I agree with that. To me, the most worrying thing about Tesla this year has been their overemphasis on full self driving features. They do not appear to be close and I do not like the way they are using puffery around that to sell vehicles.

Self driving is to Tesla as StarLink is to SpaceX. Go where the margins are fat. The market for cars (which sit idle 90% of the time) is much smaller than that for total passenger transportation miles. The market for launches is much smaller than satellite broadband services.

Cars sitting idle 90% of the time is a feature. If my car was utilized 100% of the time then it would wear out within a single year.

Which would be great.

Putting capital into something that can only be extracted years later is a poor investment.

The sooner you can get the benefits of an investment, the sooner you can invest in the next thing, and the less return the investment has to give to be competitive.

Exactly. Southwest Airlines doesn’t think “these darn planes are in the air too much!”. Every minute you’re not flying is lost revenue on a depreciating asset. Keep the metal moving. Unproductive assets is no different than lighting money on fire.

I agree in a big way here, I have no particular speciality with autonomous driving but I have seen enough media coverage of Musk both snubbing Lidar based systems and then Tesla auto-pilot hitting overhanging rear loads, which a lidar would seem to help with if not completely fix.

His aversion to Lidar seems to have more to do with the cost implications on a vehicle that doesn't have a lot of room to raise the price or cut into the margins.

Even parallax based systems are good at avoiding stationary objects, and are inexpensive since they use two overlapping visible light cameras (see EyeSight for one example). Essentially they work like the human eye to determine depth/distance.

Tesla put two visible light cameras in their cars, but didn't configure them to parallax and instead rely on radar that has noise problems and ultrasound which only works at close range. It was a mistake that has had consequences.

> Even parallax based systems are good at avoiding stationary objects, and are inexpensive since they use two overlapping visible light cameras (see EyeSight for one example). Essentially they work like the human eye to determine depth/distance.

While I agree that it would be better to be using a multi-camera system for depth estimation, and there's no reason not to (because cameras are cheap and easy to build into bodywork of a vehicle), it shouldn't necessarily be needed.

Otherwise, you'd have one-eye sighted people, who drive, running into the same obstacles, right? But they don't - so how do they do it?

Probably motion cues, depth-from-motion, etc - something the brain does. From a cost-savings perspective, eliminating that extra camera will likely be looked at being done at some point, because over millions of cars manufactured, not installing that extra camera and wiring will save a ton of money and increase profitability.

But Tesla isn't quite there yet, and probably shouldn't eliminate it...

Furthermore, I'm not sure even LIDAR should be eliminated; the more sensors and sensor types, the better, ultimately. The problem is finding a LIDAR unit that has enough resolution and can be fitted to a vehicle (and doesn't look like a giant spinning top). Flash LIDAR units will probably be the solution, but they are still fairly expensive, and I don't know if they have the resolution needed yet, either.

People with one eye do struggle with depth perception relative to people with two good eyes. It’s not completely gone but for example fast moving objects coming at you can be tricky (like catching a ball) as are point light sources at night (like figuring out exactly how far stop lights are). Speaking from experience that is, not sure how this generalizes across the population.

Some people do end up having trouble judging distance. Also a head can move around side to side, giving parallax over time even with one input (something you especially see birds of prey taking advantage of, to compensate for their narrower heads), whereas most cameras are on fixed mounts. Also, millions of years of evolution plus typically decades of training (in recognizing objects and distances) for the typical driver has a bit of an advantage over current neural nets, currently, for image recognition. It wouldn't suprise me if we crack that problem within my lifetime, but it also wouldn't suprise me if it takes awhile.

Yes, you'd think adding more sensors would be better. However, even systems with lidar have run into vehicles and people. Google's system in cali ran into the bus, and then the uber system in Phoenix hit a person.

Tesla's system has massively more users than all the other systems. They should get some benefit out of that data. I do worry that telsa will fail to make the software work well enough and get sued by all their existing customers (I'm a customer, but I want it to work :-)).

Two things: 1) humans do it by vision alone, hence, it is possible in principle, and 2) lidars are expensive and introduce one more failure point.

Most of the self-driving cars you see in bay area with lidars on top actually use those lidars to produce labeled data for vision-based distance estimator networks

I believe they are far ahead. Not quite ready to believe city self driving will be ready this year. I drive a Tesla and recently rode in a self driving Lyft. They are similar. The human driver frequently disengaged self driving and drove manually for probably half the trip. This was with cameras, lidar, pre-mapped roads, etc. I can drive mine the same way (on and off) in the city and it’s more reliable.

What do you mean? They are going to drive autonomously coast-to-coast by 2018! Almost there!

(no that's not a typo)

The first time he rolled that claim out was back in 2016 when they were going to do it in 2017.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...

You guys missed that time travel is part of this delivery plan.

I agree. But also wonder why it’s taken google so long to do anything commercialized at scale in this space. Assuming Elon is collecting data from every mile one of his cars drives, it’s not too hard to believe that he could be making significant progress and have the means to commercialize it

Because they're more honest about the "move fast and drive into a concrete barrier" problems?

IMO's autopilot'ss scariest incident is where it drove into a barrier between the exit lane and the highway. https://gizmodo.com/tesla-autopilot-malfunction-caused-crash...

Other drivers were able to reproduce the same behavior, in which the car appears to think that the space between the exit and the highway is a traffic lane that it should follow. This will dump you straight into a wall at highway speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY&feature=youtu.be...

Tesla fixed it. Then six months later the same behavior is back: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_bac...

How do you trust a system like this when any software update could turn the car suicidal with you in it? Yeah, it's also incidents where it saved drivers from a collision with faster than human reflexes, which is great. But you still need hands on the wheel and constant attentiveness or it might kill you in a situation that would be obvious to a human driver. The full self driving dream is further off than Musk will admit.