Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California
theregister.com
theregister.com
Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap.
That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it.
Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
But unless I have L5, and can turn my back on the road as I drink my vodka drink, (would that be L6? The impossible dream....) I am not interested in anything that lets me take my hands off the when whilst driving on any road. It seems too dangerous.
As a computer programmer I make my living building complex machines, and I have a very deep distrust of machines built by my comrades, at Tesla or Mercedes.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size. I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars. But I'm also a grown-up of a certain age and realize the bright-eyed 20-somethings don't understand the meaning of the word "consequences".
(And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)
I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?
We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
"Because owning a car is expensive."
That hasn't stopped families from getting multiple cars thus far, so why should that change?
"And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive."
I sincerely doubt that. Just think of all the potential for selling services and preload deals on what is basically a rolling networked computer with the user literally captured inside. You might have to pay more if you want the non-add supported version or the one without the bundled subscriptions.
1. Renting a car will become much more convenient. I can summon a car instead of having to search one 3 blocks away.
2. Selling a car with an L5-autopilot will have to include a manufacturer warranty/insurance in cases of crashes resulting from a fault of the autopilot. Tesla is already charging 10k (or 15k?) for their shitty self-driving-gimmick without a warranty. I expect L5-autopilots to cost much more and even come at a yearly subscription (which basically offsets the insurance and the required continued development). I don't expect the average person will (be able to) pay that subscription, when the far more reasonable solution is to rent a car.
A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.
I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example:
That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.
When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.
Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.
Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
Demand might also go up.
Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
Even ostensibly pedestrian friendly cities don’t have sufficient political willpower to hand street space over to other modes of transit at anything resembling a fast enough rate. Everything needs to sit in a “pilot” for two years before action is taken.
Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.
Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.
Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation
Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.
I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.
One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.
It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.
Before (4-lane road): https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/verkehr-in-hamburg-fahrverbot-au...
After (intermediate car-reduced): https://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/14369764/2020-09-30-...
Future (cars banned): https://www.hamburg.de/bvm/medien/17154924/2023-05-30-bvm-ju...
[1] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/autoverkehr-am-jungfernstieg-das...
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...
Yanks could do the same if they wanted to, but unfortunately they've been brainwashed into thinking walking is the devil
(1) Weak Federal Government. The US is more a close collection of small nation states than a single country. The kind of infrastructure you’re talking about takes the kind of planning and funding that only a strong federal government can demand.
(2) Strong respect for property rights. In the US, it takes a lot to take away someone’s private property in order re-allocate it to a public good. By now, all of the cities have vested interests speaking for every square inch of viable property.
(3) Weak labor protections. This is a big one. Labor protections are so weak in the private sector that no one in their right mind would depend on public transport if they could help it. Most Americans are one illness away from being bankrupt, fired, and foreclosed on. To make it in America, by any definition, for a vast majority of Americans (and that includes people not traditionally called Americans, like undocumented immigrants) you must have access to a private vehicle because your work place could change in a heartbeat. You could have to move because your town no longer has any jobs for you. You could have to move into your car because of divorce/eviction/foreclosure etc…
People make fun of the F150 drivers with spotless beds because they’re used as glorified, cramped minivans but the truth is every one of those drivers has made that investment because they’re acutely aware of how precariously close they are having to use that truck to do hard labor.
I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.
> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.
I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.
The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.
40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.
And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?
Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries.
Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily killing others.
So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it. Funny that you would consider public transportation a waste of money when looking at the actual data shows it's the most efficient way of moving people.
Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.
> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.
In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.
The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.
Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.
Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.
The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!
It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.
We need high speed rail to connect our cities.
Perhaps we need to slow down a bit, in general?
The major industrial countries have it. Here is is automakers who fight this, nowadays it is Elon Musk, who distracts with BS single file tunnels (Boring Company pushing Teslas in a tunnel) or hyperloop nonsense.
This needs to be a federal infrastructure along the lines of the federal highway system.
This country lacks the national drive and will, which is impeded by Corporate & affiliates like NADA your local 1% in every county in the US.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans...
That being said, I would love it if car reliance was drastically reduced. But it’s not going to happen.
And without a doubt the economy would be just fine in the long run.
It’s survived a depression, WW2, bailing out Europe, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2008 crash after all.
