Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tesla Shifts the Goalposts For 'Full Self-Driving' Technology (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the self-driving-strategy dept.

AmiMoJo writes: Tesla has been selling "full self-driving" capability since 2016, promising that "you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere," and that "once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else en route [sic] to your destination." Last week Tesla shifted the goalposts, redefining "full self-driving" as a number of Level 2 driver assistance features that were already available, and a few new tricks to be delivered later. All will require a qualified driver behind the wheel, paying attention at all times and ready to take over if the car can't handle the situation. Worse, owners who bought the previous full self-driving feature paid $8,000 for it. Tesla is now offering owners who bought their cars prior to the change the same package for $5,000. Owners who paid the $3,000 higher price are unsure if the previously promised technology has been abandoned and Level 2 is now the most they can expect.

10 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Shit happens, things change. by Kokuyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So it's harder than Tesla expected. Big whoop.

    Now go ahead and reimburse your loyal customers for the functionality you cannot deliver and I see no issue.

    Don't do that, however, and I feel Tesla is just a bunch of lying scumbags...

    Being a good person is simple... just take responsibility for your fuckups. Oh, wait... that's hard, isn't it? Well, let's see whether Tesla rises to that challenge.

    1. Re:Shit happens, things change. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It was not "harder than expected", it was impossible to begin with. If any other company would do it, they'd be in trouble for false advertising.

      Not fElon Musk's outfit.

    2. Re:Shit happens, things change. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Aye, it may be impossible the way Tesla is trying to do it. Their original plan was for a coast-to-coast demo in 2017, which obviously failed.

      Other self driving systems like Google/Waymo's one use lidar, cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors. They are anticipating the cost/size of lidar systems to reduce rapidly in the next few years.

        If Tesla had managed to use just cameras, radar and ultrasonics. It would have been a huge coup if it had worked.

      Their problem is twofold. First they underestimated the processing power needed to do handle images from the cameras. They use neural nets to process them and on the original hardware they shipped (known as AP2) it just wasn't powerful enough, they couldn't even get it to compare consecutive images (which helps when you don't have stereo vision). They went to AP2.5 and now AP3, but it's not clear if even that is fast enough for what they want to do.

      The second problem is that it's just really, really hard to use neural nets to do everything they need. Not just recognizing objects like cars, signs and traffic lights. It has to see road markings, it has to see traffic police and understand their gestures, it has to understand complex 3D spaces with no/poor road markings like car parks and private driveways. It has to be able to recognize small objects that the radar/ultrasonics close to the ground won't pick up, like toll barriers and the over-hanging rear ends of trucks.

      To give you some idea of how far away they are, even the current driver assist parking isn't good enough for full self driving. Sometimes it ends up a metre away from the kerb. The human driver can fix that, but for full self driving they have to get the camera to recognize the kerb, indistinct as it may be, and get close to it. Worse still, the current side facing cameras don't point far enough down to actually see it close to the car, so it has to see it from a distance, make a 3D model of the parking spot and navigate into it from memory.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Shit happens, things change. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They had a lot of engineering staff turnover in the first couple of years after he made the promise. Then it seemed to settle down a bit, I guess someone came in who was able to manage expectations.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:Shit happens, things change. by BostonPilot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've posted this a few times: I never understood why Tesla pursued self driving so vigorously. In my mind, a really nice electric car was groundbreaking enough that I didn't see the need, and I saw a lot of downsides.

      One downside is certainly that I didn't think they could pull off FSD ever. When I got my Model 3 last October and saw how poorly Autopilot worked, I couldn't believe Tesla ever believed they could improve it enough to FSD. They need many orders of magnitude improvement before they'll be able to turn it loose on city streets by itself. Waymo seems to have the strongest story, and I think they're still 15-20 years away from a coast to coast drive without intervention.

      Another huge downside is that FSD is a bet your company proposal. First there are all the lawsuits if you can't make it work... But even worse is the liability. And the more cars on the road, the worse the liability gets. Every time a pedestrian gets hit, there goes millions of dollars. Every time the car runs itself into a truck and kills the occupants, more millions of dollars. Aviation went through a phase where half the cost of a GA aircraft was for the liability insurance. I could see that happening for automobiles as well.

