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Tesla Updates Autopilot To Make It Follow the Speed Limit On Roads (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Before a recent update that is being gradually pushed to Tesla owners, the automaker allowed its Autopilot to be set at a higher speed than the speed limit on all roads where the driver assist system could be enabled, but now Tesla is pushing a new update to make Autopilot follow the rules of the road more closely. Owners of Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot have, up until now, been able to set the speed of the Autopilot's 'Traffic-Aware Cruise Control' feature to up to 5 mph over the speed limit on roads and non-divided highways. Now they are restricted to following the speed limit exactly, without the 5 mph leeway. On highways, the speed limit doesn't have a direct effect on the Autopilot's speed. The speed is still limited by the Autopilot's overall 90 mph speed limit. Every time Tesla introduces new restrictions to its Autopilot system, it gets a mixed response from owners. While the new restrictions are often coming from the aspiration of making the system safer, some owners always see them as taking away capabilities that they already had and had paid for. With the introduction of the software update v8.0 in September, Tesla introduced a more aggressive "Autopilot nag," which prompts more 'Hold Steering Wheel' alerts.
only applies to autopilot.
Assuming that soon this will be the norm, then all cars will be going the same speed, until then if there is enough traffic that is at a dissimilar speed, just drive instead of autopilot and you're golden.
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Most sensible people expect that self-driving cars will go significantly above the speed limit, because the reasons for limiting them to the speed limit (inability to look everywhere at once and see people pulling out of driveways, see kids about to run across the street unexpectedly, etc.) don't apply when you have a dozen cameras being monitored continuously by an AI, nor do most common human failings like inattentiveness, inability to properly assess speed of traction loss on curves, poor judgment of road conditions in general, etc. Anyone who would expect a self-driving car to obey a speed limit intended for humans with human reaction time (particularly on open highways) is arguably insane, or at best, a complete luddite.
Similarly, self-driving cars need not continue to obey traffic lights once they have achieved critical mass....
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IMHO it just seems like yet another reason to not buy a Tesla.
If everyone else on the road is going 5-10 over the speed limit
What heavenly part of the world are you driving in?
My local observation is that there are always a significant minority drivers who insiste on driving 5-10 MPH below the speed limit, and get road-ragey at anybody passing them.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
So what you're saying is that a lot of people aren't following the rules and breaking the law, but the one vehicle actually being operated under the conditions of the permit is the hazard?
Also I'm sorry but that's just plain wrong. If you're unable to travel the speed limit and insist on needing to overtake you can do it safely and patiently. The only time it's unsafe is if you're an impatient douchebag. In the mean time over on the other side of the pond we have no problem sharing our roads doing 200+ km/h with trucks and other vehicles with a 90km/h speedlimit. And the USA has roughly double the road fatality rate of Germany in every metric be it per capita, per vehicle or per distance.
My grandfather always told me that the safest drive speed is the one that follow the traffic.
I got this example in my city (and I'm sure most of you can relate) of some big, perfect straight highway with 5 lanes where the maximum speed is crazily set at 70 km/h (45 mph). And, as you can guess, everyone, even the slow lane, goes over 100.
In my opinion, this is where corporate responsibility have entered too far in personal responsibility, kinda like I don't want my GPS to start an alarm and stop working if I go over the limit. So if there's an accident related to high speed where the user have set the speed over the limit, it's the driver's fault.
Elok
It not going to "soon be the norm"! Good lLord. get out of the basement and speak to real people - none of whom want this crap/
Especially the cities that rely on traffic tickets to pay for the city budget. Auto-driving cars that never violate traffic laws will be doom for many small towns.
I never said that they would be incapable of making mistakes. Initially, they have to be at least as good as humans, or we shouldn't let them on the road, but they need not be better (though many of these systems already are, statistically).
But in the long run, as they get better at driving (machine learning, etc.), they should quickly become dramatically better than humans. After all, humans learn from their mistakes individually; computers learn from their mistakes collectively.
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