I live in the UK and public transport is actually very unreliable. Cancellations and delays are frequent, strikes happen a dozen times a year, many services have an hour between trains... public transport will take you much linger to get anywhere and you'll be able to transport much less. The car has been a blessing when shopping.
My experience in Germany is that the trains there are even worse. Every single one was delayed by up to half an hour.
Do you want to limit the cars people own or do you want to limit how much cars are used?
I could reduce the number of my cars to 1 and wouldn't be driving any less. Or I could buy more cars and still would not be driving more than I do today (but might be able to choose a smaller more efficient one for a trip).
There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do.
I wonder if other technology would have a similar effect of ultimately making driving less safe and enjoyable. I've never driven a super-modern car, but I do know that I zone out a bit when cruise control is on...
I am highly skeptical of this. I am sure auto insurers in the US have looked at the statistics, and if it were true, they would be charging higher premiums for automatics than manuals.
Most European countries have far higher barriers to entry for driver's licenses compared to the USA. A German driver's license costs around $2000 to obtain. I spent $2000 on my first car (in 2018). Combine high financial barrier with competent public transit, and people who would be bad drivers just don't drive at all.
It barely takes any mental energy to drive manual. After you learn it it's just not a big deal.
I drink coffee whilst driving.
Main difference is that American roads are big, grid layout, traffic light to runway to traffic light style things. UK roads weave inbetween buildings. It requires more attention.
Something like 60% to 80% of new cars in European countries are now sold with automatic transmission. And this figure is growing year to year. It will take a decade or two for the old manual cars to get replaced, though.
It is no problem at all to drink coffee or even eat while driving a manual car, so no idea where this comes from ;)
Of course, US is a big country and my perception could be not very typical. Extrapolating from one data point is dangerous. It's like comparing driving in Naples and Amsterdam. Both are Europe, but the driving experience is fairly dissimilar.
I don't think its the gears, Its a combination of education. You have to pass a reasonably intense exam that requires coaching and also pass written test (unless you're Belgium, although that might have changed)
Moreover road laws tend to be much more strictly enforced. And not just parking laws.
I don't have any numbers regarding sales, but after renting 10s of cars in Europe during the last decade, it seems like they almost never have any manual cars anymore. In some countries, the entire fleet doesn't even include any manual ones anymore, I was told the last time I wanted to rent a car.
Lane departure warning systems do exactly that. My mazda does this and basically between smart cruise, lane departure warnings, and big old alarms when someone in front of me suddenly hits the break, driving is SO MUCH MENTALLY EASIER. And don't get me started about blindspot alerts and HUDs oh man so amaze.
I still think Level 2 assist is worse than no assist. But level 1 assist is fucking amazing.
I agree about the parking thing. Its such a novelty thing like "hey hey hey bro check it out" and press a button. "ooooh! Aaaaah" meanwhile I can do the same maneuver in say 10 seconds flat since I've been doing it so long. Honestly maybe in 10 years the feature will be so smooth people will question how to even park without it, like rear cameras.
Frankly? I want another 10-15 years of independence for my dad. His eyesight is failing due to a mix of wonky genetics, he's fine driving in daylight, but already has started being much more cautious driving around dusk.
I want an AR display that will highlight the road and objects in it. I was LiDAR sensors hitting the brakes if it detects catastrophe. I want the car to augment and extend his ability to use it.
That's the big sell of self driving cars. Not "push a button and be whisked away," but having your own abilities enhanced by machine input that would otherwise be inaccessible to you.
That currently seems the safer bet than hoping for AI driving/aids, but isn't an option in much of the USA.
In Boston they're trying to connect North Station and South Station, a distance of about 5 miles. The cost is at least $10 billion.
Unrealistic maybe, but it colors my interest or lack of interest in the middle of the road options.
Half paying attention systems strikes me as dangerous for people.
So, Waymo/Cruise (at this point in time) basically.
This already exists, provided the route is extensively mapped beforehand, in two separate products (Cruise, Waymo)
The Toyota CH-R my wife had did that. Above 50 km/h / 30mph the steering wheel would gently "shake" if you tried to switch lanes without using your blinker.
Several brands/models offer that, sadly sometimes as an extra (FWIW I think it should be illegal to offer that as an extra: it should either come stock or not be offered at all... Safety features shouldn't be something you need to pay for).
