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Selling Full Autonomy Before It's Ready Could Backfire For Tesla (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesla has an Autopilot problem, and it goes far beyond the fallout from last month's deadly crash in Mountain View, California. Tesla charges $5,000 for Autopilot's lane-keeping and advanced cruise control features. On top of that, customers can pay $3,000 for what Tesla describes as "Full Self-Driving Capability." "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go," Tesla's ordering page says. "Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed." None of these "full self-driving" capabilities are available yet. "Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction," the page says. "It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval."
But the big reason full self-driving isn't available yet has nothing to do with "regulatory approval." The problem is that Tesla hasn't created the technology yet. Indeed, the company could be years away from completing work on it, and some experts doubt it will ever be possible to achieve full self-driving capabilities with the hardware installed on today's Tesla vehicles. "It's a vastly more difficult problem than most people realize," said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Navigant Research and a former auto industry engineer. Tesla has a history of pre-selling products based on optimistic delivery schedules. This approach has served the company pretty well in the past, as customers ultimately loved their cars once they ultimately showed up. But that strategy could backfire hugely when it comes to Autopilot.
But the big reason full self-driving isn't available yet has nothing to do with "regulatory approval." The problem is that Tesla hasn't created the technology yet. Indeed, the company could be years away from completing work on it, and some experts doubt it will ever be possible to achieve full self-driving capabilities with the hardware installed on today's Tesla vehicles. "It's a vastly more difficult problem than most people realize," said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Navigant Research and a former auto industry engineer. Tesla has a history of pre-selling products based on optimistic delivery schedules. This approach has served the company pretty well in the past, as customers ultimately loved their cars once they ultimately showed up. But that strategy could backfire hugely when it comes to Autopilot.
Considering that they are topping the table for car-ownership satisfaction rates, I don't think it's such a big issue. https://www.consumerreports.or...
What happens when they start selling them and the courts find that all liability is with the software/hardware manufacturer? I guess its nothing a quick chapter 7 bankruptcy can't fix...
Selling Anything Before It's Ready Could Backfire For Anyone
Of course, now it looks more like an Onion's headline, but that is, in itself, a hint...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There are between ten and fifteen used Teslas for sale within a 50 mile radius of where I live.
It'd be interesting in knowing why they're being sold if their owners were so satisfied with them.
yes, confirmation bias is strong with these buyers.
I also thought about how hard it would be to make a real autonomous vehicle that worked under all conditions
Getting to 90% has been done. Good weather, good visibility, few unexpected hazards
Getting to 95% will be harder, and it gets exponentially harder as you asymptotically approach 100%
The billion dollar question is...How close is close enough?
No matter how good it gets, someone will always sue, claiming it isn't perfect
The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers. The computer does not need a complete and entirely correct model of the environment to be a better driver than a person. People are very easily overwhelmed by complex traffic situations and make tons of mistakes. Roads are designed to enable safe traffic regardless of these cognitive deficiencies. Computers can take advantage of that too.
Likely they cannot afford the payments and operating costs.
Tesla's are nice cars, but they come at a premium price. I'll never afford one. My guess is as folks start to realize they are mileage limited with long recharge times (range anxiety), are paying a LOT for that 4 door sedan, AND they could get a REALLY NICE fossil fueled option for less money so they put it up for sale.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No internal combustion engine and we are discussing a backfiring Tesla? How's that possible?
(To you literalist... I'm making a joke.. )
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I got the autopilot and all I have to do is keep my hands on the wheel, steer the car, keep a keen eye on the road and the Tesla Autopilot does the rest!
This is just awesome!!!!
And I'm so kool for having a Tesla!
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers..
And others vastly underestimate the challenges of designing a system that can perform better than humans without human oversight. Particularly in an environment that was designed specifically for human drivers interacting with other human drivers. We have a very long way to go.
Says someone that doesn't have or ever driving one.
Why would anyone purchase non-existent driving software with their Tesla when, presumably, that feature could be purchased separately later, at a time when it really exists? You are only giving Tesla a free $3,000.00 loan for an indefinite period by ordering it now with the car.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The Tesla Theranos Edition.
I own a Tesla and the operating costs are substantially less than any fossil fueled car I have ever owned. Charging is much less expensive than gas and the only real maintenance is replacing the tires. I normally don't charge the battery past 200 miles unless I'm going on a long trip and my typical home charging time is less than an hour. The customer service absolutely blows away any other car brand I've owned and the car just keeps getting better with new software updates. I have never heard of any of the major auto manufacturers doing updates at all for anything that wasn't a serious problem and certainly not free over-the-air updates. I paid around $70K after the tax rebate which is not even close to the high-end for a luxury car.
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers. The computer does not need a complete and entirely correct model of the environment to be a better driver than a person. People are very easily overwhelmed by complex traffic situations and make tons of mistakes. Roads are designed to enable safe traffic regardless of these cognitive deficiencies. Computers can take advantage of that too.
And people who make claims such as yours tend to forget that roads were designed for humans, not computers, and that some things that humans do very easily are very difficult for computers to do (and of course, vice-versa).
If we had roads which were designed for computers, I am sure computers would very quickly outperform human drivers. The problem is - we don't.
