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

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

#381

Post by yywwbbn »

I_DRINK_KOOLAID wrote: post #367
yywwbbn wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US and Germany might be at different stages of this process, though. For example Germany has almost 2x less deaths per km driven and the situation is even better in countries like Switzerland or Norway. Also we’re talking about the perspective of the car manufacturer. New cars are already significantly safer than an average car on the road so it’s relatively little they can do to address many of the points since ther…

> FSD is a much more attractive proposition to most car buyers So is donating to the church hoping to secure a place in Heaven. We all fool ourselves for the sake of peace of mind or immediate gratification, the important thing is to be aware of it. It's important to be honest with yourself and decide who are the people who can take you for a ride. For me it's my younger siblings, the sport franchises I support, and…

I disagree. If often had to spend time in highway traffic jams (which is what Mercedes seems to be offering here) I’d rather pay an extra 10k to get 30 minutes of my life back every day instead of buying a car which in which I’d be 1.5% less likely to die during a crash.

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

#382

Post by hgomersall »

FabHK wrote: post #351
hgomersall wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25mph is >150% of the energy at 20mph. It's a big increase.

And not only that. In a situation where, with 20 mph, you can just come to a complete stop before the child, with 25 mph initially you'd hit it with 15 mph. vr = (c^2 - 1)^0.5 v1 where v1 is the original slow speed with which you'd come to a standstill just before the obstacle, and v2 = c*v1 is the faster speed, and vr the speed with which you hit the obstacle coming in with the faster speed (assuming you hit the bra…

Indeed, as an interesting aside it's a 3-4-5 triangle.

25^2 - 20^2 = 15^2

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

#383

Post by cortesoft »

b112 wrote: post #340
cortesoft wrote: post #269

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

Yeah, and if the self driving functionality doesn't work at all, it would be the manufacturers fault as well. The liability would work the same.

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

#384

Post by qeternity »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #372
qeternity wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that Tesla is ahead in the self-driving industry from an overall technology perspective. What info could you possibly have access to that would give you remotely enough confidence to assess this? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying I doubt you have the info to claim this.

Reasonable. It's an 'I believe' claim based not an 'based on these facts' claim. But, I am more informed that most as I spent five years in the industry leading all algorithm/ML development for autonomous systems at Apple. (Who I am leaving out of this analysis BTW :)

So what are you believing if it’s not based on facts?

Also you surely can understand that your work on AS at Apple has no bearing on what Tesla is doing, correct?

Am I missing something here?

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

#386

Post by sangnoir »

zarzavat wrote: post #317
xiphias2 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

,,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 t…

The problem with Lidar is that it doesn’t work well in bad weather. So it’s not the “endgame” technology - that’s vision. It’s a bridging technology. Whether that bridge is needed today is an open question.

> The problem with Lidar is that it doesn’t work well in bad weather

Cameras don't work well in bad weather either.

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

#387

Post by jhugo »

kube-system wrote: post #376
jhugo wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which criteria of J3016 wouldn’t be marketable? Few may know what “level 3” means, but they certainly know what “you don’t have to pay attention” means.

Right, but earlier you said:

> 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.

I don't know whether it would be a meaningful business goal to "make the shift to level 3". The business goals would be more nuanced than that, since approximately zero actual customers know or care what level 3 is. And the line between "you must watch what the car is doing and be prepared to take over" and "you must be prepared to take over if the car asks you to" is going to get blurred by manufacturers (and the distinction isn't that obvious to an average user in the first place).

Level 3 is absolutely not "you don't have to pay attention". SAE defines it as "when the feature requests, you must drive". Characterising that as "you don't have to pay attention" is what makes this potentially the riskiest level.

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

#388

Post by jhugo »

LightG wrote: post #380
ryantgtg wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were responding to someone saying that Tesla’s autopilot is safer (based on crash stats per million miles), not FSD. FSD and autopilot are two different features.