It's not at all self-driving though.
I also enjoyed the side mirrors indicating (using some kind of yellow LED) when there was a vehicle in the blind spot.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
You already have all of this in a Volvo
Good news.
However removing all the sensors, reducing redundancy, from a high speed moving car to save manufacturing costs and increase profits is in direct conflict with safe driving for the passenger and other people on the road.
Many more sensors, much more redundancy, roads that give feedback, networked cars that give feedback, satellites for near realtime external updates, all will make cars eventually drive themselves better than humans.
But certainly not "just cameras" that cannot even handle weather without severely compromised guessing. You don't do that in a physical world requiring safety.
And myself, by extension. We all have human moments.
Running red lights, mounting pavements to cut corners, brake-checking, dangerous overtaking, inadequate stopping distances, distractions, micro sleeps, accidently accelerating into shop fronts, and just generally phasing out because you are human.
I personally hate anti-social driving behaviour.
Brake Checking is the stupidest thing I have ever witnesses. It feels like it's becoming a trend here in Australia. Did it originate as aggressive behaviour in the US, or Russia maybe for insurance?
It's certainly a recent trend here in Australia.
I have noticed a lot of people failing to keep a safe distance from the car in front (tailgating), though, which is far stupider to me. Maybe the two are related?
Hyundai has a lane-keeping assist that centers your car in the lane. It is _very_ good, although of course I am nearly always ready to take over if needed.
IMO, smart cruise control + lane assist gets you a great deal of convenience for both day-to-day city traffic, and long-distance trips. The automation is good enough that it is helpful and makes driving much easier, but not so good that your mind switches completely off, so that you're always ready to take over if needed.
I would say, drive me long distances on the high way. The rest (last mile, city country side) I can do myself. It also aligns with the fact that it is easier to make autonomous driving work for high ways than inside cities etc.
This would make taking an airplane less tempting and as my car can fit the whole family we do not need to fill up 4-5 seats in an airplane and we use much less CO2 per passenger.
I want a car that will drive the hours of boring ride on the Autobahn. It should take over once I am on the Autobahn, then drive by itself while I am sleeping/working/playing, and then drive to a special "cool-down" parking lot, where it will take a few minutes mandatory break to make sure the driver has time to wake up. From there I will take over again.
I haven't driven a car for over ten years, and I don't miss a thing. No traffic misery. No parking misery. No government misery (tickets etc). No spending on never-ending this and that. No getting angry about roadworks or other people cutting me off and other nonsense.
It's absolute bliss.
I havetwo modes
1 home to beech with dog. Daily 10k total
2 town for supplies. Weekly 55k total
Not really suitable for taxies or Uber.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Honda already does both of these, since 2020 at least iirc
Our Bronco Sport has this (steering wheel vibration) in addition to lane assist. I don't like the latter, so I appreciate that I can enable/disable the two modes independently.
I know it's way more stuff for them to test, but being able to enable/disable individual features is so huge. My blind-spot warning on my Mazda is super sensitive (plus I drive mostly in traffic so any time I put my turn signal on there is a car next to me). I want to be able to turn it off, but since it uses the same sensors as my RCTA, they can only be enabled/disable together. I love the RCTA, so I just have learned to ignore the beeping that invariably happens every time I signal...
Security, by not making human mistakes. But this won't happen for a long time and probably never with people like Musk leading the way.
Autonomous vehicles are a poor substitute for long-promised flying cars anyway.
What you really want is the TCO of a car in a helicopter.
Any computerized system is only going to advance over time, with its theoretical limits far beyond the current state of the technology.
So full self-driving is clearly inevitable.
That is not true
Car drops me off in front of my destination, then goes off to a parking garage 15 minutes away and parks.
Bus? Train?
You're kind of joking, but this is more practical/safe than it sounds.
Most people drive to eat and drink out. You know how they all get home? By driving back. That's driving after drinking however many bottles of beer and glasses of wine. Every night they go out to eat and drink.
To put it simply, everyone breaks the law any time we feel like going out. The police everywhere know this, and the only reason they don't camp out at restaurants to arrest everyone is because they themselves are also guilty of the same.
