L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.
In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers.
Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?"
Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer, non-critical interventions per kilometer, accidents per kilometer, etc.
So how do you explain, succinctly, the difference between a car that can hold 55 mph (but do nothing else automatically) without driver intervention and one that can change from 25 mph to 55 mph and change lanes without driver intervention.
The differences between levels are drastic in terms of implications on overall utility of the technology. There's a reason the terms are used.
> L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.
Needed for what exactly? Each level has its own benefits. That's exactly the reason the levels were established. I want to be able to get into a car, put in an address and fall asleep for the whole trip. When do I get that? L4? L5? If I can't do other tasks while the car is driving, then the point of full autonomous is essentially pointless.
> not engineers.
Precisely. The levels have nothing to do with engineers. It's about understand the benefits for the population. For example - can I fall asleep in the back of the Tesla autonomous car? No, because it's not L5. That's the point.
It doesn't really matter so long as there are fallback drivers in all situations. An lower level autonomy car would remotely connect to the backup driver (in a third world call center) several times per hour in order to behave like a higher level one.
A higher level one would connect more rarely. The only difference I notice as a customer is I pay more out of the box for the higher level car and less as a subscription , while the lower level car costs less out of the box and has a higher subscription fee because the human costs are higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Classificatio...
So when people talk about a particular company "achieving" level 4 or level 5, I don't know what they mean. Maybe they mean achieving it "safely" which is murky, since any system can crash. Maybe they mean achieving it legally on public roads, in which case, it's a legal achievement (although depending on what regulatory hoops they had to go through, maybe they had to make technical achievements as well).
[1] : https://web.archive.org/web/20161120142825/http://www.sae.or...
Not really. L5 is impossible, period.
What I think will happen is L4 with 99.999% cases covered and have it come to a safe stop for the 0.0001%, assuming there was a way to safely stop.
L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the PR people will continue to use the term.
Agreed.
> L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the PR people will continue to use the term.
Which is precisely why so many people are critical of the term "fully autonomous".
> 99.999% cases covered
What cases? The point is that edge cases are the issue with autonomous driving. I can fall asleep on a train or a plane because I know there is human conductor who can handle the edge cases. This doesn't exist with L4. Everything else that doesn't let me fall asleep (read a book, look at my phone, etc.) is only marginally better.
> assuming there was a way to safely stop.
That's a pretty damn strong assumption.
No communicating with a server to download maps, no perfect performance, just a car that knows the state's traffic laws driving a brand new road in any reasonable weather, and getting into less crashes than a human would.
Really? Because the L5 claims come more out of the Ubers and Teslas than the "MBAs".