Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

141–150 of 222 posts

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

#141
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to say Tesla doesn't have a product and then go on to list a bunch of worse products as if they are better? Tesla has effectively incorporated Lane Keep Assist/Automatic Cruise Control into a single product called Autopilot that has vastly better software than other similar products. Simply put, if other companies had a product that would have allowed for billions of miles to be driven hands free fe…

Vastly better? I'm not sure the last time my car did an uncommanded lane change on a well painted road with good ambient light. Yet, I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing exactly that. I'm not sure the last time (actually I am - it has not) my car treated a roundabout with a shallow center median as "entirely optional, follow the circle or go straight over", but I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing that. T…

Weird, when I search "Jaguar self driving" or "Jaguar Hands Free" I don't find any real videos of it at all. Are you sure it's not Jaguar that doesn't have self driving?

Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?

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

#142
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vastly better? I'm not sure the last time my car did an uncommanded lane change on a well painted road with good ambient light. Yet, I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing exactly that. I'm not sure the last time (actually I am - it has not) my car treated a roundabout with a shallow center median as "entirely optional, follow the circle or go straight over", but I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing that. T…

Weird, when I search "Jaguar self driving" or "Jaguar Hands Free" I don't find any real videos of it at all. Are you sure it's not Jaguar that doesn't have self driving? Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?

I'm pretty sure that your comment falls under Poe's law somehow. I just can't tell if it's meant seriously.

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

#143
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…

Please stop fixating on those California disengagements. They mean approximately nothing. They are unregulated, voluntarily reported incidents. A low number could mean that safety drivers are acting irresponsibly, or that the vehicles are only being used on public roads in known-safe circumstances.

I strongly suspect that the quest for a low disengagement number is what got that woman in Arizona killed by Uber. These reports really should be sealed from the public. AV startups seem to be using their disengagement rate as a way raise money. They are aided by journalists hungry to make sense of a highly secretive field publishing these figures completely out of context.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the other car has a human in it, and those situations are ones where the reaction of the other human is critical to safety analysis, but generally unpredictable.

A computer will be able to react to a sudden crazy movement by another driver far better than a human will.

“Will be”? Yep. Given an infinite timescale computers “will be” able to do lots of things better than people, such as navigate rough terrain or open a door.

Currently, they can’t do any of that better than humans, and probably not for several years.

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

#145
I am still trying to figure out what started and sustained the enormous self-driving car hype of the last few years. I understand why people who don't know much about technology would buy into it, but I don't understand why so many relatively tech-savvy people have bought into it and why huge amounts of money have been invested into it. It should be obvious - and should have been obvious when the hype started, as well - that to create fully self-driving cars that can operate as well as a competent human driver in a full spectrum of real road situations would require solving extremely difficult technical problems that are nowhere near solved and that cannot necessarily be solved any time soon simply by throwing money at them. So what explains the hype and the investment money? Out of the people responsible for the hype, what fraction were/are merely deluded and what fraction were/are lying?

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traction/stability control can only help with the situation you are already in. Being able to see the condition of the road -- the sparkle of ice forming, for example, or a sheen that suggests black ice, etc -- allows you to act instead of just react.

While vision is a hard problem in general, the specific challenge of "ice detection" seems like exactly the kind of problem that computers can be programmed to do better (and more tirelessly) than humans, particularly with specialized detectors and LIDAR. Better sensors, better reaction time, zero distractions. (I don't have any expertise here, just intuition.)

With the right instruments, I don't disagree. But in the context of cameras, I think it will be quite some time before that happens. Watching demos of state-of-the-art computer vision object detection today, I think it may be decades before we have cameras and computers good enough to do the kind of on-the-fly visual analysis that humans do naturally.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is on the order page for the Model 3 right now: > Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. Really. Except that feature hasn’t shipped and there’s no ETA. I call that a lie. I appreciate what Tesla is doing to the industry but I wish they wouldn’t be so dishonest in their marketing.

Actually that particular feature is currently in beta testing and the ETA is a few weeks.

It has a limit of 150 feet and I’m sure in practise it will just annoy other drivers unless the parking lot is fairly empty, but there you are.

https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-enhanced-summon-self-dr...

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

#148
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

For self-driving cars, what would that be? You can misuse a non-self driving car by speeding, giving you above-average chances of accidents. You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven). You can smoke, giving you above average chances of getting lung cancer. You can misuse a partially self driving car by somehow convincing it that you do follow the traffic while actu…

In the hands of a consumer, don't forget being diligent with maintenance, driving on unsealed roads, choosing to drive in poor conditions. There are probably a lot more. It is surprising how much some people abuse machines.

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

#149
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

For self-driving cars, what would that be? You can misuse a non-self driving car by speeding, giving you above-average chances of accidents. You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven). You can smoke, giving you above average chances of getting lung cancer. You can misuse a partially self driving car by somehow convincing it that you do follow the traffic while actu…

> You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven).

You have to be very old for this to be true.

It turns out that 16-25 years old is worse than any group until something like 75-80 years old.

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

#150
post #117
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of traffic and road conditions does that trip involve and how much are you an observer vs. you hanging on to the wheel and paying attention to everything as if you were driving yourself (staying engaged) as you are required by the law and by common sense? And if you don't mind me asking, how would you quantify in real money the value added by the system?

The 90% I am talking about is a 12~ mile stretch of poorly maintained highway near Detroit usually in stop and go traffic and yes I am paying attention. I wouldn't quantify the value in real money. I would say the main benefit provides is that I have much less decision fatigue and am less stressed after my commute. I also don't care how fast I really get there anymore since I just optimize for less stress, and my tri…

> and yes I am paying attention

...Then what is the point of that system?

Tesla's 'self driving' is incredibly dangerous because it puts the driver in a set of conditions that make it very difficult to maintain attention on the road. And yet the driver must be able to take over from the 'self driving' system with subsecond warning if things go awry.

That's not value adding, that's a huge risk. I would not use that system even if someone offered to install it for free in my car.

Tesla's autopilot is a marketing twist on lane keeping adaptive cruise control - a technology available in almost every car at a similar price point. It is not a step towards actual autonomy.

Post reply on HN