      I don't see that they have any choice but to immediately refund everybody who paid for FSD. It'll cost them a lot more if they have to be sued for it. And they'll still get sued... they might end up having to buy back some cars from people who claim they wouldn't have bought the car if it wasn't for the FSD promises. Cheaper to buy the car than go to court.

      Right now seems to be one of the more difficult times for Tesla. Certainly their announcement of closing all their stores worries me. And I really like Elon (being an engineer myself I appreciate his humor and way of looking at things). But I have to say, I think it was a huge mistake for him to have gone down the FSD pathway. He should have partnered with Waymo with no promises of the technology ever making it into a Tesla... It's one thing to overpromise a bit on schedules to push the workforce... that's pretty common in high tech. But overpromising stuff like FSD just gets you sued. I hope Tesla survives.

  2. Re:So... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just to be clear it's actually worse than that.

    Tesla sold "full self driving" that really would drive itself while you took a nap for $8000. People pre-ordered it with the promise of it being ready by 2017.

    Now they have changed the definition and started selling the reduced functionality for a lower price.

    People who pre-ordered both paid more and have no idea if what they were promised is now cancelled and this Level 2 stuff is all they are going to get. To add insult to injury, if they had not pre-ordered they could now buy the same thing for $3000 less.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Why????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Why does anybody believe anything Tesla announces?

    Their cars are fine so long as you don't want to drive too far. If you do, you get to wait at their superchargers for an hour or more. Far more patience is required if there isn't a supercharger on your route. Compare that to any non-electric vehicle that takes less than five minutes to fill up. Their cars aren't as well made as any current Japanese or Korean vehicle.

    Media whore is the most appropriate term for their announcements.

    Electric vehicles will come, they won't be made by Tesla. They will be from any of several well known car companies.

  4. Re:Who wants to ride self-driving cars? by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a techie I know technology sometimes do freak up. No way I will let myself inside a self-driving car.

    People make more mistakes than a well-written and tested application that is working within the scope it was designed for.

    That's what worries me most about these "half-way-there" solutions. You do things enough for people to trust them and people's focus drifts. If you expect your car to do everything, you won't be prepared when it doesn't. I don't even like to use Cruise Control for that reason.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  5. It's more about the lawyers than the tech by Reiyuki · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Like humans, self-driving cars will occasionally get into horrible accidents. The question is, when it happens, who is at fault? the driver, the auto manufacturer, the dealer, the programmer, etc?

    The lawsuits that follow their first catastrophic crash will likely kill development in self-driving cars for the next decade or more.

  6. Academia saw this coming in the 80s by mrwireless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What I find most troubling about this is how it shows Musk does not get enough push back and/or there are not enough critically thinking people from academia allied with Tesla to even raise the issue.

    Because this was completely predictable.

    We've known about the complexity or reality since the 80's, with people like Lucy Suchman pointing out how we underestimate the complexity of the world (in books like Situated Actions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    We've know about the limits to AI since then too. The famous quote is "the hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy things turned out to be hard".

    Machine learning, as one Slashdot commenter once said, is basically "statistics on steroids". It you say "we're going to build self-driving cars that can handle the complexity of the life world with statistics", well... then you will fall into the same trap that technologists have been falling into for the past 30 years.

    The problem with Silicon Valley is that it started to believe the stories that were originally designed to separate investors from their money. The Californian Ideology slowly became an unspoken faith, and anyone who questioned it was branded a 'pessimist'.

    Musk is a clever man, but he is clearly from Silicon Valley. His fear of AI taking over is another example of this, as anyone who has studied the digital humanities can explain. It's only a valid fear if you have a simplified view on the world, a view where everything can, in the end, be modeled in a system.

    The truth is it can't. Society is amazing at producing never before seen situations. The long tail of edge cases is unending, and the degree to which society demands that you cover them is greater than any non-intelligent/non-sentient system ever can.

    Don't get me wrong - having a simplified view of the world is what makes people like Musk such powerful forces. But as we've seen here it has its limitations too.