Tesla: Introducing Autopilot and Dual Motor All Wheel Drive | Hacker News Reader

Tesla: Introducing Autopilot and Dual Motor All Wheel Drive

teslamotors.com

339 pointsbradly220 comments

Their "autopilot" is basically a "driver assist" system: lane-keeping plus adaptive cruise control. Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Volkswagen, Ford, etc. already have that. Tesla's is rumored to be the Daimler-Benz system.

That's good enough for about 99% of freeway driving. The last 1% is a problem, which is why none of the big car companies call it automatic driving. Most of them put in systems to insure the driver keeps paying attention, such as insisting on hands on the wheel in auto mode.

We're approaching the "deadly valley" - automatic driving that's almost good enough that the driver can stop paying attention. On the far side of the "deadly valley" is full-auto driving, including automatic handling of unusual and emergency situations, which is where Google and CMU/Cadillac are headed.

The minimum safe level is probably a system that can get the vehicle stopped autonomously when it's headed into a situation it can't handle. Beeping the driver to take over is not going to work in practice. As soon as hands-off driving is available, people will use it when tired, drunk, or texting.

Who downvoted you? This is a very serious issue. A partial autopilot for cars is worse than useless: it will create distracted drivers who can't react when the car encounters something it can't handle. Self-driving cars need to be either 100% or 0%.

There has been a ton more downvoting on HN in the last month and it's getting kind of absurd. It's like a group of redditors hit the downvote threshold and just started going at it.

edit: case in point

I've noticed that saying something negative about Apple or, now, Tesla, produces a quick downvote. On Slashdot, there's a striking phenomenon that saying something negative about Apple produces downvotes after about 15-30 minutes. Unclear whether this is a fanboy problem or a commercial "reputation management" firm in action.

Or magbe it's because Apple is routinely (and unfairly) maligned all across the tech sphere, especially in the comments, and Apple users on less polarized sites vote to compensate.

Huh? Apple and Tesla are both darlings of the tech sphere.

have you been to /r/technology ?

Or The Verge comments? Or Slashdot?

I can't speak for the verge, but I associate slashdot with rabid apple fanboyism.

Does /r/politics accurately reflect the political makeup of the US? No. Why would you assume /r/technology is representative?

If Apple was hated, you would see the same thing happen to them that happens to Microsoft. How often do you see big Microsoft news on the front page of HN or a Microsoft liveblog on Ars Technica? Almost never, where with Apple every word they say is splattered across the news for weeks.

The interesting parts of Microsoft get a lot of press. Consider how much coverage a hypothetical Halo 5 would get before release. The real issue is MS produces little interesting new tech. Granted, I actually like developing for C# far more than most systems, but embrace and extend just does not make for much interesting news.

Windows 8.1 release and Windows 10 announcements both got flagged off the front page multiple times before finally an article was successful enough to stick around for a few hours. Same thing with the Surface Pro 3 and Windows Phone 8.1. Meanwhile iOS 8 had an article for each new feature for days.

The admins explained it that the Microsoft news triggers the flamewar prevention they built, and it happens almost every time. Microsoft articles need admins to explicitly allow them on the front page, or they're gone in minutes.

It's mostly by the employees of the respective companies themselves. I once was working in a company (now a popular help desk company, famous within HN circles even) where the co/founder called up a few of his employees to downvote a comment that raised a serious but negative tone about his company. And all the employees were smart enough to use proxies to downvote the comment into oblivion. So, always think twice if it's worth losing your karma in a fixed game.

> So, always think twice if it's worth losing your karma in a fixed game.

Or I could refuse to accept the premise internet points are important and realize that downvotes aren't a reliable indication of post quality.

I'm certainly not going to be bullied by companies in to being quiet because they might take away some of my internet points.

I value my precious internet points and feel emotionally hurt with every down vote.

The year is 2014: anxious business owners obsess over Internet Points! How do I get more, they ask?

Please RT.

Isn't gaining karma also a fixed game?

That's absolutely ridiculous. I'm not saying that employees of a company won't downvote negative comments, but they're a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. As in, I'd put any amount of money on <1% of downvotes related to Apple or Tesla coming from employees of those companies.

Yeah, but if you can trigger a pile-on feedback loop, it could be enough.

> It's mostly by the employees of the respective companies themselves

Your anecdote is insufficient to support this claim. One example does not make this a common practice.

Is it just Apple, or do other companies not get much negativity anymore that gets commenters downvotes?

Agreed, and similar accidents are helped by autopilot even on aeroplanes. See below as an example. While the main cause is not autopilot, it is heavily relied on, and certainly worsened the situation when it was suddenly cut off in the middle of the night.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_rep...

"the crew lacked practical training in manually handling the aircraft both at high altitude and in the event of anomalies of speed indication; the two co-pilots' task sharing was weakened both by incomprehension of the situation at the time of autopilot disconnection, and by poor management of the "startle effect", leaving them in an emotionally charged situation;"

There are obviously high profile tragedies like that one, but it don't see that as evidence that autopilot technology doesn't on net make air travel much safer and more reliable.

Obviously people believe that autopilot represents a net benefit to air travel, but there are far fewer planes in the sky than cars on the road, a lot more open space that is not impregnable by most foreign objects, and a ton more money per plane allowing for more sophisticated sensors and systems. There is a dedicated traffic coordination system for aircraft and each pilot takes instruction as given by the ATC. Planes are also constantly monitored by highly-trained pilots and mechanics and operations are closely supervised by multiple regulatory bodies.

A great deal of the required operations for autodriving are offloaded or irrelevant in autopiloting. I know we were talking about an isolated case of the unexpected failure of an automated piloting system, but if we consider all of these additional complexities in typical road driving * millions more cars with barely-trained operators, it's reasonable to suppose that those types of problems would occur much more frequently with autodrivers than autopilots.

Personally I think the only things that mattered in that accident were poor training and poor UI.

First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall.

Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on.

One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.

I used to work on automatic driving. I ran Team Overbot in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. (We lost, but we didn't crash into anything.) So I'm painfully aware of the problems of automatic driving.

You need to be both looking at the road with cameras and profiling it with LIDAR. (Or terahertz radar, once that gets going.) It's not enough to just sense the car ahead. You need to be able to detect potholes, ice patches, junk on the highway, small animals, and similar problems. We could detect and avoid potholes back in 2005. Since we were doing off-road driving, that was a normal driving event.

The reason for a high-view LIDAR is that you want to see the pavement surface ahead from a reasonably useful angle and get a 3D profile of the road ahead. Google uses the Velodyne spinning-cone LIDAR scanner, which is a lot of LIDAR units built into one rotating mechanism. That's a research tool. There are other LIDAR devices more suited to mass production. Advanced Scientific Concepts has a nice eye-safe LIDAR which can operate in full sunlight. It costs about $100K, but that's because it's made by hand for DoD and space applications. The technology is all solid state, not inherently that expensive, and needs to be made into a volume product. (Somebody really needs to get on that. In 2004, I took a venture capitalist down to Santa Barbara to meet that crowd, but there was no mass market in sight back then. Now there is.)

You can only profile the road out to a limited distance, regardless of the sensor, because you're looking at the road from an oblique angle. Under good conditions, though, you can out-drive the range at which you can profile the road. That was Sebastian Thrun's contribution, and won the DARPA Grand Challenge. The idea is that if the LIDARs say the near road is good, and the cameras say the far road looks like the near road, you can assume the far road is like the near road and go fast. If the far road looks funny, you have to slow down and get a good look at the road profile with the LIDARs.

