Tesla Angers Autonomous Vehicle Experts By Promising 'Full Self-Driving' Model 3 (cnn.com)

Tesla's now taking orders for Model 3's with a "full self-driving capability" -- meaning "automatic driving on city streets." CNN reports that experts on self-driving technology "say CEO Elon Musk is playing fast and loose with definitions, overselling the technology and potentially creating safety issues." Experts say Tesla's "full self-driving" feature is really a partial self-driving feature that handles minor driving tasks such as keeping pace with other cars on a highway and still requires diligent human oversight. To most autonomous vehicle experts, "full self-driving" means a car in which a person could safely fall asleep behind the wheel, and the steering wheel and pedals aren't even needed...

Dean Pomerleau, of Carnegie Mellon University, who in 1995 drove a minivan that steered itself across the country, told CNN Business he has "grave concerns" about Tesla's practices on autonomous driving. "Claiming its vehicles will soon be 'feature complete' for full self-driving is one more step in the unconscionable practices that Tesla is already engaged in with Autopilot -- overselling its capabilities and reliability when marketing its vehicles and then blaming the driver for not reading the manual and paying constant attention when the technology inevitably fails," Pomerleau said.
CNN notes a 2018 study which found that 71% of drivers believe they could already purchase a self-driving car today -- despite the fact that currently there are no such fully-autonomous vehicles. "Experts warn that this lack of understanding could be deadly as humans may put too much trust in systems like Tesla's, leading to crashes...."

"A Tesla spokeswoman declined to comment on details around the automatic driving option, and pointed CNN Business to fine print on Tesla's order page that tells buyers the currently enabled features require 'active' driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."

Comments

Re:"To most autonomous vehicle expert"?

[Rei]

The silly part is this:

Experts say Tesla's "full self-driving" feature is really a partial self-driving feature that handles minor driving tasks such as keeping pace with other cars on a highway and still requires diligent human oversight. To most autonomous vehicle experts, "full self-driving" means a car in which a person could safely fall asleep behind the wheel, and the steering wheel and pedals aren't even needed...

1) They're describing AP/EAP as a level 1-2 system. It's actually a level 3 system with Navigate on Autopilot (e.g. makes lane changes, takes exits, etc).

2) They're describing what's presently available, which is not FSD, as if that's what's being offered as FSD. Which is just ridiculous. What's currently being offered is AP/EAP, not FSD. Heck, they don't even run on the same computer. AP/EAP is HW2, FSD is HW3 (HW2 = GPU, HW3 = custom neural net chip, about 20x faster).

3) What was targeted for the end of this year has been clearly described, both by Musk in interviews, and in the description of the product: that the car can drive in all situations on its own, but you still need a human monitoring it (aka, level 4 autonomy), with an intent to eliminate the driver requirement as soon as is allowed thereafter (level 5 autonomy). The monitoring requirements will remain until regulators are satisfied that its safety record exceeds that of humans. Musk stated that he expects this to require 10 billion or so miles of data.

4) This isn't coming out of the blue. Tesla's internal builds already handle city driving (including Musk himself). You don't have to take their word on it - customer cars are already doing detections required for city-driving in shadow mode (same, but at night here) (These aren't Tesla vids - they're from people hacking the AP system to see what data it's detecting and processing).

You know, it's really easy to attack someone when you render what they say into a straw man. "OMG, Musk is saying that a Level 1 system is FSD!"

I had issues with Tesla selling FSD a year ago, but then again, so did most people, which is why few bought it. Today? Not so much. They've made a lot of progress in the past year. I still think it's going to be a long time before Tesla's safety data is good enough to convince regulators to say, "Yeah, you don't need a human any more" (level 5). But with Navigate on Autopilot, and their clear progress on city driving, I have no issue with them stating that they expect to be level 4 by the end of the year.