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Coast-To-Coast Autonomous Tesla Trips 2-3 Years Out, Says Elon Musk (google.com)
Jalopnik reports that Elon Musk's predicted window for being able (for Tesla owners, that is) to call up your autonomous car and have it find its own way from New York to California, or vice versa, is astonishingly close: 24-36 months from now. From the article:
As far as the summoning feature is concerned, Tesla plans for the 33-foot range to greatly expand—soon. Within two years, Musk predicted that owners will be able to summon their car from across the country.
“If you’re in New York and your car is in Los Angeles, you can summon your car to you from your phone and tell the car to find you,” Musk said. “It’ll automatically charge itself along the journey. I might be slightly optimistic about that, but not significantly optimistic.”
In getting from one place to another, Musk said autopilot “is better than human in highway driving, or at least it will be soon with machine learning.” If it’s not already better than human, Musk said it will be within the coming months.
But right now, Musk said the car still needs a human around, just in case.
“The car currently has sensors to achieve that cross-country goal,” Musk said. “But you’d need more hardware and software, you’d need more cameras, more radars, redundant electronics, redundant power buses and that sort of thing.
you know it will happen.
Their "self parking car" can just barely back itself out of a garage (limited to up to 39 feet) without anyone in the car. It seems unlikely that they'll transition from this to true autonomous long distance operation in 3 years.
Hey investors! My teleporter is 2-3 years out, give me money, thanks.
You can't even get Federal approval for such a thing in 5 years, let alone 2-3. And the technology isn't even close to being done. I personally doubt it is possible to make the technology work reliably, ever.
How long till the Tesla car summons me?
To summon your car from the East coast and have it drive.....empty..... to the West coast...what a waste of energy.
As long as energy is not "green" that's so incredibly poluting, let alone the extra kilometers you make the car go.
Would be better imo, to make a subscription model where you would order a nearby Tesla.
But hey...wouldn't that be like an autonomous taxi you have the option to drive yourself?
The law may not be ready that quick and what happens with some thing goes wrong in driver less mode with no one in the car?
Will the car even try get out of the way of a road block with out even trying to due it (just that base don't crash mode)
How long till the Tesla car and other deep AI summon us?
So the contest is on....which hacker can get a Tesla to do the cannonball run the fastest. New York to LA, the games are on.
I want a car that will drop me off at the store or the movies, go park itself and when I'm ready it will come to me in front of the store. The endless walking around in parking lots trying to remember where I park the car is a giant pain in the ass.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Your Tesla will drive itself onto an autonomous ocean-going barge which will set off around the Cape of Good Hope to dock on the other coast where the barge will disgorge a smouldering heap of wreckage.
SNAKE FUCKING OIL!
It's like with cops and robbers. The thief needs to get lucky every single time, the cops only need to get lucky once. With AI it's even more unfair, not only does the AI only need to learn to drive once, after which it is always better -- but it can be incrementally improved besides, and possesses fundamentally superior perception and reaction time.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
wtf r u sayin fam
That's a good one. And I'm sure Elon Musk is going to be launching rockets and flying them back to land softly on a pad for reuse.
Oh, wait...
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Don't worry, the car makes stops in Colorado where a load of weed is added to resell when it hits LA.
Not to mention that when you summon the car an Uber alert pops up asking if anyone wants to go to your destination.
Hey, someone has to pay for the R&D.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the near term future, say 3-8 years, accident injuries and deaths will plummet as this technology is adopted. The notion of letting just anybody drive with minimal training will seem as barbaric as surgery without washing your hands first. The cost savings in both human suffering as well as dollars will have us scratching our heads on why we didn't mandate this earlier. I fully expect my grandchildren to be both amazed as well as slightly horrified that I drove along with millions of others at high speed despite the risk of drunks / sleepy / distracted drivers killing us.
...hack a persons account and you'll soon be able to steal his brand new Tesla!
"No officer, I didn't steal it, it followed me home... all the way from Florida!"
Why should they wait for "laws to be ready"? If every innovator would do that, we'd be still riding around on horses. When the car was invented, there for sure were no vehicle liability insurances. I'm sure that got sorted out soon enough after the first accidents though. Here the same. Let it happen. Of course the auto makers will do their utmost best for no accidents to happen (it's part of their business model after all), but it will happen, and then we'll see.