I believe that self-driving efforts are focused on the wrong thing: trying to reproduce a human driver, and claiming it's better if it, on average, messes up less than a human. Instead, it should be focused on trying to create an infrastructure that supports self-driving vehicles. Does that mean they will be able to drive on every imaginable road? Probably not...but likely on 95% of roads (such e.g. all roads and streets in cities), once the roll-out is complete. In this case, it probably will be safer...but if it satisfies a bunch of conditions first.
The other problem that people who claim "humans are not that smart, computers are better than them on average" miss is the variability among humans. No human driver is identical; almost all make mistakes, but the types of mistakes that are made (and the situations which they are made in) can differ widely. However, software flaws are replicated identically across many units...potentially millions of them. Joe in Chicago being a bad driver does not affect Bob in Cleveland. An undetected bug in Tesla's Autopilot will affect all Tesla owners in the world potentially, and probably under the same (or very similar) conditions. You might be in a situation where you have a 100% probability of a screw-up under certain conditions. That is simply not the case with any human driver. Now imagine if say, 20% of the cars on the road are self-driving...what you are potentially setting things up for is a black swan type of event: software-driven cars may be much safer 99% of the time, but could be prone to major screw-ups 1% of the time that will dwarf the combined effects of bad human driving.
Variability among human drivers also allows for evolutionary selection: reckless drivers will typically die, or have their licenses taken away from them. This does not remove all of the bad drivers - but does remove a great deal of them over the long run. How do we do that with self-driving cars? A destruction of one self-driving car with a flaw will not end it, because then likely all other cars of the same model and series have the same flaw. Removing just that particular car won't do it, you'd have to do a recall...now recalls can already get quite bad, imagine all of the recalls we're gonna have with self-driving vehicles (where the authorities are bound to more paranoid)...and it won't all be software problems you can patch, there will be hardware problems too.
I'm not saying these are all insurmountable problems. They can be addressed. I'm just saying there's a lot more to autonomous vehicles than the techno-optimistic "self-driving cars just need to cause less accidents on average than humans" stance. A lot more. It cannot be reduced just to a single metric. Or just a bunch of numeric metrics.
I happen to have a Tesla S and I do love the car.
They are a joy to drive. The acceleration is second to none. The handling is great, almost on par with the ( now deprecated ) hydraulic steering on BMWs's I used to drive. The cabin technology is great. I also really like the fact that the car gets free updates that actually improve it on a continuous basis!
I also feel extra pleased with my purchase because I get free EV charging in my office building, premium EV parking at most malls, and I just learned that Tesla will install a supercharger ( which I also get for free ) at my local mall. Heck I even get premium parking and free power at Ikea! ( I would get these with a lower cost EV but their really just a 'feel good' bonus. )
The autpilot is def misnamed. It's nowhere near autonomous. Just now it's more like a junior co-pilot. Would I like it to be better? Yes I sure would. But I will say that once you know it's limitations it is very helpful and - contrary to popular opinion - it does an excellent job in all weather conditions except heavy snow which covers the road. I'd say 70% of my daily commute is now handled by autopilot.
>> hugely (something)
So is Trump an editor now?
I've already heard some use "did a Telsa" to mean "stupidly destroy oneself by stepping into an obviously dangerous situation" much like Tesla's car rammed a well- marked concrete barrier at full speed.
It will. And it will not be 'ready' for a long, long time. In the future we will view Tesla as we did flying cars in the 50s.
Tesla’s are universally agreed to be shit cars. Only a complete retard would buy one.
Oh, I dunno, Tesla's logo is that big letter 'T', which reminds me way too much of a Ford Model T, and with those, if you had the spark advance set too far forward, they'd backfire like you wouldn't believe, so maybe with a Tesla it's just 'sympathetic backfiring'. xD
It does take hard AI. The dumbest person is infinitely smarter than the best computer.
You have no fucking idea what you're talking about, it's a human world with systems of streets, roads, and highways designed by and for human minds, the level of variaibility of everything demands an actual sentient mind to navigate it properly.
In fact, I think Tesla is probably the least of the offenders in this case; all (so-called) 'self-driving car' developers are rushing their 'product' to market, because they've spent so much more money 'developing' it than they ever thought they'd need to, only to find that it's way, way more complex than they ever thought it was, and they need to start showing a profit or heads will roll. Therefore they expect us, the general public, to be their 'alpha-testers' (not even BETA-testers, the damned things aren't even that good).
The billion dollar question is...How close is close enough?
You only have to be SLIGHTLY better than the average human driver, and you start saving lives by getting marginal drivers off the road.
Judging from how I've seen people drive around the world, 80% is PLENTY HIGH.
I am serious; if you took some of the worst drivers today and gave them self driving cars with existing tech, you would be saving lives and reducing accidents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're passing the insurance premiums based on their failure rates onto consumers. They're literally charging consumers to pay for the lawsuit their families file when the car kills them. This is exactly what Musk fanboys deserve, I'm so conflicted because it's like Musk has become an actual hero now.
Only idiots with cash to burn on perpetual maintenance buy Benzes.
My guess is as folks start to realize they are mileage limited with long recharge times
I doubt if any Tesla owner was unaware of these issues before they bought the car.
they could get a REALLY NICE fossil fueled option for less money so they put it up for sale.
