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.
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.
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
Now hiring for experimental brain surgery subjects! Lots of money! Sign these twelve waivers.
Very good survival rates likely!
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.
Still can’t see through fog or heavy rain like humans.
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.
If you make a road safe enough you end up with trains.
Indeed. We might have gone that way. Lots of larger cities had rail for their public transit, but the car industry got that removed for obvious reasons.
Except:
Your points illustrate why other means besides cameras should be also used, as well as why the human brain’s ability to filter or even ignore things is a bonus to our driving ability. Or a detriment. People who power through bad weather or sun glare or any other obstacles that obscure them seeing well and manage to get through aren’t greater than the computer driver, they’re just lucky. Same can be said for all the people driving while on the phone, they aren’t skilled in multitasking while moving hundreds of feet per second, they just happen to have it clear 99% of the time so think they’re that good.
The main point was that computers need all the information they can get to compete with humans, but they also have the ability to get data we cannot, and it’s stupid to not give them that ability because of some desire to simulate the full (read that as limited) human experience. Humans deal with less info all the time, but that doesn’t make them better.
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.
Benevolent dictators almost always happen only in fiction, and they don’t last. I guess you can get some that do a few good things while being bad overall.
Oh, I know, and I know it was an absolute dumb thing to even think would be in the realm of possibility, but I was just trying to find something, anything to grab on to and help keep my hope on the ventilator.
The best I’m hoping for now is that trump will do something good on accident, like how he legalized thc in 2018. Sure, he did it in the stupidest way possible, but it’s something.
Random drunk walk is sometimes successful in the results. The bonus is that it also prevents some malevolent actions from succeeding.
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.