Automatic driving systems have to do all this. "Driver assistance" systems don't. Hence the "deadly valley".

That's just to deal with roads and static obstacles. Then comes dealing with traffic.

As someone with actual experience, do you think self-driving cars are in the near future (decade or two), or are the technorati deluding themselves?

I think they're not that far away. Google is talking about starting with small self-driving cars with a top speed of 25mph or so. (At that speed, you don't have to drive out of trouble; an emergency stop is sufficient.) I expect those will be common in retirement communities in 10 years or less.

Tesla is talking about automatically putting their car into a garage. That's a good application; it's slow, and you can have sensors all around the car to avoid hitting anything. A more general system that can put a car into a big parking garage or lot is quite possible. Cooperating parking garages might have some additional bar-code markers and maybe a data link for open space info.

The whole airport car-rental thing could be done automatically, using slow-speed automatic driving to bring the car up to a pickup point at the terminal, just as the renter gets there. That may be one way this gets deployed. (I proposed that around 2003, but after 9/11, the idea of autonomous vehicles in an airport seemed politically hopeless.)

Those are some ways this might be deployed. Everyone has obsessed on automatic freeway driving since the 1950s, but that may not be the killer app.

I just had a vision of a youtube video from the near future of some slow driving cars on automatic parking mode getting stuck in loops against each other. Somewhere in the background, a dog barks.

I remember reading an article years ago about automatic driving first coming to commercial shipping (i.e. 18 wheelers and other cargo vehicles) using a separated lane on highways, but that the political pushback (jobs lost) was making that a difficult sell.

"You can only profile the road out to a limited distance"

Though, with many self-driving cars perhaps the sensors on each could share info, thereby mapping a larger (if not, endless) area.

Oh man, the vulnerabilities of using likely untrustable networked sensors for safety critical operations boggle the mind. While the sensors theoretically could be made trustable, for some level of trust, I would be very wary of trusting at the level of safety critical application. Inadvertent vulnerabilities and attacks by malicious actors would be catastrophic.

My prediction: "crashdummy" will eclipse "heartbleed" and "shellshock"!

But why LIDAR though?

Humans proved that for current level driving two not particularly high-resolution cameras are sufficient. Seems like pushing in this direction will remove this expensive component?

While driving, humans assume that the road ahead is OK (at least without significant potholes, and in sunny hot weather no ice-patches). We would expect better of robots (i.e. if a human crashes because of an oil patch, (s)he's a bad driver; if a computer crashes, it's a million-dollar lawsuit).

Edit: a better solution would be to observe the behaviour of other drivers; if there is someone driving ahead of you, you can assume that the road between you and them is OK; if there's noone ahead of you, you need to drive slower and be more careful (that's how I drive at night). Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically.

> Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically.

I would be frightened to trust the data coming from a random car in front of me. Inferring road condition from another car behavior sounds reasonable, using data supplied from it, not so much.

The internet works that way, and you seem to be fine with that. :\ Is it the "saftey issue"? i.e the internet can't crash you into a wall, it can only send you to rotton or steal your credit card...

Wow, no. I don't trust the internet to give me real facts about elephants, let alone anything life-threatening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_T... If the equipment had some built-in tamper detection, and Google's sensors digitally signed data if they didn't detect tampering, then I might trust it enough to drive with.

You'll love this talk then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk

You shouldn't and wouldn't rely unfailingly on what other cars merely report. If the car in front of you insists its maintaining speed while your own readings indicate its slamming on its brakes, you should assume it's slamming on its brakes.

However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data. The human in your car won't know anything is wrong for at least a second. The human driver behind you would know about it before the human driver in front of you.

> However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data.

Until some asshat implements a button that sends this message for "lulz", though that would probably constitute a crime under existing law.

That will be the most common failure mode for computer-driven cars: how easy they are to bring to a stop. (And, yes, that's probably criminal behavior.)

A computer-driven car, though, wouldn't (shouldn't) just immediately slam on the brakes because of that signal. It would tighten seat belts and start slowing down, but it also would want to avoid getting rammed by the car behind it. It can make very accurate estimates about its stopping distance and use all of it.

So if a car, driving right ahead of me, leaking oil when cornering...

Humans, also posses a listening system, balance system, a highly advance pattern recognition system filled with auto complete from a huge database of pictures (which to this date hasn't been replicated - face recognition doesn't count it needs to recognize cars, signs, people, animals, pavement, trees, obstacles, etc.), not to mention knowledge of various possible scenarios, various models of how their body/car/traffic works, etc.

You get to use worse hardware, but you need several order magnitude better software.

I would guess that the processing power is all that matters. It's not difficult or particularly dangerous to drive without being able to hear. I would guess that people driving remote controlled cars with 360-degree views but no other cues would perform very nearly as well as real drivers.

I think the key point is that it is very difficult for software to parse view-from-windshield images like this: http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska...

The human eye can instantly recognize the available driving paths, the motorcyclist ahead, and project where people will walk. Software would have to parse out where the open roads are, how far that motorcyclist is and whether he can clear the intersection before the car reaches it, and what that sign on the right-hand side is—using the same information, but it has to parse it first whereas we do that almost instantly. It's a totally different game.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the other sensors the parent post mentioned weren't actually important with regards to driving, just our ability to parse the visual data into a meaningful model of the world around us.

I think hearing is also useful, from time to time. It's not AS critical as sight, but if nothing it allows drivers to share their emotional state in a very primitive way and to gauge how their engine is performing.

> a highly advance pattern recognition system filled with auto complete from a huge database of pictures (which to this date hasn't been replicated - face recognition doesn't count it needs to recognize cars, signs, people, animals, pavement, trees, obstacles, etc.)

I expect that, after the first wave of clumsy LIDARing self-driving cars, all the car companies (Google especially) will be collecting exactly training data from the cars' sensors to build exactly this kind of model. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was what the Google car was really about, in the same way Google Voice is really about collecting speech training data.

The best part of this kind of training data is that it all comes pre-annotated with appropriate reinforcements: even if the image-recognition sensors aren't hooked up to anything, they're coupled to the input stream from the other car sensors and the driver's actions. So you would get training data like

- "saw [image of stopsign], other heuristically-programmed system decided car should stop, driver confirmed stop."

- "saw [image of kitten standing in the road], other heuristically-programmed system decided car should continue, driver overrode and stopped car."

Etc. Aggregating all these reports from many self-driving cars, you could build an excellent image-to-appropriate-reaction classifier.

Yes, but with voice data it's ok if the system gets it wrong occasionally. Worst-case scenario is the user gets annoyed and tries again (or gives up and does something else).

In a driving situation, the worst-case scenario is everybody dies.

Same worst-case scenario when humans drive daily, but wrong less often.

Not to mention a hard-wired muscle-memory response system for crisis situations.

"Seeing" and "Perceiving" are likely very different. Yes, we only have binocular visual input, but the excess in processing in the brain takes perception to another level. However, machines have trouble with the perception part and so have to make up for it by seeing in excess.

That's just my theory on it.

Humans fail, it's called "crashing".

Maybe we should add LIDAR to humans too.

FYI human eyesight is near 24MP equivalent. Its actually pretty high res.

Well, it's already in consumer-level (ok, "prosumer") cameras. Also we know that "fps" is of an eye is around 60 Hz - since it's the minimum that monitors looks OK.

Human eyes are actually equivalent to very high end video cameras, and the image process that you can do in your squishy grey 10 watt processor is still way better than anything we can do with computers. You need your navigation system to be able to directly sense in 3 dimensions for it to be competitive.

