Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
Why is marketing strategies even listed?
Tesla was biting off more than they could chew with auto-drive. Besides, if you want auto-drive, then you probably don't want a sports car. Sports cars are usually for people who like to drive.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
I ranked 27,013 market research firms based on the relevance of their research and the value of their brand. The only reason Navigant didn't finish last is because I included Trump's twitter feed in the list.
lucm, indeed.
How much weight was given to the "staying power" metric? That's naturally going to lean twords GM, which literally can't go out of business...
Tesla has a pretty huge advantage over other companies, in that there is a TON of data from around the world, in so many different conditions... especially the model 3 has a good number of sensors all around. The performance of that system may be lagging at the moment but Tesla is the one that has the most ingredients for success at hand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not sure I want to be in the winner's car in this race
Tesla and Apple are the two biggest laggards
That they list a company that doesn't even have a product in the market, neither active nor announced, and which is working on something only according to rumours, tells me a lot about how trustworthy this article is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And how many different models? An SUV? A sports car?
... IIRC Tesla started, has grown and continues to do quite well as an Electric Vehicle maker, NOT an AV maker. While Tesla, like pretty much every other high-end automaker today, has assisted-driving capability, I defy anyone to prove that Tesla has ever positioned themselves as even mainly a AV maker. Pure 100% organic, dolphin-free Bullshit(TM)!!
Thus far, lots of market research companies have said Tesla is a complete failure and would be dead by the end of the year and thus far they have all been proven wrong. Tesla is taking the AI heavy approach by only using radar and cameras which is likely why they have been ranked last. However, I would point out that people don't have LIDAR and yet manage to drive. Tesla isn't always on time with their products and thus far have a few kinks but they always manage to produce a product. GM, Ford, Nissan and all the other giants have dipped their big toes into plenty of ponds and ran away screaming but Tesla actually sticks with it until it's done.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Tests by Tesla owners selectively covering the cameras to see at which point Autopilot would become unavailable found that it's only using the front camera / radar, just like the old system.
Sure but that does not mean they are not collecting from the other cameras/sensors while people drive, and can learn from that as well for more advanced systems.
their progress has been minimal in the past 6 months.
I imagine they are being very careful with updates, but that doesn't mean major upgrades are not around the corner...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you look at the big auto makers like Chevy, they're cutting deals to partner up with ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft. That should tell you what their long-term goals are. They want to be the ones who own or exclusively sell fleets of driverless vehicles used in a future where people no longer own their own personal cars -- but simply call for one as needed, on a trip by trip basis.
Tesla, on the other hand, is still more firmly entrenched in the idea of making a desirable electric car with as much cool gadgetry on it as possible, so you'll WANT to proudly own one for yourself as a personal vehicle.
That means Tesla would be less interested in achieving fully self-driving vehicles. (Right now, that would probably constitute a bigger drain on their finances than it's worth - since their near-term customers are pretty ok with a car they can still drive when they want to, and which just uses automated features as kind of an "auto pilot" mode that expects the driver to cancel and intervene whenever necessary.)
that normally would be really tough to get because most cities wouldn't let autonomous cars on their roads yet. Tesla's got an Apple grade reality distortion field that lets them get away with things nobody else seems to be able to.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What does the suite of hardware cost that Cruise and Waymo are using on the roof of their cars, $100,000? Because that is a commercial technology if they can't integrate their self-driving sensor suite at a price comparable to other vehicles in the same class. I know there's hope that the cost of lidar will come way down, but when? Because if it takes four years for the cost of lidar to become viable for mass-production, that gives Tesla four years to perfect their vision system. Regardless, I think Tesla's real advantage is that once (if) they get their system to work at Level 4, they'll instantly have a global fleet of autonomous cars ready to provide TaaS in areas where they have extensive familiarity. Everyone else will have to ramp up their fleets, over years.
Meant to say ISN'T a commercial technology at that cost.
tesla is last due to technology though.
the thing about why they got it so early and why they stagnated now, is that as you might remember if you read slashdot and wasnt a total fanboi, tesla bought the lane warning camera technology from a 3rd party provider(that provides many makers) and then against the wishes of said provider hacked the lane warning system to work as autopilot - which, if you think about it, is basically a grad project - just wire the logic to the values you get out of that system. it works, but it's neither safe, good or provided tesla with something to move forward with(since it was just a hack, basically).
so them hacking the providers lane detection system to work as autopilot is why they got so far ahead in the game early, but it was not a) their technology b) used in the manner the provider had meant it to be used.
and look, the investors are getting tired of tesla. that's why musk is shitting bricks. it's already on borrowed time and the big makers will enter the market big time when it is profitable. the only recourse tesla has against that is if they can get their designs and production facilities to operate cheaply enough - you don't make money by losing money. the superfactory is online so this year they either make money or will face difficulties securing new money, and so far it's not looking that bright.
the problem with teslas technology, again, is that they have no unique technology and they never have had unique technology that was more efficient, better or cheaper than competitors have. you can't make a technology company if you can't make things either cheaper or better and preferably both.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Because I'll be damned if I trust my safety to a driverless vehicle.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
According to Musk, the primary reason for existence of Tesla is to get the world to move more quickly to electric cars. It does this by making good enough cars, and making enough money from them, that other companies realize they are missing out and so chose to emulate Tesla. I'm sure that Tesla also want to become a long term profitable major car manufacturer, but if we believe Musk, that is a secondary goal.
