Despite the hype, this blog post makes it clear that Autopilot is just a very simple camera based system that requires human monitoring (but is still very useful in my personal experience). Now they are releasing a software update that uses the previously unused radar hardware as well as machine learning to achieve better results. This is exciting because they're going to keep releasing software updates over the air and the software is just going to keep getting better and better.
The fact that the hardware is shitty doesn't concern me. Google's self driving car project depends on a Lidar system that costs $75,000 today. That's almost four times what the average car costs, and it doesn't work in bad weather. Regardless of how good Google's software is it could mean nothing if Tesla acheives a similar or better result using cheap commodity hardware. The hardware will only get better over time at the same price.
Tesla is in a better position to bring full autonomy to market than anyone else, since they control the hardware, the software, have cars in the field etc. For this reason I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla becomes the first company to break a market capitalization of $1 trillion dollars. Computers gaining the ability to move around the world with drones and autononomous driving will have an economic impact bigger than the introduction of the internet. Where we are now is meaningless. What matters is that Musk has stated the goal and we have something in the field today that can be updated iteratively over time until it's perfect (which will be never). We may not be very far along this journey, but we've taken those hardest first steps towards the next big technological revolution that will once again change everything about how humans live, the implications of which we can't even begin to imagine.
Volvo uses four cameras (one of which is a trifocal 3D unit), four radars, one LIDAR, and 12 ultrasonic sensors. That's a reasonable sensor suite for this. Tesla has one camera, one radar, and some ultrasonic sensors. Not enough.
Volvo is also way ahead on self-driving car commercials.[2]
[1] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE
https://www.google.dk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2...
And better yet: their 100,000 (soon to be 500,000) autopilots will gather live information from roads from several countries, weather types, etc. even when the cars are manually driven. Every day, Tesla's 100,000 cars will bring as much data for their algorithms as Volvo's 100 cars do in 3 years.
Or put in another way: unless Volvo magically have much better programmers than the IT company Tesla, they would need 3 millenia to keep up with Tesla's current fleet of 100,000 data collectors.
Also, do you have any source for Volvo's current system collecting data and sending it to Volvo? We know Tesla does it but I did not know Volvo does it.
That is silly overkill, and most of it is incompatible with visual cues.
I an human. I have only 2 cameras. I kick ass compared to these systems.
I can handle snow hiding the lines and edges of the road. I can handle snowbanks changing the shape of the road. I can handle cops waving and pointing. I can handle dirt roads. I can handle unmarked parking on grass. I can handle broken traffic lights, both individual and power outage. I can handle a total GPS outage. I can handle areas without cell coverage. I can handle new roads. I can handle traffic being diverted onto the opposite side of the road, or even off the road, as happens for construction. I can handle gaping unmarked sinkholes.
> Volvo Cars was owned by AB Volvo until 1999, when it was acquired by the Ford Motor Company as part of its Premier Automotive Group. Geely Holding Group then acquired Volvo Cars from Ford in 2010.[0]
> Geely (officially Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd) is a Chinese multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Its principal products are automobiles, taxis, motorcycles, engines, and transmissions. It sells passenger cars under the Geely and Volvo brands and taxis under the London Taxi brand.[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Cars [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geely
[1] : https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele... [2] : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-fir...
By the way I don't think Volvo is freaking out so much as going for it's vision 2020 thing:
"in 2008 we set out our vision that by 2020 nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car."
For a representative example, see how bad Mercedes’ latest and greatest E-Class w/ Drive Pilot is: http://www.autofil.no/936897/hands-off
It’s damning. And that is the one they advertised as being “self-driving”. That’s the best Mercedes has.
This review compares more of them: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...
The best of non-Teslas have at least twice as many autonomous mode disengagements (i.e. they suck at the lane keeping job). They specifically call out Model S for being the only one that can keep in a lane without wobbling like a drunk driver. None of the “old” car manufactures can even get that right, let alone anything more.
So yes, on paper all these components exist for 3+ years and are nothing new. Exactly like smartphones existed before the iPhone did — remember those?
I don't know why, either, since this would presumably be very easily debunked.
I believe you're multiple orders of magnitude off here. Google's LIDAR is surprisingly cheap. I believe they used expensive Velodyne units in earlier versions.
Heck, even brand-new Velodyne devices are only $8k.
They won't be able to achieve similar or better results than Google with the current sensor suite, for example they don't have anything to check for oncoming cars behind the vehicle. No software update can compensate for things that the sensors don't see.
Then how does a line changing feature works? I am pretty sure you need to see cars behind you to safely change lanes?
For safety reason the driver has yet to be sure that no one is approaching you at the moment of changing lane but the system obviously works autonomously, you just have to engage the turn signal.
> "Other manufacturers have rear facing radars for this."
Tesla have rear radars, otherwise Autolane-changing and Autopark features wouldn't be available to use.
