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Tesla and Autopilot Supplier Mobileye Split Up After Fatal Crash (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Tesla and Mobileye, one of the top suppliers to its Autopilot partial self-driving system, are parting ways in the wake of the May accident that killed an owner of one of its electric Model S sedans. Mobileye is considered a leader in developing the equipment that will be needed for fully self-driving cars. The Israeli tech company will continue to support and maintain current Tesla products, including upgrades that should help the Autopilot system with crash avoidance and to better allow the car to steer itself, said Chairman Amnon Shashua in releasing the company's second-quarter earnings Tuesday. Shashua said moving cars to higher levels of self-driving capability "is a paradigm shift both in terms of function complexity and the need to ensure an extremely high level of safety." He added there is "much at stake" in terms of Mobileye's reputation, and that it is best to end the relationship with Tesla by the end of the year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meeting with reporters at the company's new battery Gigafactory outside Reno, indicated that Tesla can go forward without Mobileye. "Us parting ways was somewhat inevitable. There's nothing unexpected here from our standpoint," Musk said. "We're committed to autonomy. They'll go their way, and we'll go ours."
I bought a car recently.
It has 'frontal collision avoidance' and 'speed limit reader' built in. It does that with a bit of lidar and a bit of camera work. Actually pretty cool CS wise.
The car companies have a real issue on their hands. Sun and temperature blindness. Twice already my car has freaked out and went into an error mode. The temp on the dashboard was easily over 120f (~50c) (the camera is behind the driver mirror). The camera freaked out and just stopped working. All of the other cameras that the car would let me see out of were smeary and 'grey'. You could tell the temp had basically made the sensor over sensitive. So the second I got a couple of reflections off a truck in front of me the system stopped working. Now some of you may be thinking 'oh just take it in'. Already done. 'common problem in the summer'. Bit or research on the internet? Same thing. Parked the thing in the garage and everything was fine again. Now these things are basically 'toys' in my car. But if they were important for real day to day usage I would be a bit more mad.
I am excited for the upcoming self driving car revolution. But it will be awhile. I would not buy one and rely on it too much today. They will need to put some very high end camera parts in these things. I am not seeing that today with the ones I have seen. Most are in the 720 and lower range with poor color contrast, and poor refresh. Little better than a cell phone camera from 10 years ago.
One human was at fault for failing to yield to oncoming traffic.
100% Wrong. The truck was completely in the right. The road was completely clear of traffic when the truck made its turn. The moron in the lemon was speeding.
The driver sets the maximum speed when they activate the autopilot, in much the same way as you set the speed when you use cruise control on any other car. Or are you saying speeding isn't the responsibility of any driver if they're using cruise control to break the limit?
Autopilot will slow down if there is traffic ahead, otherwise it travels at the speed set by the driver.
-- Pete.
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