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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Level 2 driving assistance is commonplace on many new vehicles, often as a standard feature. They are just significantly more conservative in their functionality compared to the level 2 offerings from Tesla, and marketed as safety features rather than "self driving" features.

It's important to note that nothing we're talking about here is actually "self driving" per SAE standards. Openpilot, Tesla's Autopilot/FSD, Honda Sensing, Toyota Safety Sense, Hyundai SmartSense, etc are all level 2 driving assistance features.

This turns level 2 driver assistance features into ... nicer level 2 driver assistance features.

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Really need some decimal points in the SAE list. Fully self driving but a human has to watch, and lane keeping are both level 2

"Fully self driving but a human has to watch" is nonsensical. Responsibility for observing the road and making decisions is a very important and inseparable part of driving. Mechanistically manipulating the steering, brakes, and accelerator is not the hard part.

https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

Vehicles with levels 0-2 of driver support are never self-driving at any moment of operation. These systems might be able to manipulate the controls of the vehicle, but they are not good enough to make decisions without constant supervision at all times.

Level 3 is partial self-driving, where the vehicle can assume responsibility for driving under some narrow circumstances.

Full self driving doesn't happen until level 4.

I think the reason that there's no decimal points is because J3016 is really a road-map of the milestones on the way to full automation, not a buyers guide.

In which case the number should be multiplied by the percentage of cases it can be activated in, if you can Level 3 self drive in, eg "up to 37 mph but only on highways" so you multiply 3 by 0.001 because it's only useful in 0.1% of conditions, and then you can add that to the times level 2 works.

That's not possible to calculate because the total denominator of possible "cases" approaches infinity. Level 3 doesn't define what the cases for operation are, that is up to each individual implementor of such a system to define. The criteria is likely to be more much more complicated, like "the output of all 12 sensors when applied to this algorithm, and referenced against this mapping data, delivers a confidence greater than x"

Things don't really get that simple until level 5.

Even at level 4, we're going to have vehicles that pull over when they can't figure out how to navigate successfully.

It's a useless number for consumers then, a Level 3 system could be way less safe/useful than a Level 2 system, because it only works on a sunny day in slow traffic with other cars for reference on a highway

I’ve been saying this since Tesla released autopilot because I personally think teslas implementation is the best but there isn’t an easy way to compare it to something like radar cruise with lane keeping other than saying they’re both level 2.

Exactly, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai / Kia, etc have systems, they're just nowhere near Open pilot.

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