And still Mercedes is the car company with the highest autonomy level of any car manufacturer. And no one talks about that.
Mercedes Drive Pilot only works on a handful of hand-picked highways is California and Nevada. It must have a car in front of it to follow. It can’t go over 40mph. It can’t navigate thru interchanges. It can’t be used in inclement weather. It doesn’t work around flashing lights. It doesn’t work on construction sites. It doesn’t work in night time. It cannot change lanes and it doesn’t work on roads without lane markings.
It’s effectively a train except train can take you to more places. Also, it must have a driver who can take over when needed. That’s level 3 self driving. Waymo is level 4.
Here’s what happens when you put Mercedes Driver Assist (Not Drive Pilot) against Tesla’s FSD. Tl;dw: It’s completely useless.
Tesla ACC (Autopilot my ass) manages to ‘drive’ 130km/h, while requiring you jerk the wheel every few seconds. The 2015 VW Passat I used to drive supported 160km/h and I didn’t have to jerk the dam steering wheel. Granted it did not have lane assist (Autopilot in Teslaspeak). Still, claiming a Mercedes not doing at least 220km/h using assisted driving is just silly.
One more anecdote: couple of weeks ago I rented a current Audi A4, the ‘Autopilot’ took the car to 244km/h - I decided to not push it further even though it was legal. That was just an A4!
Teslas add dangerous because the car - very much like the company CEO - is claiming it can do things which it ultimately can’t. When it fails and the and you, the driver, can’t compensate you’re on the newspaper.
You don’t need to “jerk” the wheel. You only need to touch it gently. This is because level 2 is “hands on” system. Allegedly though even this will be going away with version 12.4 and from there on it’s only the cabin camera that’s monitoring you. It’s debateable wether this is a good thing or not. Makes it easier to abuse the system.
No one is making any claims about how fast Mercedes Drive Pilot should go. Your accusation is disingenuous. I’m simply stating that it can’t go over 40mph. That’s pretty slow for a vehicle that can drive autonomously only on highways.
You don’t need to “jerk” the wheel. Yes, you do. One of the reasons I didn’t end up buying a Tesla.
You only need to touch it gently. That’s true for any other manufacture but Tesla. Stop lying.
For people not familiar with the wheel-jerk required by Teslas:
This is because level 2 is “hands on” system. No, it’s because it’s a Tesla. Other manufacturers, including Mercedes, have sensors in the steering wheel so “You only need to touch it gently.”. Again on (all) others, not Teslas.
" only the cabin camera that’s monitoring you." Some current cars do have (Lidar based?) driver monitoring as this is set to become law. The car checks whether you pay (enough) attention. Test drive a GWM Ora - it’s fucking annoying. No worries though, this will never work properly in a Tesla.
No one is making any claims about how fast Mercedes Drive Pilot should go. (…) I’m simply stating that it can’t go over 40mph. Please re-read this, does it still make sense to you?
I could return the accusation of being disingenuous but that falls short as claiming a Mercedes does 64 on ACC/assited driving is just fucking stupid. 64 is to slow to be on the Autobahn.
Okay well I was wrong about having to turn the wheel. I’m not lying - I just didn’t know. I’ve watched hours and hours of content of people driving with FSD and I haven’t ever seen them having to do that so I didn’t know it was a thing.
Anyway, that’s allegedly going away with V12.4
Then you should test drive some EVs yourself - it is very eye-opening. I also recommend watching YT channels that test different brands and aren’t caught in the fanboy trap.
Why do you need to be such a dick about it? Just because I’m interested in self-driving technology doesn’t mean I’m a Tesla fanboy. That’s ad-hominem. No other brand (that I know of) makes a car you can buy that’s capable of doing what Tesla’s FSD can do. That’s why it’s the brand I most pay attention to. If you think there’s some other manufacturer I should look into more closely then by all means link me a video about it.
I already daily drive my dream car and the “smartest” feature it has is anti-lock brakes. While it would be nice to test drive a modern EV I however have no interest in buying one nor could I even afford it.
Because it’s insanely restrictive and can’t be used by most people or in most situations. It’s little more than a marketing ploy.
I drove a hyundai recently which had multiple levels of lane assist and it drove for miles unassistated. Jarring experience, it didnt meet intersections or anything but kept to the road and speed I wanted.
Did not handle off ramps well, drove past them as needed then tried to course correct onto them very late.
Comparing Tesla with Waymo is stupid. They are doing fundamentally different things, and people like this author don’t realize that. Waymo’s technology, like a few self-driving products from Ford or GM, rely on having a centimeter level 3D scan of the road ahead of time. This allows a crap ton of pre-processing so fewer decisions need to be made in the car. It’s a developmental shortcut, but it also means their cars will only work on roads that have been scanned and processed and approved ahead of time. Tesla’s system doesn’t pre scan roads. It makes all the decisions on the fly based solely on what the car is seeing as it drives. That means that it can theoretically work on any road, in any situation, without advance preparation.
