Honestly, I think this is pretty amazing. Stop and go traffic is the most annoying part of driving to me. Level 2 isn’t helpful as you need to pay constant attention with your foot over the brake in case the autopilot does something stupid.
I don’t know why more manufacturers don’t focus on this.
I have a Tesla with FSD from 2018 and it is indeed really nice in stop and go traffic. There are definitely situations where I don't trust the car, but keeping a lane on the interstate and creeping forward it does really well.
It seems like something that other manufactures could also easily obtain with fairly little innovation.
Tesla and Mercedes are playing a totally different game.
The Mercedes system only operates in narrow conditions, but you can watch Youtube videos while the car is driving.
The Tesla system operates in almost any conditions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, and when FSD crashes the car Tesla will claim it was an operator error.
Also just to be clear - Mercedes also has a system that operates in almost any conditions and up to 120mph, the system in question here that got certified as Level 3 is specifically up to 40mph where Mercedes accepts legal liability. You can still use their advanced cruise control systems above that but Mercedes won't accept legal responsibility and you have to pay full attention(same as in a Tesla).
Just posted and already people who don't really understand AVs are comparing Apples to Oranges (this to Waymo/Cruise) and Oranges to plastic Oranges meant for a doll house (Tesla)
Waymo, Cruise and co are working with sensor stacks worth more than these vehicles with the idea that their vehicles will first be used for ridesharing. That already precludes most comparisons: it's a completely different model with completely different challenges.
Meanwhile Tesla does not have a single product that allows you to do other things without liability. Their product is downright primitive compared to what Mercedes is shipping with this.
When a Tesla murdered a man by slamming him into a highway barrier, the fact his phone had run Candy Crush at some point during the drive was dragged out against him.
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Maybe people are misunderstanding because Mercedes says you need to be awake and able to take over? They don't mean Tesla's joke steering jiggle to indicate you're watching the road: they literally mean you only need to be awake and able to take over in 10 seconds. Other than that you can be checking your email, playing Candy Crush, even whip out your laptop and code.
This is the first time you can legally use your time in traffic for something other than driving. If 30 minutes of your 60 minute commute are in rush hour traffic, you can now spend 30 minutes doing something else.
(Also for those who won't read the article, Mercedes has a separate lane keeping product that activates above 40 mph, the distinction is that below 40 mph, Mercedes is taking full responsibility of the vehicle's actions and letting you take your eyes off the road)
> When a Tesla murdered a man by slamming him into a highway barrier, the fact his phone had run Candy Crush at some point during the drive was dragged out against him.
Look, I know this is a trope that people like to bring up a lot when hating on tesla. However, you have to consider a two points.
* This happened in 2019, 4 years ago. Quiet a bit of development has gone into telsa's autopilot stack since then.
* The car was going 70MPH. Mercedes's system only works up to 40MPH. For good reason. A telsa keeping the lane at 40MPH is fairly safe.
These are not "miles ahead" systems, they are comparable.
Now, what I'm not saying is whether one system is better/safer than the other. IDK because mercedes hasn't released their yet (I suspect you don't either).
Mercedes being the "first" to apply for this in NV doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. The fact that they are limiting it to low speeds (40MPH) where a wreck will pretty much just be a fender bender should also tell you something about how confident they are in the system.
Tesla has been reckless with the way they've managed their autopilot program. No doubt about that. They've also lied about being able to turn their cars into robotaxis (not a chance of that happening). However, their system is fairly comparable to what Mercedes is doing.
Looking at the hardware Mercades is putting in the cars, the main difference is the forward facing LIDAR. That gives Merc an edge that telsa doesn't have, they can pretty confidently handle things like underpasses (where telsa STILL struggles and is a major issue with their hardware stack).
My main critique of tesla is their hardware stack and dogged approach here to keeping it cheap (not enough redundancy, poor cameras). But that doesn't mean it's not still in a pretty similar league compared to merc.
I'm mostly going to ignore the half of this comment where you downplay the fact that Tesla's Autopilot killed a man in large part because of design flaws that have actually worsened since then (they doubled down on camera only, they've kicked and dragged every step of the way on attention tracking https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/tesla-driver-moni... they're expanding the domain they claim their self-driving capabilities operate in with FSD to some of the most dangerous roads possible, with pedestrians and complex situations being infinitely more common than on highways)
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As someone who works at an AV company and semi-regularly takes driverless rides, Mercedes is entirely miles and miles ahead of Tesla here because they're taking responsibility.
If you're not familiar with AVs it doesn't immediately jump out at you, but again, even for a lay person surely you realize that the fact that Mercedes is letting you do whatever you want as long as you stay awake and able to take over in 10 seconds is a quantum leap over anything Tesla has ever done.
