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Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

arstechnica.com

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Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#51

Post by Gladdyu »

Someone1234 wrote: post #38
martythemaniak wrote: post #30

There's a few things to keep in mind when discussing self-driving tech. 1) Self driving tech doesn't exist today. It simply does not. There's lots of people working on it and they are using different strategies, but it is not clear how long it will take, which strategy is technically superior, which strategy is more economical, etc etc. There's a lot of very strong opinions floating around (LIDAR is essential! No, vi…

> They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. Can you explore that a little? We have consumer products that contain LIDAR already (e.g. Neato Vacuums). The sensors no longer cost thousands of dollars, and could supplement other types of inputs to provide a broader picture of the road.

Yes, but you can't install a LIDAR over a software update. They've been promising full self-driving mode and getting closer by updating the software - the owners that already have the current car won't be to thrilled if they get cut-off from the state-of-the-art in Tesla's self-driving tech.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#52

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

pjkundert wrote: post #23
whttheuuu wrote: post #8

ITT: people who think they know better than the company that has been working on this stuff day in and day out for years lol.

... working on this stuff day and night ... —- in California . I’ve been driving for 40+ years, millions of km, 1/2 during winter. Now, Elon is a Saskatchewan boy, so he should know better. Perhaps he’s forgotten. Winter driving is at best 1/2 vision dependent, often much less. Many times, you have to actively ignore your vision (everything you see is “moving” sideways). Quite often, you’re modulating your throttle t…

When the first snowstorm hits it never ceases to surprise me how the dynamics of the road change - not just the friction, but the number of lanes and where they go all change as people give their best guess, which over the next 2000 cards becomes codified. If you have self-driving cars following the old lanes you're going to have accidents.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#53

Post by xeromal »

CPLX wrote: post #29

It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called lying .

If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#54

Post by fastball »

xeromal wrote: post #53
CPLX wrote: post #29

It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called lying .

If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.

You could almost call him the successful / less pathological Elizabeth Holmes.

He promises the future before it has arrived, but unlike Theranos, he actually delivers a product. That product might be inferior to what was promised, but it is an improvement on the status quo nonetheless. And once released, Musk does not lie about its capabilities.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#55

Post by seem_2211 »

xeromal wrote: post #53
CPLX wrote: post #29

It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called lying .

If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.

If it is a publicly traded company, and that person is an executive, then yes it is both a lie and securities fraud. If it's a startup or anything else where it's not a public company, then it's ok to be simply delusional.

His sins may be less than those of the CEO of Enron, but that's a very low bar (after all Enron was the largest corporate bankruptcy ever when it collapsed), and people have gone to jail for much less. I get the hero worship, but it doesn't stop Musk from being a criminal.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#56

Post by billhathaway »

peeters wrote: post #32

I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. On an airplane, autopilot means you can take your focus off of both the physical and mental act of moving the plane through the air, and if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you wouldn't have a few seconds to react. In a car, Tesla's Autopilot simply doesn't give you that. If you are reading and your autopilot exits,…

I wish Tesla called something like driver assist. I use it for 90% of my commute and it is super helpful, but I would never pick a name for it of auto-pilot.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#57

Post by mikeash »

peeters wrote: post #32

I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. On an airplane, autopilot means you can take your focus off of both the physical and mental act of moving the plane through the air, and if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you wouldn't have a few seconds to react. In a car, Tesla's Autopilot simply doesn't give you that. If you are reading and your autopilot exits,…

A system with lane keeping and traffic-aware cruise control corresponds pretty well to a simple two or three-axis airplane autopilot that just holds heading and altitude.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#58

Post by mikeash »

munificent wrote: post #25
ForHackernews wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vision alone fails pretty frequently even with a human brain and 700 million years of evolution behind it. Count me as a skeptic that cameras + computer will produce a safe self-driving system.

> 700 million years of evolution behind it Sure, but only about 0.000014% of that time occurred while cars existed. It's not like we evolved to control big metal objects hurtling down artificially made flat surfaces.

On the other hand, while our brains did not evolve to control cars, our cars were designed to be controlled by our brains. A system designed from scratch for autonomous vehicles would look radically different.

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#59

Post by perl4ever »

Animats wrote: post #49

Waymo keeps plugging away. Each year, for the last few years, the number of miles between disconnects they report to the CA DMV has doubled. Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product. Nobody else is even close. This problem is slowly being solved, by normal engineering practices. The "fake it til you make it" players are b…

"Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product."

I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra-rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse.

I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity

Re: Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

#60

Post by boznz »

RivieraKid wrote: post #48
cbames89 wrote: post #5

This is a (perhaps short-term) failure of first principles reasoning. Elon's known to favor thinking about things from first principles, and there's no theoretical reason that vision can't work. However, technical limitations might take a while to overcome.

People should strive for correct reasoning. First principles reasoning, as I interpret that term, is just an approach that helps to achieve correctness by overcoming ingrained assumptions. If Elon really thought "in theory, camera-only full self driving is possible, therefore I should invest resources in that approach" than he's dumber than I thought. He's done it because Lidar was not an option - and the claim that…

The simple fact that Humans only have eyes and don't need lidar or radar to drive, however we cause accidents when our eyes misinterpret a situation, there are bad road markings or our vision is impaired due to bad conditions a camera only car will have the same faults.

So Personally I would feel safe in a camera only car driving during the day in good conditions and with good road markings or on a controlled road where humans are excluded. I would not feel safe in any other situation..

I still want a model3 it is so good in every other way but I wont be trusting the self driving.

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