Teslas (while much maligned and deservedly so) can already drive pretty well on most well painted and high traffic roads. Granted it is very conservative and often I take control just to avoid other drivers honking at me for taking too long to turn.
But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already.
I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
If, and that is a big IF, they manage to achieve it. My best guess is that Tesla won't get anywhere close to L5 before the end of this decade.
Your best chance today is to pack more sensores.
Edit: I still believe that the systems which assist the driver today are useful and can make driving safer and easier. I don't want to downplay what they have achieved but they are a looong way from L5.
I worked in Automotive for 7 years until late last year, though never directly on Autonomous Driving.
It is my belief (opinions are solely my own) that level 4 driving is 10 years away at best, and true level 5 will never ever happen with any manufacturer. I think Tesla has done well in the space of demonstrating self-driving, but Musk’s continued promises of full self-driving have gone from eyebrow-raising to eye-rolling.
I just sincerely doubt the magical future we’re hoping for will arrive.
This is a weird amount of hubris for someone who either doesn't understand the goals of current work on self-driving cars or is just clueless about the field.
Tesla's attempts at self-driving capture absolutely nothing besides... Tesla's attempts at self-driving.
There are companies with realistic sensor stacks, not artificially imposing restrictions so they can pre-sell their results, actually focused on self-driving.
A true L5 vehicle is an impossibility because that'd mean handling the frozen tundra equally as well as rush hour in Mumbai, or a wildfire in California. And laypeople tend to really lean into that...
But for a realistic definition of L5, "feasibility" is low bar already proven by major players except Tesla. So to say "completely infeasible" kind of kills credibility of everything following it.
And Tesla will just ingest large amounts of data from their fleet and magically dump an L5 solution one day? That's believable?
Elon Musk has been promising imminent L5 self driving every year for the past 7 years; that requires more than incremental improvement. The ones actually doing incremental improvements are companies like Cruise and Waymo, making it work one geography at a time.
Tesla "will be there in a year" since... 2016 or so? (Musk said in January that he is confident Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy in 2021, looking forward to that)
> those Teslas haven't been hitting anyone in slow traffic jams on well-maintained limited access highways either.
weird then that Tesla, despite showman Musk at the helm, hasn't been doing the simple stunt of putting their money where their mouth is, getting L3 permission for their system and actually taking the risk for something that is "never happening" instead of finding ways of blaming the driver every time. It would be an easy way of providing an additional actual useful capability to their users on top of what they already have.
No, it's not some massive technical leap, but "ok, we'll take the blame for our system failing" is still a big legal step.
Other companies have made over-optimistic predictions but not on the same scale and with the same frequency. Tesla is ahead of them on the "bringing to market" part but not on the autonomy part, where they're not really working on the same level of difficulty problems as the ones trying for L4.
Level 4 self-driving seems the second-least desirable after Level 0, as it's entirely passive but requires full active attention. It's a ripe situation for distraction, something Tesla cars attempt to combat with the "wheel-squeeze".
From a cynical perspective, it's easy to see a future where we constantly approach, but never quite reach, full Level 5 autonomy - or at least not with existing technology. Maybe Level 5 will prove to be an NP problem. Marketing teams are likely going to promote terms like "Level 4.1 self-driving" or "Level 4.5 self-driving" or "Level 4.9 self-driving", as edge-cases are slowly resolved.
L4 is all that's needed for a taxi service, and that's where all the money is. Tesla sold cars with "FSD" to customers living anywhere, so they have to solve L5, and they have to do it with fewer sensors and less compute. Of course it's not going to work. We're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop for the inevitable lawsuits.
I think 2016 it was already widely known by the industry it was going to be very difficult compared to what Tesla was saying, especially without the handicaps they imposed on themselves. No one with knowledge took Tesla's timeline seriously
> Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of
I've always been pessimistic about FSD but I think it'd pretty hard to reconcile that quote with actual L4 deployments by Waymo and Cruise
That’s true enough, but I’m not going to argue semantics. Tesla is explicitly clear in their product communication that what they’re selling as «full self driving» comes with the massive asterix of «someday» and is not currently an L5 autonomous driving system.
The part of the discussion that concerns their marketing is uninteresting and overdone; someone else can discuss that part.
There's virtually zero chance we'all have level 5 autonomy within 3 years.
The tech is impressive but it has to be absolutely bulletproof. I like Tesla but I find it annoying that Musk doesn't deliver anything on time and it seems like Tesla delivers way more demos than real products.
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.
> Tesla’s Chief Executive Elon Musk said this month the electric car manufacturer was close to making its cars capable of automated driving without any need for driver input, so-called Level 5 autonomy.
I suspect we will remain “close to” autonomous cars for several decades.
Let me clarify my position: Tesla does not advance self-driving research, and they don't need to. Tesla won't be the first to release fully self-driving cars. (I think 'SAE levels' are bunk, but let's say this is level 4.5 for the sake of discussion.)
EDIT: Sorry, and to clarify, I meant "not a player in self-driving research. I also do not think anyone has any vehicles we should call "self driving".
(I'll keep the rest of my pre-edit clarification below.)
To clarify further:
Tesla's offerings come from applying and engineering existing published research. That takes work, and they're making some money from that.
To the extent that "fully self driving" is an achievable goal, it makes no sense to expect Tesla to make the advances that get us there, when (1) they aren't doing that, and (2) they don't need to do that to make money.
To make this even more clear, let's make it concrete with one plausible future: In 2032, Waymo (or Didi, whoever) achieves true 'level 4' fully-self driving with proprietary technology. Their tech is seen in trucks, busses, taxis, as well as being equipped to a few thousand private vehicles. The safety stats are superhuman, and insuring such a vehicle is cheap.
In this future, Tesla Motors would like to enter into an exclusive partnership to integrate this technology into the cars they manufacture.
Did you see the presentation from Karpathy? Tesla goes for a general vision only end-to-end deep AI model that could in theory get rolled out everywhere on earth with enough training and a good approach for fast edge-case solving, which they showed how this can be accomplished. All the other players try to solve this with lidar and cars that cost around 500k to build and they have pretty much 0 data except for the maps they generate themselves. This approach will never solve L5. Tesla may need another 10 years, but they are so far out of reach of the other players that you cant even call them competition at this point.
But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already.
I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
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