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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.
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!
My car went on a coast-to-coast trip without me and all I got was this lousy lawsuit.
I predict this feature will last exactly long enough for some organized crime hackers to amass a self-stealing fleet of Teslas.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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