Edit: multimodal. Does no one remember the vision + language version of GPT4 that microsoft demoed?
I fail to see how that is relevant to computer vision
- Must be under 40 mph
- Only during the daylight and only on certain highways
- CANNOT be operated on city/country streets
- CANNOT be operated in construction zones
- CANNOT be during heavy rain or fog or flood roads
Tesla FSD navigating the complex city streets of LA for 60 minutes with zero human intervention.
This seems like a marketing gimmick by Mercedes at best; the two technologies aren't even in the same league. Any comparison is laughable. They are outmatched, outclassed, and absolutely outdone. Karpathy (now @ OpenAI) and the Tesla FSD team have really done an incredible job.
It also doesn't mean it doesn't have the technical capability to drive through the streets of LA for 60 minutes.
https://www.thatcham.org/mercedes-to-accept-liability-for-ac...
And even worst failures...looking at all these I simply do not believe the videos posted are not edited or a selection of a success out of many failed ones.
https://youtu.be/KG4yABOlNjk?t=1252
https://youtu.be/WowhH_Xry9s?t=77
https://youtu.be/WowhH_Xry9s?t=196
Since the video was live on YouTube no editing was done...
These videos are only posting the successful events, we need to see them all. That is why probably Tesla is not putting their money where their mouth is.
And regarding the FSD, most youtube videos I have seen run into human intervention within 20 minutes or so. Going 60 minutes without human intervention is certainly possible if you get a bit lucky but that does not mean you should take your eyes off the road for a second. FSD still has to be constantly supervised, which makes it of very limited utility. At this stage it is still a fun experiment at most.
Recently I visited LA and a friend gave me a drive in their Model 3. The difference in sensor interpretation quality was massive compared to what I see back home. That gave me hope of my aging Model 3 still seeing improvements… But also a nagging suspicion that Tesla may have spent a lot of manual effort on data labeling and heuristics for LA roads specifically, and the results may not be easily scalable elsewhere.
> This seems like a marketing gimmick by Mercedes at best;
No, this is what a professional roll-out of a feature like this should look like.
> the two technologies aren't even in the same league. > Any comparison is laughable.
Well, at least we agree on these two. But probably not about the direction.
I agree the comparison is laughable.
17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-a...
- Must be under 40 mph
- Only during the daylight and only on certain highways
- CANNOT be operated on city/country streets
The human has to keep the hands on the wheel at all times and eyes on the road.
Edit: I looked at these FSD videos before and am very sure it will not work that well in an average European city. Unfortunately, because I really would love to buy a real self driving car that legally allows me to watch a movie while driving (highways is enough).
For comparison, Tesla FSD cruising right through a crossswalk with pedestrians and the driver is gleeful about it: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/teslas-full-self-drivin...
For comparison, Tesla FSD veering into oncoming traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/128zncy/fsd_te...
I remember seeing a video where Tesla FSD veered right at an island/telephone pole. Another where it veered at a crowd of pedestrians on the corner of a signalized intersection waiting to cross.
A reminder that the software has been buggy for years and Tesla is somehow being allowed to "beta test" it in public among people who did not consent to the risk.
You might be right or not but gave zero arguments in your comment. The fact that these safety/regulatory restrictions exist does not mean the system is not more capable.
By my count, 46 videos of it not staying in lane, 54 videos of it swerving into objects, 23 videos of it ignoring red lights, 22 videos failing at intersections, 12 videos of pulling out into traffic, 15 videos ignoring road signs, 7 videos ignoring pedestrians, 5 videos ignoring speed limits, 23 videos stopping randomly, 5 videos failing in the snow, 3 videos ignoring buses, 5 videos speeding in school zones with children present, and 3 videos ignoring school bus stop signs.
With a level 3 system like the one from mercedes you can check your phone or do anything else and only have to react when it tells you to take control again.
In those, you can see the system disengage the second it doesn’t have a vehicle to follow at slow speeds right in front of it (like when the vehicle ahead changes lanes).
Useless.
Tesla is taking a radically different and open approach to autonomy compared to every other player. That opens them up to intense criticism though as there are thousands of videos online, with successes and failures. When close to a half a million people are using an autonomous system across the full ODD and all of the US and Canada it's going to be very easy to compile a collection of critical failures. But IMO this is the best way to make fast real progress in this space and not just a limited Disney ride.
