A human could drive the car with just the sensor input so in a very real way this is not correct. I agree that Tesla still has a long way to go though.
That's only true once the technology seems to be better than human driving. That doesn't seem to have happened so far, and is definitely not true of Tesla's efforts.
Yeah. Theoretically the claim is true (at least wrt. the sensors, not sure about computing power onboard). Tesla's hardware is already better than human hardware for this task.
The trick is, they'd have to advance the state of the art in software quite far, to derive "full self-driving capabilities" from this hardware.
Humans also have ears. And a sense of touch. And a sense of motion. And that supercomputer between the ears has decades of experience doing sensor fusion amongst all the various inputs down to the level of milliseconds of variation, and decades of experience of rising in cars and knowing what they feel is safe versus what is not, and presumably at least months of experience of control behind the wheel.
It's also questionable whether even the "full self driving hardware" claim is true, since "full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" is not yet a thing which exists, and the closest vehicles we have to full self-driving capability rely on vastly superior hardware to that fitted to the Tesla.
This argument is a red herring. Tesla is a decade or more away from full self driving with nobody in the driver’s seat. Other vehicles doing autonomy today (e.g. Waymo) are clearly marked (and sport easily visible LIDAR, no less).
That’s why people many people think Tesla is behind on the path of self driving. It’s good enough when someone sitting in the drivers seat and paying attention, but that’s a long way from self driving.
I agree with this in principle. But I'm not at all convinced the technology is ready, nor that the Teslas are an appropriate platform without additional sensors.
The future is coming, but Elon Musk will not be the guy who ushers it in.
For one, this is just a dumb decision: It both means a crippled safety package today, and one less sensor one can use tomorrow. Considering Tesla hasn't actually developed self-driving capability, they can't actually say for certain if the hardware that is on the cars today is enough or not. (Any time they promise you've purchased a car that has everything it needs to do this, Tesla is lying, because they can't know the requirements of a system they haven't yet produced.) It certainly is only going backwards on the likelihood that there is once they start removing sensors.
Whilst that's true, it doesn't seem likely that we go from where we are now (Can't do autonomous driving) to a point where can get fully autonomous driving, and then to a point where we can do fully autonomous driving with the reduced sensors available on existing Teslas in a period of time that makes sense.
The major players are not doing it the way you describe. Tesla's driving system is not a giant model trained to imitate a human brain. There are separate perception, planning, and control algorithms.
Tesla’s self driving strategy is to throw more data at a neural network until it learns to drive. That’s as out of touch with reality as a person thinking they can learn to fly if they just flap their arms enough times.
>I think it's way further off than that, like, 10+, and almost certainly not without extra hardware being added to Teslas
Doubting like this is a pretty common view outside of Tesla, and we've heard it repeated many times here. They clearly disagree.
>Full self-driving is 90% edge cases. Adaptive cruise control is not a few incremental steps away from full self-driving
This they would completely agree with, as you can see from watching their recent autonomy day presentations. And they have an overwhelming lead in collecting edge case data, so... they're in good shape with that.
None. And this is exactly the problem: Tesla might have a nice piece of silicon there, but that doesn't solve the problem of still being far, far away from having a working algorithm for level 5 self driving. They have a supercomputer in their cars, but can only run minesweeper on it, so to speak.
Their hardware (maybe, at best) solves one of the easy pieces of the self-driving puzzle. It doesn't get them any closer to solving the hard parts. But it sure helps from a marketing perspective, which is kind of important if you want to continue selling a $6000 feature that essentially is just a promise for the future and thus requires buyers to "believe".
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