I hate this sentiment. Yes, Elon makes huge promises. And you know what? He frequently gets there. Everyone quoted in the article says "No". Elon says "Why not?" And you're worried about the engineers.
It's the engineers' job to resist with good reasoning.
It's the visionary's job to convince them that we people only think the impossible things are impossible.
That's basically how I do my internal dialogue. I shoot down an idea of mine because it's too brittle, vague, and difficult. But I still want to build that something. So, I keep thinking and end up saying to myself, "Well, maybe I could do something that's like an ugly partial implementation, just leaving out the hardest things: it won't be what I want but I can write something that resembles it." And then I write the first prototype and end up having something here to play with. However, I still keep wanting more and maybe I get an insight that allows me, having first played with the first build, to make a better approach with a new set of tradeoffs but such that will get me closer to what I want. Gradually I approach what I want, possibly never quite reaching that point, but still getting closer and closer.
I don't see why they would groan in this particular instance (although I can believe it in general). He's not promising anything in the near-term that doesn't already exist in other shipping cars, or that his own people haven't already demoed.
Wow, I didn't realize they had been building in the necessary sensors all along. To just light this up one day for the existing fleet with an OTA update is nothing short of astounding.
This was announced to somewhat of a failure a few months back – there was a big stock rally leading up to the announcement and a big crash afterwards because people didn't seem to get it, that some significant number of existing Telsas were going to be self-driving.
I'm not positive on this but I believe Tesla either uses technology or licenses patents directly from Mercedes-Benz regarding their whole "self-driving" and "autopilot" marketing here.
Case in point: my current car does a variety of self-driving tasks such as:
- Autonomous braking
- Active lane keeping assist to steer you in the lane if the radar and cameras detect you are swerving
- PRE-SAFE collision prevention plus that will autonomously brake if it detects an imminent impact
- Pedestrian awareness system that will autonomously brake if it detects a pedestrian is entering the range of the long, medium and short range radar
- Distronic Plus that will accelerate and brake according to both the vehicle in front and behind you from 0 mph up to 100mph
- Attention assist that employs various sensor to detect drowsiness and alert the driver audibly and via haptic feedback if it's time to take a break.
- Active blind spot assist that will audibly, visually and via haptic feedback alert the driver that a car has entered your hotspot and prevent you from entering that particular lane
So while the Tesla camp is and should be excited about "self-driving" enhancements, Mercedes-Benz has been doing this for well over 2 years now with some of the technology above even becoming standard features on non-high end Mercedes vehicles such as the S-Class with the appropriate packages.
I don't really see much but hype with respect to Tesla's announcement.
Yeah, there are some COTS parts available for various autonomous driving functionality. My Ford fusion does pretty much all of the above, and I do not think Ford implemented everything themselves, and the sensors look very similar to various other implementations from different auto manufacturers.
"self-driving car" and "car capable driving itself on highway under optimal conditions" are 2 totally different things. The real excitement comes when I can tell my car to go pick up the kids from school or drop me off at the airport and then drive itself back home. Anyways this is a great step in the right direction but its not the game changing tech we're all waiting for.
I bought a new car in Sept 2014. It uses radar to do adaptive cruise control all the way down to stop and go. It also uses camera's to sense the lanes and steer to keep lane. Also handles emergency braking and people cutting me off.
So basically, I choose the on-ramp and off-ramp and the car does the rest on the highway. I feel like it's the midpoint between a manual car and an autonomous car.
After a few months of using this every day, driving in a normal car feels different than it used to. It's like driving a manual instead of an automatic.
"Mr. Musk said in a conference call that the self-driving technology was “technically capable of going from parking lot to parking lot,” meaning through cities as well. But, he said, Tesla will disable the autopilot when cars are not on highways or major roads, citing safety concerns."
I think the implication here is that the cars are capable of this but they are taking the smaller step out of legal and liability concerns.
The real excitement is when I can put those requests in to a network of public infrastructure and have them executed at roughly the same cost as driving for myself.
"Mostly self-driving" just seems crazy to me. As soon as the car is able to drive on a major highway, you're going to have "asleep at the wheel" issues, and the car cannot simply hand back control to the driver.
There have been times when I've misjudged my level of tiredness. Drifting out of lane is a good marker that you've screwed up and need to pull over immediately and sleep.
Does Tesla have some way to determine wakefulness or to safely pull over if the driver fails to respond?
If you're so tired that you drift out of your lane then you are beyond the point of when you should have stopped. In such a case, I would rather share the road with Tesla's auto-pilot.
I'm sure the press is going to sensationalize the first accident caused by the auto-pilot, but seeing as it doesn't get tired or drink I bet the accident rate will be far lower then human drivers.