Not really: we have hi dpi (and in focus) resolution only in the narrow field of view in the middle, everything else is not that good. We compensate for this by having ability to quickly move eyes and refocus.

When you can fit an exaflop electronic computer into a car, then maybe two cameras would be sufficient. Right now, we have to make do with less, and better sensors can make up the difference.

There is no exaflop computer in the human though - we just don't have enough energy to power it inside us.

That's a rough estimate of how much computing power is in the human brain. It's extremely efficient energy-wise, but massively parallel and weirdly put together so not entirely comparable to an electronic computer. Still, the computing resources available to process the images from the human eye are enormous.

> But why LIDAR though?

The simple answer is that we don't know how to do it with stereo vision alone yet. Getting range reliably is hard, and your brain uses lots of tricks to do it.

The second answer is that we need better-than-human performance if this is to take off. So using human-type sensing might not be good enough anyway.

Lots of researchers are pushing on vision-based driving, though.

Did you all have to do work with navigating through snow and heavy rain? I was under the impression that snow is a big challenge and heavy rain isn't much better. Does that still hold true today?

It is one thing to anticipate threats, but when the road is under snow how do computers make that intuitive leap people can?

When the road's full of cars spamming LIDAR, under a network of drones doing the same... interference and noise surely become a real problem?

My experience says probably not. LIDARs are very directional at any given instant, and you need to filter out outliers anyways thanks to things shimmering in the sun.

The duty cycle on LIDARs is very low. If you're ranging to 200 meters, the receiver is only taking data for 1.2us. At 60 Hz scanning, the receiver is active for 72us/sec, or 0.0072% of the time. So in the presence of 100 other transmitters (worst case), you'll get a conflict 0.72% of the time. If the transmit time is randomized slightly (which I don't think Velodyne does, but a production device must), you won't get the same bogus reading twice in a row. Over three readings, if you throw out outliers, this problem should go away. <p> If the LIDAR data has too many outliers, it's necessary to slow down and only use data from short ranges. At some short range, the LIDAR will "burn through" any jamming from a more distant range, per the radar equation. I agree that on production vehicles, anti-jam software, as described above, will be necessary.

That's absolutely not true. What if you are drowsy or distracted and the autopilot brakes for you an avoids an accident?

Keep in mind every car out there is currently built with a feature where you can accelerate to a lethal speed, then press a small button, and the car continues to travel at that lethal speed until the car runs out of gas, hits a brick wall, or the driver consciously disengages it. We call it cruise control.

If all we are doing is adding automatic braking and lane following to cruise control, I don't see how it can be anything other than better.

> I don't see how it can be anything other than better.

Because in the real world, people won't exercise exactly the same level of situational awareness, such that the autopilot only adds a safety mechanism. In the real world, it will replace a certain amount of driver attention. And the question is, is it always superior to human attention?

It's probably net superior, but I bet it will cause a couple of high profile accidents that a careful human could have avoided, and then people (or the government) will be scared of it.

After reading about the abysmal coding standards of Toyota in the court case regarding the deaths of those people in the unintended accelreration cases I am leery. Having worked with embedded systems before, I know how hard they are to get right. I just wish that all these companies would realize that it's better (for the greater good) to opensource this instead of try to get it right all on their own. Look at how much better the web has come since there have been a few major open source web browser projects.

> And the question is, is it always superior to human attention?

The more valuable question is this:

Does it perform better than humans in the most frequently occurring situations that lead to incidents, are those situations a large enough fraction of all incidents such that the number of overall incidents drop significantly, and will that drop be greater than the increase in frequency of less predictable situations.

If the above turns out to be the case, then there will be fewer accidents despite less aware drivers.

> We're approaching the "deadly valley" - automatic driving that's almost good enough that the driver can stop paying attention.

This sounds to me like the "technology right now is crossing a distinct line into doom" fallacy. It seems like the same could have been said when automobiles started being operated by average folks rather than professional chauffeurs, when the synchromesh was invented, automatic transmissions, antilock brakes, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, and so on.

We've seen this happen with airplanes. Where the autopilots result in the human pilots no longer being fully aware of their environment and context in that environment. So, when the autopilot alarms, the human pilot doesn't have the context of the problem and often makes a naive mistake as a result (a naive mistake that has fatal consequences).

There was a good article discussing this recently on here, a quick search should find it for more details.

So, I agree with the parent that semi-auto pilot like features are probably quite risky when intervention is required. At least current generations, but I think we can also make better designs that address these concerns.

> We've seen this happen with airplanes.

We've seen airplane crashes because of pilots' misunderstanding of or ignoring autopilot features. But have we seen air travel become more dangerous on net because of autopilot features? I highly doubt it.

As a driver of a car with these systems (Audi, having a 'Lane assist' and 'ACC'): The implementation is absolutely crushingly useless, every day.

Lane assist kinda, sorta works (I can choose if the car will actively try to stay in the lane and/or if it's going to alarm me by vibrating the steering wheel when I cross over into another lane). It's limited to the Autobahn though and really more often then not just doesn't recognizes the lanes. IF it does, it has the kind of protection you describe. Unfortunately that makes it even less useful. On a really straight road I cannot turn it on, because it's going to beep at me after 1-2 seconds. You need to drive (I exaggerate, but the idea's true) like in a Hollywood movie from the 60s (or the Simpsons intro), turning the wheel left and right for no reason.

(The ACC in this car is crap as well, but .. let's leave it with lane assist for now)

I am extremely skeptical that this system can work, in general, any time soon. Even in a Tesla.

As a Brit that lives in a village with minimal public transport, the ONLY reason I want (fully automatic) hands-off driving is for when I'm drunk.

The interesting thing is that, based on my experience with the cruise control/driver assist on the 5 Series, it's far better at responding quickly to changing road situations, like when somebody in front of you just jumps hard on the breaks. The car will take it all the way down to a stop in just a few seconds - quite often before the driver would have even realized something was happening, and way before they could have reacted to prevent an accident.

I'm guessing once the technology is widespread, we'll see almost total elimination of rear-end accidents on the freeway - the technology really is quite amazing.

Better than what? The average human driver?

That seems to be the logical comparison.

Yeah but can the computer be situationally aware to see the kid in the 2003 3 series bmw ahead of him on his cell phone and preemptively switch lanes when his head bobs down to send another text to the furthest lane away from him before he ever has a chance to pose a risk to you in the first place?

We can increase the efficiency of reactionary driving as much as we want with computers, but for me, you just can't beat defensive driving.

Just curious, How well do these systems handle potential rear threats as well? How would it handle tailgaters? Some tailgaters are more aggressive than others. Some just need a friendly reminder that you do not appreciate the tailgating by a nice easy slow down, or a slight tapping of the breaks. Others -- such as the guy in F250 super duty with 30 inch tires and a lift kit, you might just want to go ahead and move over when you see them coming.

But the gauge for success shouldn't be whether it handles every situation better than humans, it should be whether the use of these tools leads to a lower rate of accidents/injuries/deaths. Just pointing out that there might specific situations where humans would do better, while downplaying all the situations where an automated system would do better, isn't all that useful. I mean, it works on an emotional level, but we should try to be objective by looking at the numbers.

Saying everyone should just drive defensively isn't a solution. The evidence for that is the fact that that's what we currently try to tell everyone to do, and it's still a problem that people drive poorly.

Right.

Saying everyone should just drive defensively is most definitely not a solution.

I'm not really sure what you're implying...

