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Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

theregister.com

421–430 of 778 posts

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#421
post #367

What do we want from self driving cars? Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap. That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it. Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) i…

I’ve been using self-driving cars for a while in SF. I just order one in the app, it comes, drives me to where I want to go. It’s like uber except that it’s for free (for now) and no driver.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#422
post #367

What do we want from self driving cars? Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap. That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it. Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) i…

Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission, yet the drivers there are much safer than than people in the US or Australia. There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do. I wonder if other technology would h…

The driver test is super hard and expensive in France. Never got it for this reason even after spending 1k euro on it. Came to the US and got the driver license in a week for like 200$ including lessons lol

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#423
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety features cost money; it doesn’t bother me for them to be optional, especially since the alternative for novel ones is more likely “not offered” or “everyone is forced to buy them” rather than “given away for no charge”.

Safety features also save money, though? Through the safety. Makes sense that we could mandate they exist.

You can (and we have mandated some). Most of those that are now mandated followed a pattern of being developed as an optional, premium-charge feature, which is unsurprising and probably drives much of the development of new safety features.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#424
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you 2:1 odds that before this reaches market (looks like end of the year for deliveries per the article) Tesla will duplicate the stunt and lift the driver monitoring requirements in similar situations. (Edit: two replies here playing gotcha games with prior FSD announcements. But I'm serious: Tesla can do what this Mercedes does already, essentially perfectly, and has been for the two years I've operated t…

> I'll give you 2:1 odds that before this reaches market (looks like end of the year for deliveries per the article) Tesla will duplicate the stunt and lift the driver monitoring requirements in similar situations. I'll put $100 to the charity of your choice.

are u saying current tesla CAN"T do this?

40mph with a lead vehicle in daytime on a highway?

TODAY, my model3 (on FSD beta) can go 40-80mph, without lead vehicle in night anywhere, AND take turns, watch lights, watch for pedestrians, monitor who came first in stop sign...etc etc... TODAY. Not 2 years from now.

where do i signup?

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#425
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want cheap trains everywhere.

I mean that's a bus or Bus Rapid Transit, because a train requires dedicated infrastructure and is a fixed route. A bus can route around problems where a train cannot. In Boston they're trying to connect North Station and South Station, a distance of about 5 miles. The cost is at least $10 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_Rail_Link

A bus is still limited to highway speeds for any significant distance. It solves the issue of not needing to drive, but it doesn’t provide a sufficiently faster alternative.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in the AV space, it's really frustrating how confidently people who have no idea about what's hard and what isn't go off about Tesla right now. Mercedes has soundly beaten the last decade of Tesla efforts by reaching L3. I've personally watched FSD go off the rails and into a crash situation within 60 seconds of being turned on three times this month (I have a friend who loves to try it in San Francisco) Had…

> People also don't seem to understand Mercedes has a separate L2 system that works above 45 mph that already scores better than AP by consumer reports Isn't Mercedes' L2 system non-upgradable, though? i.e. people with Merc's L2 system today won't be able to upgrade to L3+ later on, they'll need to buy a whole new car - right? I bring this up only because I bought my X in 2018 with FSD prepaid - it's 5 years old now,…

>I bring this up only because I bought my X in 2018 with FSD prepaid

Mine came as standard equipment.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#427
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission, yet the drivers there are much safer than than people in the US or Australia. There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do. I wonder if other technology would h…

Lead footing is a phenomenon exclusive to automatics. Basically, you are on a 35mph road maybe, you lead foot some, the car shifts from third to the overdrive gear, now you are going like 45 or 50mph with the engine barely making any noise, you thinking this is just fine. On a manual, you'd know if you were in third and went to 50mph—the engine would be howling at another couple thousand rpm depending on the car. Goi…

I think it’s a lot of factors because when driving an automatic ‘99 Honda Accord, it’s pretty obvious when you’re not driving 35mph anymore.

