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Ex-Uber Engineer Claims a Self-Driving Car Drove Him Coast-To-Coast (theguardian.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the road-trip dept.

"Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the heart of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, claims to have built an automated car that drove from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention," reports the Guardian. Levandowski told the Guardian that he completed the 3,099-mile journey on October 30th using a modified Toyota Prius, which "used only video cameras, computers and basic digital maps." From the report: Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver's seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel. "If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked," he said. If true, this would be the longest recorded road journey of an autonomous vehicle without a human having to take control. Elon Musk has repeatedly promised, and repeatedly delayed, one of his Tesla cars making a similar journey. A time-lapse video of the drive, released to coincide with the launch of Levandowski's latest startup, Pronto.AI, did not immediately reveal anything to contradict his claim. But Levandowski has little store of trust on which to draw.

5 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Color me skeptical by mattyj · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This guy is mostly famous for being a big liar and a thief. Not buying it. Also not sure why anyone would care about this.

    1. Re:Color me skeptical by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This claim contains an obvious lie. The car does not have 3000 miles range. It can't refuel itself. Even if it could, it can't clean all its cameras if they get dirty (Tesla has the same problem). And one illegal run doesn't prove general capability anyway.

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    2. Re:Color me skeptical by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Funny

      You are right. But I trust him. He wouldn't create a startup and try to mislead potential investors. It would be against the ethics he learned at Uber.

  2. Of course it'll work SOMETIMES. by Mal-2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Self-driving works the vast majority of the time. How many attempts were made (by him and/or others) that we're not hearing about because they had to be aborted? Just doing it once is not exactly Lewis & Clark territory here.

    --
    How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
  3. Re:Trust in Ability vs. Trust in Ethics. by postbigbang · · Score: 4, Informative

    Having drive across the USA on probably similar roads, I can tell you that this isn't really a test, even if he did do it.

    In that 3000 miles, everyone was going the same direction with multiple lanes for most all of the way. There were no pedestrians, no animals, no left turns, no stop lights, no school buses, no varying speeds in lanes for most of the distance, probably good weather and no random variations. Were there interesting obstacles, I'm sure they'd be pointed out in the video for their points-value.

    So is this a real trial, or just PR? I say: PR. Nothing to see here, move along, sort of stuff.

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