We need better enforcement? We try to do that by writing laws and issuing tickets. And, again, poor driving is still a problem.

How about we FORCE people to drive defensively? That sure sounds like what automated driving is trying to do.

For the average driver who's on their own cellphone instead of doing "defensive driving", the system will do better than them. Professional drivers will still drive manually. Most people aren't professional drivers. (A reverse computer-to-car-analogy: most people don't know enough to know what programs are safe to run. Better something like SmartScreen/GateKeeper for most people. Professional computer users can "drive manually." But don't force everyone to do it, just because you want the option. They'll suck at it.)

> Yeah but can the computer be situationally aware to see the kid in the 2003 3 series bmw ahead of him on his cell phone and preemptively switch lanes when his head bobs down to send another text to the furthest lane away from him before he ever has a chance to pose a risk to you in the first place?

Probably about as much as the average driver. Hell, a lot of drivers on the road don't even notice a turn signal and get pissed that they're stuck behind a turning car in the lane.

Around here, I'd say the average driver probably thinks that an active turn signal is just faulty wiring.

I can seem to reply to derefr, but to echo his comment, this will be a safety measure in the same way that Apple's TouchID is a security measure.

We know that a fingerprint is a bad password.It can't be changed, you leave copies everywhere, authentication is based on an approximation, etc. Strong, frequently changed passwords would be much better. But is it significantly better than the security on most people's phones: a 4 digit passcode, or none at all.

If it can effectively respond to the dangerous moves of the kid on his phone, does it need to be as forward-looking and defensive as that?

Tradeoffs are different between computers and humans. Defensive driving is about trying to stay within an envelope where you can safely respond to whatever happens. A computer system will have a different envelope, so it won't need to do the same stuff.

To make a terrible analogy, a human pilot flying by eye needs to eventually make a decision to land at an alternate airport when his primary is fogged in. Is a computer smart enough to make that judgment call? Well, if the computer is equipped with a zero-zero landing system and can safely land in the fog, who cares?

Your question about rear threats is intriguing. The proper response is a lot less clear there, I think. Do you speed up? Slow down? Change lanes? Squirt them with washer fluid? Drop some caltrops from your rear bumper?

I'll be sure to set (hack, reprogram?) my future self-driving car to dispense liberal spraying of washer fluid after finally weaving around and getting in front of the asshat going 54mph in the left most lane on 101.

For the foreseeable future, there will always be scenarios in which a human could perform better than an automated system. What I'm talking about here though, is the 6,000-7,000 accidents/year that could have been prevented by an automated system that is never distracted, and has <10 millisecond response timing.

What I worry, is that these systems will (of course) have bugs, and they are mechanical systems, so they will also physically fail - and, they will cause some deaths (cars are dangerous - 36,000 fatalities/year) - - but if for every one of those bug/physical failure deaths, you have 10 where the automated-system avoided an accident - that's a pretty big net savings in human lives.

And, software/hardware systems are only going to get better - that's certainly not the case for human drivers. Indeed, with cell phones, regardless of whether they are hands-free, there is research to show we are becoming less capable drivers than we were 30 years ago.

Ideal human reaction time is around 200 milliseconds[1]. At 60mph that's more than 1 car length.

How many milliseconds does it take the 5 Series to notice what's going on and start applying the brakes?

[1] If you are a) early 20's, b) male, c) responding to a audio cue, and d) doing exactly one thing on the cue (as opposed to making even a very simple decision based on the cue), you can get down to 150ms.

> Ideal human reaction time is around 200 milliseconds.

Sure, if they're not looking down at the radio or at the accident on the other side of the freeway.

And then there's the time to actually make your movements. Getting your foot onto the brake pedal and pushing on it takes appreciable time, both for the foot to make the movement and for the nerve impulses to get there to make it move.

I recall from looking into this stuff a bit that a good reaction time from "oh shit" to "brakes are applied" is around 750ms. Accounting for people who aren't fully on top of their game (distracted, tired, injured, old, etc.), road designers assume more like 1.5-2s delay for applying brakes. And even that will be optimistic in some cases, as many car crashes demonstrate.

There's that, but also the realization that you need to brake "as hard as possible"-- we're not trained to do that often so there's additional delay before that happens.

Hence why he said "ideal".

And my point is that talking about the ideal human response time is absurd in the context of driving.

Why? It provides an lower boundary on the human response time. It's significant because the ideal response already represents _at least a whole car length_ of travel distance. We don't even need to delve into what a realistic response time is: it's already so bad that we should be looking at alternatives like our machine-overlord-self-driving-cars.

On the freeway, the time it takes to react to seeing the next car's brake lights isn't the main problem. The bigger problem is how long it takes to judge that car's deceleration.

Are they just tapping the brakes because the road is bending---some people always do---or are they slamming on the brakes because there's a traffic incident that you can't yet see? You're 200-millisecond reaction needs to be completely different in these two cases, but you just can't immediately tell the difference.

Both for people and for automatic cars, judging deceleration is a harder problem than just reacting to a red light going on, but the sensors on automatic cars should give them a big advantage.

You will never be as fast as software, hardware and sensors.

This was the point I was trying to say, but I think I didn't communicate it well.

I would like to know just how fast these cars can react. I'm betting they could be actually slowing the car before a human is even aware something is wrong, but I would like to have some numbers to cite.

Not sure about the Model S, but Google's Prius and Lexus autonomous vehicles use a radar sensor on the front of the vehicle that can see past a semi tractor trailer in front of it, providing sensor input a human would never have.

Also - keep in mind that this type of Driver Assist is (in the scheme of things) a very straightforward problem compared to others. It's pretty easy to calculate what type of braking is required to avoid running into something in front of you based on the relative velocities.

The protection is useful because for a highway rear-end accident to occur, a chain of at least two events has to occur. The car ahead of you has to significantly decelerate, and in the same window of time, the rear-ending driver has to be distracted for longer than the time it takes to close the gap and stop. Most of the time both of those events don't occur at the same time, but just look at traffic accident reports to see that in areas with heavy traffic - the probability that both events occur over the population of cars in traffic is 100%+ (because it happens multiple times every day).

Adding some sort of auto brake feature adds another layer of safety (presuming that the ratio of 'saves' to added risk is very high with this tech.)

With autobrake and safe following distance, even approaching 25% of cars using the systems would drastically reduce the amount of multi-car pileups.

I think a recent one in the news was 20+ cars. If just one of those cars had autobrake and safe following distance this could have been halved or quartered and wouldn't have blocked a highway for a few hours.

Ideal humans do not cause accidents, normal humans do and normal human reaction time while driving is not around 200 milliseconds.

Among the auto manufacturers offerings, some 'lane assist' systems can only handle the most simple of turns (taking you out of the lane, _very scary_). These systems are too simple IMHO with single cameras and or no mix of additional systems.

Tesla seems to want a system that is more complex. Things like "have the car come meet you from where it was parked", lane _crossing_ (let alone lane keep assist), and eventually on-off ramp driving. All with live updates rather than going into the dealer.

What makes this offering (potentially) different is the ambitious intended use of the system, something which would make even a Daimler-Benz lawyer cringe.

>We're approaching the "deadly valley" - automatic driving that's almost good enough that the driver can stop paying attention.

Infiniti has a commercial out now that I see frequently while streaming TV that shows someone who should not be on the road but is enabled by the driver assist features.

Maybe one mandatory feature of driver assist should be that if the car intervenes more than 2 times in 10 minutes its next step should be to find a safe place to pull over and stop.