But FSD isn't even necessary to help, an autonomous acceleration and follow mode for all cars on traffic lights and in traffic jams would already have huge benefits.
This makes no sense to me based on the technology used. Cruise actually previously had a permit to ONLY operate at night.
If so, (how) do they run GPU drivers on it?
And if not, how do they guarantee that the system is responsive and safe?
(Of course a third option would be that they don't use an OS at all for the mission critical stuff).
If you constrain a system to where it’s effectively useless and declare victory, that’s worse than trying to actually solve the problem and saying you’re not there yet.
It’s lowering the goal precipitously until you can achieve and then pretending you did it. Tesla has flaws, but this is a dumb article.
”Mercedes-Benz DRIVE PILOT is the world's only SAE Level 3 system with internationally valid type approval. It builds on a very robust foundation, setting new industry standards. DRIVE PILOT uses a highly sophisticated vehicle architecture based on redundancy with a multitude of sensors enabling comfortable and safe conditionally automated driving. The certification by the authorities in California and in Nevada once again confirms that redundancy is the safe and thus the right approach.”
"...Mercedes-Benz is focusing on SAE Level 3 conditionally automated driving with the ultimate goal of driving at speeds of up to 80 mph (130 km/h) in its final iteration..."
"Mercedes-Benz S-Class DRIVE PILOT Sensors Details" - https://youtu.be/9m-VS55w9HA
- LiDAR
- Radar
- Cameras
- Ultrasonic sensor
- Road moisture sensor
Curious how this collection of sensor compares with Tesla and also with run of the mill cars with ACC / lane keeping.
I can't stomach watching a video that starts out like that.
> On suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density, DRIVE PILOT can offer to take over the dynamic driving task, up to speeds of 40 mph.
Basically, this will follow the car in front of you in slow freeway traffic. It won't navigate, it won't even change lanes. It won't work (and it's not clear to me how it disengages) when traffic speeds up.
That's not useless. There's a reasonable argument that this is the product the market wants. But the "Germans beat Tesla" framing here is really quite spun. Autonomy and capability aren't the same thing.
This is significant as it means MB takes on liability and will give you sufficient time (i think 10s in the European version) to take over.
In the world of corporate liability this is huge even if it isn't a technical achievement by itself.
Really the big thing here is Mercedes is saying it's good enough (under 40mph) that the driver doesn't have to pay attention at all.
However Mercedes are taking liability whilst their system is in use which implies Tesla takes no liability whilst their system is in use.
I'm surprised Tesla is scared to take legal responsibility for their system and I am surprised lawmakers are allowing autonomous systems when the manufacturer doesn't believe in it enough to take responsibility whilst it's in use.
How is Tesla getting away with this?
Of course they can beat the competition especially if they do not need to take legal responsibility for any deaths/accidents that occur when it's in use.
Mercedes FSD prototype, 10 years ago: https://youtu.be/G5kJ_8JAp-w
To that end, Tesla is offering insurance directly to consumers now, offering lower premiums based upon driver safety system utilization. In my case it would cut my insurance rates in half.
Are they? This press release doesn't actually say so. There was an announcement a while back when they deployed this system in Germany, but that's obviously a different legal environment.
FWIW, this is mostly spin anyway. Liability isn't generally something that is granted, it's either there or not. If Tesla FSD causes an accident, they can absolutely be sued for that in the US. And they have been on a handful of occasions (Successfully even, I think? Pretty sure there were settlements in some of the early AP accidents?).
The reason that "Tesla is liable for accidents" doesn't make news is... that there are vanishingly few AP/FSD accidents. The system as deployed is safe, but that doesn't match people's priors so we end up in arguments like this about "accepting liability" instead of "it crashed".
The thing is, they just aren’t capable of it.
So call me skeptical…
If you mean "transportation where I'm not driving" then sure but taxis also fit that bill.
Today there are 2 fully automated ones and one other mixing manual and automated.
The sofware was developped by Matra transport international (now Siemens Mobility).
It can even dynamically add/remove trains in service to best match the demand !
It also apparently uses a 48 bit cpu architecture.
[0] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_d%27automatisat...
