And I think it's uncharitable to interpret these as delivery commitments. From the tone of the delivery, they are clearly targets (probably aggressive targets) and not commitments. Those who bludgeon Musk for being overly optimistic with timelines seem to overemphasize the importance of specific timeliness and lose sight of the bigger picture.
If they put up autonomous driving videos going through a handful of major cities taking the most awkward routes through places where driving culture is typically more agressive and the narrowest of country lanes through the towns that were built for horse and cart and space is at a premium. Places like Rome, Barcelona, New Delhi. Towns that have built one way systems into their traffic management due to limited space and measures are taken to purposely bottleneck traffic like narrow road right of way signage. Show a car doing that and I'd understand their confidence.
E.g there is a town where roadside parking is allowed because it purposely bottlenecks and slows down main road traffic. You have to judge and wait by the parked cars for a space you can pass through even when their maybe cars coming towards you there is time to pass the parked cars and into space where two cars can pass eachother. How is an autonomous car going to handle that kind of senario where it has to make a judgement call that factors in a far greater amount of risk element?
Many Tesla automated driving sceptics say without lidar, Tesla has a major issue with FSD.
> How do you tell a machine what to do when there is no correct answer?
Why would you expect a machine to be able to handle scenarios that humans cannot handle?
Note: I am sceptical of FSD being available this year, or even in a few year.
Lidar sensors are around $10k and up, and the waymo cars I've seen have many of them.
Additionally, they only sort of say how far away things are, which sort of overlaps with the ultrasonics and radar.
So, maybe the roi on lidar would not be great.
That said, the engineer in me thinks lidar would be a nice add-on (sensor fusion). But it depends on someone actually shipping one of those dirt cheap solid state sensors we see in press releases (but not in real life yet).
That's exactly my point. Isn't that what Tesla is trying to do with FSD? It's trying to train a machine that will have to make ethical decisions.
How do you factor legal liability for a machine in the same way you would with humans in the same scenario e.g fatal accidents?
This is somewhat like the civilian version of AI military drones one day making automatic target selection.
If humans are driving around somewhat successfully without being able to handle all edgecases, as long as the a machine can do as good a job or better it is a viable alternative to human drivers.
Do you hold the owner, manufacturer, or insurer responsible to right the wrongs where an autonomous vehicle is at fault?
I would expect the insurers and manufacturers to use contractual terms that absolves them of all liabilities where the car's occupant isn't paying attention to the road.
1) internally feature complete - end of this year,
2) internally they believe reliable enough that the software can let the user not actively check in / driver does not need to look out the window - mid next year
3) able to convince regulators in some jurisdictions that drivers do not have to look out the window - end of next year.
Here's where people go wrong. Now I didn't watch the entire video, but my understanding is Elon is not saying that the car will never need a user to take over. He is not saying the car will drive anywhere, at any time, under any conditions.
He is saying that the software will be reliable enough to fully drive the car in all of the basic driving environments (highway, rural, urban, etc.). It detects stop signs, traffic lights, it navigates intersections, it makes unprotected left turns, it can merge, etc.
That's what I think Elon is trying to convey when he says "feature complete". There will be neural networks, algorithms, logical decision trees, whatever, to handle all of these common driving scenarios. He wants all those scenarios coded and demoable in some condition by the end of this year.
This is not something they roll out in a day. This is gradual feature deployment over the next year leading up until "feature complete" which is a point where some drivers are getting door-to-door in some cases under supervision with wheel check-ins but without any disengagement for the whole ride.
After that point it is 6-12 months of training, training, training the networks based on Fleet learning, billions of miles tracking every single disengagement, and aggregating all that user feedback into the algorithms.
They will know when the system needs to disengage. They will know every way that it fails. They will be tracking this data and providing it to regulators for evaulation. And Elon thinks around the end of next year, they could be in a position to make a case for removing the wheel checkins and telling users that this car can drive itself, and keep you safe, and that if it hits a threshold where it can't do that, it will fail gracefully.
So perhaps there will still be the intersections where the car gets stuck. If there is a road closure and the cop wants you to drive on the wrong side of the road, maybe the computer will refuse to do it and just sit there and you'll have to take over. But if you're cruising down the highway and an 18-wheeler pulls out in front of you, yeah, the car has to be able to see that and stop.
Have you seen the progress in new features and reliability in just the last 6 months of OTA updates? Their cars are becoming more and more autonomous, and they are rolling out this autonomy in ways that is very impressive.
The fact that they can say a new lane change algorithm went live and they know they are now doing 100,000 lane changes a day without a single incident.
The fact that they can see when I take over during a lane change and that sequence is stored and anonymously included in future training sets.
I have been experiencing the massive pace of progress over the last 6 months of OTA updates, and I almost believe Musk when he says he can get to FSD in a few years.
IMO you may have cars get “stuck” in very strange situations which will be extremely annoying, but I think they will be significantly safer than humans, hugely convenient the vast majority of the time, and save a lot of lives in the process.
I wish Tesla the best of luck.