Tesla’s approach tackles a MUCH harder problem. And that must be considered when comparing the two technologies.
Otherwise it’s like looking at two people at the gym, William lifts 25lb weights and can now lift them 10 times, Tom lifts 250 lb weights and can now lift them 9 times, and saying that William is in better shape than Tom because he can do more reps. No, Tom is in better shape because he is lifting a lot more weight. Even though he can’t lift it as many times, he’s doing a lot more work in his workout.
I used to be so excited for self driving cars, but my naive younger self assumed they’d actually make sure they’re safe before putting them on public roads.
I was wrong.
What’s a few 100,000 deaths compared to progress?
/s
We’re getting those American robot cars
OK but put it into cars for sale. Ain’t worth shit if I can’t buy it
Eh, if there was an automated taxi service that was really cheap (since there isn’t a driver) I have a feeling that the need for individuals to own cars would go down.
There are people out there that can’t drive or that have limitations on driving that this could help, and in the long term it may be cheaper to pay for a service rather than own a car which needs maintenance, costs generally 20k+ new, and is a liability from a financial view.
Waymo is literally being investigated for self-driving incidents lol… They’ve also only been able to operate in a small area. I wouldn’t really call that chess.
Removed by mod
Rapid deployment and iteration belongs on race tracks, not the public road.
Am I remembering correctly that Tesla removed sensors for self driving?
Yes they sure did. I don’t believe any Tesla ever shipped with Lidar, maybe some did. The big thing that they removed/disabled was the radar. They did this because the radar and visual cameras would disagree about where things were. So instead of spending more R&D time to get it right. They just removed the radar and called it solved.
That was just an excuse, they just couldn’t get the parts. Radar is back now.
Chess is a very complex rules game, while Checkers is quite simple. Waymo has a complex approach to self driving:
- Expensive suite of sensors
- High resolution maps of operating areas
- Remote operators standing by
While Teslas approach is simple:
- Capture a bazillion miles of camera footage, feed into AI, profit?
- Unpaid volunteers teach the AI safe driving
- Car has only a basic map for routing, the rest is inferred in real time from cameras
Waymo’s successful approach scales linearly. They have to high-res map every city they want to operate in, and they can gradually bring down the cost of the sensors. They will require fewer remote operator interactions over time.
Teslas success is more difficult, but it scales exponentially. They already produce vehicles at scale and full control over all the equipment on board. The existing fleet would be able to participate as well. If they succeed, they may want to offer buy-backs for customers who didnt buy FSD - the cars would be worth more to Tesla than the owner.
In both checkers and chess, the player gains super powers for reaching the other side of the board. Time will tell who reaches the other side of the board first. They are playing different games on the same board. Okay that’s fair.
So the article repeats, several times, “waymo relies on remote operators”. I don’t think the author knows what “self-driving” means.
I’m generally the one defending Tesla in these threads but on Waymo’s defence; the remote operators aren’t actually controlling the car. Instead when faced with a challenging situation the car “calls home” for assistance basically asking a human to take a look at the situation and help it to decide what to do. This might be a car partially blocking the lane of traffic cones placed in a weird manner so the car justs asks for assurance that it’s okay to proceed. In the most difficult situations the remote operator can suggest a route for the vehicle to take but the decision on what to do is ultimately on the vehicle itself.
And he forgets to mention the precise mapping required too. He also left out the terrible experiences Waymo has had with revoked permits, cars disabled by traffic cones, and multiple traffic stopping glitches where intersections were blocked for hours.
Yeah but the waymo ceo doesn’t shitpost on Twitter so people here don’t get front page hyped up stories every single time things aren’t perfect
“self-driving”
Someone else, forreal - driving
A couple years ago, we used to joke around the shop “Of course they used AI - An intern.”
I’m making a prediction right now that real self driving will eventually rely on people from impoverished countries remotely operating the cars of wealthier countries. Sort of like how AI training data is combed through.
And Cruise is playing bumper cars
It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it’s simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying “x is playing chess while y is playing checkers” should really die.
X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.
Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.
That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.
Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.
In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.
My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.
With checkers, that is unfeasable. That’s why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as “the simple game” when for humans it is far from simple.
Agree. Checkers has been solved, Tic tac toe has been solved on xkcd. Chess has not been solved
I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.
I just watched a video of one of these going down the wrong side of the road yesterday
Maybe they accidentally outsourced one of the remote drivers from the UK
Both are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public as they beta test 2-ton vehicles on public streets. Damn them both.
I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.
Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.
If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.
Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.
Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.
If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?
Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.
