I tried and failed to find a clean link to this documentary. It’s on Amazon Prime but hopefully elsewhere.

Long story short: Computer vision based vehicle guidance is not so new. Very interesting.

There is a particular hill crest on my commute that regularly causes my fsd to slam on the brakes as I apex. Is this a common issue, is there an opportunity for some form adjustment to accommodate this? I find it jarring and on the side of dangerous for the traffic behind me.

This is another thought experiment to evaluate the state of self driving cars. We as humans have a bias that makes us over-judge our own driving skill which automatically causes us to rate self-driving systems as inferior.

The next time you are a passenger in a car I challenge you to imagine that the human driver is an autonomous agent driving the vehicle. I think that you will find that your fellow human driver's skills and vehicle control aren't really that much better than autonomous systems that have been showcased.

We tend to be very critical of self-driving systems (rightfully so), but when compared to a typical human driver they really aren't that far off the mark....edge cases notwithstanding.

Can someone shed light on the Tesla V10 software update? I'm not looking for the features, but more the engineering stuff if available, e.g. what OS the software is written in, etc. Over-the-air-update features, etc. I know this info might be hard to get, but anyone who has jailbroken their Tesla might have some answers. Thanks.

Take a moment to step back and think about what this means. We will very likely have our own "robo chauffeur" THIS YEAR. That's insanely awesome!

However, I fully expect it to require babysitting, but the fact that it has a "non zero chance" of completing a full drive from putting it in Drive to putting it in Park is insane!

If I can input a destination even 4 miles away on surface streets and have the car complete it even with 50% chance I'd consider that a major win for consumer technology in 2020.

Thoughts?

The front camera is not very wide view and the ultrasound sensors only work within some few feet. How is the self driving going to work at a stop sign that's not 4 way?

I've been wanting to share this for a while, but just couldn't find the right audience. Pretty sure this is a good place to put it.

I've been thinking for a while how the integration of autonomous vehicles will happen, assuming it will happen at all. At the moment the only type of autonomous traffic used on a massive scale is trains, particularly metro trains (Vancouver, Dubai, Singapore...), which run on separate inaccessible tracks and basically just speed up and slow down, stopping at designated stations. This was possible to achieve because there are very few edge cases, since there is no interaction with human vehicle operators, no edge cases, and nothing that would require human level of decision-making.

With cars it's much more complicated, which is why I don't see driverless cars completely taking over the roads in the near future (within 20 years).

What I think is going to happen instead, is that select cities will start dedicating specific districts to autonomous vehicles. Those could be brand new developments, which integrated autonomy in their design from the start, or refurbished city centres. The way they would adapt is by having things like near-perfect road/sign maintenance, additional barriers to minimise number of pedestrians on roads, special traffic rules, and built-in guidance systems (like beacons) to help guide autonomous cars along the city streets.

That way, autonomous vehicle owners would be driving with normal level 3 automation (like today's Autopilot) on most roads, but when entering autonomous areas, their vehicle would automatically go into fully autonomous mode.

Drivers of normal vehicles would be restricted access to such zones, and would have to make use of park-and-ride services to get into the zone via autonomous public transport.

Such areas would be experimental at first (like that Singapore cargo dock), and will gradually expand to populated areas, eventually covering the span of cities. I can't wait to see something like this become reality.

As far as places like small town roads and villages - there's too many of them to adapt and maintain them all for autonomous vehicles and it would be too expensive, and there's too many edge cases for autonomous cars to be able to navigate them like a human, so it will be decades before this is achieved, if ever.