Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says (usnews.com)

Navigant Research has compiled a new report on 19 companies working on automated driving systems, and surprisingly, Tesla came in last place. U.S. News & World Report: Navigant ranked the 19 major companies developing AV technology based on 10 criteria, including vision, market strategy, partnerships, production strategy, technology, product quality and staying power. According to the report, General Motors Co. and Waymo, the auto unit of Alphabet, are the top two AV investment opportunities in the market today. Tesla and Apple are the two biggest laggards in the AV race, according to Navigant's rankings.

Investors are acutely aware of Tesla's production and distribution disadvantages compared to legacy automakers like GM, but Navigant is also highly critical of Tesla's technology. "The autopilot system on current products has stagnated and, in many respects, regressed since it was first launched in late 2015," Navigant says in the report, according to Ars Technica. "More than one year after launching V2, Autopilot still lacks some of the functionality of the original, and there are many anecdotal reports from owners of unpredictable behavior."

Comments

Re:Conflicting niches

[dgatwood]

The feature is available in more than just their sports car, you know. It's also in their sedan, their crossover SUV, etc.

I don't think it has anything to do with conflicting niches so much as having to spend time reinventing the wheel. After they lost MobileEye, they had to spend time redoing what MobileEye provided, plus everything they were planning to do going forward.

IMO, the big open question is whether the current AutoSteer tech is actually the basis for their self-driving tech, or just a temporary band-aid intended to replace the AP1 MobileEye functionality in the interim until their self-driving tech is ready.

Right now, I've seen the following problems (consistently) with AutoSteer:

• If you put on your turn signal, the Tesla either immediately changes lanes without giving enough time to warn other drivers or it does nothing at all, and as far as I can tell, there's no rhyme or reason to which of those two things happens.
• Sometimes when you put on the turn signal it tries to change lanes into a lane that is occupied by another vehicle. It never waits for a vehicle to get past you.
• On curves, it steers way too late (a full second after a good driver would do so), then turns the wheel too far, ends up veering towards the other lane edge, then swerves back and forth drunkenly for ten or fifteen seconds.
• On some curves, this results in the car leaving the lane entirely.
• When cars are in the adjacent lane, it does not favor the other side of the lane as it should.
• When there's a concrete barrier right next to the lane, it does not favor the other side of the lane as it should (and in many of those cases where it steered too late, I had to seize control to keep it from wrecking).
• It makes no attempt at maintaining a constant turning radius (which is the very first lesson that new drivers typically learn in driver's ed class)
• It usually fails to detect pedestrians and cyclists (even when they're crossing the road right in front of it).
• It doesn't respect traffic lights or stop signs.
• IMO, it doesn't brake soon enough when cars cut into the lane in front of you.

All in all, it isn't a beta so much as a pre-alpha. It is good enough for some freeways (the ones without significant turns), but it has trouble even on some four-lane, divided highways in the greater Bay Area, where presumably Tesla should have copious amounts of training data. I would have no faith in it on arbitrary roads. It isn't the edge cases that are wrong, but rather that the base case behavior is barely even adequate. It feels like they trained their model with drunk drivers and 15-year-old student drivers.

So I really hope that AutoSteer is a temporary replacement for MobileEye, and that the reason it isn't better is that it is getting only minimal maintenance. If that's not the case... we could be waiting a while.

Ford in top tier

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilariously Ford are in the top tier, by Fords own admission they're playing catchup.

Navigant are blind IMHO.

There are only 3 major contenders, Waymo, Tesla and Volvo. All of them actively have driverless cars out on the road. Baidu are just starting that, Ford, GM etc. are rebranding things like 'lane feedback' as driverless control (it isn't).

Toyota a top tier??? Seriously? I've got a Toyota. The lights are Auto, Off, On..... no "daytime driving lights mode", Off isn't off, its on, it leaves the accent lights on, even when the car is switched off and flattens the battery. Auto is so sensitive it switches on as you pass under a cloud. Obviously the switch gear and lights don't match up, that light set would need Auto, Off, Daytime, Nighttime, 4 modes, not 3. Connect Bluetooth to a Toyota head unit? Are you crazy? Life it toooo short. Rant aside, Toyota are all talk talk on self driving cars with very little to show.

Re:the thing about teslas autopilot...

[TheReaperD]

Well, as things are going now, the "traditional" automakers will build and sell the electric cars but, Tesla will sell them the batteries and rent them the supercharger stations.

Re:the thing about teslas autopilot...

[Rei]

It's not just about appearances. It's about cost, drag, and power consumption. Lidar is a pain on all three of those (in addition to looks). You simply can't sell cars with big $10k domes bulging out of the top upping your drag coefficient by 10-20% and consuming a couple kilowatts of power. That would be a disaster to your range, and make your vehicle totally uncompetitive.

"More than one year after launching V2, Autopilot still lacks some of the functionality of the original, and there are many anecdotal reports from owners of unpredictable behavior."

Funny how you don't get anecdotal reports concerning the others, given that most of them don't have owners to make said anecdotal reports. And of most of the competitors' systems, they're comically bad. And they have the gall to actually market the car as currently "self-driving" (unlike Tesla which markets self-driving as an additional package which you can buy but won't be active for years).

Some of my favorite quotes from the test drive comparison:

One never really decides to engage Drive Pilot. You press two buttons on the left side of the dash, one for Distronic Cruise Control, the other for Automatic Steering, then press a button on the left side of the steering wheel, then, — when Drive Pilot decides conditions are suitable — it engages.

Is there an audible sound? None that I heard. Like Autopilot, a green steering wheel icon illuminates on the bottom center of the display, and is duplicated in the Heads-Up Display.

Engagement is made clear by the car’s instant and unsafe wandering in all but perfect conditions, and often in perfect conditions.

Unlike with Autopilot, placing your hands on the wheel and steering doesn’t instantly disengage Drive Pilot. I suppose this is intended as a method of allowing the user to guide Drive Pilot by making course corrections, but instead it resulted in an unwanted and stressful upper arm workout, without which I’d have been killed.

I got the Drive Pilot to “drive” itself for as long as sixty seconds, which is as along as Mercedes-Benz deems it safe. Trust me, you don’t want to take your hands off the wheel that long unless your car’s on fire and you’re reaching for a fire extinguisher, and even then.

Drive Pilot had a nasty habit of disengaging in good conditions before sixty seconds were up, with no obvious warning except the green steering icon going out, and lane drift. After the third time, I actually felt fear.

This is actually a dangerous product. The car will steer itself into oncoming traffic. It oscillates between lane markings like a drunk driver. No setting or speed is sufficient to compensate for the utter failure of this functionality.

Did anyone in Stuttgart drive a Tesla on Autopilot? Even once?

People need to be fired. Think I’m being harsh? Here’s another direct comparison between Drive Pilot and Autopilot, from Norway’s Autofil. Scroll down to the pictures comparing the two cars' lane keeping. Need more convincing? Here's Wired's take. Still don't believe me? Video is coming soon, via Drive on NBC Sports.

The only good thing about Drive Pilot is that your Mercedes will protect you from it. Did I trust it? Only at a crawl. Did I understand it? I don’t understand how Mercedes-Benz could release this to the public. I hated literally everything about it. It drove like a drunk ten year old, fighting for the wheel with a drunk fourteen year old.