It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product.
Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is totally "autonomous," but the fact of the matter (to me, at least) is that they are putting in way more effort to solve the problem than legacy auto manufacturers are.
I can step into a Tesla today, press a destination, and go there without touching the wheel or pedals. Sure it won't be flawless but the fact is, I can. I can't do the same in any other consumer car, and the closest thing is a Waymo. The effort is there, I think its just a matter of time before we start seeing the legal stuff play out.
That's a lot simpler than what Cruise showed in their video. Dealing well with pedestrians, stopped cars, cross streets, etc are a significant challenge.
Can you give an example? I'm not aware of anything in 2016 that would consistently pass this test.
In 2016 Waymo reported their safety drivers intervening once for every 5,100 miles driven [1] - which implies to me that 99% of journeys nobody touched the wheel or pedals.
The problem is 99% isn't enough, as there are tremendous numbers of cars out there, and a busy bit of freeway would get a disengagement per minute.
[1] https://driverless.wonderhowto.com/news/2016-disengagement-r...
It might be missing a few logging roads, private driveways and carpark lanes - but it shows Google is entirely capable of mapping streets in detail all over the world.
This is complete bullshit. The systems in 2016 were restricted to pre-mapped areas with lots of training. (i.e. the waymo/cruise approach today) So if you weren’t in a tiny slice of San Francisco or a few other training areas, this didn’t work.
..and yet Tesla is quick to blame the drivers when accidents happen - and has disclaimers for supervision in its TOS. Mercedes on the other hand, takes all responsibility for eventualities that happen while self-driving is engaged (DrivePilot - not ADAS)
I travel hundred miles a day on average on a mix of local and highway, but all major roads in city and suburb.
Humans would fail a driving test designed for autonomous driving too. We don't have the reaction time comparable to computers to ..say.. avoid oncoming traffic or an object/animal on the road within a few milliseconds. Or identify dark objects easier to see in infrared. Or maintain an exact speed, to a few significant digits. Or manually do a good job with traction control.
You call lying about it endlessly, misleading marketing, beta-testing on public roads, and not even having L3 properly in production "taking it the most seriously"?
I can't point to a single Andrej Karpathy or Chris Lattner or Jim Keller working at Mercedes, BMW, GM, etc (not to mention the not so big named people who are still very very good). And I also don't see many people crossing over from legacy auto autonomous orgs to openai, anthropic, deepmind, etc.
Other manufacturers don't have custom in car inference chips either, or spend billions in R&D for custom training silicon. This is clearly not a side project for Tesla, whereas with other manufacturers, its an obvious afterthought.
My guess is other manufacturers will just license some AV product from whoever is most successful and try to sell products like they always have - through design language and brand feel, not through breakthrough technological innovation.
So yes, I don't think any other consumer car manufacturer is taking it seriously.
But that has been invested in X.ai not Tesla.
This argument is always so silly because it’s just an argument about the correct way to build a safe control system (i.e. with guaranteed performance characteristics in a defined operational domain) versus the incorrect way to do it (just kinda work over an ambiguously defined set of conditions and hope you don’t kill too many innocent people to cripple your business).
Yes,that's a suppressed fact, not an assumption. It just follows the car in front. Check my other comment.
MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain.
It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe.
You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).
What evidence do you have for your argument?
Restated: You are assuming that if Mercedes engineers had a similar appetite for putting millions of innocent people at risk by operating in unreliable contexts, that their system would perform far worse than FSD does. On what basis do you make that assumption?
The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads.
Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front.
You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in front for thousands of miles on non-premapped roads.
What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?
MB also has a luxury brand reputation to maintain. When they ship a major feature like that, it absolutely has to work 100% as advertised.
Source? If someone gets killed when the system is driving, there is no legal framework for you as a driver to escape criminal penalties. Who at MB are they going to jail for it?
Can UPS indemnify their drivers from involuntary manslaughter charges?
So there will be a system happily running producing target driving paths, but some monitoring system disables in the case with no car in front.
I would guess that the mb system is in fact ok without a car in front, but didn't hit their appetite for risk yet.
I didn't say they are. You're the only one making assumptions here :)
Should we also assume that Mercedes cars can fly better than a plane, because we have not yet seen them fly?
What kind of logic is that?
In other news, OpenAI has solved AGI last year, but is keeping it a secret because it's too dangerous.
I have solved self driving, how can you say I didn't if you haven't seen it perform?
Here's a better example: let's say by law Mercedes has to restrict their cars from exceeding 80mph. They have a car that can reach 80mph in 2 seconds. Is it therefore credible to claim that the car is actually incapable of driving at 81mph?
Or is it more credible to say, "we don't know much about its performance beyond 80mph, but it can probably achieve something outside of that."
The fact that it shuts off immediately shows that they're just copying what the car ahead does.
The system is unable to function on a pre-mapped highway on a clear day with lane markings if there is no other traffic on the road. What does that tell you?
None of that is true, it just follows the car in front in slow moving traffic during daytime in good weather on premapped roads and cannot even change lanes. No car in front anymore? It completely fails to "self"-drive.
These limitations are taboo to talk about because the Mercedes system is used as an anti-Tesla talking point, you can get permanently banned from Reddit and BlueSky for bringing it up. Thats why so many people think its a great system.
Edit: Downvotes for bringing up inconvenient facts.
But within the range of cases where the Mercedes system is applicable (which recently went up to 59mph in Germany [1]) it's solidly better than the Tesla system because Mercedes did the engineering to make it reliable enough that you don't have to supervise the car's driving. If I had a highway commute in stop-and go traffic I'd be comfortable reading in a Mercedes, but not in a Tesla.
[1] https://media.mercedes-benz.com/article/4c04b46a-05e3-4a20-9...
It gets dark at 4:45PM in a good chunk of the western world in winter so it won't be useful then.
Absolutely untrue. It's not even close to perfect. I use it a few times a week and while it's seen some significant improvements over the last year, it still makes pretty dangerous mistakes, especially on left turns, right-turn slip lanes, intersections with flashing yellow lights, streets with very worn road lines or where the positioning of the road lines shift from one side of the intersection to the other. I can think of a dozen other similar situations so I'm very sure there are many others I've never even encountered.
It remains to be seen how much juice Tesla can squeeze out of a transformer approach to autonomous driving, but it's by no means a sure thing.
edit: I misunderstood the comment. I see now that "practically perfected" is a reference to the ideal conditions mentioned in your first sentence.
"Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions"
> Who has the training data at this point?
Woven by Toyota has roof pods on rideshare (Lyft) cars collecting data: https://woven.toyota/en/our-latest/20220407/
They can't though. Mercedes-Benz can. To pretend that Tesla doesn't offer a better product because they don't want to is...
Disengaging 2 seconds before an accident leads to a perfect driving record
Technologically Tesla is far behind since one man's ego wants to trump physics and computing limitations and its failing. Still no Lidar.
I don't care about 90 youtube videos of long drives with no intervention. I care about a million out of a million (and maybe 10 on top). Either there is something I can trust with mine and my kids life with, or I am not interested with anything on top adaptive cruise control (since I don't spend my life in stop&go traffic).