That said, after driving the same vehicle for a while, at least for me, I can usually guess how fast I’m going.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#428
post #43

Friendly reminder that this system is HEAVILY limited, with the following restrictions: - Must be under 40 mph - Only during the daylight and only on certain highways - CANNOT be operated on city/country streets - CANNOT be operated in construction zones - CANNOT be during heavy rain or fog or flood roads And for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZSZTKYEU4 Tesla FSD navigating the complex city streets of…

Yea you will struggle to find a single video of drive pilot where it’s not driven by a representative from Mercedes. In those, you can see the system disengage the second it doesn’t have a vehicle to follow at slow speeds right in front of it (like when the vehicle ahead changes lanes). Useless.

It is sad to see how many people in this thread will assume the absolute worst with respect to Tesla's FSD capabilities and then will accept this Level 3 announcement from Mercedes in the most charitable way possible. It requires little effort to achieve Level 3 in extremely constrained situations. For example, it would be almost trivial for any autonomy company to achieve "Level 3" at 5 miles per hour within a specific geography. 40 MPH with all of the other limitations of this system is simply not very interesting.

It seems many people in this thread are highly motivated by prior bias toward the negative on Tesla; far more than those of us who appreciate what Tesla is doing.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#429
post #367

What do we want from self driving cars? Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap. That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it. Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) i…

Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission, yet the drivers there are much safer than than people in the US or Australia. There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do. I wonder if other technology would h…

> There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving.

I am highly skeptical of this. I am sure auto insurers in the US have looked at the statistics, and if it were true, they would be charging higher premiums for automatics than manuals.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#430
post #404
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not get to assume safety in a safety-critical system, period. The burden of proof lies with the entity trying to release a dangerous product to prove that it is safe, not demand everybody else to prove that it is unsafe. The entire argument that there is no evidence that it is unsafe and thus it is okay is wrong to its very foundation. It is such a bad argument that a licensed engineer would stand a good chanc…

First, thanks for being an asshole. Second, the product has been released, I did not engineer it, and people online are arguing about it. I’m interested in whether the criticism I’m seeing is valid. Is your idea that anyone who claims something is unsafe, for any reason, should be immediately trusted? If not, how do we have such a discussion? How do we weed out poor arguments? I gave a first-principles argument for w…

It is assumed unsafe. It must be proven safe. This can be done via a engineering, statistical, or other appropriate analysis done by entitys with full access to the design specifications, usage information, etc. who are competent to do the analysis and who have no conflict of interest/unbiased. This has not been done for Tesla FSD therefore it must be assumed to be unsafe. As Tesla deliberately misclassifies their Full Self Driving Beta testing program to avoid government reporting requirements and does not release raw data to any unbiased non-government entity or research organization, it is literally impossible for any external analysis to prove that Tesla FSD is safe. The most a third party can do is affirmatively prove that it is unsafe as you need millions of times less information to affirmatively prove it is dangerous relative to existing systems.

I am not joking when I say millions of times less information. The aggregate motor vehicle fatality rate in the US is ~1.3 per 100,000,000 miles. To even have a chance of proving safety you would need to analyze on the order of 1,000,000,000 miles exhaustively. In contrast, to demonstrate it is not safe you would only need a list of like 20 fatalitys over those same billion miles to affirmatively prove it is unsafe. A list of 20 names versus the raw data for 1,000,000,000 miles is at least a factor of millions in information required and qualitatively different to achieve. Proving safety is enormously difficult and basically requires direct access to the raw information. Proving unsafety is extremely easy and can be relatively easily demonstrated by third partys when dealing with safety critical systems.

Safety engineering is not some sort of new idea that we need to reinvent by the seat of our pants from first principles, it is a mature methodology regularly deployed in aerospace, medical, civil, and automotive engineering applications. Assumptions of safety are fundamentally incompatible with safety critical engineering. This is not a fringe opinion, it is literally a core concept at the foundations of safety critical engineering and not understanding that concept demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of modern safety. It is like a geologist arguing the Earth is flat; anybody who suggests such a idea is so fundamentally divorced from the ideas of the field that their knowledge not only fails to reach the level of a expert, they fail to reach the level of even a basic practitioner.

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