Unless road conditions are completely 100% ideal (no snow, no rain, road markers are clearly visible and not covered up by dirt/dust/rubbermarks), you're never, _ever_ going to have fully autonomous self-driving. Too many variables and factors to account for.
Elon Musk has been gloating about fully self driving vehicles for years, but has never really delivered, despite people paying tens of thousands for access to the BETA feature.
It's probably much better off to have RFID beacons planted in roadways (either along lane markers, or in the center of lanes) which can be easily read by vehicles with the appropriate antenna. Sort of like a virtual railroad track. (Then again, what's stopping someone from hijacking the signal and telling all the cars going through downtown areas that they're all going to turn left/right suddenly)
It's tough. I don't like the cultural idea of letting computers control aspects of our lives. We're already starting to come to terms with it in things like AI-controlled content administration with Google (Youtube/Gmail), Facebook (New Feed "personalization", etc). I think inviting it into our physical world is going to bring up a lot of questions people didn't think they'd ever have to answer in their lives.
Yesterday I had to drive at night in awfully intense rain and I was very close to stopping because it was at the very limit of acceptable safety for me. My night vision is not so good, cars in the opposite direction were blinding me with their headlights, and road markers become invisible in the rain in Germany (not in US or Italy, I don't know why this is so bad in Germany - different paint?).
Self driving doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than me (including knowing when to stop!).
Tesla isn't there, but I'm pretty sure they can get there in my lifetime. May be way way too late for the angry customers, the courts, the investors and the stock market, but it's not unreachable.
The paint of the lines contains little glass beads that reflect your headlights back to you [0]. If the water film is higher than the part of the beads sticking out of the paint, the light bounces off further away from you.
Maybe it also depends on the roughness of the asphalt of the surface gets uniformly wet or not?
Bott's dots are better in that aspect but they stick out considerably...
Maybe Germany isn't using them? It doesn't take a heavy rain to make them practically disappear - which I haven't experienced elsewhere. But that was already a good starting point for some searches, thank you!
Why do they need a media relations department? Their order backlog stretches into 2023.
Media outlets put this disclaimer on practically every Tesla article because the media in the US are clearly butthurt that Tesla doesn't need (or want) them. Maybe we should be questioning our underlying assumptions of why a company should "need" a media relations department?
> Media outlets put this disclaimer on practically every Tesla article because the media in the US are clearly butthurt that Tesla doesn't need (or want) them.
No, they do it because they need to explain why almost every article on a Tesla issue has zero response from Tesla. Just like the "We reached out to Company but had not received a response before going to press."
Seriously? We all know Tesla doesn't have a media relations department. As such we all know they don't respond to media requests. You still consider it "due diligence" to ask questions of a nonexistent department?
A media relations department is a savvy thing to have in order to keep your brand’s reputation healthy. An order backlog stretching into 2023 doesn’t mean much for the next decade of Tesla. Public opinion is important for sales. I’m not going to claim to speak for the car-buying masses, but my impression of Tesla (false marketing claims, shoddy workmanship, bad working conditions, etc) is bad - you’d think a competently run company would want to try to shift that narrative.
Agreed, people are sheep, and will pay through the nose for crap they are taught carries some sort of cultural cachet. See also Apple products, and various handbags.
> Media outlets put this disclaimer on practically every Tesla article because the media in the US are clearly butthurt that Tesla doesn't need (or want) them.
Media will typically indicate whether there was a response, no response, or a 'no comment'. Why would they not also indicate that there was nobody made available for them to ask?
It's a bit of nonsense put out by Musk. Whether there's a "Media relations department" is immaterial. That's not actually a thing that companies have to have. You could call it marketing, light touch sales, corporate communications. When people write articles they ask for comment from the company. Normal companies either comment or don't comment. Tesla is way smarter though - they've come up with a PR strategy (definitely not something that would in any way be described as media relations) to say "Oh it's not that we're not commenting on this article about us cheating on safety tests. It's just that we don't do PR". Apparently some people fall for this, forgetting that when does release information to the media when it's autopilot kills someone. Sorry, it didn't kill anyone, Tesla says it disengaged before the crash, oh hold on hang on, I thought you guys didn't have a media relations deparment....oh.
I wonder why it took so many years? Is preparing a class action so time consuming or people were really hoping that Tesla will ship the promised AI to them?