And 10 seconds is not a normal AP panicky disengagement, they are giving you 10 whole seconds to context switch and take over. So it's not even enough that AP not disengage below 40 mph, it'd also need to never disengage urgently.
If Tesla tried to do that with AP, even limited to speeds of 40 mph, there would be absolute bedlam within a week. I've personally been rear ended by a Model 3 in slow moving traffic and while I was too angry about my car to let my inner AV geek ask exactly what configuration they had the vehicle in, but those are the kinds of mistakes Mercedes is essentially saying "we have solved"
And I mean the irony you want to talk about "confidence in a system" and here Mercedes is saying you can look down and stare at your phone and if this thing crashes we'll be liable... Elon loves to almost say things like this then ensure Tesla blames the dead person.
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This essentially boils down to you saying "Well Tesla hasn't made this quantum leap, but they totally could..." if you really think so go to TMC and make a simple poll: "Has AP ever made you react below 40 mph"
Mercedes is handling moving over for emergency vehicles so you have that full 10 seconds to take back control, meanwhile AP still likes to panic disengage because of sunlight, or a bad update, or because the planets aren't aligned with your chakras on this particular day.
> they literally mean you only need to be awake and able to take over in 10 seconds.
When I hear that, I immediately think of this 2016 study[0]. A ten-second window is not a sufficient window to take control. At that point, you don’t have enough situational awareness to be at the level of a drunk driver, let alone to be a competent driver. Any system that expects inhuman levels of focus and context switching is not a well-designed system.
Do you have a link where I can actually see the study?
It must depend on the situation. And how drunk is their comparison line? And how long does that impairment last?
All of that is needed to know the size of the problem. Maybe it's a really big deal. Or maybe someone reaches "this wouldn't have even counted as DUI in 1970" for a few seconds and it's fine.
Waymo and Cruise have level 4, but in tightly geofenced areas.
Tesla have no geofence, but only level 2 (requires constant supervision).
Which makes this is an impressive achievement! I believe it's the first level 3 system that you can purchase outright and not limited to specific cities.
Yeah, I thought people here would celebrate something actually shipping, but instead there's so much moaning about this and that. Nationalism at its worst, IMHO.
> level 4, but in tightly geofenced areas. Tesla have no geofence
Can we get past this? Practically none of SDCs rely on geofence, not like precomputed routes and paths are necessary. Those are just for safety and for managing complexity for experiments.
It’s like trying to ridicule someone in a yellow vest for having to mind safety. Just pathetic.
Mercedes explicitly accepts liability while their system is in control, while Ford and Cadillac don't. They say you don't have to hold the wheel, but you are still liable for anything that happens.
This. It is about the driver actually not being responsible for the system behavior when the car is driving itself. That means Mercedes-Benz bit of the long tails.
Are you suggesting that this system is equally likely to crash into a parked truck as a Tesla? If it is, it would be amazingly reckless to tell people they don't have to look at the road. And extremely bad PR.
And I'm not picking on Tesla in particular. There are lots of level 2 systems that don't reliably detect stationary objects. But nobody suggests relabeling them as level 3.
As stated in the article, this is only up to 40 MPH, however know that "level 3" doesn't always mean 40mph. Per SAE, the ODD (operational design domain) is entirely defined by the manufacturer of the car/autonomy system in use, so the next manufacturer might be able to introduce Level 3 up to 45mph or 55mph. The document[0] includes low speed traffic as an example of level 3 operation:
> A Level 3 traffic jam feature performs the complete DDT on a fully access-controlled freeway in dense traffic, but requires a human driver to operate the vehicle upon ODD exit (e.g., when traffic clears, as well as before entering the congested freeway, and again upon exiting it).
>However, it's worth noting that the Mercedes Drive Pilot technology is only functional at speeds of up to 40 mph (64 km/h)
This seams backwards. In my experience the faster you are able to drive the easier it is to drive. Places with a small speed limit in the middle of town are much more complex to drive through compared to country roads where you just go straight.
That is true, but accidents at higher speed are more destructive/expensive. Mercedes can afford to pay for many dented cars, but at higher speeds (more) people die.
Mercedes is the first company with enough confidence in their system that they accept legal liability while their system is in operation - that's not impressive???? Literally no one else is doing this.
It should be noted that Mercedes accepts liability for accidents involving their self-driving cars [1]. This is a very different approach from Tesla [2]. Tesla's irresponsible approach is impacting other more responsible companies because it is lowering consumer confidence in self-driving cars.
"The Autopilot kept Riad’s Tesla at a steady speed as it approached the stoplight that marked the end of the freeway and the beginning of Artesia Boulevard. According to a witness, the light was red, but the car drove straight through the intersection, striking a Honda Civic. Riad had only minor injuries, but the two people in the Civic, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves, died at the scene. Their families said that they were on a first date."
