> The main thing is that Mercedes Benz will take liability for anything that goes wrong. But the system as a whole is far less capable than Tesla FSD.

"It's less capable except for the minor fact that if we <<kill>> someone, it's <<our fault, not yours>>".

You know, that minor factor called "life or death".

> ... only when driving under 40 mph on highways. So it is pretty useless.

If Waymo/Tesla/whatever would do this, they'd be the darlings of the internet.

If Mercedes does this, no one thinks: "ah, it's the first iteration, they can you know, <<increase>> the speed later on".

Also known as "draw the rest of the owl"

At least they started with an owl shape. Tesla is starting with a square before "draw the rest of the owl"

Mercedes has drawn a lot more of the owl than anyone else. Accepting liability is huge.

It's putting their money where their mouth is.

Musk is putting his mouth on a lot of things, I guess that makes him a baby?

You aren't going to kill people while going under 40mph on a highway (cars only, no pedestrians) anyway. Under 40mph is like stop and go traffic.

This is a marketing stunt. They've taken a well-solved problem (stop and go) and taken responsibility for it, and getting headlines by screaming something about J3016 level 3.

A highway is any public road per legal definition. https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2022/code-veh/divisi...

40mph is more than enough to kill someone.

* * *

Mercedes' system only works on specific listed limited-access highways, not all public roads.

> If Waymo/Tesla/whatever would do this, they'd be the darlings of the internet.

How exactly do you think Waymo works that they wouldn't take responsibility?

Waymo takes responsibility for all accidents and Tesla is able to drive autonomously at 40km/h on highways, but neither does both. Mercedes does. That's –I believe– the point that parent is making.

Now, I'd argue that Waymo has probably somewhat solved highways already as they're much simpler than city driving, they're just not offering it to the public yet.

Pure speculation but I bet Waymo doesn’t do highways because they can’t safely reconcile the speed limit with the speed of traffic. In CA and AZ (where Waymo is currently operating) typical highway limits are 55 or 65 mph while traffic speeds in light traffic are easily 70+. Speed differential is dangerous; having a Waymo going 55 while everyone else goes 70+ sounds like a terrible idea but they can’t exactly teach the robot to speed the way a human does either. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during that discussion, ethics, human factors, law, you’d have to tackle the whole shebang.

If the local DA decides to prosecute you after your car kills someone, there is nothing Mercedes can do for you. This liability they are assuming must be civil only.

Changing who holds liability does not make the system more or less capable. Think about it. Was Mercedes system any less capable the day before they declared it L3 than the day before? Clearly not. It was the same system.

If you want to convince me that their system is way more capable than Tesla, you would have to show me evidence that Tesla FSD fails in the same limited environment as Mercedes is certified L3 in, and I have not seen any.

The system was of course the same, but we as the public have new information about Mercedes' level of confidence and are updating our views.

If a magician bets you $1,000,000 that the card he is holding is the one you chose, are you not going to change your position on how likely it is that he's right?

> but the system as a whole is far less capable than Tesla FSD, the renowned “exaggerator” told me so

We actually have no idea what Benz et al.’s systems are capable of if they were to deploy them with the same recklessness as Tesla.

This statement makes no logical sense. Their systems are “capable of” what they can be used to achieve in actual operation.

It’s not like it’s this massively sophisticated system for FSD with most of the code commented out.

These are purpose-built and heavily tested to a specification - that’s how engineering works. The Mercedes system specification is extremely limited in practice, but gives them the marketing win of being able to claim they do L3.

Systems that are required to have ~100% performance within an operational design domain generally have more than 0% performance beyond that domain.

For example, Tesla FSD seems like a pretty good highway cruise control, but it can be dangerously deployed in city driving too. Of course this is a little difficult to argue about since AFAIK Tesla has never defined its ODD and IIRC their lead autopilot software guy said in his deposition that he didn’t even know what an ODD was?

I suppose one man’s “marketing win” to “claim” L3 is another man’s “actually deploying L3.”

I maintain that the Mercedes system is “capable of” what it can functionally be deployed to achieve by a user. That’s what “capable of” means. If Mercedes wants to try its hand at a universal L2 system, I wish them the best. This system is in truth not capable of L2 or L3 autonomous driving under almost all typical driving conditions. There is a small geofenced and speed constrained window under which the car will lane-keep and TACC without requiring hands-on-wheel. To me, that’s what we call a “gimmick”.

An autonomous system which cannot even change lanes should not - in my opinion - be classified as L3 Autonomy. Not only is it a gimmick, it’s basically a loophole in the spec.

As an aside, since you mentioned it, I think that describing FSD as “pretty good highway cruise control” is gaslighting.

Describing FSD as dangerously deployed in city driving is merely misinformed. In fact FSD (including the human driver and FSD’s comprehensive attention tracking and alerting) is safer than the average driver in city driving.

https://www.tesla.com/impact

I’m not sure what you’re even trying to argue here. You disagree with SAE’s designations? Interesting trivia I guess.

Anyway I’m sure Tesla will say it’s Level 3 whenever it’s Level 3. Would’ve thought that was a while back when they marketed, sold, and rolled out “Full Self Driving” on public roads.

Well Mercedes does supposedly offer a L2 system. Why do you say it doesn't?

Tesla's system can be used to achieve nothing in actual operation. It makes constant mistakes and requires an ever-vigilant human to take over in a fraction of a second when it does. There is no advantage over manual driving, let alone manual driving with modern driver assistance.

That's all enforced by the government, it's not a limitation of the system. They might be comfortable with liability for more than this but are not allowed to by regulators - which is wise

It literally is a “limitation of the system”.

The implied system is Benz's autodriving. You seem to refer to "society" as a system. Clever, but not really fruitful.

I wasn’t trying to be cheeky. I must have misunderstood your comment?

As I understand it the L3 system is limited to limited access highway roads, < 40mph, and no lane changes. Those are its limitations, and I believe they are self-imposed by Mercedes, not any US regulations.

"Regardless of those capabilities, the California DMV is placing some serious restrictions on the Merc system. It can only operate during the day on certain limited roads, and only at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. The system will be usable on California highways in the Bay Area, Central Valley, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, as well as on Interstate 15 between southern California and Nevada, where the autopilot was approved for use in January."

This indicates to me the limitations come from regulators and not the manufacturer but I might be wrong.

Only on CERTAIN highways if it's daytime and it's not raining.

People spend years of their life going under 40 on the highway in LA. This seems huge in socal.