Has anyone driven a Tesla autopilot? My Subaru has Subaru's adaptive cruise control. It also yells at me if I stray out of my lane. I ask about Tesla because every article up to this one had led me to believe the technology was pretty much ready for prime time. A road near home had a small median and turn lane added. The old white line was mostly ground off, but it's partially visible. My Subaru sometimes dings at me because it sees me straying over that old line as I drive around the median. My Subaru will also stop itself in traffic but locks the brakes until I brake and take over. Is Tesla further along? When people say self driving cars are on the way, do they mean rolling bedrooms where I can take a nap, or do they mean a car that will override driver commands that would otherwise result in a collision? Articles seem to imply the former, but increasingly I suspect the latter.The technology for semi-driverless cars still isn’t good enough or cheap enough. The $50,000 Volvo I was driving — like a Tesla I’ve tried — got confused by unpainted lane lines, for instance, and I had to take over. But the technology is improving rapidly. Within a few years, many cars will have sophisticated crash-avoidance systems.
I think it's something closer to the latter than to the former. Google - excuse me, Waymo has shown little to no progress and is supposedly suffering from an outpour of talent. Which gives HERE (formerly Nokia, kleinbl00) and TomTom a chance to catch up on their mapping capabilities. Full automation is a really tough nut to crack. It's an easier problem when you have low-speed suburbs (like Waymo tests in) or fenced-off highways (like Tesla, Volvo & Daimler), which is why those places see automation happen. Tesla is out there beta testing automatic steering on highways on its willing serv-...I mean users. Volvo and Daimler will probably have something similar ready in a few years as an expensive addon to their luxury cars, with it slowly trickling down to regular cars. But full automation, in complex urban environments and non-Californian weather? The experts I've talked to about this subject are almost all very conservative in their estimations. "Forty or fifty years from now, maybe."When people say self driving cars are on the way, do they mean rolling bedrooms where I can take a nap, or do they mean a car that will override driver commands that would otherwise result in a collision? Articles seem to imply the former, but increasingly I suspect the latter.
There are two schools of thought out there as regards autonomous vehicles: 1) Make the car smart enough that it can handle any situation 2) Make the map good enough that it can handle any car Google is going with (2). Tesla is going with (1). Google obviously wants to sell maps. Tesla obviously wants to sell cars. Personally, I think (1) is going to be hella harder to implement in an "every day" sort of way because there's no good verification. There's no audit trail. There's no real way to say "no, this won't run over a pedestrian." I mean, the first autonomous vehicle fatality was a Tesla that didn't "see" a semi crossing the freeway. This article is about Volvo, which is kinda-sorta doing (1) but not in a serious way; they're probably looking for a viable way to nickel'n'dime Google (or the other big European mapping concern which veen can elucidate at the drop of a hat) into getting a better rate. I, personally think we'll see a lot of (1) on proscribed routes that eventually spread out from population centers, but that's an educated guess.