Sure, Autopilot is safe 'when used correctly,' but I wouldn't trust someone to maintain 100% attention on driving with it enabled. Maybe for a few cumulative hours. Not for hundreds or maybe thousands of hours. If I'm paying attention and I prevent Autopilot from getting me into an accident, why have it on in the first place? It's supposed to protect me from inattention! (e.g. automatic braking)
As it gets better at protecting people from inattention, people will be less attentive, and more will encounter the edge cases that the machine learning models will inevitably have.
Don't get me wrong, I love SDCs and the massive impact they will have, I just believe that partial autonomy is unsafe because of the human factor.
Because it takes less mental effort to watch for the exception case rather than constantly adjusting speed/heading/etc.
Also something that's rarely mentioned is that in it's current form AP's killer-feature is rush hour traffic. In those situations you're dealing with <20 MPH and tends to be the most mentally taxing.
In my small sample set(~30k AP miles) I've found the mental load for driving long distances and rush hour traffic to be significantly less.
At ~30k miles, chances are you haven't seen enough exceptions to make a judgment on that.
It is hard to stay focused on jobs that are extremely dull, except for the rare cases where they aren't.
There's tons of research on this because there are many people in that situation (watching radar screens for incoming ICBM's, guarding a facility, luggage screening at an airport, etc)
Flying tires, wildlife jumping out. Heck, just yesterday had someone merge into the lane with no signal. Just because I'm not providing steering inputs doesn't mean that I'm not constantly scanning traffic.
The problem of Level 3 autonomy is not cognitive load but the general lack of active feedback on the one hand, and a lack surprising events to mediate the allocation of attention on the other. It makes sense, the longer you're encountering non-events, the more difficult it will be to justify alertness. Surprise guides attention which in turn is strongly correlated with alertness. The longer one must remain alert, especially without surprise, feedback or reward, the higher the levels of subjective effort and mental fatigue.
Intuitively, if you imagine that only a few things are filtered to attention, the less surprises, the more predictability, the more difficult it is to select what to attend to, the more likely your mind will begin to wander. This is one explanation for the finding in [1]:
The fact that the number of false alarms increased suggests
that the rather dramatic increase in missed targets was not
due to a simple reduction in the number of responses:
the number of responses to nontargets even increased.
This suggests that the observed deterioration of performance
is not caused by task disengagement but may result from increasing
difficulties for subjects to correctly identify targets
[1] In the linked article they specifically call out driving as an activity sensitive to mental fatigue http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926641005...
Yes, this!
The argument that drivers are safer if they are forced to pay attention all the time is ridiculous, you can use that to argue against every feature on the car! Servo steering is bad, you don't feel the road properly! Automatic gearboxes are bad, you're not in tune with the engine! ABS brakes are bad, you should know how to brake so as not to lock the wheels! Traction control is bad, you should never drive on surfaces where you're not in 100% control of the car! Blind spot radars are bad, you should always look around you and make lane changes responsibly! Bla bla bla.
The current Level 2 autonomous systems makes it easier to do the right thing when driving. Used correctly, they lessen the cognitive load, but you have to learn how they work, what they can and cannot do, just like you need to know what situations your traction control systems or anti-lock brakes can save you from. They're not magic, they're just one more helper system.
The best human drivers can get by without the first set of features.
How is routing not human-enhancing? It makes it easier for you to choose which route to take? How is an automatic gearbox not human-replacing, it eliminates the need for a human to shift with the shift stick?
Interesting---how did you measure this?
I've been doing the same ~7hr drive + workday for 2 years. Both myself and my wife noticed I was a lot less wiped out after AP. We have the car ~3 months before AP so it was a pretty controlled change.
The same reason you have cruise control - it doesn't do everything for you, but it helps reduce cognitive load in some basic areas, which reduces fatigue over the long haul.
Last I heard, Autopilot was MUCH safer per mile.
For every Tesla that is now able to recognise a truck cutting across a highway and brakes in time to avoid a fatal collision you will have new bizarre scenarios like following behind a truck that dislodges overhead objects, which a human would have avoided but a Tesla's computer didn't see, leading to a human getting crushed by a bridge falling down.
I would also expect a short learning curve for Teslas to acknowledge the emergency stop water curtain signs.
But the short version is yes, SDC will result in more deaths even though they get relatively safer and safer.
This device isn't enough for a full point cloud. It doesn't scan in elevation, just azimuth. Some variants do have an upward-pointing beam in additional to the main forward beam, which is about 5 degrees in vertical.
There are automotive radars which scan in 3D[2], but Tesla's is not one of them.
Small radars are rather blunt instruments. You tend to get one point for each target, not lots of points. The beam focus isn't that tight. Tighter focus requires a larger antenna array.
[1] http://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/bosch-presents-... [2] http://www.fujitsu-ten.com/business/technicaljournal/pdf/38-...