Re:Audi claims the A8 is the first production car to reach L...
by jakobegger on Thursday July 13, 2017 @04:14AM
(#14759590)
There‘s no question that Teslas can drive themselves under favorable conditions. But did you see the videos above where a Tesla crashes into a highway barrier, and the one where it crashes into a stationary maintenance vehicle?
You can only take your eyes off the road when you can be sure that the car can detect unexpected circumstances. Teslas are apparently bad at detecting stationary obstacles, so you can‘t take your eyes off the road (and calling the system „Autopilot“ is really not a good idea)
Re:Audi claims the A8 is the first production car to reach L...
by zwily on Thursday July 13, 2017 @11:07AM
(#14761892)
So far those videos are all with the v1 autopilot hardware (I believe). It will be interesting to see as the new hardware rolls out, and its software gets better, how much better it is at avoiding those obstacles.
So now, almost two years later, if you're on a highway with clear markings and good weather, though the car is programmed to nag you every ~5 minutes no matter what to basically just nudge the wheel, the car is better then a human at driving. Theoretically if Audi does get ready to release this they could simply remove the nags and have a much better system for the use case Audi is describing (Tesla supports up to 90mph). Again, for highway driving the nags are basically there for Tesla to cover their you know what. Off highway you can use it but it's more of a gimmick still as you have to very closely babysit it on most roads.
Hope that makes things more clear.
[Quick Edit: One other thing the nags are good for is just in case there is a scenario that they haven't accounted for they can say that they told the driver to put their hands on the wheel and they ignored the nag. Tesla has two years of an entire fleet of cars using and proving the system. Audi will be releasing it theoretically w/o this in place and telling drivers no hands needed right away.. I'd be skeptical on that vs what Tesla has already been proving]