FF cars come with zero nerd-cred. Nobody cares. You have to park at the back of the lot, while the EVs get the premium parking spaces near the entrance.
Disclaimer: I am a very satisfied Tesla owner. Well, technically my wife owns it, but she lets me drive it if I wash the dishes everyday.
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers.
Or, and this is a just a (correct) thought: you're a self-indulgent futurist moron who overestimates yourself by assuming the rest of the world is retarded so surely a computer can do it.
You paid $70k for a car. No one said anything about a high-end luxury car. Tesla's certainly aren't that. They are the equivalent of a $30k Ford in terms of luxury. But at least you get free updates!
Both for their cars and their factory. They're getting sued for their FSD fraud, and they've wasted time and money over auto mating their Fremont factory for the Model 3 line. Now Musk is going to have a 24/7 shift for the Model 3 line. How ever close they were to positive margins on the $60K Model 3 have now become that much more elusive. And the $35K Model 3? Phffft.
And others vastly underestimate the challenges of designing a system that can perform better than humans without human oversight
And still OTHERS appear to be utterly ignorant as to the state of the art in self-driving car research and delivery.
Kind of strange for a place like Slashdot to have some many people so very, very ignorant of technology.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Elon Musk has been warning everyone that AI would be dangerous. Perhaps it will be for him but not in the way he envisioned.
Customers said they loved their cars, because they didn't want to look stupid in the eyes of their friends for paying a ton of money for something that came late and was short. If you look around well enough, you will see that customers love their cars only because of Stockholm syndrome and there are enough of them that actually have an open mind and are not afraid to show they were misled.
Everyone is saving face, there is no other reason to love the junk.
Oh go kill yourself, fucking wanker. They're not the end-all & be-all of cars and they have flaws but overall the people who have bought them really love them, to the point of buying the latest & greatest Tesla as soon as they are available.
Brooks Weisblatt of Drag Times has upgraded to the quickest prod Model S at least 4 times in the past 5 years, his wife owns a Model X P100D, he has 2 reservations for Model 3s and he cashed in enough Bitcoin to pay the full $250k reservation for the forthcoming next-gen Roadster.
While he's something of an extreme example, he's far from unusual among Tesla owners.
By the way, he owns a raft of very fast ICE cars including a McLaren 720S.
I guess that's cool if you go to stores and like being at stores all.. the.. time. Me? I like to stop in a park when I stop. You keep drinking the kool-aid.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And people that have actually done any sort of machine vision or similar work also realize the absolutely incredible sophistication of our visual cortex, and the similarly incredible engineering challenges posed by trying to outperform it.
Driving isn't about being smart. If it were, there would be far more people without a license. That's exactly what I mean when I say that people overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers. The cognitive processes for driving are much closer to mere stimulus-response of the autonomic nervous system than to reasoning. You know how sometimes you feel like you've been on "autopilot" for a short while and don't know how you got to where you are? This happens because you have done so much driving that it does not require higher cognitive functions anymore and your mind starts to wander. Before you respond that this never happens to you: Have you never missed an exit that you know perfectly well?
While I agree that AI's outdriving humans is considerably closer than we give it credit for. Simple human falacies, normal panic, and human tendency to sensationalize new causes of death and completely tone out the deaths we are used to. In a world where the laws were written by people who understood statistics, and the media was more concerned with facts over views (or a world where accurate facts was the way to get views). Self driving vehicles are at most 5-10 years from catching up to humans, and thus being a better option. On the other hand.. the world we live in, almost every story about self driving cars, in the last month, makes sure to point out that 1 fatal tesla autopilot accident and/or the fatal uber accident that happened recently. If self driving car accidents reach 100 in a year, even if manual car fatalities dropped by 10,000 in that same year for the same reason, public perception (and thus the policies politicians enact), will be that self driving cars are more dangerous.
While it is a hard problem, a lot of the defensive driving techniques are to counteract the fact that we can't maintain awareness from every direction. We can see a very small amount and our other senses give an incomplete sense of what's going on.
A car just monitoring the distance of tailgating drivers and objects moving towards the car's path of travel alone would be a most of the way there.
They are the equivalent of a $30k Ford in terms of luxury.
Said the guy who has never owned a "luxury" car.
Can you try that in English?
So true. I don't consider sitting in a metal box with wheels to be "luxury". But Tesla ain't even a luxury car.
I love Tesla owners crowing about "free updates" on their $80,000 car. Ultimate stupidity.
I didn't say drivers were smart. Do you even read? Computers are dumb. Cars will never self drive.
Wait until people realize the car will try not to hit them. The reason peds don't jaywalk too often on the freeway is because the drivers hit them. Once they start stopping, freeway jaywalking becomes much more viable. The loons in Berzerkley will love it, since the computer will be BETTER than the human at allowing them to jaywalk.
"the state of the art" - I'm still waiting to see this myself. Where are all the major research papers? Where are all the patents? Surely by now there should be some secondary technologies coming out of this race for autonomous vehicles, but the best right now are navigation apps and camera assisted parallel parking. At the very least I would expect some amazing new object recognition tools to appear, there are all sorts of applications where that would be useful, certainly something more impressive than Snapchat.