Fair enough. I cannot believe those related are not in tight conversation considering the AI element of FSD (or am I mistaken there?). Either way, in summary, I cannot trust FSD until it is 100% reliable (impossible) and the temporary situation for some time to come (regulated/supervised FSD) drains all the life out of what I enjoy, actual engaged driving! ... The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some moto…

> The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some motorway driving) have already been taken care off more than a decade ago.

Not really. You're referring to assistance features that require continuous driver attention. I think that highway driving, and perhaps even city driving in some parts of the world, could be completely automated to a level of safety that is far higher than humans can achieve.

I am deeply skeptical that we will ever see a system that can drive in all current road conditions though; I think it's more likely that road systems will eventually co-evolve with automated driving to a point that the automated systems simply never encounter the kind of emergent highly complex road situations that currently exist which they would be unable to handle.

I also enjoy driving, and my 40yo car doesn't even have a radio, let alone Autopilot, but I think it's likely that within our lifetimes, the kind of driving that you and I enjoy will be seen as a (probably expensive) hobby rather than something anyone does to get to work or the shops every day.

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

#389

Post by ryantgtg »

jhugo wrote: post #388
LightG wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I cannot believe those related are not in tight conversation considering the AI element of FSD (or am I mistaken there?). Either way, in summary, I cannot trust FSD until it is 100% reliable (impossible) and the temporary situation for some time to come (regulated/supervised FSD) drains all the life out of what I enjoy, actual engaged driving! ... The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some moto…

> The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some motorway driving) have already been taken care off more than a decade ago. Not really. You're referring to assistance features that require continuous driver attention. I think that highway driving, and perhaps even city driving in some parts of the world, could be completely automated to a level of safety that is far higher than humans can achieve. I am deeply s…

I think the majority of people enjoy driving. Driving is fun. Sure, traffic sucks, but the actual act of driving comes with lots of pleasures. Most people don’t seem eager to give up driving, nor are many people ready to hand over control to AI.

I’m a transportation planner, and for many years my specialty was bicyclist & pedestrian planning and safety. I would follow autonomous vehicle news, but always through that lens. In addition, I have sat through lectures, webinars, and sales pitches that tout our wonderful autonomous future. And lemme tell ya, there is little to no mention of all the road users who are not in vehicles. Countless renderings and animations that do no account for our most vulnerable users. It smells like mid-20th century transportation planning mentalities that is completely engineer-driven. Very narrow-focused and regressive.

My coworkers and I enjoyed sitting around and coming up with countless difficult-to-solve scenarios (that my tech friends would look at and say “eh, sounds interesting and solvable”) for AV developers to contend with. And despite pressure from our “future forward” marketing coworkers to focus on this sector, it feels nowhere close to really being ready (20-30 years maybe?).

Anyway, I do think the focus on “allowed in some places” is interesting. I have some trouble seeing “road systems will eventually co-evolve with automated driving” coming to fruition given the glacial pace of road system evolution.

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

#390

Post by jhugo »

ryantgtg wrote: post #389
jhugo wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some motorway driving) have already been taken care off more than a decade ago. Not really. You're referring to assistance features that require continuous driver attention. I think that highway driving, and perhaps even city driving in some parts of the world, could be completely automated to a level of safety that is far higher than humans can achieve. I am deeply s…

I think the majority of people enjoy driving. Driving is fun. Sure, traffic sucks, but the actual act of driving comes with lots of pleasures. Most people don’t seem eager to give up driving, nor are many people ready to hand over control to AI. I’m a transportation planner, and for many years my specialty was bicyclist & pedestrian planning and safety. I would follow autonomous vehicle news, but always through that…

I guess by "road systems will eventually co-evolve with automated driving" I would also include relatively minor interventions like increasing the proportion of controlled intersections, which are much easier for autonomous systems to deal with.

I have spent a lot of time in parts of Asia where massive evolution of transportation infrastructure has happened on a scale of a few decades (or less), so it seems less crazy to me that large-scale road evolution could happen along with autonomous vehicle development than it might seem to someone working in the West.

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