year away for what, a decade?
> The functionality has been locked behind their driver safety score to ensure only responsible drivers can beta test
Pretty sure that's no longer true.
A lot of what FSD does & doesn't support is left intentionally vague.
At various times the FSD product page, the car sales page, and what Musk tweeted were completely out of sync as to what mode does what.
Lots of people bought the car thinking it handled situations it very much did not, and have attempted to use it in unsupported ways.
For example - poll 10 Tesla users about Autopilot on non limited-access highways use and you will get 4 different answers. Then ask them about what objects Autosteer is capable of avoiding. LOL.
Tesla and Space X get heavy talent (despite the downsides of working for Elon Musk) because in their primary fields they are the leader by a large enough margin that if you're one of the best there aren't a lot of other places to go that are going to really challenge you. That's just not the case for the software involved.