The company’s rollout of its new driverless cars has gotten off to a wobbly start – and rival Waymo remains well ahead
After years of promising investors that millions of Tesla robotaxis would soon fill the streets, Elon Musk debuted his driverless car service in a limited public rollout in Austin, Texas. It did not go smoothly.
The 22 June launch initially appeared successful enough, with a flood of videos from pro-Tesla social media influencers praising the service and sharing footage of their rides. Musk celebrated it as a triumph, and the following day, Tesla’s stock rose nearly 10%.
What quickly became apparent, however, was that the same influencer videos Musk promoted also depicted the self-driving cars appearing to break traffic laws or struggle to properly function. By Tuesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had opened an investigation into the service and requested information from Tesla on the incidents.
This is the same guy who said (paraphrased) “they do it with 4 bolts so why can’t I do it with just 2?”
Nothing is lamer than superior technology, eh Elon? I mean you may be a looser but at least you’re not a nerd.
Musk maintains that camera-only technology is the most “human” way to approach self-driving, since people use their eyes to navigate the road.
Newsflash for you, Elon. Most people are terrible drivers. We should be striving to do better as a society, not imitate something that already sucks.
This was him justifying what was a cost saving decision that became a face saving battle for him personally as everyone told him he was wrong.
If there is one thing Elon cannot stand above all others is admitting he was wrong, especially when he has spent years promising this and now he would have to retrofit at his cost Lidar to all those cars he sold as self driving ready with an expensive optional extra.
He might be able to avoid any sort of punishment from the US government as long as he stays in Trumps good books, but he will not be able to do so in Europe or similar.
Musk maintains that camera-only technology is the most “human” way to approach self-driving, since people use their eyes to navigate the road.
A few years ago I was driving on the motorway, came up on a bend in the road and was greeted by a dense freak fog bank out of nowhere. I immediately let go of the accelerator to reduce speed, at the same time my dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and a collision alert started blaring. That gave me enough time to apply the brakes and prevent a collision with the first and only traffic jam I’ve ever seen there.
I see no reason to not augment our own capabilities with radar and lidar, to see what we as humans can’t.
Imagine if we could “see” in those wavelengths!
…
Don’t tell Musk I said that
M’profits!
He also claimed he wanted to make self driving safer than humans. You can’t do that well if the car has the same visual limitations a human has.
Well the computer could probably react faster than a human even with the same visual stats.
Of course computers can “compute” faster than humans. In that case, safety should not be compared with the average human. We should be expecting a lot better. It can also fail faster, and in unpredictable ways, than a human depending on the condition, which is why you can’t skimp out on sensors.
When Autopilot started I would hear people joke about how it couldn’t drive in bad weather where people could. They seem to miss the point that when the computer begins to lose information needed to navigate, it’s going to stop driving. People lose information and they keep going. One of these is safer.
Of course if Elon had thrown everything at the car to make it have information even in terrible or odd conditions, there’d be more merit in claiming those cars are safer than humans. But between genius brain (however much there is) and narcissist, the latter won out in doing it his way because others were doing it the obvious way.
The safest roads would be fully automated and tapped into each other. We wouldn’t even need lights at intersections. A hybrid mix of human/computer traffic is always going to be dangerous.
Except:
- When mud, snow, bug splatters, etc. blinds a camera I can very likely still see perfectly fine out of clear part of the windshield. I can move my eyes, the camera can’t move.
- Sun glare will blind some cameras (even side cameras) when it’s low in the sky. The same sun wont bother me at all.
- I’ve seen the cameras get tricked by things in front of it like a trailer full of tree branches & other landscaping debris that hangs over the back and obscures the brake lights & license plate.
They seem to miss the point that when the computer begins to lose information needed to navigate, it’s going to stop driving.
There’s also the point that, while AI has gotten quite far, the human brain is still fairly superior at accurately interpolating and interpreting limited information. This may have changed in the past year or two, but my impression is that humans are still far better than machines at handling new or “corrupted” information, like driving in poor visibility, or suddenly having road markings disappear, etc.