Given all this, and given Tesla motor's significant growing pains and limited resources (compared to GM, Ford, VW etc) it seems to me that self driving is a major distraction which uses resources better used elsewhere. I suspect they'd have been better off just to go for the standard levels of automation in high end cars (e.g. autobraking.)
And all you mindless Musk haters, pay attention: this article shows how you can intelligently criticize Tesla, rather than pretending there was some vast supply of government subsidy money that any halfwit could have sucked up, yet somehow only Musk thought to do so, or was allowed to do so.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
When the first thing they are grading on is "Vision", I am not going to RTFA. The summary also says they have reports of ???. As opposed to the reports on my Toyota not driving itself. Because it doesn't...
They are first or near first in one important way, having had a vehicle with many self-driving car features on the road, testing and improving them for 3+ years. Other companies like the volt now are getting there, but Tesla is not lost in the part about actually have working cars with some features.
Anyone of us is capable of pointing out problems, but people with solutions are the only ones that matter. Rest is just noise.
Tesla is also the first in the driverless vehicle race. Because I don't see anyone else in it who could be taken seriously yet. Lots of talk, very little self driving cars.
But I do reserve the right to change my opinions, because they are often proven wrong.
I feel like I'm the only sane one here!
That's actually among the first signs of insanity :D
Personally I think Tesla has been clueless at selling vehicles.
As long as Tesla has a backlog, it seems to me that their marketing is doing just fine relative to their production capacity.
GM etc just have more technical resources to back these things up, so they can use their existing technology and supply chains rather than having to build everything from scratch.
The big problem with electric cars is that its not sustainable however, and will not scale to large usage, because the batteries consume so many rare earth metals. The idea that electric cars are environmental is such an outrageous idea, its a joke. When you consider the effects of mining and how it is depleting non-renewable resources, its just ridiculous. Many of the batteries will end up in landfills like alkalines and other rechargeables because people just dont give a damn that they are throwing away their childrens future when they dont recycle these materials and there is no requirement that they have to do so. It should be illegal to toss any electronics in the garbage and instead it should be sent for metal recycling. But getting this done is like herding cats.
Its similar to the idea of Hydrogen cars. Hydrogen was perhaps worse, because to make hydrogen you have to split water with electrolysis. However inevitably a lot of the hydrogen will escape, not being bound to oxygen, it will float up into the atmosphere and drift into space. Theres a reason why hydrogen and helium are so hard to find because they are too light to be held down by gravity. So essentially, your burning up water and releasing it into space. You have to consider the long term effects of this over many millions of years because short term thinking has gotten us into trouble with how we think about other resources. The idea that a Mars civilization burned up its water in such a manner has been a subject of sci-fi but its a plausible scenario. The same problem exists with hydrogen fed fission reactors and hydrogen rockets. When you launch a hydrogen rocket your basically losing some earths water supply to space. This is why we need to rethink the idea of hydrogen rockets and look into something else before we consider any kind of large scale space colonization, and also how these colonies will exist without sapping earths supply of resources such as water and oxygen which may seem abundant but are actually finite. Leakage from space craft would result in cumulative running losses of oxygen hydrogen and so on into space steadily depleting the earth ecosystem of these vital gasses. There needs to be an international convention against removing oxygen or hydrogen from the earth ecosystem.
Much of Musks ideas are based on technologies that are barely possible at the small scale but disastrously unsustainable at the large scale.
Both Apple and Tesla do nothing special and their status is based on their hype machine rather than reality. Tesla for example has made many promises and claims in the past it hasn't lived up to yet, mostly in order to keep those Federal dollars rolling in, and Apple mostly innovates meaning it takes work others have done and repurposes it. It therefore comes as no surprise that both are falling behind companies that don't make wild claims about what they can do and that actually invent stuff.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
And when the company's C-levels are going to work on driverless motorcycles, then I'll believe driverless technology is ready.
http://media1.break.com/dnet/m...
Two camera level five autonomy would never be able to work in every real-world situation that a human can work in.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So if you can't buy it, it doesn't exist? You must be American.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Backlog or not, any company can lose money per unit. That's not a difficult bar to achieve.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Only Americans are skeptical about vapor?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'