... only when driving under 40 mph on highways. So it is pretty useless.
The main thing is that Mercedes Benz will take liability for anything that goes wrong. But the system as a whole is far less capable than Tesla FSD.
The main thing is that Mercedes Benz will take liability for anything that goes wrong. But the system as a whole is far less capable than Tesla FSD.
"It's less capable except for the minor fact that if we <<kill>> someone, it's <<our fault, not yours>>".
You know, that minor factor called "life or death".
> ... only when driving under 40 mph on highways. So it is pretty useless.
If Waymo/Tesla/whatever would do this, they'd be the darlings of the internet.
If Mercedes does this, no one thinks: "ah, it's the first iteration, they can you know, <<increase>> the speed later on".
How exactly do you think Waymo works that they wouldn't take responsibility?
Now, I'd argue that Waymo has probably somewhat solved highways already as they're much simpler than city driving, they're just not offering it to the public yet.
It's putting their money where their mouth is.
Musk is putting his mouth on a lot of things, I guess that makes him a baby?
If you want to convince me that their system is way more capable than Tesla, you would have to show me evidence that Tesla FSD fails in the same limited environment as Mercedes is certified L3 in, and I have not seen any.
If a magician bets you $1,000,000 that the card he is holding is the one you chose, are you not going to change your position on how likely it is that he's right?
This is a marketing stunt. They've taken a well-solved problem (stop and go) and taken responsibility for it, and getting headlines by screaming something about J3016 level 3.
40mph is more than enough to kill someone.
We actually have no idea what Benz et al.’s systems are capable of if they were to deploy them with the same recklessness as Tesla.
It’s not like it’s this massively sophisticated system for FSD with most of the code commented out.
These are purpose-built and heavily tested to a specification - that’s how engineering works. The Mercedes system specification is extremely limited in practice, but gives them the marketing win of being able to claim they do L3.
For example, Tesla FSD seems like a pretty good highway cruise control, but it can be dangerously deployed in city driving too. Of course this is a little difficult to argue about since AFAIK Tesla has never defined its ODD and their lead autopilot software guy said in his deposition that he didn’t even know what an ODD was?
I suppose one man’s “marketing win” to “claim” L3 is another man’s “actually deploying L3.”
An autonomous system which cannot even change lanes should not - in my opinion - be classified as L3 Autonomy. Not only is it a gimmick, it’s basically a loophole in the spec.
As an aside, since you mentioned it, I think that describing FSD as “pretty good highway cruise control” is gaslighting.
Describing FSD as dangerously deployed in city driving is merely misinformed. In fact FSD (including the human driver and FSD’s comprehensive attention tracking and alerting) is safer than the average driver in city driving.
Anyway I’m sure Tesla will say it’s Level 3 whenever it’s Level 3. Would’ve thought that was a while back when they marketed, sold, and rolled out “Full Self Driving” on public roads.
As I understand it the L3 system is limited to limited access highway roads, < 40mph, and no lane changes. Those are its limitations, and I believe they are self-imposed by Mercedes, not any US regulations.
This indicates to me the limitations come from regulators and not the manufacturer but I might be wrong.