511–520 of 691 posts
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For a company having paying customers does matter a lot. Having customers paying for the R&D will help make it sustainable.
I suspect the revenue from passengers in this case looks like a rounding error. But the PR and feedback from early adopters is very valuable.
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I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...
That’s just stunningly beautiful - Czech countryside is something else! I’d gladly buy a self-driving car that require some additional input on such a road and had additional aids to spot oncoming traffic I can’t see behind the tractor that’s a few hundred meters forward of the spot linked to. It would still be safer. To really make things work, we need cars to be able to negotiate the way humans do on the right of w…
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How well do sensors and vision systems handle winter conditions like snow and lack of lane markers?
Easy, my dumb level-0 car can tell me when it's icy. And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self driving (the hard part is knowing when to ignore them).
It's not a matter of "finding" lane markers. There are no lane markers visible after it snows.
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I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...
From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even busy city centers and complex parking lots are very difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies. The understanding level necessary just isn't there. These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads. They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety levels in those circumstan…
Waymo drove 29,944.69 miles between "disengagements" last year. That is an average California driver needing to touch the wheel once every 2.3 years.
Tesla by comparison is classed as a SAE Level 2 driver assist system and isn't even required to report metrics to the state. While they sell it to consumers as self-driving, they tell the state it is basically fancy cruise control.
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"If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive" Less drunk, distracted, angry, and/or sleepy drivers on public roads, with overall significantly less crashes? Sign me up!
That would be an ideal outcome, but plenty of people would need to be economically or legally forced. Cross-reference to vaccines.
I'm really beginning to get sick of seeing people use the word "freedom" when they clearly mean "no personal responsibility while living in a society among other people".
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It's unclear to me why Tesla's solution is so discussed. They are definitely not on the same playing field as Waymo or even Cruise.
There's a lot of people on here who have invested in Tesla
“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…
By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year.
Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.
“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…
This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not, it's legally required they do this till the government changes their minds.
That said, I agree with others that this is the natural progression of testing rollout and doesn't tell us anything about the pace at which the rollout will occur, in particular whether it will be faster or slower than Phoenix.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p...
[2] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...
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Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by probably 50+%.
For depot to depot runs, sure. Most runs aren't that though, and require direct delivery from manufacturer to purchaser. Plenty of deliveries, for example in Chicago, basically happen off a residential street. Alley docking and turning around in these environments is challenging even for a human. Add to all this one thing and we're further than I think most people realize: Weather. Show me an FSD doing better than a…