Toyota definitely has technology to detect whether the driver is asleep and wake up the driver. (I am not sure if this technology has hit the market yet so I can't comment on what the implementation is)
You can then wake up the driver by actuating the seat or sounding an alarm.
A co-worker and I were just talking about this. My take on the situation is that this could be partially alleviated if the car were to refuse to get off of the highway until after the driver manually took it out of autopilot. If the driver doesn't respond, skip the exit and stay on the highway sending out alerts until the driver responds.
Not exactly optimal, but I feel it may be the safest route. It would be interesting to see what other strategies people come up with.
The insurance / responsibility question really shows how moronic bureaucracy has made us.
To rephrase naysayers in a more first degree way: "sure there would be less accidents than when the vehicle is driven by a glorified ape, but for the fewer people still killed or maimed, we wouldn't be sure whom to blaim. So we'll keep killing more of them through ape drivers, rather than rush the paperwork-rethinking trauma".
Eh, a half-dozen really smart companies are pursuing self-driving technology. If it were really a concern enough to keep it off the market, they wouldn't continue working on it.
An interesting implication of that statement is that all the hardware to make this functionality work is already in the vehicle if it's just a software update.
It's not likely that this "autopilot mode" is close to the state of the art. See for example what kind of technique Audi has put into their prototype A7:
I can't believe Tesla has all these sensor already build in.
Plus Audi, Mercedes, etc. have all enormous experience in vehicle dynamics, which is critical in handeling automatic reactions like full braking and sudden fast steering at higher speeds.
The critical part is what does so car do if it requests driver interaction but the driver does not response. Brake? On a highway?
Autopilot will come, but not in the three month. That's just hilarious.
You're right that "autopilot" isn't the state of the art anymore. It's just radar cruise control and automatic lane keeping. The radar cruise control feature is already available in the Model S, and has been for a couple of months. Lane keeping is the missing piece. You can buy cars right now with automatic lane keeping, and Tesla has demoed it extensively in their cars, so there's no real doubt about it coming soon to Tesla.
Three months is "hilarious" for a feature that's already been commercialized by others and has been shown to be nearly done in Tesla's implementation? How do you figure?
It looks like Tesla is just trying to play catch up with some other companies. Volvo already has a car with self driving technology, Chrysler also has a very good near-self-driving system.
To Musk, highway speeds are not the challenge; the complexity of the landscape is. “Highway cruise is easy, low speed is easy, it’s medium that's hard. Being able to recognize what you’re seeing and make the right decision in that suburban environment in that 10 mph to 50 mph zone is the challenging portion.”
Two points in the article bring up an interesting thought- Will autonomous highway driving make the recharging stops more or less annoying? If you're not actively driving the car, will you have less fatigue and so less need or desire for a 30 minute recharging break every few hundred miles?
Sounds great, but I'd prefer a simple slow/stop crash avoidance when there is an object slowing/stopped in front of the car. What is he status on that, anyone know?
The Tesla forums on the subject are filled with geniuses advising people to drive better, in lieu of such important safety features.
So torn on this because I fall into the chest beating, love to drive my car set but I also remember how much reading I got done when I was younger and used to use the train to commute.
Having that time back is a very seductive proposition.
What I do wonder though is what's the point of having your own car, if all cars are autonomous then isn't that essentially a tram system? How long would it take before there are established routes and taking your car to a given location is no different to hopping on any one of the other cars that are heading there anyway?
Surely the one of the first businesses to be radically impacted by widespread autonomous vehicles is the taxi industry?
I can't see an outcome where pretty soon it's not just a fancy tramway.
I'm looking forward to summoning my self-driving car from my Apple Watch and living out my childhood Knight Rider fantasies. (I know, only on private property in the early stages -- but still, pretty darn cool.)
Does anyone know what my car insurance rate would do if I got a car that will let me nap or read a book on the way to work? That is one major issue I haven't seen addressed.
Well, it's pretty clear that the headline is a bait for page views... Anyways, steps in the good direction, but far from the self-driving cars we all have on our minds...
This feature is great. Perhaps once such cars become the majority on the road, traffic flow could be optimized resulting in a faster commute during rush hours.
I am not sure I agree on the two hundred mile threshold, maybe for the family commuter car. however no electric of that range will ever replace the car for trips to grandmas.
let alone the price differential between an equivalent gas powered car is going to have to be a lot closer to justify the limitations of an electric.
You're missing the self-driving feature. Once there are self-driving cars there will be cheap self-driving cabs. That's what you take to grandma's house. And of course the cab can run on gasoline. Or run on electricity and when it runs out of power it stops somewhere you can get some food and a freshly charged cab.