This is false. They recently added a subscription option (prior to that it was only available as a one-time buy), but it has always been an extra upcharge.
It intentionally started at some initial pricepoint and then kept increasing the closer it gets to completion. Sorta like an early adopter discount. I remember it was around $7k in 2019, and it ramped up to around $10k in the present day.
I'm sure preparation of such does take time, but I would guess that the CA DMV recently determining that Tesla's "Full Self Driving" is not, in fact, full self driving and banning trying to use it as such is the motivation. FSD costs a obscene amount of money for a feature that every Tesla clearly already supports, but as it has now been declared by the CA DMV to be not FSD, and therefore people cannot even consider using it, the purchasers quite reasonably want their refunded.
Also it remains absurd to me that you can advertise a product for X, but then get out of liability by saying you do not guarantee it can be used for X. In the case of Tesla FSD it's both "full self driving" but also "the driver must remain in control of the vehicle at all times", but there are plenty of other examples you can produce.
Why not redesign highways so it is easy for self driving vehicles to follow? You could even have it set up that vehicles are only allowed to self drive when conditions are right. Maybe signage on the road itself enables or disable self driving.
To me this feels like this could be done immediately, and at least we would have self driving for the most monotonous part of the driving experience, long hours of highway driving.
I recall seeing that option discussed on The Daily Planet with Jay Ingram back in the early 00s. They interviewed a research engineer on self-driving vehicles, probably in the context of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. He'd clearly been working in the space for years and was very knowledgeable.
IIRC, they had some very successful prototype road systems back in the 90s (or maybe earlier) that were based on implanting magnetic markers into the road at regular intervals. The big problem was cost. There's miles and miles of roads and the cost to upgrade and maintain enough miles was prohibitive.
With that said, perhaps now that the cars themselves are 90% of the way there, the upgrades to the roadways could be more limited. I wonder if adding machine-readable markers to particularly important or problematic areas might be reasonable at this point.
Spending many, many billions of dollars on revamping public infrastructure for an unproven, nascent technology with functionally zero current adoption sounds absurd to me. Good luck convincing governments and the people that hold the purse strings.
(1) it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to do that, and be of pretty much no use to the _vast_ majority of tax payers. Essentially it would be an enormous cost that would primarily be shouldered by people for whom it had no value.
(2) all the things that "FSD" vehicles need are things that degrade quickly to the point where they don't work for said "FSD", so the highway maintenance costs would skyrocket
(3) Even if you were to say the costs of 1&2 were reasonable, that money has to come from somewhere, and what that will essentially mean is that the already underfunded infrastructure will have even less funding for things that are the also already underfunded freeway things, so your normal streets end up in even worse condition, and based on existing spending the brunt of _that_ cost will be born by low income people. The cost for low income being exacerbated by their presumably cheaper and poorer condition cars taking more damage from poorly maintained roads, and so increasing their direct maintenance costs.
(4) Fundamentally single car travel is an inefficient way to move people around, it simply does not scale as well as good public transport, and always will be: the amount of people a road system can transport is directly proportional to the area of the road that each person takes up, and cars are just not efficient. The average car is 8m^2 and in commute traffic the vast majority of them are single occupant, the average bus is ~30m^2. If we were extremely optimistic and assume an average of 2 people per car you have 4m^2/person vs 1m^2/person in a bus. This is excluding following distances, which if we were to include (say) 2m of following distance you get a conservative 3.5-4m^2 of additional wasted space so lets just say your total for a car is maybe 5m^2 per person. I think :D
I suspect this could be a really efficient way of working this. In much the same way that public transport - trains, busses etc. are more efficient. But I suspect a big part of the answer is incentives. You have the Silicon Valley model, where Billionaires plow billion after billion into self-driving vaporware in the hope that one day they can force the entire middle class into serfdom. On the other hand you have city planners who literally could solve the problems of public transit if previously mentioned billionaires paid a bit of tax - but that's totally off the table don't be ridiculous.
Efficient transportation in cities is communal, and built using tax dollars. That's not Silicon Valley sexiness.
That sounds great. A dedicated safe self driving vehicle network. We could call these special signs 'signals'.
We could then get them to automatically travel close together to reduce air resistance.
And you could charge them while they drive.
