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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.
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
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
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!"
It would an understatement to say that Elon Musk has made some outrageous predictions for his companies and the world. At this time, we can't be sure they'll come true because his due-dates are still in the future.
That said, it is believable to me that cross-country autonomy could be technically possible in 2 or 3 years. After all, going 33 feet is just the first step in going 33 more feet, and then 33 more, and so on. I think the current 33-foot limit is caused by early prudence rather than technology limitations.
What I find hard to accept the idea that it will be legally possible in 2 or 3 years. But, I wouldn't be surprised if Elon negotiated a special route with the governments of selected states, to provide a demonstration. And maybe a human convoy escorting it?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Google's self driving cars have racked up over 1 million miles in the past few years. They're probably already capable of a coast-to-coast autonomous trip - in good weather.
What's uncertain is if they can cope with really poor driving conditions.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I'd be willing to bet that they're better in really poor driving conditions than humans are. Probably by even a larger margin over humans than in ideal conditions. And they would understand the limits of their sensors and capabilities and pull over until the weather is conducive, rather than push on into conditions which were too treacherous for the capabilities of the vehicle or driver. That's one of the safe things about autonomous vehicles - they don't succumb to the pressure of wanting to get to a destination in unreasonable circumstances as humans often do.
Personally I think that it would be extremely unlikely for self driving cars to not become a reality. There is too much money being spent on it by too many smart people. It may be that the US ends up being late to the game though due to the nature of the US legal system.
Eventually. Like speech recognition, which also seemed to always be 3-5 years out until it finally went mainstream a few years ago. But I'm thinking more like 2030 or 2040 than 2020 at least around here, from what I can tell they haven't even begun to test snow and ice. I totally understand why they start with making it work under optimal conditions, but it also means they have a looooooooong way to go with non-optimal conditions.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Indeed.
I recall driving a rental car many years ago at about 9:30AM in a section of NYC that was very congested - and most of the cars were taxis (it was pretty much a sea of yellow). The only way to make progress was to play a little game of chicken with the taxi drivers and shove the nose of my car in front of their bumpers when there really wasn't enough room to do so "safely". And, that's exactly what they were doing with me and each other also so I didn't get honked at or cursed at -- it was just how you could get where you were going.
However everyone, myself included, was making what would be considered illegal lane changes and IF there had been an accident fault would have been allocated to the driver shoving their nose into the tiny bit of daylight between two cars in the adjacent lane.
I can't imagine that the google lawyers would let the engineers code the software to drive that way OR to come as close to pedestrians that were jaywalking here and there. I suspect a google self driving car would just sit there and start whimpering and maybe 12 hours later finally think it was safe to progress when traffic was lighter.
A more actual example... I was reading someone complaining because a google self-driving car was in front of them in a residential area and a garbage truck picking up rubbish was in front of the google car. The google car didn't have the sense to pass the truck (perfectly legal and what drivers normally do) as it stopped every 50 feet to pick up another bin all the way up the block. This left the person behind having to pass not only the truck, but the google car that was dutifully tailing the truck. The more google cars that piled up behind a garbage truck, the harder this passing would be.
In light rush hour where I live, there are all sorts of instances where merging onto a freeway requires playing a bit of chicken -- else you would end up at the end of the merge lane in a dead stop (and that's REALLY difficult to recover from and creates a giant mess for everyone). Sometimes someone will act unpredictably (either intentionally closing a gap to keep you from taking it or, more often, trying to "help" you at the last minute by trying to create a slot in front of them when you were planning on sliding in behind them). Other times, you just have to act like you're going to take a slot that's really a little too small to take without making someone slow down a bit (almost everyone is already closer to the car in front of them than they should be so there are no gaps to merge into leaving proper clearances behind and ahead of you). Again, I can't imagine the lawyers (or the programmers) allowing self-driving cars to be that aggressive and, in the end, I'll bet it won't be uncommon to see traffic jams caused by cars that couldn't merge "safely" so just stop at the end of the merge lane - that won't be popular.
Mixing self driving cars running code overseen by lawyers and conservative programmers with meat bag driven cars in congested situations seems to be very challenging. However, once on the freeway going in a straight line w/o any need to deviate, I'm pretty sure, on the average, self driving cars are/will soon be much safer than meat bag driven cars whose drivers are on their cell phone or shaving or putting on mascara (yep, I've seen that - amazing).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You might want to get a better grip on reality. Tesla Autopilot is already 80% of the way there, and the other 20% may not be available to consumers yet, but it has had millions of miles of testing...
It seems that Slashdot has been infested with willfully ignorant ball-less trolls. This is supposed to be a site for nerds. There is no greater nerd than Elon Musk. He is infused in sci-fi. He builds rockets...he designed much of the first SpaceX rocket (Falcon-1) himself. He builds arguably the best car in the world, and certainly the most technologically advanced (the Model S). It has the most advanced auto-driving features of any production car in the world. He literally bet the entire fortune he made from the sale of Paypal (200 million dollars) on Tesla and SpaceX after the 2008 market crash; most so called capitalists in our elite would never take such risks. Any libertarians amongst the readership here should worship Musk. He is more the Ayn Randian superhero than anyone I can think of. And if they return that Musk has taken some government help (like money for building the Dragon capsule to ferry cargo to the Space station for NASA or a $7500 subsidy for clean energy vehicle purchases), I would ask them what they think of defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin who receive 75% or more of their income from government contracts, or oil companies who have literally had wars fought in their name by governments. If those so-called libertarians don't denounce such things, then they are the worst type of corporate troll hypocrites.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Not until a terrorist puts a bunch of explosives in the trunk and auto-delivers them somewhere?