Slashdot Mirror
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."
Shocked! I say I'm shocked that a boutique car made by a startup company directed by an eccentric tycoon could possibly have had a supplier or design change. Unfathomable!
First world problems mate.
Impressed but not surprised Mobileye would ditch Tesla. If one of my customers was using my shit recklessly on public beta experiments that got people killed I would ditch them too.
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.
I'm not at all convinced that anything will change. Car companies have to be forced by the government to spend $5 on seat belts, they're always going to be looking for the absolute minimum cost to produce economy/midrange vehicles and full automation will never fit into that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most people buy a Tesla because it's electric and fast, NOT because it has a bot.
Table-ized A.I.
Two humans and one computer failed to avoid the collision. One human was at fault for failing to yield to oncoming traffic. Fatal accidents involving left hand turns are common.
About 100 people die every day on US roads. Beyond regretting that yet another person failed to yield while turning left in front of traffic and it resulted in a death what, exactly are we supposed to care about regarding that particular accident?
I don't know how many lives would be saved with autonomous vehicles, I only know that about 30,000 deaths a year on the roads are caused by human errors. Far more accidents involving serious injuries and billions of dollars in damage also occur each year due to human errors.
To quote Elon Musk:
“This was expected and will not have any material effect on our plans. MobilEye’s ability to evolve its technology is unfortunately negatively affected by having to support hundreds of models from legacy auto companies, resulting in a very high engineering drag coefficient. Tesla is laser-focused on achieving full self-driving capability on one integrated platform with an order of magnitude greater safety than the average manually driven car.”
This sounds quite reasonable to me. Tesla wants to go faster than anyone else in autopilot. Mobileye starts selling its chips to many car-makers. Mobileye is unwilling to make a special chip only for Tesla. Tesla then decides to come up with their own solution, using their in house chip expertise as well as possibly other companies' products (Nvidia perhaps?). This post is a subtle troll on Tesla.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
LIDAR is likely not the best tool for self-driving cars. It has problems in snow and rain. Radar and video are likely better, especially radar that makes a sparse point cloud, as Tesla's is going to do in the next update.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Two musky stories in a row? Some PR firm must be getting some big dollars.
Not really. Lots of people just really like Musk's products. I mean, he landed a fucking rocket on a boat! He makes the world's fastest production SUV. His autopilot is orders of magnitude better than the competition.
Musk is in some ways similar to Steve Jobs. Early on, trolls would shit over Apple products. Too expensive. Too simple. Then Jobs guided Apple to be the most profitable company in the world. Why? Because people liked Apple products. Musk received nearly 400000 pre-orders for their next car. Why? Because people liked the car when they saw it. It wasn't some tricky marketing campaign. People just like how the Model 3 looks, and how it performs.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
That's another thing. The speeding. Autopilot breaks the law and LOGS IT.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Despite initially feeling the same as you about the Autopilot name, I've been cooling rapidly on it for one simple reason: in practice an aviation autopilot can handle pretty much anything that it is likely to encounter well enough for a distracted pilot to take many seconds assessing any crisis situation before having to take control. And that's key, because if the pilot's input is not needed, then human nature dictates that they're likely to be distracted when a situation that *does* need their input arises.
Tesla's Autopilot is not yet anywhere near that competent, not because it's technical competency is lacking in comparison, quite the opposite in fact, but because its expected operating environment is far more crowded and chaotic, and most crises will unfold far more rapidly, having already reached a conclusion before an inevitably distracted driver can hope to assess the situation. As such, Autopilot will need to be FAR more competent than it currently is just to be able to offer the same level of real-world functionality and safety as its relatively crude aviation counterpart.
I'd say it's currently got 70-80% of the needed functionality worked out, which means, as any programmer can attest, that only 90% or so of the work remains to be done.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
I think the name "autopilot" starts to suffer the same fate as the name "hacker": they both have a precise meaning, but in the general use by the public, the meaning has shifted
Hacker used to be someone who is good at McGuyvering, at finding creative uses, etc.
But the press ended up using it for Cracker, someone who just breaks into things, not necessarily showing any creativity.
Same happenned with Autopilot: in aviation, it is a very precise thing - an apparatus which can take care automatically of the small minute details of flying the plane. The human need to provide it an order (a destination) and then only watch over it and control that everything is going well, but not actually hold the commands themselves.
Nobody has ever deigned this for the whole crew to take a nap while it is on.
Same in a boat: the autopilot will keep a destination, so you don't need to hold the wheel. That doesn't mean that you should be napping, you still need to whatch out for dangers, obstacles, etc.
But suddenly, the general public has taken a different meaning: as you say, now the think of it as Chauffeur: the Chauffeur (not necessarily electronic, it can be a human) takes care of everything, while you can safely take a nap or whatch some harry potter.
Elon should have called it "Ship's Commander mode" (as the one which gives orders instead of holding the wheel) sound both mor awesome and a little bit less passive role for the driver.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Lasers, obviously!
Remember George Hotz?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6...
He developed some self-driving technology and Elon offered him a job with a bonus if they developed technology independent of MobileEye. Elon has wanted to part ways with them for a while.
The accident gives him the excuse he needs.
Elon likes to do as much as possible in-house. You see that in both Tesla and SpaceX.
Gee really nice, asshole. You want my kid to die?
No, I want you to die before making him, but causality prohibits it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"