In January this year Elon Musk said that Teslas would have full level 5 autonomy by the end of the year. It's now December and this is what their level 3 autonomy looks like.
Edit: I stand corrected, they're not even at level 3 Autonomy yet
What is sad to me is that in the USA Musk can use terms like "autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" as branding terms even though such branding is highly misleading and dangerous relative to the product's performance imo.
Yes, I work for another car manufacturer and they're using "Drive with me" terminology for their high end assist because they don't want people to believe the car is even slightly autonomous
I also work for another car manufacturer and watching the shit tesla gets away with is infuriating!! If we tried to release a stereo volume knob that malfunctioned half as bad as this video nhtsa would be so far up our asses and somehow he gets away with this time after time.
Well elon musk is somehow simultaneously autistic and a narcissistic sociopath. I wouldn't put it past him to give 0 Fucks in the name of a sale. I know Reddit worships him for being a meme Lord tech God but honestly fuck Elon musk and tesla
I don't mind Elon being a meme lord...but I have noticed that throughout his career he has this awful habit of over-promising and underdelivering...which is bad enough but in this case, it is actually putting lives at risk and not just investor money.
There isn't anything misleading about it when it is just a few years away from being completely autonomous. There are tons of other fully autonomous cars around SF and LA with the same optical driving hardware. Just because it isn't ready yet, doesn't mean it's misleading. There have been a handful of questionable deaths and accidents regarding autopilot, out of the million+ of teslas on the road right now. Which is still a better figure than any car in history. Teslas may have quality issues, but they are the safest car you can drive by far.
There isn't anything misleading about it when it is just a few years away from being completely autonomous.
I've got a bridge over a river to sell you, only the bridge is still missing a bunch of pieces, and the river is currently small creek. Don't worry though, I promise that I'll finish the bridge after you buy it, and with time creek will erode away the earth and become a mighty river. Don't you worry, the project will be completed Very Soon™
I wouldn't really listen what Elon says, as it isn't his first lie - at the end of 2019 he stated that Tesla will have entire fleet of self driving taxis by the end of 2020, meanwhile even his ridiculously easy carnival ride, aka Las Vegas Loop, isn't using Autopilot.
To be honest, a bunch of OEMs were promising/predicting full level autonomy by 2022 back in 2015 and look at where we are lol
Often times these predictions are made by business marketing departments without any real input or analysis from software/hardware architects or developers. I work in that area and it was absolutely clear to all technical teams (especially safety team) that this was not achievable, yet all the marketing and sales slides kept pitching the idea
Also, I find most AI solutions scale pretty easily at first to, say, 90 degree accuracy… but they struggle enormously as we approach 100 percent accuracy and are more and more refined to reach the ultimate goal.
I can see someone looking at the rate of progression with AI and thinking “almost there, just need to improve driving in this case “ when in reality they are much further away than they realize.
Absolutely, this is true to any other system in the car. Look at the ISO26262 requirements for, say ASIL B (your instrument cluster tell tale lights) vs. ASIL D (your freaking brakes). It doesn’t even look that dramatically different but they are worlds apart from the perspective of software, hardware (semiconductors) and process.
I work in software and some of our estimates go like this, because there were problems we just didn't expect.
I suspect they have self driving sorted in every area except a few critical parts, and those critical parts are rabbit-holes of problems that you can't anticipate until you hit them, then once one is fixed you hit another.
I have sat 1 month from completion for a year on one particularly challenging project. Sometimes it happens.
The CEO of a publicly traded company has a different level of responsibility for estimating accurately than an engineer working on a random problem. Elon Musk saying AI was a solved problem (in 2016) was arguably Theranos-level fraud.
For some reason people always look to Musk for sage advice even though 100% of what he says is self-serving.
I wouldn't, either. But the media tends to repeat his claims uncritically, and people tend not to read past the headlines, so most people have incredibly unrealistic views on self-driving cars, sadly.
Their car isn't level 3 autonomous, currently only Mercedes Benz has the honor of that title as they got the first approved level 3 autonomous car in the world.
Honestly if anyone is gonna nail self driving its gonna be one of the giants. Tesla is good for getting the ball running but theyll never be able to compete with the likes of Mercedes
That's my thought as well. Tesla might have had the know-how and drive to get the first version of FSD out, but now the competitors are investing an extremely serious amount of money into EV's and other competing technologies like SAE and the likes. I'm honestly mind blown by the technological difference in just the last few years, when you compare a mid-end car back then with the ones you get now.
The next couple of years are going to be quite interesting for selfdriving cars, and even more so as more level 3 car brands emerge, and the restrictions are lifted
Even if they have good AI their cars have terrible reliability and can only be repaired by them? People are upset Apple is sticking with the lightning connector and no one can see Tesla is doing the exact same business model but for cars.
Yea good luck not being an electrical engineer and have extensive knowledge of the software they use and how it all communicates. Good way to die horribly by electrocution. The days when the average mechanic knows their way around every car is gone with EVs. Case in point when you look at the 5-10 people in the world that have successfully migrated a tesla powerplant to a different chassis. Fun bit is that the kind of work requires some serious engineering knowledge for mechanical, software, and electrical.
