GM Exec Says Elon Musk's Self-Driving Car Claims Are 'Full of Crap' (smh.com.au)

An anonymous reader quotes the Sydney Morning Herald: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's claims about the self-driving capabilities of his upcoming Tesla vehicles are "full of crap", General Motors' self-driving Tsar says... "To think you can see everything you need for a level five autonomous car [full self-driving] with cameras and radar, I don't know how you do that"... GM's own solution involves several radar and Lidar sensors, as well as cameras and multiple redundancy systems. Each system costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and GM are some way away from getting the cost low enough to be commercially viable. "The level of technology and knowing what it takes to do the mission, to say you can be a full level five with just cameras and radars is not physically possible," Mr Miller said.

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[nospam007]

GM can't do it.

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[Sarten-X]

I'm sorry, but as an ex-roboticist, I have to disagree. The centralized approach is actually expected to be significantly more difficult.

Driving isn't the problem. There have been partially-automated train systems for decades, and some fully-automated ones more recently. We can easily make a system, centralized or not, to get travelers to their destination. The far more difficult aspect is dealing with the unpredictable interference. Children run into the streets. Animals think train tracks are comfortable beds. Storms knock down trees and flood routes. Every winter, potholes turn small cracks into large hazards.

To detect those problems, we have two approaches. The centralized approach is to have a vast array of sensors constantly monitoring every foot of roadway. That's a lot of sensors, so even being cheap inductive loops still puts the total cost in the billions. Unfortunately, "cheap" and "secure" are often mutually-exclusive. If the sensors can be hacked at scale, reality starts permitting the movie plots involving forcing an armored car or emergency responders to take the criminals' chosen route. Of course, with that many sensors, you also need a massive infrastructure project (and budget) to handle the input. That centralized coordinating computer has to be a supercomputer, even with modern processing, just to properly handle the ever-changing status of the roads. That's not even including the routing and coordination aspect, which would also need to scale as people are traveling. Coordinating a few million vehicles in a hurricane evacuation is no small feat.

Fortunately, the other approach makes a lot of those scaling issues disappear. By having a swarm of autonomous vehicles, the total sensing domain is limited to what's in the vehicle's immediate area, and to a lesser extent what will be in its future route. Rather than monitoring the whole road space, each vehicle can monitor just the road it's interested in. Detected hazards can be communicated to other vehicles, but that's merely advice given out of courtesy. Each vehicle looks out for itself, and as such the available processing capability naturally scales with the processing capability that is required. As technology improves, the new technology is deployed with new vehicles, remaining compatible with old vehicles operating in the same shared roadway, including those with no autonomous function. They are treated as minor hazards, just like any other object in sight.

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[ShanghaiBill]

No. there is an addtional pair of sensors that are critical- especially to accident avoidance.

The ears.

Nope. Deaf people can drive, and they have no higher rate of accidents than non-deaf people.

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[mSparks43]

tesla and amd collaboration should make more sense to you now then.
All of these are mostly solved problems for computer vision.
The problem is the latency from pixels to world model, currently botched by oversimplifying the world model. going massively parallel through a couple of threadrippers should give both the cost and performance needed to not oversimplify anywhere near as much.
I reckon musk has recently seen just how realistic a world model they can get from that performance, which is why he believes level 5 is within reach.