Premium parking space near the entrance of what? A mall? That makes life worth living! What nerd-cred is a Tesla? Most of them are driven by rich lawyers and finance guys who have a couple of SUVs at home.
Yes. Most higher end cars already have that. Distance detection, lane detection, crash avoidance, etc. That is the easy part. That isn't self-driving.
There are an endless number of cases where your description of the problem is laughably wrong.
Navigating a parking lot.
The car gets a flat tire and needs to safely navigate to the side of the road.
The car has to park in a grassy field near a fairground.
A traffic cop is directing traffic.
The car needs gas.
"I'd say 70% of my daily commute is now handled by autopilot."
With your hands on the wheel and full attention on the road?
Because that's the way to do it, and in the future Tesla should/will have to state that clearly in its promotional material.
Actually I'm not a tesla owner, but only because I bought my land rover before the tesla suv was available.
I lol at your sad little butthurt attempt to save face.
And others vastly underestimate the challenges of designing a system that can perform better than humans without human oversight
And still OTHERS appear to be utterly ignorant as to the state of the art in self-driving car research and delivery.
Kind of strange for a place like Slashdot to have some many people so very, very ignorant of technology.
Please explain the "state of the art" for all those ignorant people. You could be one of them as far as I know.
I own a Tesla and the operating costs are substantially less than any fossil fueled car I have ever owned. Charging is much less expensive than gas and the only real maintenance is replacing the tires.
Tesla's cost more to charge than high MPG gas cars.
Don't know where you are living that you think it is cheaper. Certainly not the US, and we have thee cheapest gas in the world.
The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
The problem (traffic, roads, laws, standards) will get redefined to fit the new AI solution, same as when we transitioned from horses to cars. When you get enough autocars out there, the roads will begin to get engineered to mitigate the weaknesses of AIs, bit by bit.. This is exactly what happened to cars: we created and adapted roads, laws, enforcement, etc to match car's needs and continue to do so. The Model T was high off the ground to deal with the rutted, muddy dirt roads (or no roads at all) they were likely to encounter. Today, we have aerodynamic skirts a few inches off the pavement for efficiency. Pavement--smooth pavement--is simply assumed.
That's what always happens with any disruptive technology: we end up adapting everything, including ourselves, to meet it part way.
An example of things that will probably be changed soon than later: road construction zones will be required to implement certain protocols (signage, markers, notifying some central database, whatever) to make them easier for AIs to traverse. Failure to do so will entail liability for accidents.
My guess is that true full autonomy will first roll out in a big way on certain long-haul trucking routes. Many freeways are a fairly clean, well-defined situation and the prize for trucking companies is too big to ignore. Those parts of the chosen freeways that are problematic for the AIs will be upgraded, either due to lobbying by large trucking firms, and/or those firms'll kick in some of their own $ to make those changes happen sooner.
The Apple of cars. Their customers are satisfied only because they need to self-justify voluntarily getting reamed.
I'd say 70% of my daily commute is now handled by autopilot.
How do you keep yourself focused while the car is on autopilot?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I've read on slashdot. This is just another hit piece.
- everybody who is tired of waiting on the feature can ask their money back from Tesla.
- not a lot of people who have enough money to buy these cars are stupid enough to 'get confused'
- it's a duplicate of a similar story which ran 1 year ago. Tesla Autopilot has gotten better and will get better
- Tesla has already promised that if a hw upgrade is necessary (which is likely), they will upgrade free of charge.
Aside from that, we love the AP capabilities of our Tesla's.
"Tesla's cost more to charge than high MPG gas cars."
No, they don't. For the sake of argument, a high MPG gas car here would have to do more than 50MPG and you would have to always charge the Tesla using a supercharger and you would have to pay the rate that some superchargers charge if you don't get free supercharging. Charge your car at home and you pay far less. Get free supercharging by ordering and using a referral code and you can't even compare it with a high MPG car because charging costs zero at that point. 90% of charging is done at home at night rates, not the 25c/kW this whole argument requires just to get a 50MPG car in the same ball park, and it also requires the cost of fuel to be less than $2.60 a gallon which it isn't in many places and even if it is that low it can easily get higher quickly and make this whole argument completely irrelevant because it won't take much before you need a car that can do more than 100MPG and those simply don't exist.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Not to lie, I wish my car got some updates once in awhile. The problem is an update would also require a newer ECU since the late model of my car has upgraded electronics including beefier CPUs. More cycles == faster response. My rear clutch is actuated by software and it would be nice if the clutch shifted in tandem with an increase in engine output. I'm sure there are some 68k wizards out there that can optimize the shit out of a car company's code.. but we're almost into the 2020s, throw more hardware at it.
But my car only cost $13k, so I guess I get 5 tries at rewriting my ecu to alter shift points
This is Slashdot, home of the cyber-luddite.
It's been like that for years here, so many commenters afraid of technology, or who actively hate it.
Never mind that thousands of cars are already driving themselves on public roads. Never mind that Chevy is going to be shipping production cars without a steering wheel next year. Never mind that almost every car manufacturer is planning on shipping self driving cars within five years, most of them within three.
