We haven’t even begun to address emergent behaviors. You say your Tesla does “weird things.” What happens when all the cars on the road are Teslas and they do the same “weird things” at the same time (because they have the same programming)? This is an important aspect of systems engineering that we haven’t even scratched the surface of when it comes to self driving cars.
1. People "hacking" cars for fun/malice. This could be anywhere from "painting on the road/sign" to wireless comms penetration attempts or nation state attacks.
2. People who OWN the cars replacing firmware/hardware for perceived benefits. IE put back the "rolling stop" feature. Or "improve" behaviour/performance. (Car modders changing headlights in a Tesla might mess with the optical only approach) Or change the default decision in "trolley problem" events.
Okay, so you've got a private company explicitly writing down the value of human life in a big list, top to bottom. Let's pretend we fast forward the several years to decades for the public to accept this new reality. Now we realise that different locations operate under different value systems. In Saudi Arabia, one man is worth three women. You best believe they will require the car to run down the woman. So each country/location is going to require an ethics update, and it's all going to have to be public. Imagine the heat Tesla is going to take by complying with Saudi rules and explicitly programming their cars to mow down women instead of men.
Yet there has been no report of this exploit used maliciously in the wild.
There are definitely people in the industry who are thinking about this and working on it, but AFAIK none of them work at Tesla.
The cost, simplicity, and availability of self-driving cars will undoubtedly change the consumer.
Self-driving cars have been at 95% since the 90's. They've been at 98% since 2012. Humans are higher than 5 nines.
It turns out that human drivers, even poor ones, have a much better driving record than self-driving cars. With this latest Waymo experiment we may finally see some significant progress.
And then compare it to what happened to the internet between 2005 and 2022...
Progress isn't always linear but it tends towards diminishing returns more often than exponential progress.
And we're not talking simple things like "can billions of people and Moore's law result in something a bit more exciting than Facebook with a newsfeed and ads and YouTube without Flash", we're talking about progress in the form of monotonic improvement in complex intractable software to solve edge cases the dev team haven't even thought of where the failure mode involves corpses, and do it to the satisfaction of regulators across many jurisdictions.
The gap between "drive 10 miles without serious incident this time" and "consistently drives a billion miles between incidents serious enough to be fatal without any possibility of intervention" is enormous.
I hope I'm wrong though, I would prefer it if my kids and other road users didn't have to drive.
I am still hoping for fewer cars on the road overall. The car itself is inefficient and hopefully on its way out.
And then I think about all the potholes that I dodge when I drive around town. And how 4-ton electric vehicles are going to make road wear worse, not better.
Here’s an autonomous drifting Delorean https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE
The physics and control of cars are quite well understood, even in extreme conditions. Further, sensors allow a car to detect changing road conditions much more quickly and adeptly than a typical human.
The hard part of self driving seems to be understanding and predicting the humans in its environment.
If the car is "smart," maybe it will simply refuse to travel (because the calculated risk of traveling over an icy parking lot is above some maximum threshold risk).
What happens the first time a steering wheel free car strands a family in a blizzard due to a few feet of icy pavement, ultimately freezing them to death?
Traditional cars with drivers haven't solved the weather problem 100%. But they are here now. Sometimes we ban them in some conditions, but they are a game changer the rest if the time.
It’s not that traditional cars have solved for weather, it’s that self driving cars haven’t solved the problem of “being as good as human drivers in weather commonly encountered.”
And computers are better at reacting to unexpected things like icy road. And cameras are better at seeing through rain and fog. What's barely perceptible to you, computer sees clearly.
Other than random people saying this on the internet, I have seen zero indication that this will be the case. You cannot will something into existence just by strongly believing in it.
Driving in truly bad weather is still an open research problem, but it's also one that most of these companies haven't dedicated a lot of resources to, since they all have initial rollout plans in places that don't experience much extreme weather. But assuming these vehicles can drive well in good weather, I don't think it's a stretch to assume that progress will be made on driving in more extreme conditions once more resources are dedicated to it.
I dig the commitment and passion, but as a consumer, I want the thing to work perfectly first time, every time. If it doesn't, I don't want it.
Doesn't sound like much of a data trail. No one disputes that it at least sort works (while also doing "weird things", as you put it) in some conditions. As long as, you know, nothing weird happens out on the road. Like for example rain.
It's the fat tail of "weird things" (and how these systems currently handle them) that leave the question of whether FSD will ever arrive -- very much up on the air.
I know 5 people with the Tesla FSD Beta, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has admitted to letting Tesla drive them home when they drank too much and went past the legal limit. And not a single one of those 5 people has ever had a DUI. So FSD rapidly changed there drinking behavior.
Also I get that I have an atypical and shitty social circle. I don't think this represents all Tesla drivers.
Does anyone else remember that spyware?
Improved software, and maybe one hardware refresh should be sufficient to get us all the way there for 99.99% of drives.
Aside: some really old drive assist tech for snow plows on I-80 Donner pass - https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp... /// https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/janfeb-2001/safe-plowi...
I'm still waiting to see how an AI would handle Figure 5-1 from that. And no, the snow plow's solution of burying magnets in the road isn't practical (Cost of infrastructure installation for the test sites is approximately $11,000 per kilometer ($17,000 per mile), including surveying, installation, and magnets).
99.99% means 1 in 10,000 "drives" has an accident of some sort? So 100 accidents per million people/drives?
Not sure how to compare if that is better or worse than what we have now.
Just the other day my Tesla model 3 drove me home from a restaurant 10 miles away, at night, with plenty of other cars on the road, through side streets and on a highway, without intervention. Did it do weird things? Sure, but nothing that made me nervous enough to intervene. Compared to just a year ago when it was still phantom breaking on the highway and couldn’t do side streets at all. All the people saying it’s still decades away don’t realize how quickly things are progressing.
10 years is a long time and progress is not always linear. Think about what happened to the internet between 1995 and 2005.