Model 3 will certainly have a steering wheel. Musk is on record multiple times saying people should be able to continue to drive themselves, should they choose to, for the foreseeable future.

> without a traditional steering wheel

That's a really silly idea, starting with how self-driving systems that can even theoretically handle the worst of New England winters don't actually exist yet.

Agreed. When theres 3 inches of snow on the road (before the plows have hit your neighborhood) and/or snow blowing there's zero chance of an autonomous car being able to decide where the lanes are.

It is something that puzzles me that there is no-one talking about making lane markers reflective on a radio frequency that passes through water (liquid and frozen) without too much trouble and put a radar on those frquencies on the car. Is it because there is no such frequency (I doubt)? Or would that be for whatever reason prohitively expensive? Or something else, like difficulties in getting good enough resolution from radar or that there exist no such material that reflects those frequencies well enough?

Many localities can't even be bothered to maintain their paint. It's been speculated that this is one reason why Tesla's Autopilot is so much better than Mercedes' supposedly equivalent system: Mercedes is testing their system on German roads with perfect markings everywhere, Tesla is testing theirs on California roads that haven't been painted since the Reagan administration.

I can give you a better test environment, Come here and test in India.

If you can get your car to self drive here, I assure you, your car will run anywhere on earth.

Now that you mention it, it will be really interesting to see what happens with self-driving cars in places like India.

In winter driving, where the paint actually is matters very little.

I believe that should be solved with improvements in computer vision. We are probably decade or two away from parsing realtime 2x100 megapixel streams.

Who is gonna pay for that?

We are, through the government, as usual.

Laying down some RF reflective paint/markers on the road wouldn't be nearly as expensive as other proposals (like embedding electronics or special wire underneath the road surface), it would be similar in expense to pavement markers[0] that are applied to some roads today, plus with a HUD it could even help human drivers in snow environments. Lots of places make special modifications to the road specifically for snow, and especially for snowplows.

[0]: http://www.highway-markers.com/pavement-reflectors/PM290.htm...

> there's zero chance of an autonomous car being able to decide where the lanes are

Let alone the seemingly indefinite construction zones that have become commonplace across America - often with the lane markers missing or going off in directions that do not exist anymore (old lanes now blocked, etc...).

Is that right, have construction zones become more commonplace in highways and/or roads across America recently?

I had not heard about that but that sounds interesting and I would love to learn more. Any sources you can point me at?

I wouldn't say recently... it's a symptom of how the roads and highways were built in the US. They are essentially in a constant state of construction due to repaving needs, growing traffic congestion, etc.

What sort of "source" do you expect would exist for this? It's just the day-to-day job of DOT.

I guess I misunderstood your usage of "have become" to mean that this is a new state of affairs, and it didn't use to be this way in the past.

In the midwest, we have two season, Winter, and road construction. As soon as winter ends, road construction begins. Neverending road construction.

The drawback with that approach is that it requires the road to have been previously scanned. So all roads would have to be scanned and added to a database, much like Streetview.

So it just needs to be driven in the summer first, then. Seriously, how do people navigate in whiteout conditions if they don't already know the terrain?

> I still think the Model 3 will be fully autonomous without a traditional steering wheel...

That seems highly unlikely; most regulators thus far have been (unsurprisingly) unwilling to let autonomous cars on the road without some form of manual control. Given how early we are in the technological development cycle for autonomous cars, this seems prudent and logical.

Plus their target date for initial Model 3 shipments is barely more than a year away. The hardware design is probably almost finalized right now. The software end needs to be production-worthy by about this time next year. They aren't even willing to remove the "beta" label from the Model S's autosteer functionality. I would not be surprised if the Model 3 ships with much more advanced autonomous driving features, but I can't imagine it shipping without a steering wheel.

Tesla is pushing hard to get the Model 3 out the door on time. They may not succeed, but they're going to do everything they can to try. Requiring the Model 3 to incorporate full autonomy from day one would be an enormous and unnecessary risk to their ship date.