> There are few federal laws addressing automated driving. So, Mercedes Vice President of Automated Driving George Massing tells R&T, “we will probably have to deal with each individual state.” But the company plans to accept legal liability for what the car does while Drive Pilot is engaged.
Uh.. is there any actual documentation about them taking liability? Some headlines are fine but not a webpage for submitting a claim or a legal document you can show to a court for why you'd like to introduce Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC as a party to a liability case.
Tesla would have to remove features to meet the reliability bar for level 3. And they won’t ever do that, because their marketing angle is entirely reliant on equating “features” with “capability”.
The fact of the matter is that the gee-whiz factor of seeing their cars navigate intersections is greater than the gee-whiz factor of lacking a notification that you must monitor the cars actions.
What does that even mean? How do you "pay off the US"? The congress? The President? The regulatory agencies? Also, isn't Elon the wealthiest man on the planet? If the issue was simply about "paying off" someone, surely Elon could have already done it ages ago?
Or maybe Deimler is a serious corporation that actually knows what they are doing, and through rigorous engineering they know they can accept legal liability for their system, where other companies will not.
Very cool. This is the kind of progress I would expect here. Big players like Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, are going to take longer to get going, but when they do, they will have the execution and scale to do it far better than most tech companies. The initial tech hurdle is massive, but the space is won on logistics and consistency once the tech is solved.
“ As some of you may have heard, Mercedes-Benz has been granted regulatory approval to begin testing its Level 3 autonomous driving technology on Nevada roads.”
The first sentence seems to contradict the headline. Approval to begin testing is not approval across the board.
56 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadEssentially, Tesla's EAP.
Waymo is WAY beyond this, as is cruise.
I don’t know why more manufacturers don’t focus on this.
It seems like something that other manufactures could also easily obtain with fairly little innovation.
This system doesn’t require that, the driver can pay attention to other things.
The Mercedes system only operates in narrow conditions, but you can watch Youtube videos while the car is driving.
The Tesla system operates in almost any conditions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, and when FSD crashes the car Tesla will claim it was an operator error.
Waymo, Cruise and co are working with sensor stacks worth more than these vehicles with the idea that their vehicles will first be used for ridesharing. That already precludes most comparisons: it's a completely different model with completely different challenges.
Meanwhile Tesla does not have a single product that allows you to do other things without liability. Their product is downright primitive compared to what Mercedes is shipping with this.
When a Tesla murdered a man by slamming him into a highway barrier, the fact his phone had run Candy Crush at some point during the drive was dragged out against him.
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Maybe people are misunderstanding because Mercedes says you need to be awake and able to take over? They don't mean Tesla's joke steering jiggle to indicate you're watching the road: they literally mean you only need to be awake and able to take over in 10 seconds. Other than that you can be checking your email, playing Candy Crush, even whip out your laptop and code.
This is the first time you can legally use your time in traffic for something other than driving. If 30 minutes of your 60 minute commute are in rush hour traffic, you can now spend 30 minutes doing something else.
(Also for those who won't read the article, Mercedes has a separate lane keeping product that activates above 40 mph, the distinction is that below 40 mph, Mercedes is taking full responsibility of the vehicle's actions and letting you take your eyes off the road)
Look, I know this is a trope that people like to bring up a lot when hating on tesla. However, you have to consider a two points.
* This happened in 2019, 4 years ago. Quiet a bit of development has gone into telsa's autopilot stack since then.
* The car was going 70MPH. Mercedes's system only works up to 40MPH. For good reason. A telsa keeping the lane at 40MPH is fairly safe.
These are not "miles ahead" systems, they are comparable.
Now, what I'm not saying is whether one system is better/safer than the other. IDK because mercedes hasn't released their yet (I suspect you don't either).
Mercedes being the "first" to apply for this in NV doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. The fact that they are limiting it to low speeds (40MPH) where a wreck will pretty much just be a fender bender should also tell you something about how confident they are in the system.
Tesla has been reckless with the way they've managed their autopilot program. No doubt about that. They've also lied about being able to turn their cars into robotaxis (not a chance of that happening). However, their system is fairly comparable to what Mercedes is doing.
Looking at the hardware Mercades is putting in the cars, the main difference is the forward facing LIDAR. That gives Merc an edge that telsa doesn't have, they can pretty confidently handle things like underpasses (where telsa STILL struggles and is a major issue with their hardware stack).
My main critique of tesla is their hardware stack and dogged approach here to keeping it cheap (not enough redundancy, poor cameras). But that doesn't mean it's not still in a pretty similar league compared to merc.
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As someone who works at an AV company and semi-regularly takes driverless rides, Mercedes is entirely miles and miles ahead of Tesla here because they're taking responsibility.
