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Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

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Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#201

Post by TekMol »

flohofwoe wrote: post #193
TekMol wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "20 years", not "less than a decade". When has there been some truly "giant shift" Some examples: Cars replaced horses. Email replaced letters. Phones replaced desktops. Phones replaced cameras. Websites replaced newspapers, TV and radio.

These aren't exactly giant shifts though, just incremental progress. Maybe with the exception of cars vs horses, but this shift took at least half a century and two disruptive world wars happened in that time. For the other things, the enabling technologies were microchips and the internet, and those also took their time to grow.

If the web was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. If mobile was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is.

The web created a searchable, worldwide instant knowledge base in which mankind shares what it knows.

Mobile makes everyone connected to everybody else, where ever they are.

For all of these examples, the time going from "most people are aware of it" to "most people use it" was less than 20 years.

Example: Most people in developed countries started to become aware of email in the 90s. In the 2010s most people had an email. Probably even in the 2000s already.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#202

Post by badpun »

dx034 wrote: post #179
Hamuko wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind it makes sense for Mercedes-Benz to be the first one to do this. There's probably a laundry list of automotive firsts that are associated with just the Mercedes-Benz S-Class.

And Mercedes has been pumping huge amounts of money into it for at least a decade. They're just much more conservative than typical SV companies so they only publicly announce products when they're ready.

Exactly, Mercedes has been doing some work on self-driving since the early nineties IIRC.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#203

Post by TacticalCoder »

I drive a lot and I don't know if I'm crazy or not but instead of a car which can "mostly self drive but which I must watch at all times for something could wrong", I want instead a car that watches me while I drive and which prevents me from making most dangerous things.

Rephrasing it: I don't want to be the one preventing the car from doing stupid things. I want the car to be preventing me from doing stupid things.

For example my wife's previous Toyota would gently shake the steering wheel if I were to switch lanes without using the blinker. Or it'd warn me if I were to put my blinker while a car was in the lane I was planning to go to. Or take start and stop trafic, bumper to bumper in trafic jams... I want the car to prevent me from bumping in the car in front of me if I'm not careful enough (the Toyota didn't do that).

Stuff like that.

I find it very stressful to have an "autonomous but not really" car that I must baby-sit. I want instead to feel more relaxed by knowing that the car is probably there to help me should something be about to go wrong.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#204

Post by epolanski »

ahartmetz wrote: post #127
Toumassa wrote: post #119

Very cool, still dont understand why electric cars got to be ugly ... The design is more like Prius than S-class.. Sorry for being off topic.

I kind of like it, it's moving away from the overly aggressive looking style of most modern cars. Maybe we can have cars for adults again instead of these Transformers-style designs. A shape that is fit for purpose (aerodynamic) is part of that. BMW and Mercedes switch places periodically in technical and design leadership, and I think it's Mercedes's time. BMW has been going off the rails recently...

Still, it's pretty uninspired and unless you're heavily into cars looks like any other Mercedes out there.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#205

Post by epolanski »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #203

I drive a lot and I don't know if I'm crazy or not but instead of a car which can "mostly self drive but which I must watch at all times for something could wrong", I want instead a car that watches me while I drive and which prevents me from making most dangerous things. Rephrasing it: I don't want to be the one preventing the car from doing stupid things. I want the car to be preventing me from doing stupid things.…

I have driven few cars with assistive technologies and I came to the conclusion that I feel more tense in them than I do with all assistive technologies turned off.

You get way too "distracted" with those technologies imho, but you still need to check what the car is doing.

So if before I was relaxed and driving in auto-pilot mode not even thinking about it, I'm now more tense and looking over what the car is doing.

Obviously blind spot, simple cruise control or beeps that warn you in traffic the car ahead is moving are fine, but the more complex assistive technology gets the more you need to check what it's doing.

Stuff like lane assist is just...unreliable in many situations. I was more than once driving on streets that from a second to the other had the white marks disappear and the car drift dangerously off road.