Man oh man I hate that commercial. Every time I see it my blood boils.

This. Why shouldn't driver assist be able to tell when the actual driver is drunk/tired/dangerously incompetent and pull over. It could even call their emergency contact or a taxi and disable the car.

Because no one would buy it. Who wants an inanimate object deciding that they are to tired to drive with no discussion or recourse?

And can you imagine the liability implications? "My spouse had an asthma attack/allergic reaction/severe cut in the of middle of the night and my car stopped me from driving them to the hospital. They died before the ambulance reached the house."

...and the reverse liability implications: "My spouse had an asthma attack and their car didn't pull over safely, so it is the [car manufacturer]'s fault that they crashed into a tree and died."

True enough. If you promise buyers that your car will safely stop if the driver is incapable of driving, you better get it right.

Not being a drink or erratic driver, I was thinking more of driving when I'm tired. It is possible to be a little too tired to drive safely without realising it, but I imagine the extra small adjustments you make when this happens - because you drift and correct - would be recognisable by the car.

It would be a huge pain if you are on a long drive and your car decides you need a nap! But it would save lives, possibly mine. Personal transport is a convenience. Personal safety is paramount.

Is this the commercial you're talking about?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id8CQ-vsojQ

Basically that one, but I feel like there was more of an intro to it. I will have to pay attention next time it comes on to be sure.

Are the current generation systems in a state where they can recognise and deal with some high percentage of that 1% by bringing the car to a safe stop? I realise of course that stopping can in itself be dangerous in certain situations, but it's probably going to be safer on average than just barrelling on regardless of what's coming.

I can imagine that not being default behaviour because it doesn't match driving norms, but perhaps it would be better?

I don't think the term is misleading at all. Autopilot on aircraft does not remove the need for a pilot, it just maintains course and speed.

"Course and speed" are necessary, even vital, but not sufficient.

Two airline pilots fell asleep while cruising over Hawaii last February, flying past their destination toward open ocean for 18 minutes before waking up and returning for a safe landing, federal accident investigators revealed Tuesday.

Ref: http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=5042619

A packed passenger jet heading to the UK was left flying on autopilot when both pilots fell asleep at the controls, it emerged last night.

Ref: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2432847/Both-pilots-...

How come in those situations doesn't the crew notice something's not right and tries to communicate with the pilots?

> The minimum safe level is probably a system that can get the vehicle stopped autonomously when it's headed into a situation it can't handle. Beeping the driver to take over is not going to work in practice.

I think the MVP for an automatic driving system—presuming we don't just get the AI version out soon enough—would be your suggestion (stopping the car when it can't handle a situation), plus passing control of the vehicle to the moral equivalent of OnStar. There'd be call-centres full of people remotely driving drunk/sleeping people's cars for them using the vehicle's instrumentation+the driver's pre-programmed route. Like a taxi service where your own car is the taxi.

I'm recalling some discussions with scientists in remote robotic surgery a few years back where I was told that for some truly high precision operations, the latencies become unmanageable past a point. I'd be curious to know if the state of the art has shifted at all, or if we really are starting to hit the limits of systems that require a certain bar of reaction time and precision.

Following from that, I wonder what bar Driving has, and as such, what distribution of "Controllers" we'd need to be safely within that, and if that would allow it to be viable.

Client side prediction would help a lot. Online racing games seem to easily handle 300ms latencies.

I fully realize that the difference between virtual racing games and real live humans in hunks of metal is massive. I'm just saying that work on dealing with latency in situations which are more predictable and have larger margins for error than high precision operations have been worked on ever since QuakeWorld.

Indeed, I would say that the work done getting e.g. OnLive to work would be extremely relevant to people driving remotely: if you can be competitive in an arbitrary FPS game streamed to you across the continent—in a direct adversarial contest of reaction time against people playing locally on their own hardware—then I'm pretty certain you can drive a car using streamed data. Especially since, unlike with games, drivers won't demand "excellent 1080p graphics and HD sound"; just something usable to get around. The car-side computer can do a lot of pre-processing of its own outputs to get the streamed data rate down to something useful.

The real problem, I think, would be making sure the (presumably cellular) connection to the car doesn't drop or suffer from latency spikes. If the car companies teamed up with the cell companies, there'd probably be big pushes to put 4G or WiMax microcells on every power-pole running down streets and highways, and even more in cities, to ensure cars remain online.

I find it so odd that automated driving and auto-safety features (adaptive cruise, lane assist, etc.) are being so aggressively developed.

These features have never once appealed to me and I can't imagine using them even if I had them. I find it very hard to square the "American Love of Driving" and the cultural connotations that driving has in the US with systems that relegate the driver to a passenger ...

Maybe for stop and go rush hour driving ... but beyond that, I don't see the appeal.

Not that I disagree with you about the American love of driving, but that notion is part truth and partially a creation of automotive marketing. Frankly, many cars aren't that enjoyable to drive, and driving an enjoyable car in traffic is usually not very enjoyable either.

Americans love cars, but not necessarily driving them.

I think this pretty well sums up why most people hate it: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2587

Lower insurance rates. And I don't care how much you love driving, no one loves to accidentally rear-end someone that just slammed on their brakes while you were distracted by checking adjacent lane prior to moving over to get to an exit. And automation can help both situations (when putting on the lane change signal, I want some type of alarm if a car is entering my blind spot, for example).

Trucking industry.

The pay isn't always great, humans require sleep, and freight needs to be delivered. I am still amazed trains are piloted but they are and that is far simpler to automate than trucks.

Once trucking becomes automated you will have trucks delivering at all times to warehouses, scheduling around traffic patters. Whereas humans are not necessarily best at driving at night, vision and physiological reasons, computers could drive at hours when traffic is always the lightest.

>>>Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Volkswagen, Ford, etc. already have that.

So? None of these manufacturers have a carbon-friendly drive train. The fact that Tesla added a software feature "late in the game" is no 'bonus' to the already-contenders. Actually, lets see Mercedes' obstacle-avoidance compete with the SpaceX/Tesla crowd. I'm willing to suffer the down-votes until such a point is reached that we all, conscientiously, acknowledge the docking maneuvers allowed by a SpaceX/Tesla co-operation. In the meantime I'd like to point out to you: software features as an "also-ran" is not really a dilemma.

It is funny that on HN the discussion is mainly focused on driver assist and its merits/drawbacks, while the real innovation is being ignored: this thing has two engines, increased range (on all but top of the line versions where range is decreased by only 10 miles), and is nearly a 10 second car, with 0-60 time in just over 3 seconds. Oh and roller coaster-like lateral acceleration of 1 g. Also note that the range of the dual motor setup is the result of software optimization of which engine to run at what power level at what point. This is the really exciting new development here.

Thanks for saying this. I was scratching my head as to why the top comments focused on the wrong thing. Distributed coordinated engines is in my opinion hugely exciting

Absolutely. Some more stats I found about the maxed out P85D: 691 horse power, 0-60 in 3.2 seconds, quarter mile in 11.8 seconds. The curb weight on this thing is 4,936 lb which is quite heavy for a car this fast.

Also very cool: apparently, the reason for adding a second engine increasing range is because now there is more capacity to regenerate/recapture energy when slowing down.

Personally, this is the first Tesla car I actually want.

Edit: Jalopnik review http://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-s-p85d-this-is-it-and-i-went...

The base model at 4,600 is also very heavy for a car in the class, so buyers likely aren't going to mind 300 more lbs for AWD. :-)

The's some pretty big maintenance drawbacks to AWD though. If you blow out a tire, you have to replace all four.