They're also pushing hard to convert Model 3 reservations into Model S purchases. I don't think they'd be doing that if they were going to release a revolutionary increase in AP in only a year.

Musk has basically said it's mostly a software problem at this point. And if new Model S's aren't already getting the Autopilot 2.0 hardware yet, they will be very shortly.

They're pushing reservation conversions because the more cashflow they can have now the better terms they'll be able to get financing as they move down their roadmap.

Lets not put the cart before the horse :-)

A bug was just discovered (a glaring blindspot, literally) in existing Model S. The workaround was to disable that feature until a solution is found. That workaround involves a steering wheel. If another bug is found that is similar to this one than those cars without a wheel will sit in driveways until the both the NTSB and NHTSA are satisfied. These investigations can take years and Tesla owners will not be happy about it.

What feature was disabled? I haven't noticed any missing features on mine.

I assumed the hands-free driving was disabled. I haven't driven a Model S but from what I can gather the autopilot is comprised of many autonomous systems aboard. I'd assume Tesla has either told drivers or made some form of firmware update to limit people from doing handsfree driving?

No, there hasn't been any change on this front lately. They've been tinkering with the various thresholds since the initial release last October, but the overall theme has remained the same: you can take your hands off the wheel for long stretches as long as the car is confident of its own ability, and once the car loses confidence beyond a certain point it will ask you to "reassure" it by holding the wheel.

There was a period for a few months where part of that algorithm seemed to include a timer, such that the car would always lose confidence after 3-5 minutes hands-free. But that was long before the current media fluff, and they changed it back to be more dynamic.

Wow. That is reassuring. I'm used to boat and plane autopilots. They disengage quite abruptly and usually after the situation has degraded. Leaving the pilot to figure out why and then take action.

Yeah, that's not good. Tesla's usually does a good job of gently encouraging you to help before things get bad. And with practice, you can learn the situations where it's likely to have trouble and take over preventively or just be ready to.

I really can't believe that. Imagine you've ordered a model-3 and instead of a car that you know how to use you get something entirely different of which it remains to be seen if it will work in your situation.

I think the Model 3 will not be fully autonomous, and it will have a traditional steering wheel.

I don't think they'll get rid of the steering wheel just yet -- even in a fully autonomous car. It'll take some years of prevalence of autonomous vehicles until the steering goes away.

Anyone else a little disappointed that "full autonomy" refers to driving and not running a factory? I think the latter is much more interesting.

:) Funny you should mention that...

In the same conference call[1] Musk mentions that the Model 3 factory, aka Alien Dreadnought v1.0 (their internal name for "the machine that builds the machine") will be fully automated, running more like a high speed bottling plant or an automated pick-and-place machine than a traditional car factory.

Their stated rationale is that as soon as humans are involved with the actual assembly, it has to slow down to human speeds. There will still be plenty of people working in the factory, they'll just be maintaining on the machines, doing continuous improvement, dealing with anomalies, etc.

[1] http://ir.tesla.com/eventdetail.cfm?EventID=174610

So... the Model 3 will be completely illegal to operate in most (all) of the US? That doesn't sound like a sound business decision...

sorry, I just don't see the "autopilots" or such being that good that soon. they can't even distinguish plastic bags from rocks at times. They certainly aren't doing the driving when its most needed; bad weather like heavy rain at night or similar. I really don't see it happening unless roads have features applied that are guaranteed to be there so the cars can navigate properly.

then comes the next phase, the car knows the speed limit, so who is liable for the speeding ticket? After all we are here for safety so why would we accept "self driving" cars breaking driving laws? Also, motortrend demonstrated that all such current implementations tail gate, some with barely more than a second of difference.

I would be happy if the 3 comes in quantity before 2020 but I doubt even that. I would never bet on it not having a steering wheel or more advanced driving capabilities than the S

I think it would be pretty off-putting to buy a car in 2016 and have it not come with a steering wheel with no warning.

The tech Geohot is creating at comma.ai does look incredible, I'm really curious to see how the Tesla partnership has affected development.