If you can afford a Tesla, you can afford to rent a gas powered car a few times a year, or more likely you just fly when you are traveling that far. And of course in the US it's pretty common for families to have multiple cars, so you could have one electric and one gas car. I agree that it doesn't handle all use cases for a vehicle, but no car does and it would be pretty foolish to try.
I'm sceptical that they'll be allowed to deploy this.
But hey -- They should just push the update with a harcoded feature toggle keeping the functionality off. Then the line they tow is "Oops! Someone rooted their car and overrode our safety!"
Why not? Every luxury carmaker has had this level of highway autonomy for quite some time now - here's an example of an Infiniti where the (completely reckless) driver literally gets into the passenger's seat while the car is driving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY_zqEmKV1k
Most European automakers have systems with similar capability (Audi and Mercedes have systems that even work down to 0mph in traffic) but maintain a "one hand on the wheel" sensor to prevent stunts like this.
The purported "parking lot to parking lot" capability is what's really interesting, but it sounds like Tesla have no timeline to actually deploy it yet.
The Tesla Model S has forward-looking radar, ultrasonic sensors on all sides, and a forward-looking camera. That's marginally enough for automatic driving in routine freeway situations.
I love Tesla, but Musk's starting to smell a little like Peter Molyneux -- promising the world and delivering little. Get the Model X out (2 years late and counting...)
If you get past the tremendously misleading headline, you'd see that his statement isn't so crazy. All this article is about is Musk saying that Tesla Model S firmware version 7, out within a few months, will include full "autopilot" functionality, which means traffic-aware cruise control and automatic lane keeping. The former is already enabled (I just used it half an hour ago) and the latter has been demoed extensively and there's no reason to doubt it will ship when claimed.
I don't that comparison is apt. One delayed product is not nearly the same as a long sequence of products that were launched without many promised features.
In this instance though, it's more of selective delivering. He is still delivering on many of these features and "futuristic updates" just not on 1 specific piece of hardware.
AceJohnny2|11 years ago
As I understand, they have folks actively managing Musk trying to prevent him from promising the moon :)
JulianMorrison|11 years ago
pbreit|11 years ago
yason|11 years ago
It's the visionary's job to convince them that we people only think the impossible things are impossible.
That's basically how I do my internal dialogue. I shoot down an idea of mine because it's too brittle, vague, and difficult. But I still want to build that something. So, I keep thinking and end up saying to myself, "Well, maybe I could do something that's like an ugly partial implementation, just leaving out the hardest things: it won't be what I want but I can write something that resembles it." And then I write the first prototype and end up having something here to play with. However, I still keep wanting more and maybe I get an insight that allows me, having first played with the first build, to make a better approach with a new set of tradeoffs but such that will get me closer to what I want. Gradually I approach what I want, possibly never quite reaching that point, but still getting closer and closer.
ridgeguy|11 years ago
“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”
Robert Browning, from Men and Women and Other Poems
mikeash|11 years ago
cbd1984|11 years ago
... he does it not because it is easy, but because it is hard!
For his engineers.
Not so much for him.
tfe|11 years ago
orblivion|11 years ago
a_c_s|11 years ago
It seems Google is the "odd one out" relying on primarily on different hardware (LIDAR).
colechristensen|11 years ago
mikeg8|11 years ago
dakrisht|11 years ago
Case in point: my current car does a variety of self-driving tasks such as:
- Autonomous braking
- Active lane keeping assist to steer you in the lane if the radar and cameras detect you are swerving
- PRE-SAFE collision prevention plus that will autonomously brake if it detects an imminent impact
- Pedestrian awareness system that will autonomously brake if it detects a pedestrian is entering the range of the long, medium and short range radar
- Distronic Plus that will accelerate and brake according to both the vehicle in front and behind you from 0 mph up to 100mph
- Attention assist that employs various sensor to detect drowsiness and alert the driver audibly and via haptic feedback if it's time to take a break.
- Active blind spot assist that will audibly, visually and via haptic feedback alert the driver that a car has entered your hotspot and prevent you from entering that particular lane
So while the Tesla camp is and should be excited about "self-driving" enhancements, Mercedes-Benz has been doing this for well over 2 years now with some of the technology above even becoming standard features on non-high end Mercedes vehicles such as the S-Class with the appropriate packages.
I don't really see much but hype with respect to Tesla's announcement.
Good link here: http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/benz/safety
MichaelGG|11 years ago
josefresco|11 years ago
The absurdity of this statement is amazing. Apparently Mercedes has brainwashed it's owners into a new definition of "standard".
deeviant|11 years ago
nateguchi|11 years ago
nikhizzle|11 years ago
dharma1|11 years ago
acadien|11 years ago
stevecalifornia|11 years ago
So basically, I choose the on-ramp and off-ramp and the car does the rest on the highway. I feel like it's the midpoint between a manual car and an autonomous car.
