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Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

fortune.com

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Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#91

Post by ec109685 »

ra7 wrote: post #43
matsemann wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically if Tesla decided to self-insure when autopilot is engaged, it would be the same. So it's not the same as Tesla. Reading Reddit now that FSD has been available to not just those having bought into the hype has been interesting. It seems more stressful to use than just driving yourself.

Can confirm Tesla FSD is more stressful than driving yourself. I’ve been using it for a few weeks since they offered everyone free trial. Seems to be improved from the previous version, but still requires a ton of interventions every single drive. It’s cool to experience for people who are tech savvy, but nowhere near the realm of being useful and replacing your driving needs.

Not in the situations that Mercedes is allowing L3: some roads in traffic. The Tesla does really well there.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#92

Post by heyoni »

pavlov wrote: post #63
ra7 wrote: post #57

It operates under such specific conditions, it’s not very useful right now. Unless you spend a large part of your commute on clogged California highways, there’s not a big use case. But Mercedes would be hoping to expand that operational design domain (ODD). Ultimately, I don’t think their L3 technology is the groundbreaking part (I think they use Nvidia Drive). It’s that they are willing to take liability inside the…

> “commute on clogged California highways” It’s embarrassing for Tesla because they pretended they had this solved and practically ready to ship eight years ago, started taking customer money; still take customer money on promises of “Real Soon Now”; and yet it’s a bunch of staid old Germans who actually ship it.

I’m so glad I didn’t fall for it. Nearly bought one, then took it for a test drive at the dealership and it couldn’t even make a left turn correctly. Then I rented one on another trip because I wanted to test it more extensively and the car locked up because I activated some stupid easter egg that started playing a song with an animated gif all over the screen…even getting out of the car and locking it didn’t stop the damn thing and I literally just had to sit on the side of the road and wait it out. The weird thing is I haven’t been able to find that easter egg mentioned anywhere.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#93

Post by prepend »

kgwgk wrote: post #18
pound wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why Waymo is considered to be not living up to expectations? They operate in limited number of places, but seem to be just fine driving there (of course some people will not like them regardless). Tesla - yes, not comparable..

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/report-waymo-aiming-to-... "Even if Waymo's schedule slips a few months and it introduces a self-driving car service in the middle of 2018 instead of late 2017, that will still give the company a multiple-year head start over most of its rivals. And it would confound skeptics who insist that full self-driving technology is still years away." https://www.ft.com/content/3355f5b0-539…

That article is from 7 years ago. It seems unwise to make a judgement for today based on it.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#94

Post by ra7 »

bhauer wrote: post #81
ra7 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher. No one’s going to take liability if their technology is not ready for the conditions th…

The limitations of the Mercedes system are only a little higher than the hypothetical parking lot Level 3 system. The point is to emphasize that a narrow Level 3 system is not very interesting compared to a broad Level 2 system. Technical capability > appeasing lawyers.

Technical capability with known operating conditions (that can expand over time) > technical capability with unknown operating conditions.

Only one of them allows you to take liability.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#95

Post by prepend »

pb7 wrote: post #44
harles wrote: post #8

> As of April 11, there were 65 Mercedes autonomous vehicles available for sale in California ... One of those has since been sold, which marks the first sale of an autonomous Mercedes in California ... Those are pretty small numbers and strike me more as them testing the waters. It's neat to see some potential in the space after what felt like a total collapse with Waymo and Tesla especially not living up to expecta…

Grouping Waymo with anyone else including Cruise and Tesla is insane. You don’t know what you’re talking about frankly. Waymo is better than anyone else out there by a mile. Source: I take one daily.

Are there human “watchers” in your waymos? Or are they completely autonomous?

They just started testing in my city and have humans sitting there not doing anything. So it makes for kind of an uncomfortable ride. Chitchatting with the Uber driver is the worst part of my ride, so I’m looking forward to just robots.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#97

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

thibran wrote: post #47

A PR lie. Watch a Tesla FSD 12.3.4 video, then one of Mercedes and see for yourself.

FSD ver. 12 is a massive improvement over ver. 11, but not something I'd want to trust my life on. The vision system alone is reason not to trust it (it's just a "multiple choice" image classifier). The actual driving in ver. 12 (now neural net vs C++) looks much smoother.

The continuing problem is that at the end of the day these are just rule-based systems with zero intelligence. They'll work fine 99.9% of the time, and then do something life-threateningly inappropriate in the 0.1% of cases they were not trained to handle.

The only way to make these things as safe as a human driver is to base them on human-level AGI, which is still a long ways off in the future. I don't know if Musk is planning to add his Grok "AI" into the mix, but having a hallucinating chatbot as backup system or driver is not my idea of safety.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#98

Post by ra7 »

ec109685 wrote: post #91
ra7 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm Tesla FSD is more stressful than driving yourself. I’ve been using it for a few weeks since they offered everyone free trial. Seems to be improved from the previous version, but still requires a ton of interventions every single drive. It’s cool to experience for people who are tech savvy, but nowhere near the realm of being useful and replacing your driving needs.

Not in the situations that Mercedes is allowing L3: some roads in traffic. The Tesla does really well there.

Then Tesla should take liability in those conditions, if they are confident.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#99

Post by ra7 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #85
ra7 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is the only one actually scaling driverless taxis. They’ve gone from providing public rides in 1 city (Phoenix) to 3 cities (+SF, LA) with a 4th one (+Austin) coming soon. They’ve given more than a million rides, with the majority of them coming in the last year. No one else is doing this. If other companies thought they’d hitch on to Waymo after they started giving rides in 2017, then that’s on them. Because W…

"Taxi service in a congested urban area" is probably the market where it makes the most sense. Trips are pretty short, cars stay in the a local area where they have hyper-accurate mapping data, and are likely to quickly find another passenger or can return to a nearby parking/waiting area. Waymo won't keep a monopoly on this forever. There are still high barriers to entry, but they will fall sooner or later. If there…

Indeed congested urban areas are their market. That's exactly why they are in two of the largest taxi markets (SF and LA) where it doesn't snow.

I'm not sure about barriers to entry lowering soon. First off, this is an incredibly hard problem no one else seems to have cracked (and even Waymo has a long way to go). Second, they could help influence regulation that requires extremely high safety records, mandatory sensors, etc. which could make it harder for others to compete. It's all very early though.

Re: Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S.

#100

Post by flohofwoe »

bhauer wrote: post #64
homefree wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is amazing and has fully replaced Uber for me in SF. They're also expanding to the entire peninsula from SF down to Cupertino - you're out of date on this. Waymo driving in SF is way better than human. It's not timid either. This Mercedes post is marketing - it's not really what people consider autonomous given the constraints. > "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain cond…

> "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology. called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, includ…

> against Tesla's Supervised FSD Level 2 system

...those same Mercedes cars that have Level 3 also have a much more "powerful" and flexible Level 2 system built in, but this requires to keep a hand on the wheel and pay attention to the road (mentioned towards the end of this video, at around 6:15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLz95Gw7g8c)

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