If you're not familiar with AVs it doesn't immediately jump out at you, but again, even for a lay person surely you realize that the fact that Mercedes is letting you do whatever you want as long as you stay awake and able to take over in 10 seconds is a quantum leap over anything Tesla has ever done.
And 10 seconds is not a normal AP panicky disengagement, they are giving you 10 whole seconds to context switch and take over. So it's not even enough that AP not disengage below 40 mph, it'd also need to never disengage urgently.
If Tesla tried to do that with AP, even limited to speeds of 40 mph, there would be absolute bedlam within a week. I've personally been rear ended by a Model 3 in slow moving traffic and while I was too angry about my car to let my inner AV geek ask exactly what configuration they had the vehicle in, but those are the kinds of mistakes Mercedes is essentially saying "we have solved"
And I mean the irony you want to talk about "confidence in a system" and here Mercedes is saying you can look down and stare at your phone and if this thing crashes we'll be liable... Elon loves to almost say things like this then ensure Tesla blames the dead person.
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This essentially boils down to you saying "Well Tesla hasn't made this quantum leap, but they totally could..." if you really think so go to TMC and make a simple poll: "Has AP ever made you react below 40 mph"
Mercedes is handling moving over for emergency vehicles so you have that full 10 seconds to take back control, meanwhile AP still likes to panic disengage because of sunlight, or a bad update, or because the planets aren't aligned with your chakras on this particular day.
When I hear that, I immediately think of this 2016 study[0]. A ten-second window is not a sufficient window to take control. At that point, you don’t have enough situational awareness to be at the level of a drunk driver, let alone to be a competent driver. Any system that expects inhuman levels of focus and context switching is not a well-designed system.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/154193121360142...
It must depend on the situation. And how drunk is their comparison line? And how long does that impairment last?
All of that is needed to know the size of the problem. Maybe it's a really big deal. Or maybe someone reaches "this wouldn't have even counted as DUI in 1970" for a few seconds and it's fine.
Tesla has no Level 3.
https://www.wardsauto.com/industry-news/mercedes-benz-takes-....
Tesla have no geofence, but only level 2 (requires constant supervision).
Which makes this is an impressive achievement! I believe it's the first level 3 system that you can purchase outright and not limited to specific cities.
https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
Can we get past this? Practically none of SDCs rely on geofence, not like precomputed routes and paths are necessary. Those are just for safety and for managing complexity for experiments.
It’s like trying to ridicule someone in a yellow vest for having to mind safety. Just pathetic.
EDIT: What I meant is that it is not a reliable indicator for identifying technology leaders.
Meaning, this is the first stock car you can actually buy where you do not need to hold the wheel anymore when it is self-driving.
The difference, as I understood it, was in this system the driver’s full attention isn’t needed, unlike the systems above.
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...
Unlike Mercedes.
And I'm not picking on Tesla in particular. There are lots of level 2 systems that don't reliably detect stationary objects. But nobody suggests relabeling them as level 3.
> A Level 3 traffic jam feature performs the complete DDT on a fully access-controlled freeway in dense traffic, but requires a human driver to operate the vehicle upon ODD exit (e.g., when traffic clears, as well as before entering the congested freeway, and again upon exiting it).
0: https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3016_202104/
This seams backwards. In my experience the faster you are able to drive the easier it is to drive. Places with a small speed limit in the middle of town are much more complex to drive through compared to country roads where you just go straight.
[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-well-be-liable-for-sel...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/magazine/tesla-autopilot-...
Excerpt from [2]:
"The Autopilot kept Riad’s Tesla at a steady speed as it approached the stoplight that marked the end of the freeway and the beginning of Artesia Boulevard. According to a witness, the light was red, but the car drove straight through the intersection, striking a Honda Civic. Riad had only minor injuries, but the two people in the Civic, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves, died at the scene. Their families said that they were on a first date."
> There are few federal laws addressing automated driving. So, Mercedes Vice President of Automated Driving George Massing tells R&T, “we will probably have to deal with each individual state.” But the company plans to accept legal liability for what the car does while Drive Pilot is engaged.
Uh.. is there any actual documentation about them taking liability? Some headlines are fine but not a webpage for submitting a claim or a legal document you can show to a court for why you'd like to introduce Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC as a party to a liability case.
The fact of the matter is that the gee-whiz factor of seeing their cars navigate intersections is greater than the gee-whiz factor of lacking a notification that you must monitor the cars actions.
What does that even mean? How do you "pay off the US"? The congress? The President? The regulatory agencies? Also, isn't Elon the wealthiest man on the planet? If the issue was simply about "paying off" someone, surely Elon could have already done it ages ago?
Or maybe Deimler is a serious corporation that actually knows what they are doing, and through rigorous engineering they know they can accept legal liability for their system, where other companies will not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334925
The first sentence seems to contradict the headline. Approval to begin testing is not approval across the board.