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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."
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.
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)
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
Tesla ditched Mobileye, and not the other way around. Mobileye's stock went down by 10% after this. Tesla's didn't.
Welcome to slashdot, where the moderators are dumbfucks and the points don't matter. Guess what? Mobileeye ditched Tesla, to spend more time working with other manufacturers. They probably saw the writing on the wall: Tesla wants to control every part of their car internally, and working with Mobileye was just a way to get their foot in the door sooner with a product. Sooner or later, Tesla would have dropped them. While their stock has taken a big hit since the announcement, it's probably best for them in the long run. It's also great for Tesla, since they can deflect some of the blame onto their now-departed partner.
Whose stock dips after an announcement doesn't inherently tell you anything, mostly because the market is not rational.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"