The problem is, most of the industry has spent the last decade adding neat features and trying to improve their reliability...without much practical thought as to increasing controllability (in terms of accident avoidance) in the inevitability of a component failure.
Controllability has basically been shortcut by keeping a driver behind the wheel. We've done pretty significant testing - regularly hauling freight on the highway while in self-driving, no-one behind the wheel in super unstructured environments, dealing with extreme edge cases w/o intervention.
The big technical accomplishment that we're showing here, is that our system is controllable in the inevitable case of failure...without using a physically-present human as a crutch.
All that matters in the end is the safety and cost of the resulting system. Remote assistance operators and bandwidth are not cheap, and a system that has a high level of remote faults is most likely operating too far out of operational domain to be truly safe.
[0] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
That's not fair, Waymo and others are using redundant backup systems and obviously try to think of every failure case they can. Besides, aren't the remote-control parts as likely to fail as any other? I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive a car over facetime...
If Tesla's self driving truck division did a crappy demo then fair enough, but cut these guys some slack, at least they aren't in a cubicle at facebook trying to find better ways to sell ads for toilet paper.
Edit: I think I overreacted a bit and shouldn't have flagged it. But I don't think the commenter you replied to did and can see why that comment is on top.
This isn't webcrap, where it doesn't really matter if it fails now and then. People die when self-driving vehicles screw up. Especially with heavy vehicles. California DMV doesn't allow self-driving heavy vehicles on the road yet, and that's probably a good decision.
If YC is going to fund stuff like this, they need to get some avionics people on the team. Before they kill somebody.
To be fair, this is an absurdly competitive space. If they achieved something of similar magnitude for a problem dozens of other teams weren't already solving, it would seem much more impressive.
Are you saying it would be more impressive if dozens of competitors weren't already doing what they're doing? I feel like you're arguing against Starsky's competence by pointing out that they're in a competitive space with noncompetitive technology.
"Working with partners, we will use unmanned trucks to haul freight in 2018." These guys are 5% of the way to where they need to be. This is a business where your bug reports are written in blood.
What they seem to have is an ordinary lane-keeping / auto brake system, like a lot of cars, plus drone-type remote control. All cameras, no LIDAR. Looks like a standard anti-collision radar in the front bumper. The steering motor doesn't seem to be redundant. This is demo-grade technology with too much hype and a tear-jerking video. They put that crap on the road and they're going to kill somebody.
Even Otto was better than this when they did their Budweiser demo on an empty road in Nevada. They at least had a potentially working technology. Years later, now owned by Uber, it still barely works.