Live data from Hacker News

Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

thedetroitbureau.com

341–350 of 410 posts

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#341
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We killed a few people but we got a bitchin' architecture going from the start." You should be a construction site manager in Qatar.

"It is better to play it as safe as possible safe when rolling out a technology that could save tens of thousands of lives a year" The antivax people agree with that approach. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine therefore we shouldn't use it.

Vaccines still had to go 3 stages of trials and vaccine side effects are immediately obvious in the vast majority of cases.

And pharma companies are far less irresponsible and far more regulated than vested and biased commenter darling Tesla.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#342
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point about Tesla has been made frequently in this discussion. I still wonder: how does Tesla store any meaningful video data in customer vehicles and transfer it? I know that other vendors have a hard time putting the necessary fast storage in the trunk and get the data off with 100G cables in the garage.

Their AI system has something called “shadow mode” where it can make observations without having any effect on the car. When Tesla needs to collect a dataset of something, like short videos of cars that put on their blinker but did not change lanes, or partially obscured stop signs, they can train a net to run in shadow mode on all their cars and collect more of this edge case. I presume that they also collect a lot…

As I understand it, it's mainly collected when the car goes in for maintenance.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#343
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is better to play it as safe as possible safe when rolling out a technology that could save tens of thousands of lives a year" The antivax people agree with that approach. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine therefore we shouldn't use it.

Vaccines still had to go 3 stages of trials and vaccine side effects are immediately obvious in the vast majority of cases. And pharma companies are far less irresponsible and far more regulated than vested and biased commenter darling Tesla.

Tesla has done something worse than this?

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20220304/sackler-fa...

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#344
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't design their roadmap around arbitrary level numbers but instead around marketable features.

SAE levels are based on the features of the system… and the conditions it operates in, and the responsibility of the driver.

I said marketable features. Outside of HN's demographic, the number of people who even know what an SAE level is would round off to zero.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, they’re all liable. If your product is unreasonably dangerous and defective, and that defect is the proximate cause of injury to another, you’re responsible. I know nothing of German law, but from a US legal perspective, it appears that MB is just promising what they already have to do - compensate those harmed by defects in their products.

No, the competition explicitely tells the driver to be ready to take over any second, they promise full self driving only in the ads, but not the contract. So when a accident happens, the "driver" can be blamed for not reacting. Mercedes offers full self driving including legal responsibility. You are not oblieged to watch the road or the car while driving (with the current tight limits)

The competition doesn't get to override laws. Tesla may put as many illegal clauses in their contract as they want, if they crash because of autopilot in Europe, they're liable. That's why Autopilot is barely enabled here at all, because they know their software is unreliable.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#346
post #281

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 L…

The conversation is complicated because LIDAR is used for many purposes in self driving. It's used for localization, it's used for objection detection, it's used for classifications, it's used for understanding occlusions, it's used to get accurate 3D positions and speeds of objects, etc. For each of these cases there is a way to use just cameras (or camera augmented with radars), but often with some significant perf…

I think you're probably right - the really difficult bits of self-driving cars are still really difficult even if you have perfect sensor data.

But still, we're a long way from vision based sensing being good enough for reliable self driving so why make it difficult for yourself?

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#347
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Uh, no? If the car's brakes don't work due to a defect, you are not liable at all. And if you show reasonable due diligence, that is regular maintenance, the same applies doubly so. Beyond that, I've seen a lot of accidents, and none of them were the car's fault. All were literally human error, or external factors. EG, deer leaping on to road, too many frogs on the road, etc

"If the car's brakes don't work due to a defect, you are not liable at all."

Morally perhaps but if you drive into the back of me because your brakes have a manufacturing fault I would still expect you to pay for the damage. The manufacturer may then be liable to you but that that is your business.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#348
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Italy for example has many highways that I am terrified to try to navigate merges on. Spain too!

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#349
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no? If the car's brakes don't work due to a defect, you are not liable at all. And if you show reasonable due diligence, that is regular maintenance, the same applies doubly so. Beyond that, I've seen a lot of accidents, and none of them were the car's fault. All were literally human error, or external factors. EG, deer leaping on to road, too many frogs on the road, etc

"If the car's brakes don't work due to a defect, you are not liable at all." Morally perhaps but if you drive into the back of me because your brakes have a manufacturing fault I would still expect you to pay for the damage. The manufacturer may then be liable to you but that that is your business.

It goes beyond morals.

If you are driving a car and an crash occurs due to a manufacturing defect, you'll probaly not be found criminally liable.

This becomes super important if someone gets injured or killed.

Re: Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most car accidents are 100% operator error, it'd be really far fetched to try to blame those on the manufacturer. Autopilot not so much, the point stands.

Launch control option added by car manufacturers I'd say is 100% the car manufacturer's fault they thought of it, installed it, promoted it, but it's pointless and dangerous.

>launch control How many accidents happen from a standstill? Id love to see some stats, but i highly doubt it would be a high number
Post reply on HN