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A comment on Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage. Parent comment

Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by NickM on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:21AM (#11422041)
It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.

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".

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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by joantune on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:46AM (#11422243)
What do you mean? Automatic parking comes before self driving. Google's cars already do all of that https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/

They don't use GPS for driving, perhaps general orientation, they use cameras and LASER based RADARs (called LIDARs)

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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by the_economist on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:49AM (#11422787)
My Model X drives itself on the freeway extremely well well. I don't have to do a thing from San Francisco to Sacramento, for example.

But the self parking barely works, and can't handle anything complicated.

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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by Laaw on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:25AM (#11422071)
Self driving cars don't use GPS, it is not reliable or granular enough.
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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by rpedela on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:28AM (#11422108)
At all? How would it drive to the mall on the other side of town without GPS?
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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by TillE on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:34AM (#11422161)
A map, plus the assumption that it never moves without being powered on.

(I'm sure it does use GPS for navigation. But it's hypothetically possible to do without.)

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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by talmand on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:34AM (#11422655)
Seems like it might need GPS at times, or some other means to know where it is at certain moments. Once it establishes where it is then I could see it no longer needing GPS, as it should be bright enough to keep track of location by itself using a map.
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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by chucksmash on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:26PM (#11423664)
Using just dead reckoning you would pretty quickly have issues with accumulated error.
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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by gregmac on Monday April 04, 2016 @02:22PM (#11424098)
Apparently not. There's a pretty fascinating story about Etak, who made a dead reckoning-based car navigation in the mid 1980's: http://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgott...
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Re:Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage by Laaw on Monday April 04, 2016 @04:21PM (#11425232)
Directions plus a bevy of road sensors. Basically the same way you do.

It may use GPS supplementally, but never primarily.

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