There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.
Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.
I've often wondered how self-driving cars will deal with this. Imagine we reach the point where self driving cars are perceived as being guaranteed to stop before hitting a pedestrian.
This presents a lot of problems that need to be overcome. A car-jacker could rob you simply by getting an accomplice to stand in front of your car. Teenagers might start jumping in front of cars as a high-tech game of chicken. What happens when somebody steps into the road and the car brakes so hard it gives the occupants whiplash?
I'm sure all of these problems will be solved in time, but it's going to be interesting to see how!
So now you have a long street where tons of people are crossing every 10 meters during the day because it's a quite busy shopping district.
Although cars are driving slow, it must be very hard for autonomous cars because there are people everywhere running in every direction.
That said, the default is not going to be stopping within 1-2 inches of pedestrians, rather it's going to gradually slow down to deal with pedestrians while trying to maintain forward progress. The point is a self driving car could be more aggressive than most people while staying safe instead of freaking out and just stopping because people are jaywalking.
It's the edge case where a car needs to cross a really high traffic area that's going to be an issue and people can't do 20mph right in front of a high traffic box store entrance etc. Further, going slow for a few hundred feet really does not take that long.
There may still be reasons to prefer robot cars for low-speed environments but the probability of such a vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian is already very low, so that is not relevant to a discussion of a robot car's ability to stop very rapidly at very low speeds.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/HS809012.htm...
Yes, walls are easily located. Holes not so much. Emptiness is quite difficult to see.
The bigger problem, is imagine, would be weather. I dunno how completely they've solved that problem yet.
If I ever get an autonomous car, manual driving is a must-have feature :|
Keeping my horse was a must for those situations.
I once rode in a plane that could only go a few hundred miles before refueling.
Keeping my car was a must for those situations.
I once rode in a train that could only go ~60 mph.
Keep my car was a must for those situations.
(hint, I'm talking about early stuff)
2 autonomous cars could negotiate which has the shorter trip, an autonomous car encountering a human could default to timidity.
When a self driving car messes up it'll be a very expensive lawsuit for pain and suffering and psychological trauma of not being in control while the accident unfolds and surely its all the mfgrs fault for having a software bug.
Its not so much the physical characteristics of being narrow as being a location where many accidents happen compared to an interstate-class road.
Must be a nightmare for every car proximity-sensor.
I witnessed 2 car accidents when I was there and both were vehicles turning (slowly) and clipping motorbikes in their blind spots. Not gonna happen with a computer.
> and it is already difficult to navigate those places
> as a human
But is any of that a problem for Tesla to sell a lot of autonomous cars? No. Not even a little.
How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.
So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".
They don't use GPS for driving, perhaps general orientation, they use cameras and LASER based RADARs (called LIDARs)
But the self parking barely works, and can't handle anything complicated.
(I'm sure it does use GPS for navigation. But it's hypothetically possible to do without.)
It may use GPS supplementally, but never primarily.
You're not thinking far enough into the future. We already had that, in 2015.
These cars won't exist until late 2017, so you have to improve on what we've got, today, by more than 2 years.
Is that how you read it?
Because I read it as Tesla feeling the pressure to get something tangible out there for people to see, so they demonstrated a car that wasn't finished (just like the battery swap tech, or "off the hook" Powerwall demand). It got huge hype, now it'll be two more years of "wait and see what we have planned!" Smart, I guess.
I wish everyone would stop framing this as Tesla vs everyone else, instead of rooting on the EV industry as whole. There'd be less pressure on Tesla to take over the world, which ain't gonna happen.
In fact, when we're criticising UX we say it's like the controls in the space shuttle.
Yes, there's a risk you may hit something and be killed, but per passenger mile, I expect it to be even safer than the space shuttle.
I think most people imagine piloting a spaceship as being awesome. And are thinking of it more like sci-fi spaceships rather than a modern day shuttle packed with obtuse controls.
The rest of the information does not need constant visual presence, actually the GPS is probably more interesting than anything else.
I would still be surprised if there is no HUD provided with the car. You still need some very visible notification area for event like running out of juice or any kind of malfunction. Also there still some stuff the car are bad at doing like fog lights, or putting the light on in a foggy situation ( actually almost had a crash because of that - so use of the car switching the light on or off, forgot that fog during day or overcast weather are the same to a light sensor ) Also if the car is not 100% of the time autonomous, you need to be able to tell immediately if it is enabled or not.
As for the lack of instruments, I rarely look at much other than the speedometer while driving, and if the car can read the signs and help regulate speed for me, I may not even need that. My non-Tesla car has an audible chime at 50 and 25 miles to empty, so I don't even need to look at the fuel gauge.
Turns out the way I drive involves letting the wheel slip under my hands when going around corners, and you can't do that if the circumference of the wheel moves as it turns.
Is there a reason that basically NO car manufacturer has EVER made a production model with steering by anything other than a wheel and pedals?
They said that German legislation does not allow for cars with side-stick rather than steering wheels, and that it would be cost-prohibitive to introduce - the latter is probably no longer true...
The current model S is already problematic. I have had drivers adjusting their AC almost hit other drivers because they had to look down.
On American roads? Not likely.
That's a shitty metric. Does it mean it will need intervention every 950ms for 50ms?
And the "steering controls and system feels like a spaceship"
And Musk tweeted a little while ago about getting a special team of Software Engineers reporting directly to him for self-driving that was "top priority" within the company.
And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production.
At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous? (and maybe you'll have to take over sometimes, but I'm thinking 95%+ of the time it will be driving itself)