Rail: 0.09
Car: 2.52
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat... (eu data)
I live in the Netherlands and we have this. Because it is what people want and need. And because it's been invested in for decades. And because it has a way higher ROI than car infra.
That would be those incompetent Eurocrats....
There is one 100 metres from my house. I cannot catch trains at it because some reason I do not understand the powers that be will spend zillions on roads and SFA on rail tracks.
I also know that the companies that run the rail system have not updated their logistics as if it is the twenty first century. I cannot pt a box on the railways, and pick it up in another city, faster than driving it be truck no matter how well I plan it.
I can track my goods on road transport close to real time.
While Tesla did amazing things for EVs adoption, and self driving (even if one may say the main contribution is hyping it) it’s hard to see them as leaders anymore.
Fact is, Mercedes is taking responsibility for its system while Tesla is not. Tesla claims (and especially it’s fanboys) starts to look like Theranos. Yeah it almost work and it will be a game changer. Yeah well…
I’m curious about those Tesla videos that are everywhere - is there some kind of dataset somewhere with videos of similar situations, annotated with which version it is etc, so one can make a kind of historical evaluation of its progress ?
(Would also like the history of Elon tweets claiming each version fix this or that to go along in the dataset)
What has Mercedes ceo commented about it?
I think you’ll find Mercedes just don’t publish anything, where as Tesla pretty much develop in the open. Regardless of the sausage, some people just don’t like knowing how it’s made.
Tesla publishes very limited and extremely biased numbers - they don't publish raw numbers allowing anybody to do the work.
"Tesla pretty much develop in the open" - that's the issue though - should something like car auto-pilot be allowed to be developed in the open ?
My request was not a shot at Tesla, I just think it would be a very interesting to see - say you are able to isolate and filter all situations of some type (say left turn) from all youtube FSD videos - and compare across the different versions in time. I would love that !
Can you make this statement with a straight face? That a company develops machines that can kill you any second, up in the open, and have untrained people expose general public to those tests?
How would you feel if I’d be developing magical drug, that cures cancer just by drinking it, with no side effects, by just throwing each iteration into your municipal water supply and put it in your kids milk?
Are you saying Mercedes process is better? Where they haven’t done extensive testing and have a brand new drug that has actually never been properly tested in the wild?
I’m confused what your point is.
Anyone looked if there's a cheaper way to get this Mercedes L3?
https://www.lesnumeriques.com/voiture/drive-pilot-mercedes-c...
https://www.lesnumeriques.com/voiture/essai-mercedes-eqs-450...
1. Actual car checks everywhere. I've seen some crazy cars in the US that would be impounded ASAP in most of Europe.
2. Add pedestrian safety requirements for new cars, which would practically ban tall cars (trucks and SUVs) except for professional use.
3. Something for smartphones, not really sure about the best attack angle.
This "might not ever happen" self driving shtick is just moving the goalpost into the middle of nowhere.
Please be careful not to conflate the goals of capitalism with the goals of technology and science.
[1] PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INOA-EA22002-3184.PDF
I'm the one fooling myself? That's in no way realistic
I'm the one fooling myself?
In practice, this is "Level 3", but only within an ephemeral subset of driving conditions that aren't going to be consistent enough for you actually exploit that autonomy.
[1] Actually much more, obviously, but it at least does this.
Statically you could decrease the number of deaths by 20-30% by just banning cars older than 10 years. There are some other (cheaper) things that can be done as well.
> Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State
Which mashed a lot more sense since Waymo, Cruise and Zoox all have L4 autonomous cars on the road today in California operating with no human inside at all.
Wonder why you can’t buy these L4 cars. No Level 4 cars are commercially available in the US. [1]
What you are describing are pilot programs propped up with a huge, expensive, unprofitable infrastructure of remote monitoring, support vehicles, and backup drivers. Waymo’s technology might be promising, but today these companies are bleeding money.
In contrast, Mercedes is selling retail cars with Level 3 features to consumers and taking responsibility for them.
[1] https://www.autopilotreview.com/self-driving-cars-sae-levels...
"Germany will be the world leader in autonomous driving" - https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/DG/act-on-autono...
"...The Autonomous Driving Act took effect in Germany on July 28, 2021, introducing significant and comprehensive amendments to the German Road Traffic Law..." - https://www.ippi.org.il/germany-autonomous-driving-act/
Law here (German): https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Gesetze/Gesetze-19...