Agreed.
I hate trump and Musk and I morn the world we could have if it weren’t for people like them. However… after the election the only bit of hope that I - and which I knew would never happen - was that maybe they would use their authoritarianism to make the very hard decisions that could lead to a better society, such as phasing out human operated vehicles on public roads in favor of interconnected, self-driving vehicles. We have the technology to do so many amazing things… there just isn’t enough profit to bribe the politicians, pay the executives and build it to make it worth while.
waymo is already superior to tesla in self driving,waymo has been around for a few years already. teslas already too late into the game.
Do we need any more evidence that his financial success has nothing to do with intelligence?
Elon Musk is intelligent, intelligent people make mistakes and believe in weird shit all the time
What’s funny here is that Tesla used all of the Tesla owners driving habits to train.
One thing this means is that when it’s “socially acceptable” to go +20mph it’s going to. Not that that makes it right, but what it also means is that they didn’t sanitize their data.
So think of the worst Tesla driver you know. They helped train FSD.
There is a segment of highway near Budapest where cops often hang out on an overpass with a speed camera. Teslas do a light phantom brake under that overpass, like going from speed limit to 80% speed limit, because apparently the car learned that that’s what it should do there.
I wouldn’t have believed it’s that stupid, but there is a whole discussion on local owner groups about that specific spot, and I’ve also seen it first hand from the passenger seat.
Just to clarify…
How bad is Budapest traffic? Is it LA? Or New Jersey?
Most drivers are good at driving, terrible at being good people. So it’s not like you get cut off a lot, and there is less texting and driving than in other places, but there are more people road raging. I’ve seen someone getting brake checked by police, and I’ve also seen someone brake checking police.
Traffic jams happen, but it’s not LA level. The roads are terrible though. The motorway that this thing is on is notoriously unsafe because it has much tighter turns that it should have, and it’s rated 110 kmh rather than 130 as a result, and that is still too fast.
Most drivers are good at driving,
[x] doubt. :P
but that’s just because I assume everyone is a terrible driver. Around here, we have people struggling with the whole zipper merge thing, though.
In much of Europe you don’t need a car to live, so the training requirements to get a driving licence are higher.
Relevant:
Every time I see this I chuckle regardless of how many times.
I mean the data IS sanitized, but not to the level that would have required certain human things to not happen.
Part of what’s led to its improvement over the years is better going through the data and removing bad things or properly labeling them.
That left turn that was cut to short makes it into the first set of training as a cursory look at it seemed okay, and then they see that cars are cutting turns to short. So they go through the data again and try to find examples of it and then label them properly so it doesn’t think it’s okay.
But that’s not a simple process, and then trying to only have certain good behaviors gets really hard because they’re actually very uncommon in normal driving because the bad behavior is socially acceptable.
The thing is that you have to break the law to be an effective and even safe driver. Going way under the limit or refusing to go into the opposite lane for a moment means that you cause traffic congestion and piss people off. Waymos definitely break laws at times, I’ve seen it personally. And other times waymos get too “safe” and end up locked in place for 30 min at a time. The real world is a chaotic place and there’s always been a discrepancy between what the laws are and how people actually drive. Lidar helps see things humans cant, but the main problem is the intelligence required, which may improve over time
The biggest problem is if you’re training in the extremes.
And they did.
The stopping for 30 minutes has more to do with “I don’t know”, which is something Tesla could do more of, imo. (And certainly not in the way they just set you up for a crash and hand it over after it’s too late.)
You can establish rules in top of the neural net output. No acceleration higher than 0.3g. No speed higher than the limit + 5 (if you know what the limit is, which teslas struggle with to this day). No running of red lights.
You can, yes.
They didn’t seem to, but they can.
The worst Telsa driver I know. Hum. That’s a tough competition.
So stupid to deride a technology that a computer can process far better than video alone. Its only because he can’t own and monetize it.
“LiDAR is lame!”
Not even inanimate objects are safe from his projection.