No, Slashdot luddites have declared that it's impossible, that cars will never be able to drive themselves better than humans. They'll probably still be typing the same stupid comments about it in a few years, while they're riding in a self driving car.
My point was simply that most luxury cars donâ(TM)t get updates. I previously owned a similarly priced BMW and if it got any updates - ever - they were too subtle to notice.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When the car is doing 80 mph down a highway in a downpour I am certainly at full at attention.
When I am in stop and go traffic I confess I am usually not.
And others vastly underestimate the challenges of designing a system that can perform better than humans without human oversight
And still OTHERS appear to be utterly ignorant as to the state of the art in self-driving car research and delivery.
Kind of strange for a place like Slashdot to have some many people so very, very ignorant of technology.
As I pointed out in my reply above, current SDC capability is orders of magnitude (two orders, to be exact) worse than the average human driver.
We aren't ignorant of tech, we're just better at stats than you are.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
A high end lexus is about $70k... Is tesla's service better than lexus?
Charging is much less expensive than gas and the only real maintenance is replacing the tires.
So Teslas don't have brakes/rotors, ball joints, wheel bearings, tie rods, shock absorbers, or any other components that wear?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Even the best self driving tech still needs operator intervention every 5600 miles. Which translates to an accident every 5600 miles Lets triple that, maybe the operator intervened too early 2 times out of 3 and the car would have been able to handle it, meaning 17000 miles. A human driver that has an accident every 17000 miles is a pretty bad driver and I don't want him on the road.
And that's in good weather.. Now try it in heavy rain, snow, fog, night, combinations of those.
You can't compare current self driving cars with human drivers until they can drive on the same roads (all of them!) in the same weather conditions (all of them!). Until then, you're comparing apples to oranges,
Object recognition tools do exist, although a long birth. The first conference I was at that demonstrated SDC technology was in 1995,
This. Tesla sold the capability of the car to go find a parking space and then return when you summon it later. There are all sorts of edge cases that a human would be able to deal with easily, like poor road markings or someone else parked badly or road works, but which AI will struggle with.
Considering they can't even get the system to drive straight in the middle of a lane yet (it's prone to ping-ponging between the lines) the current estimate of 2020 for this feature (that they have been selling since 2016) seems optimistic.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It does not matter, what car makers do or do not do. Autodrive should not be sold until a set of standards has been set, for what it can detect and how it should react to what it can detect and those standards should be set by regulation and followed. No roll your own experimentation, real world standards that can be followed, that a consumer can expect without having to drill down through the tech details. So being an Australian, can the system detect a kangaroo approaching the vehicle when you are doing 100KPH because you don't what one to hop, just as you are about to collide and have it join you on the front seat, you really, really don't (roos are pretty tough and do a lot of damage to vehicles, let alone you, I don't need to tell you lot about moose or horses but roos are fast even idling and can leap out when you are least expecting it, you see roos from the road, you slow down, seriously, the one you don't see is the one you will run into). What can it detect, can it take evasive action or will it just brake (that hard braking without impact, is likely to cause pretty bad neck trauma if you are not expecting it and of course likely lethal neck trauma if you are not expecting an impact at all and get one). So there you go, should auto cars issue a loud warning prior to impact ie 'BRACE' 'BRACE' 'BRACE' and should people be taught to expect that and react to that or just a recognised impact alarm, hear that sound and brace for impact.
Not rules, no design guidelines, no accepted performance tests to make sure standards are met etc etc and they should not be sold to the public to be used on roads. No automated vehicle standards, then automated vehicles should not be on the road ie The comfortable hopping speed for a red kangaroo is about 20â"25 km/h (12â"16 mph), but speeds of up to 70 km/h (43 mph) can be attained over short distances, while it can sustain a speed of 40 km/h (25 mph) for nearly 2 km (1.2 mi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., so yeah, you see them, you slow down, depending how far from the road they are and how close coverage, trees and bushes are to the road. No autoslow down will increase road deaths from roo impacts guaranteed. Kangaroos dazzled by headlights or startled by engine noise often leap in front of cars. "Since kangaroos in mid-bound can reach speeds of around 50 km/h (31 mph) and are relatively heavy, the force of impact can be severe. Small vehicles may be destroyed, while larger vehicles may suffer engine damage. The risk of harm or death to vehicle occupants is greatly increased if the windscreen is the point of impact. As a result, "kangaroo crossing" signs are commonplace in Australia."
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I used to be like that, until I got a macbook. Fucking plastic Windows bullshit laptop motherfuckers, go suck my balls poverty-stricken prole.
You could design "roads" for automatic drivers, they're called rails. You have automatic underground lines, and even regular trains have an almost automatic control, maximum speed and braking is automatically controlled bi signals. Of course the human intervention is required for oddball situations, like a failing engine or unexpected cows in the track, but I suppose that the money invested on self driving lorries could be more succesfully used for freight train infrastructure. By the way the electic train is a solved problem and doesn't have batteries.
You could expand this to most of the current AI goldrush. It wouldn't be the first time that capabilites of AI have been oversold.
This.