I tend to disagree here. For example if you have vehicle to vehicle standardized communications, vehicles can communicate between themselves the location of cyclists, some road obstacles, etc. generally making the roads safer and reducing the number of fatalities.
Yes, they will make some people more rich, but is this a legitimate reason to obstruct technological advancements? I am sure people were thinking the same way at the cusp of electrification, or automation of some factories, where machines were augmenting the human labor and in the process making those people redundant.
If we think the same way we should never abandon coal power plants and mines because miners might lose their job, right?
There are greener, more energy effecient and more socially fair ways to get the same results than selling everybody a high tech steel box.
What do those options matter if nobody is developing them and they only work in dense cities? You might as well be arguing for Star Trek-like transporter technology here.
They may not be perfect yet, but if their track record is safer than a human driver they aren’t any worse than any of the other assholes on the road.
Millions of human drivers are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public, too, but we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests to keep bad drivers off the road. We’re just bitching about someone else trying to solve the problem because it isn’t a perfect solution on day 1.
If their track record is better it’s because it’s a record at a much lower scale, under more controlled conditions, and kept by companies with a vested interest in it appearing good. If Boeing can hide flaws in flying vehicles carrying hundreds of people per trip I think these companies can hide flaws in cars.
we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests
Why aren’t you? Wouldn’t that be the most logical answer?
My country has had a very bad traffic safety record, among the worst in the EU, and that was one of the things we used to improve things, along with harsher consequences.
There’s also another solution, reducing people’s need to drive. Public transportation could be improved by a fraction of the money that goes into these self-driving endeavors.
Just adding “AI” to something may look cool and even make sense at small scale but ultimately completely fail in real life. “Sometimes knives kill people, let’s put AI in knives that will retract the blade instead of cutting someone”. Does that sound plausible too?
This is literally the only way we’ll ever get self-driving cars. You have to test them in real life. Simulations and tests tracks can only take you so far. Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people but this will be greatly outnumbered by the amount of lives saved when the technology actually starts working as intented. It’s not like human driven vehicles are exactly safe for pedestrians either.
Also, when a self-driving vehicle fails it almost always means it ends up getting stuck somewhere or blocking the road. It’s extremely rare for it to cause an accident, though that does happen aswell.
Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people
Easy to say when those lives doesn’t include yours or anyone you love/care about.
So you’d rather more people die in avoidable traffic accidents because we weren’t allowed to develop this technology?
I’d rather have people avoiding using cars at all, adopting mass transit solutions instead.
Great that’s admirable, but that isn’t going to happen because it doesn’t work for most people and there is no political capital to make it happen, so what then?
How could anyone know that? It just as well might.
It’s a fallacy to think we can build a perfect world where all bad things can be avoided. With all new technology comes downsides. We’re already losing 80+ a day in the US alone because we don’t have self driving cars. It’s far more likely for someone close to me to get killed by a human driver.
I don’t think public deaths is a valid cost for creating self driving cars. We could be builidng safer and more effecient transportation systems. Some billionaire is going to make even more money because they were allowed to use the general public and city streets as a testing ground for their product. This is not fair to the family or the people who are injured or killed by self driving cars.
There are currently 80+ people dying every single day just in the US alone because we don’t have self-driving cars. Not developing that technology is just as much of a choise to let people die than going forward with it. I’d argue it’s the moral thing to do. People are awful at driving. As a fan of cars I like to go sit by the freeway watching them passing by several times a week and the number of people driving 120kph while staring at their phones is mind boggling.
Not only that but virtually all of those vehicles are going to be electric as well so that also means less people dying because of air pollution. Then there’s also the fact that it’ll bring down the cost of taxies immensely as well as allowing private individuals to let their vehicle go do ride sharing for the day instead of sitting on the parking lot of their work place unused. There’s just too many upsides to it. Also it’s not like passengers getting killed by rogue self-driving vehicles is a particularly common occurance despite the technology still being at it’s infancy. This is the worst they’re ever going to be.
The same problem could be fixed with electrified transit and walkability. Transit would also be even more environmentally friendly.
Plus we could still develop self driving cars but do a lot more testing before we set the public as the guinea pigs to see if they are safe.
Id also argue that we cannot claim this is the worst self driving will get since self driving cars are only used in a few areas right now.
Like I said; there’s only so much you can test on a closed track. At some point you must start doing that in the real world. Pedestrians getting killed by experimental self-driving vehicles is not an actual issue we’re dealing with right now but more like a theoretical possibility of what could happen in the future. There are only a couple of such incidents recorded ever. That’s not a good enough reason to not continue with it.
What I mean by them now being the worst they’ll ever be is the self-driving technology itself. It’s constantly improving and the trend is towards better. The technology we have right now is the worst it’s ever going to be.