I just find more relaxing and safer normal driving (unless I was doing thousands of kilometers per week I guess) than being this controller who has to check what the car is doing.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#206

Post by realityking »

Karellen wrote: post #109
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how does this compare with Tesla? Mercedes appears to be indemnifying drivers when its tech is engaged. That's frankly the bigger first for me than SAE Level 3.

But the level they're selling still requires that the driver be able to resume control when notified. So the "the car notified the driver to take over, disengaged, and shortly following that the driver crashed the car" narrative is still possible, even when the "shortly following that" might actually be "0.1s later". Sorry, our tech wasn't engaged at the time, you're actually the one at fault here. Yes, the standard…

This is a straw man. Mercedes gives you 10s to take over, for those 10s the car remains in controls & Mercedes liable.

Not good enough to take a nap but good enough to be texting or reading.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#207

Post by realityking »

Animats wrote: post #76
metaphor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this supposed distinction actually meaningful? I don't know...color me unconvinced. When I interpret "being constantly ready to immediately take over" language, it's unambiguous that I need to maintain full situational awareness as if I were driving the vehicle. Physically and mentally transitioning from partial to full situational awareness obviously takes some time, and yet from the graphic in the SAE link, the…

There are studies on this, but most of them are paywalled.[1] The key value issue is "takeover time", where a level 3 system asks the driver to take over. Values studied are in the 5 to 7 second range. This is marginal. Volvo was trying for a level 3 system where, if the driver did nothing, the vehicle ended up safely stopped, preferably out of traffic. That's the gold standard for level 3. "Under German law, to be a…

I can’t find anything supporting “they really want the human back on line in 3 seconds” in your 3rd link. Quite the contrary:

> You’re allowed to take your hands off the steering wheel, to take your eyes off the road, and even to turn your head to the side. But you can’t take a nap. > > As I discovered in my short closed-course test-drive, some flexibility is built into the system. For instance, as long as you’re belted, it’s OK to look back to a child in the back seat for three to five seconds. > > You can push it too far, though. After consulting with the engineer in the passenger seat, I closed my eyes completely, and just eight or nine seconds later a prompt popped up asking me to confirm I was still alert. I ignored it, which soon started the 10-second countdown toward disengagement.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#208

Post by piaste »

akira2501 wrote: post #131
bsder wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very nice to be able to "link" my electric car into a convoy of other electric cars at say "San Diego" and allow the system to take said convoy to somewhere in "Los Angeles" and reassert control. This would solve a lot of the "last mile" problems that we currently have with train stations in the US (need to park at one terminus, need to get picked up at the other, can't deal with accidents on rails, etc.)…

They have trains you can just drive your car into. It's quite popular in Europe.

They are absolutely not popular. I've never heard of them, despite having both family and friends who went on yearly car trips across (one or more of) Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark.

Looking into it, it seems they were popular decades ago, but they've been all but shut down by the 2010s due to unprofitability, and only a handful of seasonal routes remain now.

Though who knows, if gas prices keep increasing, they might enjoy a brief resurgence for a decade or so until enough people have switched to EV.

But it will take quite a bit of an increase. I looked at the longest route, 1300km Hamburg-Verona (which would actually interest me!) and it costs 400 to 600€, depending on the date. That's well over twice as much as the current gas prices, even being generous; while I guess it includes sleeping arrangements, you could stay in a very fancy hotel with the money you saved.

Re: Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US

#210

Post by signatoremo »

winrid wrote: post #116
paxys wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been on Jeff's side of this bet since they announced it. Level 5 is simply too high of a bar to reach in the next few years, and in fact we are going about it the wrong way. We need smart roads more than smart cars. (Note that there's an escape hatch here, which is that the AI falls back to some human in a call center for guidance to get out of sticky situations. In my opinion that still doesn't qualify as lev…

> We need smart roads more than smart cars. Ah yes, trains. :)

Train is only accounted for 16% of travel done even in the place where it’s most popular in Europe (Switzerland). So no, train isn’t the answer. An important part, yes.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/449539/europe-railway-sh...

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