A point I commonly hear made from both Tesla and Comma.ai for example is that Lidar is far too expensive with Waymo's vehicle costing a total of $200,000 and that cameras alone are sufficient for full self driving. I do think that cameras alone are probably sufficient for full self-driving but every time I hear this point I think to myself that self driving progress is moving so slowly on the camera-only front that Lidar might become so affordable by the time camera-only makes substantial progress that by that point it was much more efficient to just have been developing with Lidar from the start. Am I missing something or just completely wrong? I would really appreciate any insight on this.
Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
281–290 of 410 posts
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see what it has to do with fight club. suppose car A and car B have autonomous driving that perform identically across a wide range of conditions. the manufacturer A enables FSD whenever the customer feels like it, but accepts no liability. manufacturer B accepts full liability for FSD use, but restricts it to situations where that's a good bet. car B is safer for the average customer, because it doesn…
No, this reasoning is flawed. The baseline safety of cars is an absolute shit show. 30,000 people dying every year and trillion dollars of damages and lost productivity. Car A can enable FSD in all cases, be safer in all cases, but still not be a good deal economically for the manufacturer to accept liability. Car B could be making drivers less safe overall by preventing them from enabling FSD in most cases, but at l…
Your comment is predicated on the assumption that FSD (the actual system installed in the car, not a future theoretical perfect system) is safer than the average driver in the situations where Mercedes currently disables it.
I'm not sure we have data to support that? We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average, but most of those miles will have been driven in the situations where Mercedes allows it to be used.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#283For me the corollary of this ("you just invented a more expensive railway") is the business model assumptions that go away. Long distance trucking is still a likely winner, but there is still the "last mile / last off ramp". None of the business models touted today survive the new railway problem. That's not to say it's not a valuable technology - it's just we cannot whistle up a human shaped robot that just does wha…
Boston's Big Dig is an example of this. Surface space is now a series of green parks with limited car access, and the cars moving through the city are underground. It's quite lovely, though it's detractors will ask if it was worth the cost.
Last I heard it was horribly mismanaged, insanely over budget, went on for years longer than it was supposed to and the tunnels still had leaks. Admittedly I didn’t look closely but from what I heard it was a disaster project.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
'This is a tectonic shift in liability. ' Its the only form of liability i consider acceptable - I woupd never use autopilot where I would be to blame if i fail to react in 50 milliseconds once the car fucks up
You are already going to be to blamed if you get in an accident for most hardware failures in a car. Why is this one so different?
Because none of the other hardware features give the driver a false sense of being able to not do their job. It doesn't matter how many times the owner is told, we have already seen people are not smart about this. Drivers shooting video of them being in the passenger seat, people shooting porn while the car is driving, and several other stupid things that people will do just because they think it that's what self-driving is meant to do.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don’t think they’re more than good enough on highways. Even teslas still veer over when they encounter on-ramp-merges.
Hardly a problem in Europe where on ramps are much better (one lane is primary and one is joining).
Europe is quite diverse in this respect. Italy for example has many highways that I would be terrified to let autopilot try to navigate merges on.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big risk that Waymo/Mercedes is taking with this approach is that they do not know what blocking issues they will run into when adding new functionality to these systems. What if driving in rain or snow is incompatible with their architecture and they have to do a major rewrite to expand into that functionality? With the Tesla Approach they already know where the system fails and where the system isn't making any…
Yeah and they certainly have a lot of data because of their approach. I just wonder how (or if) they’ll make the shift to level 3 without angering customers. Or, if they’ll choose to stay at level 2 so they can have more features.
Maybe they don't design their roadmap around arbitrary level numbers but instead around marketable features.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#287A point I commonly hear made from both Tesla and Comma.ai for example is that Lidar is far too expensive with Waymo's vehicle costing a total of $200,000 and that cameras alone are sufficient for full self driving. I do think that cameras alone are probably sufficient for full self-driving but every time I hear this point I think to myself that self driving progress is moving so slowly on the camera-only front that L…
,,Lidar might become so affordable by the time camera-only makes substantial progress that by that point it was much more efficient to just have been developing with Lidar from the start.''
Tesla and Comma are already making profit with great margins that they needed a lot when they started developing self driving capabilities. Waymo is using Google's coffers, but so far they lost billions of dollars that they have to get back.
Regarding Lidar I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the Robotaxi that comes out in 1-2 years from Tesla, but maybe it would be a PR nightmare at this point.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's translated from 60 kph. Apparently, the current system is restricted to German highways. Those are limited to vehicles which can go at least as fast as 60 kph, and this might be where this number comes from. It's basically the slowest highway speed at which there is no controversy about legality. Targeting highways first makes sense from a complexity and data quality perspective. Although driving at 60 kph on Ge…
I doubt this reasoning. While it's true that 60 kph is the minimum for Autobahn, it's the minimum in the sense that the vehicle must be capable of that speed. There is no requirement to actually drive 60 kph or faster. On the other side of the equation, nobody would feel comfortable cruising along at that speed, since you'd be continuously overtaken by trucks, which drive a little more than the allowed 80 kph unless…
The vehicle is not capable of more than 60 km/h when used in self driving mode, so the reasoning seems quite logical. I wouldn't want to use this on the Autobahn though; everyone would be overtaking constantly which introduces additional risk, and the speed is so low that journey time would be considerably inflated.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#289"it's geofenced to certain roads, and only work under 40mph", " you should not use this in the rain" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMNnOosjrBo&ab_channel=Engad...
Restrictions that very much make sense given the usage scenario; Stop and go traffic on highways.
"Stop-and-go traffic on highways" is quite a narrow usage scenario, isn't it? At least in a lot of highway driving in UK, FR, DE, CH, I find this mostly only happens with major events or roadworks, and even then it's for a short time or distance. The rest of the time you'll be plodding along at 60 km/h, with all other traffic overtaking you, which itself adds risk.
Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll
#290A point I commonly hear made from both Tesla and Comma.ai for example is that Lidar is far too expensive with Waymo's vehicle costing a total of $200,000 and that cameras alone are sufficient for full self driving. I do think that cameras alone are probably sufficient for full self-driving but every time I hear this point I think to myself that self driving progress is moving so slowly on the camera-only front that L…
I would say the race isn’t over yet. One thing to consider is the training dataset. By using only vision, Tesla was able to start collecting data with their entire fleet starting many years ago. They probably have more edge case data than anyone else, in more diverse driving situations. They would not have been able to do this if they needed to use expensive lidar on company owned training vehicles.
What we will likely see is that lidar equipped vehicles gain a lot of ground at first, but have to be rolled out slowly both due to cost and how they are trained. Tesla’s vision based fleet could get an update tomorrow that theoretically was able to drive almost anywhere.
Of course, Tesla has clearly been finding out that while vision is in principle sufficient, the brains behind the cameras are not so simple. In my opinion it’s still too early to call who will win in the end.