Things will be sorted out soon enough. First figure out who is liable for the accident - I bet most of the times it is not the autonomous car. But if it is the autonomous car, it will be up to the courts to find liability, and it's going to be insurer from one side versus manufacturer on the other side. The courts will hand down a judgement, maybe a few more such incidents, and there's precedent. Laws may be updated or amended it the court ruling goes against what the public wants, and that's it.
You're either a genius or a madman. But, I'm a gambling man, so I'll go with genius!
How much do you need for your business plan, and will you accept payment via shares in a Namibian corundum expedition?
The law may not be ready that quick and what happens with some thing goes wrong in driver less mode with no one in the car?
I don't know, but the lawyers already have dollar signs in their eyes and they are rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the law suits.
The first funny problem is when you are in NYC and you accidentally bum dial your LA car to come get you. You arrive back in LA to find your car "stolen" so you bring up you app to find that it is getting its kicks on route 66.
The other is when you move from NYC to LA but still haven't updated your contact list to say that "Home" is in LA not NYC. You drunkenly get into your car and say, "Home James" it then proceeds to take you to your old address in NYC. You are hung over so you don't wake until 2pm, 12 hours after leaving. It has been doing a fairly steady 70 for 12 hours, putting you over 800 miles from home. Also this translates to a 12 hour ride to return.
Why do you think you even need federal approval to do this?
I say lets try and see what happens? I don't feel any less comfortable with computer driven cars on the road than I do with the typically inattentive driver with an ill-maintained car... something featuring a spare donut tire being driven at 75 MPH plus (designed for 50MPH!)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
insurance will be all over this like a cheap suit, once functioning, full autonomous driving will be practically mandated by insurance companies.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Meh, this is hardly breaking news. Im sure I saw this done back in the 80's by a Mr Michael Knight.
Well, on the highways that the Feds pay for ... Yes, you do. These things will never be certifiable, as they're bragging about machine learning which is non-deterministic and therefore no responsible certifying body will approve it for life safety critical applications. I'm sure that musk could buy legislators to certify it, but that's a very bad "rich people only" stink to have.
I think you need it, because, um, you do. You don't think you can drive non-approved vehicles on public roads do you? You need Federal approval of kids car seats! You need state approval as well depending on the road you are on.
It's not rocket science.
Come on Elon. You think coast-to-coast autonomous car is possible in 2 years but you can't give us a 40K car in 2 years?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As long as in the worst case you are ready to due some hard time as you are the owner / the one who requested the car and when it hit the school bus well the local Officer Barbrady things you just ran off after crash.
criminal liability? Tickets?
As for tickets there are ones that go to the car and other ones that go to the driver (points) how will that work? What about the courts? What about must show up court tickets?
In what situation would you ever need to do this? So you fly to NY, then decide you'd like your car there and wait for it to drive itself to you? I can see this being a really neat perk for when you buy the car online or something, but if someone wants there car somewhere normally they'd just prefer to drive it there I think. Musk is starting to remind me of Michael O'Leary the CEO of Ryanair, making crazy claims that help people make small talk at parties. It's just marketing, and it works.
You know, that makes sense when you can't kill thousands of people. However, the laws are already ready (stay off public streets) and fortunately most people are more responsible than you.
Well, on the highways that the Feds pay for ... Yes, you do. These things will never be certifiable, as they're bragging about machine learning which is non-deterministic and therefore no responsible certifying body will approve it for life safety critical applications.
Sure they will be certifiable. There are no standards that will prevent it.
NHTSA issues the FMVSS, which establish minimum performance requirements for safety systems; anything not required by a FMVSS standard is outside NHTSA's jurisdiction, in regards to manufacture and import of vehicles, So no issue there, since there is no current law requiring certification of the Autonomous Vehicle Machine-Learning software; there is no requirement that operation be provably deterministic.
I think you need it, because, um, you do. You don't think you can drive non-approved vehicles on public roads do you?
What is unapproved about the vehicle itself brainiac? It's totally street legal. What do you think street legal refers to anyway....
It just at times has no driver.
Think before you post please.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AI works on an extremely limited problem space. The talent in getting AI working is in slicing up and reducing the problem space into multiple layers of agents.
When you take the amount of data a human has to drive, the problem is quite massive and difficult to learn; if not impossible with the current state of tech/AI. So we cut down the input and the complexity of the environment in which it lives to extremely simplistic levels within small niches (sub problems) then we combine many specialized agents together into one big AI.
