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.

Comments

Seems overly optimistic

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[Deep Esophagus]

My car went on a coast-to-coast trip without me and all I got was this lousy lawsuit.

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[ClickOnThis]

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?

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[haruchai]

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...

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[haruchai]

City driving is MUCH harder than highway.

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[haruchai]

What?? They can't use Google Maps?! :-D

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[uncqual]

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).

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[Euler]

Exactly this. For this reason, I've found it easy to be dismissive of Google's claims. They have hardly discussed situations like this, not to mention bad weather, construction, etc. Google tends to promise big potential, then drop projects, because, hey, 'failure is good.'
The problem with Elon's claims is that he has credibility. He has a history of doing exactly what he claims and persevering at it. So he is either putting his credibility at risk, or he has some ace up his sleeve to mitigate _all_ of the odd cases in the short term.
I will say, in the long run the driverless car will change the nature of roadways in one way or another to eliminate the situations described. You can't really predict how these things unfold, but the basic underlying premise will change. But that is measured in decades, not 2 years.

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[del_diablo]

It could also end with most of New York losing their drivers licenses over the entry months of self driving cars. Simply by automating reporting of dangerous drivers.
Thats not even a scary ideal, but it would lead to lots of fun court time and messing around until the legal crisis that has been delayed for decades is forced to be solved.

Re:Seems overly optimistic

[Applehu Akbar]

"A million miles at no higher than 25mph."

Hasn't this already been done in Volvos?

Parking lot

[Ziest]

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.

Re:Parking lot

[wvmarle]

I think there is a reason these auto makers go for a "coast to coast" first. It's all highways, and easy driving.

Your problem is a much harder one: improperly mapped surroundings, lots of moving obstacles (ranging from people to dumpsters placed haphazardly), etc.

I'll be impressed when this car can do what you describe. Or navigate from one end of a big city to the other - without using the city's ring roads, but really going through city traffic, dealing with traffic lights, cyclists, detours, and all the other unexpected obstacles thrown at city drivers.

Re:Parking lot

[Harlequin80]

You are stuck using only visible light to perceive the world around you. Any autonomous system would have sensors that are working outside that band and hence are going to be more or less affected by various conditions. You would expect the system to use lidar, radar, and ultrasonic at the absolute minimum. It would also have sensors that are closer to the ground and at better angles than your eyes so while the lines may be invisible to you in the drivers seat the sensors can see them clearly.

My expectation of behaviour would be that the AI is able to make a remarkably accurate estimate of braking distance and then reduce its speed to a level where its sensor range exceeds that of braking distance + a margin of error.

Re:Parking lot

[adnonsense]

In pre-digital days I used to carry around a graphite-based stylus for noting the car's location on a carbon-based "tablet" with a nifty non-battery-reliant offline storage solution, though these days I just take a photo with my moble pocket computing device. Saves having to wait for reliable autonomous cars to be developed.

AI always wins

[penguinoid]

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.

Yeah, right.

[Irate Engineer]

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...

Re:cannonball run, anyone?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I predict this feature will last exactly long enough for some organized crime hackers to amass a self-stealing fleet of Teslas.

as barbaric as not washing hands

[liquid_schwartz]

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.

Re:as barbaric as not washing hands

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."
 
Oh God.... here we go again...
 
It was not and will not be mandated for some time due to technological limitations. The concept probably goes back decades or more but what will happen is that when it comes to fruition there will be a gaggle of Musk worshipers who will claim that no one had the idea before Musk and no one "worked" on the idea until after Musk brought it to the masses in a tidy little package. Anyone else who puts this out will be compared to Edison and called a thief and a cheat by this gang of fanboys. Endless Facebook memes will give Musk credit for making anything worthwhile in his lifetime and even credit him with some inventions that were patented before his lifetime just like how they're doing with Tesla today.
 
Musk was wise in choosing the name of his auto company as that's what he'll end up being in technology history.... another engineer given the credit for other peoples' work and others vilified for their accomplishments.
 
You losers will even be claiming that he was "an alien" that was "centuries ahead of his time" and without which we'd "still be living in the dark ages."

Re:as barbaric as not washing hands

[Harlequin80]

North West Rail Link (NWRL) which is a huge urban metro line in Sydney is driverless.

I see to funny problems

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:cannonball run, anyone?

[penguinoid]

That's why it will have espionage, ahem, security features!

Re:Bull Spit

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Bull Spit

[110010001000]

Different manufacturers (Lexus, BMW) have done automated highway driving for years. Highway driving is the easy one. I know you think Tesla invented the idea, but they really didn't. It isn't hard to make a car follow lane markers on a highway and avoid other cars. The hard part is the 20% of the rest. Get a grip on how complex non-highway driving is.

When are we getting the 40K car?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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?

Re:cannonball run, anyone?

[gweihir]

"Self stealing", indeed. Nice! I predict that it will take far longer than 10 years to make this sufficiently secure.

Re:Bull Spit

[catchblue22]

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.

Re:cannonball run, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not until a terrorist puts a bunch of explosives in the trunk and auto-delivers them somewhere?

Re:Bull Spit

[bigpat]

... 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.

You can say that about most human drivers...