If that's the only downside, sign me up! I live in the northeast where having AWD is a basic necessity unless you like not getting out of the house most of the winter. Also, most people don't blow out tires that frequently to really worry about this. In fact, if you get new tires, you can often get pretty cheap warranty/insurance against this.

I've owned two Subarus, and this has never been recommended to me, even from the dealer.

I'm surprised that hasn't been recommended. It's hard on the AWD system, and Subaru recommends it: https://www.subaru.com/owners/resource-center/vehicle-care-t...

Partially valid: having different diameter tires can lead to lash or noise in the drivetrain, but that extra noise/stress depends on the diameter difference. You're not going to HAVE to buy all new tires if you have a blowout and need a new one. Your drivetrain won't explode if you put on a new tire with three used ones. Decent tire shops are able to shave tires to match the rest of the set if there's a big difference.

Also, I don't see anything physically connecting the front and rear tires - this is where much of the drivetrain wear comes from on AWD/4WD vehicles.

1) that's not something most AWD car owners worry about - it's a form of maintenance diligence like tire rotations and checking their oil every fuel stop that few drivers bother with, without serious consequence.

2) That clearly only applies when all the wheeels are connected through limited slip differentials. When the front and rear axles are run by independent electric motors with electronic power/brake distribution and regenerative braking feedback systems? you may need to revisit your mechanical assumptions.

There is no innovation in having two motors in a car, unless your restricting the statement to a purely electric car. Many cars produced by others do the more difficult, combine and electric and petrol motor. There may even be examples of dual electric motor vehicles.

The performance should be expected since they engineered for that. Electric motors have their torque immediately and it becomes a balance of suspension and tires in effectively using it.

What I am disappointed in that there is only ten more miles. Frankly why is a 100k car than only gets a little over two hundred miles lauded so much? If anything its a demonstration that the technology IS NOT THERE.

I was really hoping D was double range. When a 100k electric gets 500 a charge call me, then I will be impressed. Tesla better hurry, many of the big manufactures plan to field 200 mile range affordable electrics no later than 2017

I'm with on you on that Tesla is still too expensive for what you get range-wise. However, they are far and ahead of everyone else. By 2017, when the first Fords, Chevys, and Toyotas with 200 mile range will be rolling out (probably with lots of issues), Tesla will have years of expertise and technology innovation on them. They are almost a decade early on all of this stuff.

Now, as far as having two motors, no it's not brand new. There are even prototypes/one-offs that have a motor on each wheel. The innovation is that you now have a car with two electric engines, one up front, one in the back, that can be controlled by software, really tuned for the driving conditions and based on sensor inputs, and updated remotely for better range, better performance, etc. That, and actual performance of a Ferrari for just over $100k.

It gets lauded because the range is enough. It's not great, but it's enough that you can mostly treat it like a car, rather than a glorified golf cart. 265 miles is enough to treat it as gas^H^H^Hcharge and go, rather than needing elaborate planning for everyday activities.

You're completely right that the range and price demonstrates the limits of current technology. But the Model S is great because it makes different tradeoffs from usual, and tradeoffs that make it a great car if you have the money. Other attempts at electric cars have tried to keep the price down, and that means sacrificing range to a huge degree. Tesla responded to this tradeoff by making an expensive car with a good range that has comparable features to other cars in that expensive price range, rather than making a cheap car with crappy range the way others have done.

And yes, dual motor is no real innovation. It's cool, and 3.2s 0-60 is fantastic, but all it really took was throwing extra money into the machine.

As for 200 mile affordable electric cars in 2017, we'll see. The battery is the limiting factor right now. The Model S battery pack by itself costs more than an entire Nissan Leaf, and you can't reduce the energy needed for that range that much beyond what the Model S needs. Battery technology, whether chemistry or manufacturing or both, needs to get substantially cheaper for that to happen. I assume that's what everybody's betting on happening.

You can get the 85kWh Model S for $80k with an EPA rated range of 265 miles. Let's see what the other companies are offering:

BMW i3: $41k @ 81 mile range Nissan Leaf: $30k @ 75 mile range Honda Fit: $36k @ 82 mile range

It has 3 times more range than any of these cars and sells for 2-3x as much but is a few classes above when it comes to safety, comfort, performance, options, etc... The Model S deserves every bit of praise it gets.

Why does it matter if your ev gets a 250 vs 500 range? The only time this is relevant is for long road trips, and in that case you have superchargers. For most people the distinction is irrelevant.

The 200 mile range or so seems to be the sweet spot where you can plug the car in every night and never think about it; on any given day you are not going to drive 200 miles other than the rare days you have preplanned road trips. The key point to remember is the car is recharged every night.

On the contrary, I think the reality of tens of thousands of people owning teslas and never complaining about the range (in terms of practical effects) is evidence that the technology is there.

It is evidence they are willing to make trade-offs.

What additional evidence is needed for someone to be convinced that technology is "there yet" beyond the adoption of electric cars by consumers because they are simply better products, as is the case with the model S? Clearly the technology is there, it's just only available (like most new things) in luxury class cars. If the argument is that somehow Model S owners are willingly sacrificing features (since the technology isn't 'there yet') in the name of some higher good like helping the environment, that's ridiculous, my wife has one and it's superior to a gas car for a long list of reasons. (With the minor exception that if we decide to take a long road trip, we need to plan ahead for a few minutes to ensure we can hit a supercharger.)

From http://www.teslamotors.com/models/design

>Model S comes standard with a forward looking camera, radar, and 360-degree ultrasonic sensors that actively monitor the surrounding roadway. Progressive software updates over time will enable sophisticated convenience and safety features that use these sensors to respond to real world conditions. These features will ultimately give Model S Autopilot capability on the highway from on-ramp to off-ramp.

That's a pretty nice TODO to leave in the code :)

At this stage all you need to install is the machine learning algorithm so it can watch and learn what real drivers do when faced with the conditions it's sensing.

Absolutely brilliant!

Machine learning can't do that and won't be able to for a long time even in principle, to say nothing of doing it in real-time on a car. Autonomous driving contains very little machine learning for all the sensing and high-level parts.

It may contain some low-level classifiers for things like people and possibly other cars, but this is not strictly required and car manufacturers generally try to avoid it, because it is difficult to reason about. Traffic sign classification is another candidate, but again, at least the Google car probably pulls this from their precomputed map.

Finally, none of these classifiers are trained online, in the car, but always offline, likely on carefully selected data on some GPUs for many days or weeks.

Fire-and-forget machine learning may be a bit overexuberant, but one should not discount the value of these data. On one hand, there is sensory data about the real road environments these Teslas are traversing. On the other hand, we have human driving decisions. Together, one has–at at a minimum–a rich test environment. At a stretch, it could be analogous to the corpus on which Google developed its translation capabilities.

The nightly reporting-home of Tesla's fleet shows how interconnectedness is introducing network effects into unexpected places. Sort of like how map quality is now driven–in part–by the user base.

By this time next year when they have 40,000+ vehicles all logging conditions and driver decisions, in car processing and OTA updates to their testing algorithms may be the better option. Google's fleet come back to base every day, Tesla have to think very differently in their approach and bandwidth could be their biggest issue.

Actually, machine learning can do that. Back in 1995, a team at Carnegie Mellon used a neural network in a car:

"ALVINN is a forward-looking, vision based driving system that uses a neural network to learn the mapping between road images and appropriate vehicle turn radius. By watching a person drive for about 5 minutes, it can learn the relevant features required for driving[3]. It has successfully driven our testbed vehicles on unlined paved paths, jeep trails, lined city streets and interstate highways."