I don't think most people bashing autopilot realize that when you talk to people who own AP, this scenario - stop-and-go traffic - almost always tops the list of things that they like it for. Most people picture it as being just about driving down an open highway. Yes, it does that too, but that's not where it shines best.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
Do you apply this to everything that can control the steering wheel, accelerator and/or brakes? So, say, all TACC needs to go under your rules?
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
Only on Slashdot can the car with the highest customer satisfaction in the industry be "universally agreed to be shit cars".
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
How in the fuck do you know if he has owned a luxury car? In fact, how in the fuck do you know if anyone posting here has owned a luxury car?
Christ, you are a know-it-all condescending toolbag.
I totally agree. This is exactly where you see in which situations computers are superior to humans (e.g. achieving a reliable, consistent 90 second headway between fully loaded subway trains at rush hour) and what you need to achieve that (it's not just stuff in the train, but also on the rails, signals, in the stations). The electric train is a solved problem, but a battery-powered one could be useful on less frequently used rail lines where it doesn't make sense to electrify (and here it would displace diesel trains). With self-driving trains (even say, self-driving wagons that could detach and join up with others), it would probably make sense to expand rail for freight...freight is a lot more schedulable and predictable than passenger car traffic, so it would lend itself more easily to automation.
Also, concerning this article: The terms for AP and FSD haven't changed in a year. There is no "news" behind this article. By selling FSD separate from AP, it makes it explicit what you're buying. You cannot choose just AP and think "I'm getting full self driving". Meanwhile, the FSD option is plastered with all sorts of weasel words like "in the future" and "eventually", with no hard dates. You cannot choose FSD and think "I'm getting this immediately, or at least the day after tomorrow!"
Why this article? Why now? Again, literally nothing has changed about the terms or wording in the past year. It's not like there's a lack of news. Just yesterday, we learned that not only was the 2k+/wk Model 3 production rate not a burst rate, not only have they maintained it for three weeks, but that when they're done with the upgrades this week, the line should come back at 3-4k/wk; and Tesla is now targeting not just 5k/wk at the end of this quarter, but 6k/wk (with an expectation that at least one supplier or process won't get it all the way, in order to ensure that they get at least 5k, with the intent to get it up to the full 6k in Q3).
That's actual news. This is concern trolling. And it's full of statements that are just plain wrong, such as that camera-based AP systems "don't work well in low light conditions". Nonsense; AP often works even better in low light conditions than it does in bright conditions. There's no "glare" at night, strong contrast between headlight-illuminated markings and obstacles vs. the road, and the cameras have good low-light sensitivity (better than the human eye). The article also makes it sound like they've not taken any time at all to research how Autopilot works, writing things like "If a sensor fails, Tesla will have to choose between disabling self-driving capability until the customer repairs it or allowing the car to continue operating with a higher risk of a crash." - seriously, virtually any Tesla owner can tell you that if you have a sensor failure, AP is disabled until you get it fixed. Just bloody ask. They then go on to imply that Tesla doesn't have redundant control systems. That's simply not true - go see them with your own eyes. The mechanical systems to control the brakes, steering, etc are all redundant. Concerning the computer, they link to a teardown of a Model S (older model) from last year. Why? Do they think that nothing's changed in the past year? And yes, the computer has on-board redundancy.
What the heck is up with all of these hit pieces of late?
I also could not disagree more with one of their main conclusions - that going straight for "full autonomy" is the safer option. Tesla has had three deaths around a billion miles of AP driving - the exact amount of mileage on AP today is not known, but was 300 million in November 2016, so probably around a billion today. The normal rate of deaths per mile is 1 per 80 million. Meanwhile, Uber had a pedestrian fatality in its first week operating in Arizona. If you try to go straight for full autonomy, you guarantee driver inattentiveness. Vehicles should be locked at no more than Level 2 autonomy (and level 3 should be illegal) until a high degree of safety can be guaranteed without driver involvement in the real world. Tesla and most of their emerging competitors (like the laughably bad Mercedes Drive Pilot - which actually does claim to be self-driving, unlike Autopilot) make you keep your hands on the wheel to try to ensure you're paying attention. With AP, it's not enough to simply touch it - you have to actually apply torque. But honestly,
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
Technically speaking, Autopilot does not mean autonomous. In aircraft autopilot usually means keeping the speed, heading (and in advanced autopilots the course) and altitude. An aircraft autopilot does not react to other traffic, ATC or weather. All that is the responsibility of the pilot. So, the Tesla Autopilot does pretty much the same - it keeps speed and stays in the lane. In many ways, it is a lot more advanced that aircraft autopilot. It is able to reduce the speed in response to the car in front of it and change lanes if commanded.
Same could be said of any industry. It wouldn't be the first time that capabilities of a commercial product have been oversold.
How in the fuck do you know if he has owned a luxury car?
Its called reading. Anyone who has actually owned a luxury car would not claim that a tesla is the equivalent of a $30K ford.
And the binary bitch confirmed her lack of ownership experience in her reply. So it looks like you got your panties in a twist because someone was smarter than you.
What my rules,"ISO is an independent, non-governmental international organization with a membership of 161 national standards bodies. Through its members, it brings together experts to share knowledge and develop voluntary, consensus-based, market relevant International Standards that support innovation and provide solutions to global challenges. You'll find our Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland. Learn more about our structure and how we are governed." https://www.iso.org/home.html. Read my lips S T A N D A R D S as internationally written and agreed to and represented nationally but national standard bodies. Government and industry get together to discuss and agree design rules that should be adhered to as a minimum.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'll repeat my question: So, say, all TACC needs to go under your rules?