Maybe have a special low friction surface for the wheels to reduce energy use and air and waterway pollution from tyre, road and brake dust. Without tyre wear and range being a weak point in the design they could travel at much faster speeds.
Also if they are travelling together anyway you could have one big one with a more efficient motor and join them to it and use the charging network directly rather than needing them all to have individual batteries. We could call it a tesla chain or tchain. With then coupled together you could just have one person in the big-engine car supervising the 'full self driving' for all of the cars. Doesn't really matter then that it's in beta because it's just one or two people for 700 passengers.
Then there wouldn't be so many constraints on the size and shape so you could basically make the cars a box to fit more people.
Then with our self driving car network coming close to any given point we could just let them stay on the highly efficient part and get off it near our destination. We'd no longer need to dedicate 50-70% of the land area to collectors, arterials, extra wide streets and parking. What little time you spend walking would be more than made up for by not having to find a park, higher density and higher speeds. What a world! You wouldn't even have to dedicate a quarter of your home's lot to setbacks, driveways and storage for your car!
If only we'd had elon's amazing genius in 1879 we could have had a whole network of these by the beginning of the 1950s. We wouldn't have had to destroy half of our cities to make room for highways and parking then choke on exhaust fumes and toxic dust for 70 years.
Why do so many countries invest heavily in car-centric infrastructure and completely abandon public transit? Isn't transportation technically a solved problem already, with politics being the main obstacle?
Sure, small populations in hard to reach places will still need to use cars but that's like what, 10% of all people? (at least in the EU)
> largest being it doesn't make enough money for the rich
Perhaps you have not been to one of the handfull of major metropolis in the world, where day in and day out worker drones get onto public transport to go sit in a cubicle and generate the majority of the money going around in circles in the world. A tiny fraction of that money goes into their pocket and they get on the subway and ride and hour with it. The lions share gets chucked into the trunk of the bently for 4 blocks ride home for the rich.
52 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadThey're real close to having full self driving AI --- the only thing missing is "intelligence".
/sarcasm
Elon Musk has been gloating about fully self driving vehicles for years, but has never really delivered, despite people paying tens of thousands for access to the BETA feature.
It's probably much better off to have RFID beacons planted in roadways (either along lane markers, or in the center of lanes) which can be easily read by vehicles with the appropriate antenna. Sort of like a virtual railroad track. (Then again, what's stopping someone from hijacking the signal and telling all the cars going through downtown areas that they're all going to turn left/right suddenly)
It's tough. I don't like the cultural idea of letting computers control aspects of our lives. We're already starting to come to terms with it in things like AI-controlled content administration with Google (Youtube/Gmail), Facebook (New Feed "personalization", etc). I think inviting it into our physical world is going to bring up a lot of questions people didn't think they'd ever have to answer in their lives.
I think matching expectations with the varying definitions will be important moving forward.
Self driving doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than me (including knowing when to stop!).
Tesla isn't there, but I'm pretty sure they can get there in my lifetime. May be way way too late for the angry customers, the courts, the investors and the stock market, but it's not unreachable.
Maybe it also depends on the roughness of the asphalt of the surface gets uniformly wet or not?
Bott's dots are better in that aspect but they stick out considerably...
[0] https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1yRIhHpXXXXXUXFXXq6xXFXXXr/220...
I’m veering off topic here (much like a bad autopilot, bazinga), but why would a company possibly want to disband this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/06/07/...
Media outlets put this disclaimer on practically every Tesla article because the media in the US are clearly butthurt that Tesla doesn't need (or want) them. Maybe we should be questioning our underlying assumptions of why a company should "need" a media relations department?
No, they do it because they need to explain why almost every article on a Tesla issue has zero response from Tesla. Just like the "We reached out to Company but had not received a response before going to press."
One wonders why news outlets attempt to contact a media department that does not exist, and that they know does not exist.
Perchance it is so that they can remind the reader that the media department at Tesla does not exist?!?
I wonder who issues those statements, absent a media department?
Reports are that if anything substantial needs fixing , it it cheaper to discard the car and buy another one used.
What the US public chooses to buy is, evidently, easily manipulated. Consumer reports, less so.
Media will typically indicate whether there was a response, no response, or a 'no comment'. Why would they not also indicate that there was nobody made available for them to ask?