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/tjochem/www/nhaa/navlab5_de...

Wouldn't recaptcha video would help google?

The problem obviously is ... Privacy and more importantly - upload speeds to google servers. US internet infrastructure wouldn't cope with thousands of cars uploading crisp HD videos. Probably google infrastructure wouldnt cope either.

Meh, there's no way their hardware is equivalent to what Google or the like put on their self driving cars. So I don't think any algorithm can realistically learn everything based on highly limited information. I feel like it's much more likely to enable some safety functionality than anything approaching real autonomy.

Their hardware is almost identical to Google's, except for the cloud point laser scanner on top of the vehicle.

For the Google car, LIDAR is the absolute primary source of accurate data. It's like saying that a car without an engine has almost identical hardware as it has everything else.

Can you describe what can't be detected without a LIDAR scanner and without the Tesla's onboard ultrasound sensors?

@toomuchtodo: For the Google vehicles, LIDAR is the primary sensor. They're not identical in the slightest.

@agildehaus

Elon and Tesla believe that their array of ultrasound sensors, GPS, and front facing camera will be sufficient without the addition of an expensive LIDAR roof mounted scanner. Google has under 100 self-driving vehicles in the field collecting data; Tesla is now making 2500 vehicles/week that will be collecting data.

My comment stands. The sensor networks are the same except for the Velodyne LIDAR device. Google has Street View data, Tesla will have a substantial fleet of vehicles collecting data towards improving their autopilot system.

Vast amount of mapping data do you no good if you have to test your scenarios in simulated environments (as Google requested they be allowed to do to the California DMV).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3WtvzmKCQQ

I don't think 'our system has been trained to respond in the same way as the average driver' is much of a selling point. You want your auto drive to do the right thing, not the average thing.

most drivers do the right thing most of the time. Accidents are usually caused by the occasional mistake from humans being unreliable.

Reliably driving like the average driver is perfectly acceptable.

(On a side note, nothing is preventing the machine learning from learning when a driver's response results in accident, a system can learn from negative experiences as well)

Here's a quick demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0

It seems that Tesla's autopilot is pretty similar to other highway autopilots from manufacturers like Mercedes Benz. The new feature seems to be automatic reading of speed signs.

> The new feature seems to be automatic reading of speed signs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_sign_recognition

Tesla might have the first US-compatible system, although since it's not out yet it's hard to say if they made it first or not.

What happens when these systems fail to detect or otherwise read an obstructed speed limit sign?

The same thing that happens if its obstructed from a human?

Well, my GPS navigation app seems to know the speed limit most of the time.

Remember, even if the system isn't perfect, it can still outperform a human.

BMW has already released this in the United States.

And lane changing.

Impressive...I wonder how effective these "autopilot" features are in snow and ice road conditions? Does the autopilot and traction control work together?

California doesn't have to worry about these things but a lot of northern markets (Canada/Norway) do.

Plenty of snow in California :)

More impressive than the "autopilot" is the D option, at least to me. The P85D has 691 hp and will do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. If that 0-60 holds true it should the quickest accelerating production 4-door sedan, besting the E63 AMG S (3.4 sec). And 691 hp makes in nearly the most powerful.

The "autopilot" is similar to what Mercedes and BMW have had for a while (software updates is a nice capability), but the performance is best in class.

For comparison, the Ferrari FF has something like 670 bhp.

Ooh, I like http://www.teslamotors.com/en_AU/:

“Wir präsentieren Autopilot und Dual Motor Allradantrieb”

Did they confuse Austria (de_AT) with Australia (en_AU)?

It sure looks like it.

There are no kangaroos in Austria , that's how I remember the difference ;)

That will confuse those Australians this morning.

I don't understand why they don't solve the problem of sitting in traffic (relatively safe) in a hands-free way first. Would help so many people be more productive, etc..

It's already solved for highway driving. There have been radar assisted cruise control since 1997 and consumer cars that can handle stop and go traffic automatically since 2006. I don't think anyone who recommend or take liability for taking your hands off the wheel, however.

I am surprised that they did not stream the announcement or immediately put it up for viewing. I think they have the opportunity to turn their announcements into as much of an event as Apple does.

Certainly the amount of hype they got from Elon's tweet shows that people are paying attention, I bet there are people clamoring for Tesla news in the same way people are clamoring for Apple news.

Your comment is from 9 hours ago, their video is from 8 hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk

Thanks for the link. I checked the front page of their website, their blog and the Vimeo channel their new car walkthroughs and the model X announcement were on, I thought I checked the youtube page.

My point is more general, they are missing an opportunity to turn these product announcements into as much of a event as they possibly can and vastly increase their visibility.

Update: I show the video having been posted on October 10th. The event and my comment were on October 9th. Their blog post is also on the 10th and starts with "Yesterday we...".

They are missing an opportunity making the resources available the following day, a Friday (take out the trash day) when news viewership numbers are way down.

A strange thought but I wonder if their cpu uses ECC memory.

Autopilot is not a place I want bit level errors to happen.

ps. not really a car person but dang that Model X looks nice - announced Feb 2012 but still not shipping?

ECC? Yes, but that's not all; safety-critical applications like automotive often use two cores running the same code in lockstep, each with their own memory. If the behavior of the two CPUs goes out of sync, the processor can be configured to take corrective actions, such as resetting, halting, and/or going into a failsafe mode.

TI has an overview of the safety features in their Hercules microcontrollers here:

http://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry178/spry178.pdf

Don't you need at least three actors, such that in a single failure condition you can use an election algorithm? I guess two are enough if you do regular snapshotting and the worst case time to restore from a snapshot is lower than the real time bounds you need to comply with.

It depends if, when two processors disagree, you can perform a simple 'stop' action.

For example, if something goes wrong with the processor on your industrial robot arm, you just stop all the motors and activate all the brakes. No need to figure out which of the processors is right, have an engineer come out and fix the bug that caused the disagreement.

On the other hand, if something goes wrong with the processor during your space shuttle launch, it would not help to turn off all the rockets - better to have an election algorithm so things can keep working.

Is a self-driving car more like the first case or the second? Depends if the driver is ready to take the wheel :)

I'd argue the second case, generally.

There are far too many situations where a switchover time of [user initial reaction time + initial response time] is high enough to be rather dangerous.

Generally the system will fall back to a 'limp home mode' running on a simpler algorithm on a watchdog microcontroller. See for example, Freescale's reference design for an airbag controller.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/application.jsp?cod...

TBH, assuming the system either has a relatively short log of the traffic situation, and / or does a few thousand calculations a second, I can't imagine how a random bit level error would severely influence the system. Unless, you know, it causes a full system crash, but I'm sure there's a lot of measures against that.

It's not really 'autonomous driving' so you might be overestimating the safety factor implied by the term 'autopilot'.

I'm not a car person or expert in the field but I've done a little bit of work on automotive systems. As the other responders pointed out these systems are designed to, ECC or not, do things like (at the slightest sign of inconsistency or error)

- reset and recover very quickly

- enter reduced functionality or failsafe modes

- fully disable themselves and anything that might cause you to rely on them

They're fundamentally built around the eventuality of them failing and with consideration of the things that need to happen when they fail. They don't usually rely on 'well, we'll just put in a somewhat more reliable component'.

That's the most terse introduction ever. Where can we find out more information?