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
How the hell would I know, I am not an international body of standards. Mt guess there would be an overriding autonomous vehicle standards with a whole slew of sub-standards tied to it, covering what ever they consider to be appropriate, this tying into other existing vehicle standards. I am just a commenter on slashdot not ISO or have any association with any standards body, I have just worked with them, hundreds of different ones and appreciate their worth and benefit and the safety they provide the community. They are like the science of making stuff, things that go in there have been tested, the outcomes proven and those tests can be replicated.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If anything this story should have been put out in January, back when they had just missed the deadline for their promised cross-country antonymous drive. Or maybe when Elon put out that tweet pushing FSD back to 2020. People say that the sales reps were telling them it would be within a few months, mid 2018 at the latest.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To be fair though, that state is Rhode Island.
This would be an opportunity for Tesla to open source its entire autopilot dataset and technology to allow researches and hobbyists all over the world go over their failures and help them fix it. When faced by embarrassing results - increase transparency and disclose all. Either your faults will become clear or the critics will fall silent.
I'm a fellow Tesla owner, this is true and something non-owners need to realize. When you buy a Tesla, you're buying technology not luxury.
Also, Autopilot =/= "full autonomy" - Tesla sells "Full Self Drive" as a completely separate product that does nothing at all right now. "Autopilot" is the word they use for their assistive cruise control options package. If you don't pay for Autopilot, all you have is old fashioned cruise control from the '80s. With it, you get traffic aware cruise control, autosteer cruise control, park assist, and "Summon." Of these the only portion that is actually "full autonomy" is Summon - and that only works at 1 mile per hour or less with you standing within 30 feet of the car. Everything else people mistake for "Full Autonomy" is either their "Full Self Drive" kickstarter campaign that costs several thousand dollars more than Autopilot that doesn't actually deliver a single function, or mistaken ideas of what cruise control is. I've heard people claim that the name "Autopilot" implies autonomy by itself, but it never has in the 106 years its been used on airplanes so there's no reason for it to suddenly start when the old name is used to sell cars.
You used to get voluntarily reamed? To each their own, I guess.
I actually get my Tesla brakes burnished every few years so the rust from lack of use doesn't get too bad. Regenerative braking means you only use the physical brakes to slow from 3 miles per hour to zero, you don't touch the pedal to slow down at higher speeds.
Suspension is normal, and gets the same normal replacement cycle... which is typically longer than most Teslas have been sold so they aren't commonly in need of replacement.
Autopilot =/= autonomous. It's named after a century old aviation cruise control technology. Like in aviation, the pilot is always required to operate the vehicle and the autopilot is there to reduce the effort. There are no autonomous autopilots in aviation OR automotive applications.
Short sellers who want to close out their positions in the money?
Someone managed to burn out their brakes on a Model 3 already. Of course, they did that by racing on a track with only mild regen ;) Apart from the brakes, the base Model 3 performed like a champ - but the brakes are clearly not intended for heavy use, because you normally don't need them for much. I'm sure they'll put much better cooled brakes on the performance model.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
FYI, https://www.tesla.com/where-yo... Gives a estimate of costs from Tesla, they used to give a mpg slider but took that away, now they compare a 21 MPG car's cost to the Tesla (Compared to a performance car, that is fair.) But for something like a Prius, as long as the savings is less than the cost, a 41 MPG vehicle would be cheaper to fuel.
So for me $.15 for electric, for Gasoline up to $2.35 a gallon, 41 MPG is the same price.
They also say you can only use the SuperCharger for free up to 1000 miles. I don't think that is enforced strictly today though.
At least for now, their maintenance cost is a little more. IE you pay from $500 to $900 a year for maintenance, and if you ever plan to sell your Tesla, you better buy the service plan. A Tesla with maintenance plans look to lose about $10k-15k a year over the first 3 years, while one without will take a $10k hit to the sell price. I do all my own maintenance, so far in 10 years $350 is the most I have spent in a year, average more like $150 (minus tires) a year. But spending over $300 on a gas car in the first 3 years would be excessive even at a dealer.
Back in the 90s BMW had the highest customer satisfaction and were "universally agreed to be shit cars". The phenomenon came to be known "The BMW effect". People spend too much money on a shitty product, and then they have to fool themselves in to believing it was a wise purchase. Read up on psychology and you find out that the person you lie to the most, by far, is yourself. They've done studies and when people have bought two identical items for different prices, the people who paid more for it universally found it to be higher quality and better in every way than the people who paid less for it. This is INCREDIBLY well studied.
By most measurable metrics, Teslas are certifiable shit. They are not well equipped for the price, they are not reliable, they are not well built. The only thing that they're good at is they accelerate fast. But even that is tempered by the fact that the batteries quickly overheat and go into safety mode.
I don't know why I bother responding to you though because at least when talking anything Musk, you do not pay any attention to facts. You are a Musk fanboi in the worst way.
