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Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

theregister.com

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Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#541

Post by zaroth »

justapassenger wrote: post #455
simondotau wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sarcastic retort is not consistent with anything anyone is arguing. Nobody has said FSD is ready to be relied upon, least of all Tesla, who still calls it a "beta". This isn't what I said. This isn't what zaroth said. Nobody said it. So why did you say it? I realise this isn't a simple argument, but let me try again: DRIVE PILOT is ~100% capable of limited self-driving on ~0.01% of roads (a curated set of slow h…

I’m sarcastic as it’s hard to assume people argue here in either good faith or have any idea about the problem. Being capable of 90% self driving means it’s not self driving, period. And going to ~100% is extremely, extremely difficult. Anyone comparing those numbers to show Tesla’s superiority (or even being in the same league) just doesn’t understand anything about safety critical systems. What’s better - Airbus 32…

What Tesla has deployed and continues to develop is absolutely an L2 DAS in its current incarnation.

One day, if they are successful, you will see them rollout L3 operation. I would expect this to happen on highways first, and then off-highway. It would be a truly crowning achievement of software engineering and AI, a moonshot realized. I hope they get there.

I think their approach is sound and has proven merit. In the worst case they will have an L2 system that makes commutes more relaxing, and saves lives both inside and outside the vehicle.

But they are uniquely positioned with the massive amount of operational data they collect to solve this problem in a generic / worldwide fashion, and their iterative approach has put them years ahead of the competition.

Their solution is truly scalable, in that it doesn’t require geofencing nor extensive and constant local mapping of the world state in order for the vehicle to safely navigate through it.

Now, Elon openly and readily admits that the same optimism that leads him to try to tackle these moonshots in the first place is what also leads him to over-estimate how quickly they will surmount the challenges they face.

But, he has an extraordinary amount of capital, and an equal level of determination to reach his goals, and frankly no one else on the planet has a better track record for problem solving at this level.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#542

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sgc wrote: post #539
rcxdude wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owned. It's also extremely likely that it requires ride-sharing to be viable, which will substantially reduce traffic as well as car ownership (I suspect there may be enough cost pressure that most self-driving vehicles are more like minibuses than cars, which would also help a lot with pollution and congestion, but this may require regul…

Self driving fleets will be driving around to avoid parking while staying in the high use areas, and contributing a lot to traffic, perhaps more than if everyone just had their own car.

This isn’t a weird thing if you live in a place with lots of taxis. Beijing, for example, 25% of the cars are taxis, and if it isn’t really busy, you’ll be able to get one just by raising your hand on a minorly busy street.

Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#543

Post by voytec »

878654Tom wrote: post #538
voytec wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do we want from self driving cars? Security, by not making human mistakes. But this won't happen for a long time and probably never with people like Musk leading the way. Autonomous vehicles are a poor substitute for long-promised flying cars anyway.

Flying cars already exist, they are called helicopters. What you really want is the TCO of a car in a helicopter.

Helicopters are outside of reach of an everyday person. You can't drive them when you feel like it nor start your journey on your suburban driveway.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#544

Post by sgc »

afarrell wrote: post #531
vermilingua wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the highest paid single individual person on that list gets only a measly 8% of the total estimate per year , therefore we shouldn't tax the rich. The extreme mental gymnastics some people will go to to rationalize the current state of the world absolutely blows my mind.

If you want to change the world positively, the first step is accepting the current state of the world is what it is.

They were pointing out that you jumped from the CEO compensation in general they mentioned, to just pointing at one person, which does not reflect the state of CEO remuneration (and the wealthy in general, which they also referenced), at all.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#545

Post by throwawaypoll »

0xr0kk3r wrote: post #431
worik wrote: 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…

> What do we want from self driving cars? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size. I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars. But I'm also a grown-up of a certain age and realize the bright-eyed 20-something…

[flagged]

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#546

Post by opportune »

worik wrote: 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…

> That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it.

This already exists, provided the route is extensively mapped beforehand, in two separate products (Cruise, Waymo)

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#547

Post by 878654Tom »

voytec wrote: post #543
878654Tom wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying cars already exist, they are called helicopters. What you really want is the TCO of a car in a helicopter.

Helicopters are outside of reach of an everyday person. You can't drive them when you feel like it nor start your journey on your suburban driveway.

And so were cars at one point. Helicopters are still "flying cars", airplanes are "flying busses".

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#548

Post by justapassenger »

onethought wrote: post #527
justapassenger wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you’ll find Mercedes just don’t publish anything, where as Tesla pretty much develop in the open. Regardless of the sausage, some people just don’t like knowing how it’s made. Can you make this statement with a straight face? That a company develops machines that can kill you any second, up in the open, and have untrained people expose general public to those tests? How would you feel if I’d be developing m…

But they don’t. People ask to opt in to it. And that is exactly how human trials work in the medical test. So your analogy is apt. Are you saying Mercedes process is better? Where they haven’t done extensive testing and have a brand new drug that has actually never been properly tested in the wild? I’m confused what your point is.

Do you know you’re not the only user of the road? And there’s tons of videos, with predictable abuse, where people allow cars to do illegal/dangerous things to see “if it’ll figure it out”?

If Tesla influencer his me with his car, I didn’t consent to that. Or when erratic behavior (like FSD driving against the traffic, which you have tons of videos of) will cause others to crash - they didn’t consent to that.

Tesla has full “test in prod” approach to their FSD. You can see that from erratic regressions and hot fixes.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#549

Post by nradov »

afavour wrote: post #510
nradov wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous driving is just another safety and convenience feature, like cruise control or anti-lock brakes. It won't fundamentally change anything. I see no reason to give up owning my own cars even if they can drive themselves. The biggest reason is that I use my cars like a rolling storage locker or mobile base of operations when I'm out doing stuff. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of shared vehicl…

You may not want to deal with the hassle but I wouldn’t assume that applies to everyone. A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great thing…

The economics won't work outside some small niches. Any sort of car sharing service means a business is managing that service and charging high fees for it, in addition to passing on tax and insurance expenses to customers. The taxes and insurance on my own cars are cheap.

Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.

Re: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

#550

Post by axpy »

sampo wrote: post #466
AussieWog93 wrote: post #412

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…

> in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission Something like 60% to 80% of new cars in European countries are now sold with automatic transmission. And this figure is growing year to year. It will take a decade or two for the old manual cars to get replaced, though.

This is a very recent phenomenon driven by hybridization and fuel regulation (auto get better mileage because they have more gear). But you are right, they sell a lot more auto nowaday than they used to.
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