I use the word "deluded" above realizing that I might be completely wrong. If they pull it off I'll eat crow and give them props. But I just don't see it happening.
Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. They'll go at length about how LIDAR is a hard requirement, about how many FLOPs you need, etc etc etc. Fact: FSD doesn't exist and no one has it. Nobody knows which approach will work and if more than one approach works no one knows the timelines or economics of the different approaches and very certainly no one knows the market impact of these. But people start thinking they know the future and then become very emotionally vested in their make-believe stories.
It's actually quite simple: companies sell you stuff, buy it if you want it/need it. Today Waymo sells me nothing, Cruise/GM sells me nothing, Tesla sells me a great BEV with Level 2 driving assistance. I got the car, but not the level 2 because it doesn't fit my driving needs. If they start selling level 3-4-5, I'll buy it if the price is right and I need it.
It's certainly not nothing
But there's no need to pick on GM, they all have self-driving tech capable of killing you.
Assuming autonomy is make or break for Tesla in the long term: if Tesla fails at it your stock will still be worth something (versus a useless upgrade). If Tesla succeeds you'll make more than enough to cover a retrofit.
Tesla will fail. But they will fail at 5% of their goals, and achieve 95% of that goals. It will still be called 'Failure'.
To avoid that 'Failure' tag, other companies won't even try.
Do this process enough number of times. And it will appear like Tesla is failing all the time, and yet achieving almost 100% more than other companies.
The problem here is in defining success in terms of binary outcomes of success and failure.
I think “fraudulent” would be more accurate; it was factually false, it was at best entirely unfounded if not actually knowingly false, it was material to decisions of people to purchase the self-driving add-on.
The Autopilot page [1] still states the following:
"All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."
Personally, I’d refuse to implement self-driving vehicle without at least a ”backup LIDAR” to check vision system results. Otherwise you are forced to assume stuff like ”things at stand still are either above the road, beside it, or just shadows”, causing crashes when there is suddenly a stopped car in front of you. (If you didn’t do that assumption, you would be dodging shadows and other clutter..)
[source: I’ve been researching vision algorithms in a related field.]
Because that isn't how people judge distances, at least not distances beyond a few feet in front of their faces. Plenty of people with only one eye do very well. It is a difficult problem because we use a variety of techniques and 'hardware' when estimating distances and speeds. Car companies are trying to do with one tool (ie lidar) something we do with many.
I guess the same logic applies directly to self-driving cars as well..
At any but very close distance, don't humans mostly use a combination of lighting cues, a priori knowledge of actual size vs. apparent size, motion parallax, and other flat-image cues instead of stereoscopy?
But, yeah, LIDAR cuts through all that, too.
Anyway, if LIDAR becomes small and cheap, Tesla can just strap it on.
Whether this will succeed is another question.
Supposed to be fully autonomous since, what, 18 months ago? How about that SF->NY demo?
He also added that it would be sort of cheating, because that's a very defined route and he prefers it to be able to be much more dynamic. i.e. pick any two US cites and the car will drive you there.
http://www.autonews.com/article/20180208/MOBILITY/180209770/...
Google's autonomous efforts far precedes Tesla, yet they have not out in the market yet. I would say on the contrary, they made significant strides in a short amount of time even after a complete overhaul Mobileye (AP1) to an in-house solution (AP2/2.5) https://vimeo.com/192179727
Waymo has been operating a real actual passenger service for over a year now. They drive tens of thousands of miles a day. They're "not out in the market yet" only in the sense that they're not charging money for it yet, which they seem to plan on doing soon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...
I can only assume then that you have some kind of insider info to support your claim?
Ergo, logically, if Tesla has not performed such a test, it is strong evidence that Autopilot is not currently capable of passing it.
By going to a custom ASIC with inferencing. I have little doubt about Musk's claim that it'll offer a 10x improvement over the current stripped down PX Drive2 variant for deep learning tasks. If I'm to decrypt Musk's branded terminology and take him at his word, then they'll be going from about 8 TOPS to 80 TOPs with that they'll be able to get even deeper into the no man's land that's even more overkill for basic ADAS but still not nearly enough to handle full self driving safely in all conditions, though maybe they'll get L3 highway out of it.
Nvidia's upcoming Pegasus board will supposedly do 320 TOPS, and their competitor, Intel/Mobileye's EyeQ5 will likely have comparable specs. These motherboards are designed to replace Robotaxi trunks brimming with ~$150k in liquid cooled compute that draw 3-4000 watts.