“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
The thing with (full) self-driving is that the edge cases are the challenge. Driving is the Pareto Principle really cranked up: (fully made up numbers) 2% of the driving represents 90% of the difficulty. And highway driving is a much simpler task to be automated than driving on a stroad, weird intersections, unprotected turns, etc.
I think we are a long ways off from full self-driving, and highway driving capabilities of current vehicles only address what is by far the easiest scenario. And even there those capabilities are limited from what I’ve seen.
I believe that some technological ideas can work. The problem is that ideas that are under people like Musk, are doomed to always fail and will be seen as negative.
Elon Musk sucks.
The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail
Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…
Yep Elon famously invented the first electric car and the first reusable spacecraft. He did it in his garage with his own two hands!
Read your damn history.
SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period
Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.
Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.
Wow. What a visionary 🙄
I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.
And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.
He wasn’t up Trump’s ass like a month ago. That’s a fairly recent development.
Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.
Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.
As ever, things that succeed with Musk as the figurehead succeed despite him not because of him.
My Leaf can handle itself on the highway and it’s the perfect amount of self driving that I want. I also didn’t need to pay half the price of the leaf for the privilege.
Wow, what a genius!
/s
Still no LiDAR.
I personally don’t think it’s a matter of more sensory input. Whilst Lidar wouldn’t be a bad thing, autonomous cars are just a problem current technology can’t solve.
Have you seen Waymo?
The vehicles with a higher automated driving rating than Tesla use a more diverse range of sensory inputs. While it may not make fully autonomous driving, it very clearly would have made Tesla closer to it based on the fact that cars that use things like lidar in addition to cameras surpassed Tesla’s rating many years ago.
I think there needs be car 2 car ( or even car 2 human f.e. in smartphones and wearables ) introduced before self driving cars is capable to exist. Of course until real AI is introduced. We’re nowhere near the human capable ai
We already have road legal level 4 self driving cars for sale in Germany (Mercedes EQS and S Class), level 5 isnt far away.
If Tesla didn’t go the vision-only route they would probably also have level 4 autonomy by now
Elon Musks make engineering orders of magnitude more difficult. Those poor Tesla neoslaves
“Trust me, you just need to buy more compute for your car. We’ll figure out reliable driving by sight someday.”
I’m happily using all the sensors my car offers, even if I’m pretty ok with driving by eyesight. Better sensors that can easily see through fog/rain/snow/whatever? Hell yeah, give them to me.
LiDAR in particular actually kinda sucks at those conditions (basically any form of precipitation). It’s really only good in clear environments.
We’ll fix that, the car will be driving fully autonomously 2018, promise!
Good. I don’t trust them dern robuts.
He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting
This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.
Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.
This 100%, too many musk fanboys don’t understand how much he is actually hindering innovation.
Even at SpaceX they make more progress when he isn’t involved.
Lying liar lied. News at 11.
Over Promise under deliver
I realized self-driving on roads is impossible for so-called when someone pointed out what human drivers do when there’s like a flock of geese camped out in the middle of the road.
We know that we should slowly move forward until they get out of the way, including bonking then with the car (gently). Do we want cars deciding that some obstruction in the road is “ok” to hit? I don’t. So what’s the solution? Something other than pure autonomous self driving.
We can probably have some very high level driver assist. Maybe.
All the issues with self-driving could be solved if they actually gave a shit about making it work. You don’t let the machine choose. You give it hard fucking rules to follow. It doesn’t need to identify geese, human, ball, dog, child to react differently to each; it should see an obstruction and stop to avoid damaging the fucking object and car, regardless of what it is. They are making it way more complicated than it really has to be.
Maybe he shouldn’t have called it “autopilot.”
Surprised if he is truly capable of even this level of self reflection.
Billionaires also fall into the Gartner hype cycle. And convincing a billionaire there’s an opportunity to automate workers out of a job is a quick way to get an injection of cash.
It’s going to be generations before we are actually able to automate most labor. But long, long before that AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
How would this play out? The shareholders pay off the current CEO to implement an AI-CEO and step aside?
Maybe. Or companies that are AI ran will outcompete the existing ones.
But how does an AI come to run a company in the first place? A CEO has to be replaced by an AI. What does that process look like in the first place?
Worker owned co-op with CEO duties coordinated by an AI.
McKinsey, Deloitte & co will provide that service.
I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.
Yay for OpenPilot
Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY
You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.