After a few months of using this every day, driving in a normal car feels different than it used to. It's like driving a manual instead of an automatic.
The car is a fully loaded 2015 Chrysler 200C.
DubiousPusher|11 years ago
I think the implication here is that the cars are capable of this but they are taking the smaller step out of legal and liability concerns.
Hytosys|11 years ago
My father sits through 2-4 hours of Los Angeles rush hour each day, and this is absolutely a game changer for someone like him. This is stellar.
superuser2|11 years ago
cjensen|11 years ago
There have been times when I've misjudged my level of tiredness. Drifting out of lane is a good marker that you've screwed up and need to pull over immediately and sleep.
Does Tesla have some way to determine wakefulness or to safely pull over if the driver fails to respond?
metric10|11 years ago
I'm sure the press is going to sensationalize the first accident caused by the auto-pilot, but seeing as it doesn't get tired or drink I bet the accident rate will be far lower then human drivers.
heyheyhey|11 years ago
Not sure about Tesla but the technology DOES exist and some cars do currently have it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_drowsiness_detection
hkmurakami|11 years ago
You can then wake up the driver by actuating the seat or sounding an alarm.
jccooper|11 years ago
stdgy|11 years ago
Not exactly optimal, but I feel it may be the safest route. It would be interesting to see what other strategies people come up with.
fab13n|11 years ago
To rephrase naysayers in a more first degree way: "sure there would be less accidents than when the vehicle is driven by a glorified ape, but for the fewer people still killed or maimed, we wouldn't be sure whom to blaim. So we'll keep killing more of them through ape drivers, rather than rush the paperwork-rethinking trauma".
coldpie|11 years ago
dchuk|11 years ago
greglindahl|11 years ago
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/dual-motor-model-s-and-autop...
n_blom|11 years ago
http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1029470_autonomous-audi-a...
I can't believe Tesla has all these sensor already build in.
Plus Audi, Mercedes, etc. have all enormous experience in vehicle dynamics, which is critical in handeling automatic reactions like full braking and sudden fast steering at higher speeds.
The critical part is what does so car do if it requests driver interaction but the driver does not response. Brake? On a highway?
Autopilot will come, but not in the three month. That's just hilarious.
mikeash|11 years ago
Three months is "hilarious" for a feature that's already been commercialized by others and has been shown to be nearly done in Tesla's implementation? How do you figure?
coliveira|11 years ago
bobbles|11 years ago
aetherson|11 years ago
manicdee|11 years ago
Forward radar, forward camera, 12 long range ultrasonic sensors with coverage in "every direction at all speeds".
danielweber|11 years ago
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2898118/elon-musk-teslas-coul...
joshschreuder|11 years ago
waterlesscloud|11 years ago
tbrownaw|11 years ago
mixmastamyk|11 years ago
The Tesla forums on the subject are filled with geniuses advising people to drive better, in lieu of such important safety features.
mark_integerdsv|11 years ago
Having that time back is a very seductive proposition.
What I do wonder though is what's the point of having your own car, if all cars are autonomous then isn't that essentially a tram system? How long would it take before there are established routes and taking your car to a given location is no different to hopping on any one of the other cars that are heading there anyway?
Surely the one of the first businesses to be radically impacted by widespread autonomous vehicles is the taxi industry?
I can't see an outcome where pretty soon it's not just a fancy tramway.
gdubs|11 years ago
Sakes|11 years ago
cloudwalking|11 years ago
Source: listened to the call this morning.
chrisBob|11 years ago
cowsandmilk|11 years ago
joeyspn|11 years ago
Fando|11 years ago
Shivetya|11 years ago
let alone the price differential between an equivalent gas powered car is going to have to be a lot closer to justify the limitations of an electric.
AnthonyMouse|11 years ago
TheCoelacanth|11 years ago
vvanders|11 years ago
patcon|11 years ago
But hey -- They should just push the update with a harcoded feature toggle keeping the functionality off. Then the line they tow is "Oops! Someone rooted their car and overrode our safety!"
bri3d|11 years ago
Most European automakers have systems with similar capability (Audi and Mercedes have systems that even work down to 0mph in traffic) but maintain a "one hand on the wheel" sensor to prevent stunts like this.
The purported "parking lot to parking lot" capability is what's really interesting, but it sounds like Tesla have no timeline to actually deploy it yet.
Animats|11 years ago
fab13n|11 years ago
unknown|11 years ago
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suyash|11 years ago
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Domenic_S|11 years ago
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shkkmo|11 years ago
waterlesscloud|11 years ago
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godgod|11 years ago
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