"They're making great progress. They will throw ML/AI at it, and it will be interesting to see what comes out. For people that enjoy tech, this is neat."
-Me, hearing Elon in 2015 describing fully autonomous self-driving as a "solved problem" and stating that "we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."
this was hilarious. I'm watching the full twitch broadcast right now and there are interesting tidbits in there for anyone interested in autonomous driving.
> Here's Steve, who joined us for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it's also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met.
“Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we’ll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let’s say dropping you off in Time Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of [2017]”
At this pace the coast-to-coast test will take centuries :-)
He seems like a pretty cool and level headed person. If you watch the video, they're working on phase 3 of car automation which is basically when you're on the highway (or on the smaller roads) and the car takes over for you. It seems like google is working on phase 4, which I feel is basically too far off (no reason for us to need cars that can drive themselves without anyone in it). Also, Tesla, Mercedes, those are all phase 3 (Autosteer).
Based on the video playing on his screen it looks like he is working on parts of the autonomous driving system, most likely related to the startup that he was Head of Research for, called comma.ai
IIRC, he + the CEO raised a bunch of money to work on his own self-driving car designs, which culminated in a prototype that wasn't as feature-rich as some of the better capitalized players, which had been demoed a few years back in limited capacity over the last few years. He just got kicked out, as reported in TC on the 18th of last month though, so maybe he's making his own new thing.
Search on YT for comma.ai and you'll see some good content.
Surprised with all the skepticism here. It's not perfect but this guy is a hardware, software, and AI genius and this could very well speed up the self driving race by several years or even more. When it comes to price, it could speed things up by more than a decade. With some funding and a solid team this could move incredibly quickly.
http://youtu.be/Oo07tHQe-y0
Sounds like he is quite pleased with the progress of their autonomous driving algorithms.
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