Tesla recently turned it into an up-sell, instead of a free (beta) feature. It was $10000 when I was considering a Tesla.
It intentionally started at some initial pricepoint and then kept increasing the closer it gets to completion. Sorta like an early adopter discount. I remember it was around $7k in 2019, and it ramped up to around $10k in the present day.
Also it remains absurd to me that you can advertise a product for X, but then get out of liability by saying you do not guarantee it can be used for X. In the case of Tesla FSD it's both "full self driving" but also "the driver must remain in control of the vehicle at all times", but there are plenty of other examples you can produce.
To me this feels like this could be done immediately, and at least we would have self driving for the most monotonous part of the driving experience, long hours of highway driving.
IIRC, they had some very successful prototype road systems back in the 90s (or maybe earlier) that were based on implanting magnetic markers into the road at regular intervals. The big problem was cost. There's miles and miles of roads and the cost to upgrade and maintain enough miles was prohibitive.
With that said, perhaps now that the cars themselves are 90% of the way there, the upgrades to the roadways could be more limited. I wonder if adding machine-readable markers to particularly important or problematic areas might be reasonable at this point.
(2) all the things that "FSD" vehicles need are things that degrade quickly to the point where they don't work for said "FSD", so the highway maintenance costs would skyrocket
(3) Even if you were to say the costs of 1&2 were reasonable, that money has to come from somewhere, and what that will essentially mean is that the already underfunded infrastructure will have even less funding for things that are the also already underfunded freeway things, so your normal streets end up in even worse condition, and based on existing spending the brunt of _that_ cost will be born by low income people. The cost for low income being exacerbated by their presumably cheaper and poorer condition cars taking more damage from poorly maintained roads, and so increasing their direct maintenance costs.
(4) Fundamentally single car travel is an inefficient way to move people around, it simply does not scale as well as good public transport, and always will be: the amount of people a road system can transport is directly proportional to the area of the road that each person takes up, and cars are just not efficient. The average car is 8m^2 and in commute traffic the vast majority of them are single occupant, the average bus is ~30m^2. If we were extremely optimistic and assume an average of 2 people per car you have 4m^2/person vs 1m^2/person in a bus. This is excluding following distances, which if we were to include (say) 2m of following distance you get a conservative 3.5-4m^2 of additional wasted space so lets just say your total for a car is maybe 5m^2 per person. I think :D
Efficient transportation in cities is communal, and built using tax dollars. That's not Silicon Valley sexiness.
We could then get them to automatically travel close together to reduce air resistance.
And you could charge them while they drive.
Maybe have a special low friction surface for the wheels to reduce energy use and air and waterway pollution from tyre, road and brake dust. Without tyre wear and range being a weak point in the design they could travel at much faster speeds.
Also if they are travelling together anyway you could have one big one with a more efficient motor and join them to it and use the charging network directly rather than needing them all to have individual batteries. We could call it a tesla chain or tchain. With then coupled together you could just have one person in the big-engine car supervising the 'full self driving' for all of the cars. Doesn't really matter then that it's in beta because it's just one or two people for 700 passengers.
Then there wouldn't be so many constraints on the size and shape so you could basically make the cars a box to fit more people.
Then with our self driving car network coming close to any given point we could just let them stay on the highly efficient part and get off it near our destination. We'd no longer need to dedicate 50-70% of the land area to collectors, arterials, extra wide streets and parking. What little time you spend walking would be more than made up for by not having to find a park, higher density and higher speeds. What a world! You wouldn't even have to dedicate a quarter of your home's lot to setbacks, driveways and storage for your car!
If only we'd had elon's amazing genius in 1879 we could have had a whole network of these by the beginning of the 1950s. We wouldn't have had to destroy half of our cities to make room for highways and parking then choke on exhaust fumes and toxic dust for 70 years.
Sure, small populations in hard to reach places will still need to use cars but that's like what, 10% of all people? (at least in the EU)
Perhaps you have not been to one of the handfull of major metropolis in the world, where day in and day out worker drones get onto public transport to go sit in a cubicle and generate the majority of the money going around in circles in the world. A tiny fraction of that money goes into their pocket and they get on the subway and ride and hour with it. The lions share gets chucked into the trunk of the bently for 4 blocks ride home for the rich.