But I don't think there's a lot of criminal prosecutions for driving on highways at speeds under 40 mph.
The main thing is that Mercedes Benz will take liability for anything that goes wrong. But the system as a whole is far less capable than Tesla FSD.
"It's less capable except for the minor fact that if we <<kill>> someone, it's <<our fault, not yours>>".
You know, that minor factor called "life or death".
> ... only when driving under 40 mph on highways. So it is pretty useless.
If Waymo/Tesla/whatever would do this, they'd be the darlings of the internet.
If Mercedes does this, no one thinks: "ah, it's the first iteration, they can you know, <<increase>> the speed later on".
We actually have no idea what Benz et al.’s systems are capable of if they were to deploy them with the same recklessness as Tesla.
40mph single lane travel during clear skies and daytime down certain highways can be done by any number of naive driver assistants from many manufacturers. Tesla's autopilot from 2015 could certainly accomplish that, let alone the 2023 FSD versions. The only thing Mercedes has accomplished here is ambitious paperwork.
[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/delf-driving-car-born-1986-e...
I'm not sure which system Mercedes is using here. Could also be NVIDIA hard- & software (Mercedes and NVIDIA teamed up).
Public transport is a cultural problem as well as a technical problem. I live in a city with decent public transportation system options. I use it frequently and I'm grateful for it. But as soon as I go even a few miles outside the city, the public transportation options are slim to non-existent. I wouldn't even pretend for a second it's a practical option. You better have a car.
Tesla sells system that’s not legally self driving under any set of conditions. You’re always driving, and Tesla will fight you in court if you want them to take liability for any action it took.
There’s nothing misleading about this headline.
Non technical people would probably assume that Tesla already has this, since we hear about it all the time, and that this is Benz getting up to speed - while it's not the case at all and Benz is beating the largest competitor in the market.
I think this is a fair title.
And as « there is no such thing as bad publicity », it keeps people talking about the concept of autonomous vehicles. Which seems to work like a charm according to the number of comments I see for this post !
A L3 car is required to be able to handle all short term situations and only do a handoff with 5-10 seconds of warning. The idea is it’s ok for the car to come to a complete stop and say I have no idea what to do, but it isn’t ok to simply fail on a freeway at 70 MPH.
Failing safely is a huge difference, as mentioned in the article: if a driver doesn't take over when prompted the car activates the hazard lights and slowly comes to a stop before making an emergency system call to alert first responders to a potential problem.
But it's absolutely true that the practical difference between "human must supervise" and "human must be ready to take over" is MUCH smaller than people want it to be. Mostly everyone wants to yell about Elon Musk and "2 vs. 3" is ammunition.
They've been fully autonomous in San Francisco for something like a year, and are piloting in Austin and Phoenix(?) ...
No need to own a car if it can be doing dozens of trips instead of paying for parking.
If it can reliably wake me up or pull over at the off ramp then it's good enough.
If you're in a bar and want to go back to your place, you call one if such autonomous vehicles. Or you want to go from home to work without needing to care about parking. They are called taxis.
I strongly believe this would improve safety for autonomous vehicles by 1000x.
The “self-driving” infrastructure would not be magically any better than the “human-driving” infrastructure, and how to handle conflicting data from the infra in terms of sensor fusion is not at all clear.
In short, it creates as many problems as it solves, and doesn’t really solve the problems that it sets out to in the real-world.
Even simpler things like supplemental signaling that could be used in special circumstances like road work and emergency vehicles, if they are not used properly and consistently in all cases, it doesn’t change the fact that the system needs to correctly handle these cases internally.
> on Interstate 15
These two things are not compatible.
> though the driver must remain behind the wheel to take over when prompted
That is a modal interface and the system may also decides to switch modes at will. Anytime a human is expected to wakeup from a mode and takeover from an automated system on short notice, we have failure modes that are unique compared to a modeless system (including Full Human Drive )
Tesla is smoking the competition in AVs. Go watch any of WholeMarsBlog's videos on YouTube, of FSD Beta perfectly navigating rush hour San Francisco streets, or driving him from SF to LA without intervention. This is already happening regularly, and has been for months.