Adding more input than a human gets and modeling the environment in more detail than a human is making the problem more complex than what a human has to deal with. This approach works against you in an astronomical way; it only benefits you if you can filter/reduce that input to lower than human levels (essentially creating a summary of superior input which is more simple so the AI can actually do sometihg with it.)
I definitely want to pay a steep premium to purchase my own tiny little train car. I especially can't wait until the release the software update that automatically drives me to the police station if the computer hears me say anything seditious.
If you're flying cross-country, would be cool to send your car off a few days earlier and have it pick you up from the airport when you arrive.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Human learning is non-deterministic as well, yet they've issued hundreds of milliions of diver's licenses. If they can thoroughly demonstrate the cars driving at least as well as humans, they'll get approval.
> after all, going 33 feet is just the first step in going 33 more feet, and then 33 more, and so on.
A journey of three thousand miles begins with one step - Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
Can I keep it?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Musk is a businessman first, nerd second. And this is a site for nerds - nerds most of whome probably drive and can see the huge number of situations in which a self drive car is going to exhibit behaviour very very far from the optimal, all of which have been mentioned in other posts so I won't re-iterate. If you want to swallow the musk kool aid thats up to you, but those of us who see beyond the blantant marketeering and angling for investment cash might hold off on the congrats for a while.
A couple of obvious gotchas... 1. What if your Tesla suffers a mechanical failure like a puncture whilst en route? Will it simply phone the nearest Tesla-approved repair centre? What about access to move the vehicle to make a wheel swap safely? Will the repair technician be granted access? 2. What about the pranksters? In the days of rail freight we've had the local hoodlums sat on a bridge with a rifle and a box full of ammo... What is to stop the same jokers prancing Tesla owners by shooting out the windows of an unaccompanied car? 3. What about insurance? Say your Tesla does get hit by pranksters such that it does the journey but when it reaches you it has been badly damaged? Will insurance companies have to treat that like a hit-and-run? Don't get me wrong, this has some potential benefits, but I would be concerned that owners would end up picking up the cost from all these unforeseen events, like it or not...
His company won't be doing much of anything if the markets sh!t themselves in the next 2-3 years. He should figure out the problem of profitability before he tries carless driving cross country. Not a lot of good can keep occurring if he keeps taking out equity to pay the bills.
If you default on the car loan, it can then repossess itself and just drive away.
playmoney.me - The free alternative to paper board game play money
Why would I need insurance if I'm no longer in control of my own vehicle? At least, why would I need liability insurance if I'm no longer in control of my vehicle.
Liability should clearly be with the manufacturer if it is shown to be a defect or design flaw in the collision avoidance system. Otherwise, you will have a full set of sensor data to show if it is another drivers fault or no-fault due to road conditions.
Plus the whole "machine learning" thing he's counting on to make this work sounds more like a buzzword than any kind of reality. Machines don't learn. We don't even understand how we learn or how our brain works, and we certainly haven't made any serious progress in making a machine "learn". What we have done is come up with better statistical models and the ability to update those models and rulesets, which can allow the car to make better programmatic choices in a larger variety of situations, but really, there's no learning going on. Just humans continuing to refine and fine tune code that handles hard problems. If his humans can get the technology working in three years (which sounds overly optimistic to me too), then great, but it's not like you can just send the car to a driver's ed course and it will "machine learn" how to drive better while in the class.
And I do agree with others who are skeptical that the security implications of this have been worked out. I'm particularly not a fan of a car being able to go long distances without a human in it. I think the range should be limited to a couple blocks for parking convenience purposes, and that's it. Otherwise, you have the possibility of terrorists being able to construct car bombs in rural areas far from the eyes of the law, and then remotely command the cars to drive to populated areas and blow up while they sit undetected in safety somewhere. I don't think the human should necessarily have to be in the driver's seat, but there ought to be someone in the car to prevent these things from becoming autonomous warfare drones.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
because the operator agreement for self driving vehicles would require it, and the AI won't drive without verifying current coverage.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Do you just wait for stories on any new technology so that you can post "what happens when the hackers get ahold of that?"? Do you have any idea how much that makes you look like a retarded Debbie Downer?
You call your car to you across the state lines... and it shows up with a kilo of weed under the seat.
How did it get there? You don't know! It's a mystery. Maybe it fell in through the sunroof?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens