Tesla has lane-assist, adaptive cruise control and a few other goodies. Many auto manufacturers have those things. You still have to manually follow GPS directions.

Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge.

Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket. Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today... and that's amazing.

> Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket.

That's exactly what Tesla is marketing and working on with their new self-driving features, and you can buy cars that will allegedly be capable of this today.

"All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."

From https://www.tesla.com/models/design

I'm looking forward to seeing calendar spam invites bring people to unexpected locations.

https://plus.google.com/+RonnieBincer/posts/ec3aZmhNMwg

I would assume it wouldn't take me to any meetings I had not accepted.

>Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today.

It should be obvious that Tesla is going to win this race. Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. And they build real, production cars. "Real artists ship", as Steve Jobs said.

If you a manufacturing ace, would you join the company with a long list of failed projects and no actual production cars, or would you join the company that is building 500,000 of the most advanced autos right now?

If I was a hardware expert, would I join Google who shies at giving a fraction of it's cash to hard tech, or Tesla who buys german automation companies?

Or plain old software. Tesla has magnitudes more data and can update neural networks to hundreds of thousands of cars at a whim. Soon millions.

> Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November.

That video, for reference, is: https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...

I'm not super convinced by that video. That drive had almost no challenges/obstacles. No bicycles, no construction, basically no pedestrians, no other vehicles behaving erratically.

Google has cars that can respond to everything from a cyclist making hand signals, to a school bus (which must not be passed), to a police car pulling it over, to a woman chasing a duck across the road: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=8m49s

I'm also not sure this is a simple case of "throw data and hardware at the problem." If it were that easy, it wouldn't have taken Google so long to get to where they are today.

They released a video a month later (3 weeks ago) with a much more challenging route:

https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

Again, not to take away by the amazing feat Tesla has achieved, but Google has had similar videos going back 2-3 years, and they are still not ready to release.

So either the problem in practice is much harder than a simple video can show, or something else is up.

Though, I think the real issue is that google wants to go straight for L5 (meaning 100% automated, and you can remove the steering wheel). As compared to an L4, which is more like 99.9% automated, but you still need steering wheel for those rare edge cases.

I can attest to the police car pulling it over. I saw a little Google car pulled over on the way to the grocery store a month or two ago.

If Tesla executes perfectly they might stand a chance. They don't have much margin of error though. One lost lawsuit because of an accident caused by a bug in their software, and they are out of business...

I find that notion very frustrating. 30,000 people die on the road in the US every year and no one seems to bat an eye, a self driving vehicle has one and it's the end of the world. The expectations seems rather unrealistic and the media seems to love creating a controversy.

On their webpage, waymo breaks down that 30k into smaller pieces. 94% of those deaths were due to human choice or human error. At least 71% were due to speeding, alcohol, distraction, and drowsiness. It's probably safe to say that driving like those 94% during your DMV driving test would mean a human wouldn't even get licensed. Why lower the bar to just being better than them? I want my autonomous car to be better than a good human driver.

The trouble with just throwing the statistics around and saying "it's fewer deaths!" is that it has to be fewer deaths in comparable situations. A tesla having fewer deaths per mile in perfect driving conditions shouldn't be compared to a possibly-drunk person in possibly-awful weather. This isn't the media creating controversy, it's people expressing skepticism when a corporation's incentives are to let a couple people die, and trying to maintain a high bar.

But they should be compared. As you indicated and the statistics show the death primarily happen when people are impaired (drugs and alcohol, fatigue, distractions etc), the machines substitute these human errors by fewer and further apart potential engineering faults. With proper Root Cause Analysis of the investigations (helped with all the data collected of all the accidents), overtime fewer and fewer would be expected.

If you can go from 30000 to 1000 just by changing to good enough autonomous cars that's a change worth doing. Then you can look at improving it to 0 and encourage that process if not through insurance liability processes through regulations that require ongoing improvement in autonomous safety.

As rtx said, the difference is choice. We could save a ton of lives where people choose to put themselves in danger, but we'd save them by killing a smaller number of people who choose not to put themselves in danger. I don't think that's ok.

The diffrence is choice.

Sure, but if the average person really would be safer with a car that self-drives 90% of the time, wouldn't you recommend that everyone get a self driving car? You can't say "Only get a self-driving car if you're a below average driver" because then nobody would get one (and they'd be worse off for it)

I don't think there's a clear answer to that question, but my gut says that would be immoral. What we'd be doing is saving a ton of lives where people would have otherwise gotten themselves killed through their own choices, but at the expense of a few deaths where the fault is entirely our own (the car maker). It's laudable to protect people from themselves when it doesn't otherwise affect them, but when the cost is killing totally innocent responsible people, I think it crosses a line.

On the other hand, if you think fault doesn't matter and it's just one life for another, then it essentially becomes the trolley problem, which doesn't have a clear answer either.

Well, in the former case, that is the fault of the driver (or another driver). In the latter case, it would be the fault of the manufacturer. It's not even remotely the same thing. Remember those out-of-control Priuses, where the manufacturers were at fault. Toyota got plenty of backlash for it.

I find this an interesting question. With the exception of OTC and prescription drugs (for which there are still lawsuits) I have trouble coming up with other consumer products when used as directed and properly maintained are still directly involved in killing people because... well, stuff happens. This isn't an argument against using autopilots but it is an issue that hasn't been really addressed so far.

I know it was a side mention, but I'm fairly sure the outcome of that situation was that the Priuses weren't out of control and it was driver error.

Tesla already seems to have that, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DbrYx-SN4

The issue is Google is doing it with (prohibitively) expensive hardware, so we don't know yet if Google's self-driving system works with cheaper Autopilot 2.0-level hardware that the other car makers are going to use as well.

"The person in the driver's seat is just there for legal reasons" -- but note just how closely that person's hands are to the wheel, in an obvious state of readiness. That person is 100% ready to take over the car if it messes up.

Tesla had the luxury of running test drives until they had a success. This is a different thing than putting a car on the road with no steering wheel and saying bon voyage. The first is a demonstration of a single successful instance (which is probably repeatable on average); the second is a much stronger demonstration of a > 99% success rate.

Googles car only does 25 mph. They might have made that video when they only have a 95% success rate, because in the 5% chance of collision it would be at low speed, with a very light vehicle, and very unlikely to cause a fatality.

https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...

I have friends that live in one of the neighborhoods they're testing in, here in Austin (Mueller, if you're curious). And they've said the vehicles have been performing well, with no issues at intersections or dealing with pedestrians or cyclists. It's a new-urbanism style neighborhood, with the houses positioned close to the streets, with lots of on-street parking. I imagine it's a challenging environment for the car.

Yep! Plenty of pedestrians with strollers/dogs/bikes/etc, vehicles stopping in moving lanes for pickups or dropoffs, a mixture of stop signs and traffic lights, one-ways, two lanes, four lanes, divided roads, and the cherry on top: a two lane roundabout, which endlessly baffles drivers here.

I'm not sure there's a better spot in Austin to test autonomous cars.

That said, they aren't perfect. 1. They wait just long enough at stop signs when it is their turn, which confuses other drivers. 2. They drive well under the limit, causing small jams at peak congestion.

They're limited to 25mph by law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle

I live almost in the backyard of their facility in Silicon Valley. No issues here either, the vehicles are very well behaved. Of course, how much is that an indicator of their progress, I don't know.

Some issues, like the at-fault collision with a bus on El Camino Real near Castro.

The issue is they drive too slowly and obey traffic laws.

"how they compare to Tesla"

Given that Tesla doesn't even have emergency braking and auto-steering, I'd guess they compare quite favorably...

Presumably one would compare Google's fully autonomous prototype against Tesla's fully autonomous prototype, not what Tesla is shipping now.

Then, per the article, Google had its first Level-5 fully-autonomous, no-backup-driver in public streets over a year ago.

Given that Google doesn't have a car you can buy I think the jury is still very much out on who is ahead and behind here.

Tesla will have 100,000 prototypes being trained in shadow mode for a billion miles per year across the globe within a year. Tesla will compare quite favorably

One can scale up the first 99% of an autonomous driving os pretty fast just using pattern recognition, but the devil is in the edge cases.

We haven't heard much from Google because they've been programming and validating all the unglamorous little problems that training data and a neural net can't solve alone. 4 way stops, passing motorcyclists and stuff like that, where old fashioned hand coded features are necessary to adress situations in which specific kinds of reasoning is necessary.

Tesla has to solve all this boring stuff as well before they can offer comparable capabilities in an AV.

>old fashioned hand coded features are necessary

I don't believe your hand coded features will outperform ML trained over a billion miles, even in the long tail rare events.

Sure ML is bad at rare events, but hand coded features also map poorly to such rare events, because it's unlikely you'll be able to imagine them all, or even manage to handle categories of rare events well.

Furthermore, I believe it would be possible to train an ML based rare-event detector, which simply detects the difference between "regular driving I'm familiar with" and "something funny is going on, I haven't seen this much in the training dataset", and then refer to a remote human to resolve the issue.

> and then refer to a remote human to resolve the issue

Successful remote control is a whole different project, very different from self-driving. In order to give the remote pilot enough situational awareness, you need plenty of streamed imagery (recreated or recorded). And you need a feedback loop with a very small latency. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it won't happen "organically" by cars becoming self-driving.

That's the benefit of having 100,000 cars with all the sensors but humans performing all of the edge cases. Tesla can take data from all the cases where there was a deviation between what the car calculated it should do and what the driver did.

I don't think hand coded features are necessary. No one hand codes humans to drive.

And how many of those miles are in conditions like:

* that road with the one-foot deep pothole (it's more like a sinkhole at that point, though) in the middle of a lane

* the perpetual construction zone where there are five layers of lane markers, only one of which is the actual layer of lane markers

* the 10% grade two-lane winding road in the dark with 2 inches of snow on the road and more coming

* open highway with a constant 30mph crosswind

* dense fog with less than 100m visibility

* torrential downpour with so little visibility you can't even see the lane markings on the road right in front of you

Those are all conditions I've driven in, and I can think of several other horrible driving conditions that I haven't yet had the (mis)fortune to drive in. Just because you can drive well in good conditions doesn't mean you can drive well when things get tougher--as the driving records of many human beings can well attest.

There are some conditions a human shouldn't be driving in. For example a hurricane or while intoxicated.

We can likewise say there are some situations a machine shouldn't be driving.

As long as the machine can identify when it is incapable as a driver, it's only the same as the human pulling over for a nap because they can't stay alert.

Sure, if you ran a taxi service with such a system you'd have to send a regular taxi to pick up the customer, but it's only the same as any other kind of breakdown like a puncture.

This is why Tesla's strategy is better than Google's. Tesla will get the data on those situations, because their data comes from every driver of their cars. Google gets data on Mountain View and downtown Austin.

That's a prediction, not a comparison.

That's a super conservative prediction which has zero growth from current sales numbers in it. Tesla grows has historically grown at about 50% per year.

Not talking about the number of cars sold, talking about that translating into self-driving capabilities. And in that sense, it is a very aggressive prediction, given that Google has had fully-autonomous, no-backup-driver, public-road-testing for over a year.

So you can say that Tesla is at least 1-years behind. More like 4-5.

Tesla is definitely behind Google now, but I'm saying their trajectory is orders of magnitude better, because they are collecting real world training data much faster. Humans show the minimal set of sensors needed for driving, and Tesla have a superset of that being delivered to customers today, which is being used to train their model. They get a lifetime of real world driving experience on those sensors every day.

Your prediction is only good as your assumptions: that Tesla can achieve human-like levels of intelligence in under 10 years.

That is extremely aggressive. Getting data is the easy part of self-driving.

Surely they will make all that data available to OpenAI to help democratize the future of AI?

Tesla models equipped with Autopilot enhancements do in fact have some form of emergency braking (automatic emergency breaking) to avoid rear-end collisions and primitive auto-steer.

Yes, but they aren't sold anymore.

And "autopilot" has been on the market for over a decade, it's OEM off-the-shelf equipment.

They provide monthly reports: https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/ (some more detailed than others)

Looks like that page got killed in the Waymo switch. Archive.org is missing the PDFs, but it looks like they still work if you follow the archived links straight to the URL.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161016050722/http://www.google...

[1] http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-09...

EDIT: I think I triggered them all to be archived, links in [0] should work now.

sums up google products