One would think such a glowing report wouldn't be from an AC. You should have saved your typing time. That thing could have come from a Tesla salesman for all anyone knows. Worthless.
Several millions of miles and several different car makers have proven that.
I can consistently bowl 300 on lanes with bumpers. I am ready for the PBA tour!
I wish my $80,000 car got free updates. Or any updates at all.
A little ahead of yourself there, Sparky. Chevy is petitioning for that. Note the very first sentence in that article is "If the Department of Transportation grants GM's latest Safety Petition."
Also, which $30K Ford has:
1. a giant touch screen with built-in maps & navigation
2. lane assist, collision avoidance, auto-breaking
3. 5 star crash rating
4. backup camera
5. power lift-gate
6. > 60 cubic feet of cargo volume
My guess is as folks start to realize they are mileage limited with long recharge times (range anxiety)
Actually Tesla owners almost universally realise that they aren't. It's traditional car owners that think they are.
They are the equivalent of a $30k Ford
Haters will hate. In the mean time actual reviewers are praising them no end and sure as fuck aren't comparing them to $30k Fords.
yes, confirmation bias is strong with these buyers.
It is, but only because they really are awesome cars to drive.
I've put 18K miles on my Model S in the one year I've had it. Probably 16K of those miles were all done with AutoPilot - we did many 400+ mile trips.
on perpetual maintenance
You're thinking like a poor person... which is good; most poor and middle-class in this country have been programmed to think like they're not. However, the folks for whom a new Benz might be a suitable purchase... aren't likely to keep it for more than a few years... and certainly don't (or shouldn't) mind "paying the price."
It's the poor schmuck who buys it afterwards who gets it in the ass - after all, the purchase of a used Benz/BMW/Audi could very well be the 3rd or 5th most important bad decision he/she will ever make.
Computers are dumb.
Yes, they are (if you mean the silicon hardware, not the people that used to calculate). Software - not necessarily so. But please define smart and dumb before we continue that discussion.
Cars will never self drive.
What makes you say that? Some already do, although not very reliably. That is improving day by day.
Or did you mean legally? We'll see.
Usually by reading a book or posting on slashd0.,-;@
no carrier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Regenerative braking means you only use the physical brakes to slow from 3 miles per hour to zero, you don't touch the pedal to slow down at higher speeds.
I'm familiar with regenerative braking, having driven 80-ton electric trains for many years, but the friction brakes on a Tesla are most definitely used for hard stops. Romp the brake pedal down hard enough, and you'll hear the antilock system chatter just like any other car.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Lol, so BMWs are "shit cars" too? What do you consider to not be a "shit car"?
"not well equipped" - Teslas come with tech features found in few to none other cars.
"They are not reliable" - Consumer Reports ranks the Model S above average in terms of reliability
"they are not well built" - Consumer satisfaction disagrees.
"the batteries quickly overheat" - Wrong. The batteries never overheat. You're confusing the motor with the battery pac. And it takes a couple minutes of track duty to overheat a S and X motor; it never happens in real-world driving. And the 3 motor never overheats (PM rather than induction - no rotor heating) - even in track duty.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
Different AC here.
Tesla is not a luxury vehicle.
They are relatively expensive, but are not luxury in the automotive sense.
The interior does not compare favorably to any luxury vehicle I have either owned or encountered. For that reason alone, they fail to achieve luxury status.
I got a Macbook and the number of design compromises made in the name of form over function is staggering. The computer seems reasonably well built, but it's a pain in the ass to use with a shitty keyboard, lack of ports, lack of decent cooling, poor ergonomics, and so on. And since its a disposable toy with poor serviceability and very limited upgradability, the actual service life isn't going to be any longer than those cheap plastic laptops that cost a fraction of the cost.
As a driver, you don't get to run over a child in a school zone with the defense, "Your honor, I drive through here every day. I've NOT killed a child 300,000 times. Please weigh all that good against this one tiny death."
Actually, I've seen that defense work: waiting for my turn in traffic court, an old man was charged with going through a stop sign on an obscure suburban corner. A cop had been posted there after a kid got hit.
"20 years I've been going through that stop sign, and never before do the police stop me." His exact words, seared into my memory.
The judge let him off with a not-so-stern warning, despite the guy having just admitted to thousands of offenses, that he was chronic part of the problem that got the kid hit.
"So for me $.15 for electric, for Gasoline up to $2.35 a gallon, 41 MPG is the same price."
Very market dependent of course. For me, I have my own solar panels on my roof and the power I generate earns me $0.07/kWh whereas I pay $0.20/kWh for power I buy. That makes it nearly 3x more cost effective for me to prioritise charging my Nissan LEAF from our solar when the sun is shining than the export power to the grid. In addition, fuel here is around US$8 a gallon. This means that even the most efficient hybrid is still way more expensive than an EV to run even if you just use grid power rather than solar as I do. Comparing a Tesla to a Prius isn't really fair since the Tesla is a much more expensive car, but comparing it to a LEAF makes more sense and here, the LEAF is way cheaper than the Prius for both fuel/charging and servicing, not to mention they're actually about the same price to buy. If you can work within the range limitations of the LEAF it is by far the better car.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Autopilot on modern planes can take off and land as well as fly where you're going, as far as I've heard, they just don't use it