On perfectly marked roads, in fair weather, with no bad behaviour seen from other drivers in the video. Impressive, but the technology has a long way to go yet before it can replace human drivers.
90 - 95% of the time I am driving long stretches, I spend on highways. No problem if only that part would be done selfdriving. Those few minutes in busy town centers I do not mind to do myself. No problem of driving short stretches (10 - 15 min) either.
Buyers were convinced by "cruise control", which just (barely) keeps a set speed.
Doing those things right now in a Tesla is probably not safe just now, but it shows that level 5 autonomy is not so far fetched and 2020 is a realistic date.
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.
Autodriving 100% of the time is where it gets revolutionary (mass-layoffs of truck drivers, taxi drivers, summon features that park cheaply outside of downtown).
The former is great, but there's a lot of hype going around right now so it's not strange for people to be cynical.
It's all about predictability. Even just full motorway / major road driving would be pretty awesome, and the car would know when it's coming up to a section you need to drive and you can have plenty of warning. Not "HELP DRIVER I SAW EITHER A LEAF OR A CHILD QUICK TAKE OVER"
If/When it's good enough that I can sleep during a long highway trip (and pull into the last rest stop before my exit if I don't wake up) then I'll be happy.
live in the gonnies? own a car. hailing one would take forever. having cars near you in the gonnies,that you dont own wouldn't be economical.
basically, there would be less vehicule owners but not that many less.
For example, friends of mine recently bought a summer cottage. It's a little over an hour's drive. They don't have a car, so they currently rent one or try to borrow one when they want to go there. Once there, the car will probably sit still for a week.
Currently, there's no really good solution to this. Renting is expensive if you just need to drive a couple of hours a week. Buying a car might make more economic sense in the long term, but it's still pretty expensive for the purpose. Taxi rides like that cost an arm and a leg too. But if the car could drive itself out of the woods...
Of course it's a question of pricing, and I'm guessing we're still some way off from having self-driving cars navigate dirt paths that pass through people's yards as is the case here.
Anything less than 4 is asking for trouble.
I'm not talking about "oh hey, here's a situation I can't handle" and more "take over now".
Here's the first of 100 self-driving cars Volvo will put in customer hands in 2017.[1] This shows close-ups of all the sensors - high radar and camera behind the windscreen, low LIDAR and camera in the nose, and side and down-looking cameras on the door mirrors. No high-mounted LIDAR, though. These vehicles are intended for self-driving in all weather conditions in Gothenburg, Sweden.
They certainly are saying they'll only release a Level 4 vehicle - the Tesla is still expecting a human to take over.
Tesla's old system was Level 2. Google and Volvo have level 3 in test. Tesla's new system is supposed to be Level 3. There's a bright line between level 2 and 3 - NHTSA says that at Level 3 and above, the manufacturer is responsible for accidents and cannot blame the driver.
[1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/About-NHTSA/Press-Releases/U.S.-Departm...
However statistics say that most of the accidents happen at the beginning or towards the end of the trip. There are environmental reasons (city vs. sub-urbs vs. cross-country) and there are human reasons.
What's weird is the period we're entering, where the technology is becoming more and more capable, but we're still a very long ways away from full auto. Yet the hype machine says it's just around the corner. I'm betting we're still 10-15 years out. So how do we handle situations where the driver has to pay a little attention, but not that much? In airplanes, this has been a very dangerous area -- and things in airplanes usually happen much, much slower than they do in traffic.
I think it would be worthwhile to figure out how to shut down the hype machine, or at least tune it down a few notches. Dreams and visions are fine, but every time I switch the current tab from HN to Facebook, I get to see overhyped bullshit predictions about AI, nanotech, self-driving cars, etc. being just about the corner, as evidenced by whatever misinterpreted paper or video news sites could find that day. And the non-tech crowd is totally buying that. Not just regular folks, but also investors and politicians and all the other people who then end up causing resources to be wasted because they buy into the bullshit.
In 2013 an oft-cited and alarming study out of oxford suggesting most jobs will be automated over the next decade was released. It was followed by a series of influential books whose authors ran the lecture circuit: 'The Second Machine Age', 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society', 'Superintelligence', and 'The Rise of the Robots'.
There were some bold bold and well publicized statements from respected luminaries such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
Aggressive maneuvering to hoover up machine learning talent, and bold investments from automakers pursuing autonomous driving has only added gasoline to the fire.
Automation became the talk of the town at Davos in Switzerland. There's been a rising chorus from Basic Income supporters.
Now the hype is out of control. Nobody is actually looking at the technology. It's okay, though. Hype is self-correcting.
Or, as we call it in China, "driving".
all at once: moped taking over from the right, in a round about, truck entering the roundabout without slowing down. donkey & cart on the side. woo hoo!