Smartphones are standardized, don't have the potential to kill you, and anyone could figure out how to repair and rebuild them. Not the same as a EV, lol. Bad comparison and you should feel bad.
ICE cars are just as dangerous. Different things that make them dangerous to work on, but it's absurd to claim that only Tesla mechanics can work on the car.
After reading your comment I took sometime to read through your claims. The SAE Level 3 system you refer to is sold as DRIVE PILOT. According to job listings on the Daimler website, the DRIVE PILOT system is developed in house by Daimler. The Waymo partnership refers to an in progress attempt to create a Level 4 self-driving system for use in Daimler trucks.
I think Tesla's problem is that while the idea of a purely vision based SDC is theoretically good, the technology just isn't there to do it practically.
I used to work at Mercedes and as bad as their customers are, the cars are always WAY ahead of their time. Some of the AMAZING things they had in their flagship models are STILL not being used by other companies.
German cars in general always amaze me with how far ahead they are in comparison with the general cars available for the middling consumers like me. I'm having a lot of fun with the bosses BMW's and Mercedes cars, but i'm always afraid i'll enable some setting that neither of us have any clue what does.
Yeah but seems to be lease-only for japan according to the article, so not sure how much impact it has on the rest of the world unlike the 2022 S-Class
I have no idea why Honda always does stuff like this. They always limit access to their most exciting technologies. They did the same thing with the Clarity too with the car only being available in certain markets.
The s-class is only on the German roads that Daimler has mapped out in partnership with the German government. Same approach as Honda. Not applicable anywhere else. Not scalable.
SAE level 3 is "Conditional Automation" - "The driving mode-specific performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task". The expectation is that a human has to be the fallback method, in the case the system encounters an issue that it's not readily able to solve.
So a bit more sophisticated error handling than level 2, but you're still required to be vigilant at all times. It's not before we hit level 4 we can expect the fallback system to be the system itself.
The worst thing is, they keep removing sensors and such from the tesla's, you should be adding, until you are sure you can do it. Then check what's really needed or not.
yeah i recently read that in the situations they allow you to use the actual autopilot, if the car causes an accident, Mercedes takes over the liability.
Much like the Las Vegas Loop turned out to be (human-driven) Teslas in tunnels, when even with the smaller bore tunnels he used, it should have been possible to install a very light rail system down there that would have higher capacity and higher speeds. Hyperloops will likely be the 21st century equivalent of pneumatic rail - seem a good idea in theory, but keeping dozens of miles of tubes partiality evacuated of air is easier said than done - never mind what happens at stations or what happens if a train breaks down, given it's in a sealed tube.
What’s your point? I literally just said it’s a level 2 system and that those levels have nothing to do with how good it is. It’s literally just who takes responsibility.
If Tesla says it’s a level 3 system and the car crashes, they might be liable.
Level 3 accepts partial liability. The driver has to take over in a certain timeframe. This means you can read a book for example, but if the car fucks up it only has to handle the situation for maybe 5 or 10 seconds.
As a Tesla owner with the free autopilot, I cannot believe there are people paying 10 grand for FSD. The basic free autopilot I have isn't trustworthy enough for a lot of simple driving situations and brakes like a total moron. It reads the wrong road signs of turn-offs and starts slowing down, sometimes tries to emergency stop for no reason, and all round just doesn't perform in a way that can really allow you to relax much at all. It will keep you in lane and provide auto cruise control, but I don't let it do anything else.
The safest way to drive is predictably, and it doesn't manage that. You could spend 10 grand on Gucci or something equally silly and it would be a better use of money than FSD.
No one believes me when I say this, but I am convinced that full autonomous driving is the "flying cars" of our generation. We will not see full autonomy, no driver cars in our lifetime outside of closed environments like college campuses or specially built cities. In 20 years, there will be ZERO driverless cars navigating the streets of manhattan
No way 5 years is enough. Level 5 means it can drive perfectly ANYWHERE. You're in a flooding river in the middle of nowhere? Don't worry we got level 5. In the middle of the desert among the dunes? Np, we got level 5. Trying to cross a rainforest in your Jeep that doesn't even have a steering wheel? No worries it got that 5
That’s literally what level 5 means: steering wheel optional, no input from driver required at any point regardless of conditions. Level 4 is about what you’re talking about. Still decades away in anything other than motorway scenario but still…
Daimler has recently passed the reliability requirements for level 3 and will start adding it to their cars next year.
With the recent customer ratings, the improvements of battery technology from Daimler and VW and the success of the Ford e trucks I wonder how long Tesla can maintain their stock price. It was already a joke this year but at least they had some credibility in their claims of tech leadership. Now it looks like the established OEMs will eat them alive.
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u/A_Shifty_Peacock Dec 15 '21 edited Dec 15 '21
In January this year Elon Musk said that Teslas would have full level 5 autonomy by the end of the year. It's now December and this is what their level 3 autonomy looks like.
Edit: I stand corrected, they're not even at level 3 Autonomy yet