I really dislike the idea of vehicles capable of that kind of acceleration on city streets. It could make for some truly spectacular accidents at intersections.

It's a shame that superfast impractical cars like this get all the good press and hype, while a sensible version with limited acceleration and top speed but with much greater range would be boring. The latter would be a much greater benefit to humanity.

I'm sure you've seen all the same "street racing" videos with folks crashing that I have. Yes, it's dangerous, but typically what you aren't seeing is that the driver has completely disabled the (normally always-on) traction aids.

I hate hooligan drivers as much as / more than the next guy, and the "horsepower wars" are getting a little out of control, but I don't think that the Model S is any less safe than a Mustang Camaro, or Charger that one can get for less than half the price.

(disclaimer: I'm a huge automotive enthusiast, and regularly take my car on the track)

I don't care to share street space with those, either. Or sport bikes, or tractor-trailers, etc.

The track is an appropriate place for those kinds of vehicles. (Also an enormous amount of fun!)

Not-fun is trying to drive a twitchy high-horsepower car in a congested urban environment.

Somewhat fun is opening up that car for the one clear block that you get, except that it's extremely dangerous for everyone around you. Only sociopaths incapable of thinking about the effect of their actions on others do that kind of thing. Not even street racing, just stepping on the gas out of frustration.

I'd be way more interested in the "autopilot" features if they worked in urban settings, such as automatic braking for obstacles.

Quite a bit of hype here.

My 3-year old CLS can do most of not all of these "new features." Including, parallel parking itself, alerting me to someone in my blind spot via audible, visual and haptic feedback via the steering column shaking, keep its distance from the car in front via Distronic Adaptive Cruise Control and slow to zero (0) during a braking situation, alert me via haptic feedback (steering column shake) if I swerve out of my lane and for shits and giggles has night vision (totally useless for me in the city at least).

But what's even more impressive is that the brand new S-Class I just picked up does all of this and then some: it has a pedestrian awareness system: the car will brake if it senses a collision with a pedestrian. It has magic body control: a system that scans the road ahead via stereoscopic cameras for potholes and uneven pavement surfaces and adjust the suspension in real-time for a smooth ride (this is an insane feature). It has active steer assist! It will keep me in my line by applying brake pressure to the opposing wheels and will not let you swerve out. It also has another two features that I simply can't think of at the moment. But there is a really neat video from Mercedes Benz on all of this somewhere.

I also believe Tesla's entire drive train and technology is made by Daimler-Benz.

Finally, like Animats pointed out - all of these features are not necessarily a good thing for the heavily distracted driver these days. These features open the door for even more careless driving (texting, fiddling with Google on your Tesla screen and etc.) I believe Mercedes actually have self driving technology working for a few years now (they have a freight truck that is completely autonomous) but decided to pull full self driving from the S-Class due to many of these issues raised.

I guess what irks me most about a lot of these Tesla drivers (from reading articles, blogs, posts and watching the news tonight after the unveiling) is that they are so hung up on the damn hype, they do not see past the issues that still remain for the company. Yes, Musk is a visionary guy, no doubt. But too much hype here. Some dumb women even said on the news when asked how she likes the new car "I'll let you know tomorrow morning." Clearly alluding to her caring solely about the lousy $20k of shares she probably has in the company.

I think another big problem for Tesla (and yes, going off track here) is the fact that not everyone can afford a $70k+ car. Tesla needs to get a sub-$40k car if they want to actually sustain this model. I just don't see how they can by selling a niche car to a niche market.

Finally, like others said, we need to go 100% autonomous or 0%. The middle ground is scary. I bought two Mercedes because I love how amazingly engineered they are. They are at the pinnacle of modern engineering and perhaps the best built cars on earth (most likely). I enjoy driving. I don't enjoy playing with a touchscreen or texting. The features I have on my cars compliment the driving experience, they make it better. I fear many people will start buying cars (whether Teslas or cheaper) for these "lazy" features that allude to you not having to concentrate as much any more. This is a scary premonition and I don't see it ending well.

The most exciting part of this for me is not the immediate features that are being released, but rather the hardware being put in place that can open up a bunch of neat possibilities via software upgrades.

>I think another big problem for Tesla (and yes, going off track here) is the fact that not everyone can afford a $70k+ car. Tesla needs to get a sub-$40k car if they want to actually sustain this model. I just don't see how they can by selling a niche car to a niche market.

They're working on that, it's called the "Model 3". But it's still a while away for them to reach the economies of scale for them to be able to produce it.

ur a jealous ahole

Look, if Nissan has beeb doing it for years already, Tesla can do it too. This is a terrible excuse. It just shows that Tesla is still learning, and cannot make a cheap car, even after getting their currebt factory at a steep discount.

Is it fair to compare an S-class, which has been engineered into it's current state over 60 years, to a car that did not exist at all 3 years ago?

You may have it backwards; Tesla is building the powertrain for the Mercedes electric A-class E-cell.

I think a lot of people pay attention to the new tech in the Tesla but don't follow any other luxury sedans, so they do come off a bit uninformed.

Yes, it is, because that's the market Tesla is in! They're selling a $90k car, this is the market.

Seems like more and more cars have radar/ultrasound sensors. Won't this eventually lead to interference? Can such a system be influenced by, say, a nutter with a stronger radar?

video demo of Autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0&t=40

I was about to get all OOH, CAR PORN STATS but then I saw the Dodge Challenger/Charger SRT Hellcats... which are literally half the price, and faster. Womp womp.

Somewhat... In a straight line ya, not in a road course (most likely). Definitely agree with you on the point of price and yet, it's sort of hard to compare them. If drag racing/street racing is what you're after yah, Dodge all the way.

>not in a road course (most likely).

For that, the GT-R is a monster, also $30k cheaper than the Tesla.

The Hellcats are cheap...Do you want to buy a cheap car?

And of course, it's only until you go to a gas station.

If you're trying to insinuate the North American definition of 'inexpensive due to inferior quality', that doesn't apply here at all. One is a muscle car, and one is the most advanced electric vehicle in the world. Apples to oranges. On comparing price to horsepower, it's totally cheap in comparison, and yes I would prefer the Dodge.

Assuming $80 per tank, with a fillup once per week, it would take me 14.4 years of continuous driving for the cost of gas to equal that of the Tesla, without taking my house's electric bills into account.

Footage of the announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk

I love tesla for it's all electric cars. But do we hate driving so much now that we're taking drivers out of the driving experience? This is not just for tesla but any other automaker.

If you're doing 'self driving' cars, why not make better technology for public transportation which makes way more sense. Not to mention this picture: http://randomdude.com/images/car-bus-bike.jpg

> But do we hate driving so much now that we're taking drivers out of the driving experience?

For the most part, yes. Plenty of people in LA/NYC have multi-hour commutes each day, and I imagine they'd be very happy to work in the car if the computer could drive. I just finished an 8 hour drive to visit family, and it'd have been much more pleasant if I could just hang out with the family and play games in the car for that time.

> why not make better technology for public transportation which makes way more sense

In the US, because it's a political non-starter in most areas.

Does it improve battery life too ?

For the Performance model it loses 10 miles, all the others gain 10 miles.

According to the website the ranges are the same for the RWD.

S60 208

S85 265

P85 265

The dual motor configuration increases range on all models.

S60D 225

S85D 295

P85D 275

Offline :(

Wow. It's incredible how far we've come with technology.

D is for disappointment.

Marketing fail. They should announce it as a 700 HP car with better acceleration than the fastest Audi R8, while being big enough to take the kids to the soccer club and go shopping.

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