I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...)
I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it.
If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...
It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and leave you with annoying issues.
But it could also partly be a case of differing expectations. The web has trained us all that software generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up paying good money to replace the car stereo with something that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my dashboard.
I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7. It's the same as it was in its year 1.
Q: Why would that be frustrating?
The frustration is that those tend to have awful interfaces, with extra frustration that they could be fixed but don't get fixed.
If you had normal buttons then there wasn't anything to get annoyed with in this way in the first place, so it didn't need updates.
Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're apparently still working ok.
Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white line right into the space my vehicle would have been in.
Talk about adrenaline rush :(
My first car had no software, so I didn't expect anything to get better. But the most recent thing I drove frequently had significant amounts of software, especially the touchscreen that did audio and navigation. Even when it first came out it was not very good software, so it was the kind of thing I'd want to get better. And 5 years later, having watched all the rest of the software in my life improve, the flaws were ever more grating.
"Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there’s data to prove it": https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-touchscreens-really...
I did actually chortle when I read that :)
I love it.
Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.
Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are.
For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]
More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there.
Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that.
Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot.
Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.
I disagree that humans are bad at driving.
Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human?
And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here?
In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year.
Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109%
To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.
Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record
Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years
It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve
But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be
Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost)
Fixing transit is a long timescale thing
I still remember the time my mom almost drove into a tram tunnel! She wasn't used to the city.
To quote:
> Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.
> Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.
E.g. keeping track of near misses / interventions can get you data points much more quickly.
Every time we try it for a spot to reverse into, the linear regression it must be doing is so apparent. It violently tries to turn left and right rapidly trying to straighten itself.
It works better for parallel spots but often gives up half way because it made a bad angle choice.
We’ve tried it in various models in addition to our own Model Y. They’re just embarrassingly bad at it.
The cynical in me feels this is to do with employees at Tesla want to work with new and shiny ML instead of old boring PID tech for the sake of "resume driven engineering".
As a robotics engineer for a long time I thought they were ahead of the curve. But I am beginning to see that their big bet isn’t paying off, and I’ve taken more of an interest in going back and listening to those people who said it wasn’t going to work.
Remember it uses sonar to park, not the lines.
Strangely, I've never tried backing into a spot - I guess because the backup camera is great at seeing the lines and I can back in quickly.
In the video I linked, you can see it out perform Tesla’s implementation.
Specially because we don't drive with eyes only, we use at least our ears too for hearing unusual noises and the balance sense for detecting vibrations, changes on road surface, and to get feedback about orientation changes.
Unlike human drivers, a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently and in real time.
But most humans can in most cases feel when there is a loss of traction on the road. Although agreed it comes nothing close to what the car knows.
That said I am not sure that this is a core feature needed to make FSD work.
I only vaguely (for a developer) know about AI / computer vision, yet I’m still made deeply anxious by the implication that we will somehow in the foreseeable future be able to pull this off at ALL, let alone with 1.5 hands tied behind our backs as Tesla insists.
I'm not sure that I agree with this, tbh. More of the regular AP stack is moving to the FSD underpinnings, and I'd expect the nav on autopilot feature to be a part of that eventually. All of those are much needed fixes, IMO. I bet the recent big improvements to the auto-high-beam functionality is related too.
I do wish they'd focus on something more like a FSD-lite for the highway, though. Let me go hands off for a little longer as long as the driver facing camera is detecting attention.
Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the complaints about the name it’s exactly what is claimed.
Auto park is bad. It doesn’t detect the spot half the time and it’s not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces where it would actually be useful.
Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It’s often too timid to actually switch lanes if there’s traffic. I like the signal-to-lane-change.
Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time) claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and don’t pay attention. Every year it’s another few months away. I doubt it’s actually possible with the hardware on the car at this point. Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. It’s glossing over the very important bits of “with the compute power in the car” and “within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques”. I have no doubt that autonomous driving is possible - it’s actively happening in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model Y can do what I paid for, and that’s unethical.
This doesn’t need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.