DeRage
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2017
25:16 · 44K views · Feb 26, 2017
A driver tests Tesla Model S Autopilot firmware 17.7.2 on hardware 2.0 and records numerous failures, including crossing to the wrong side of the road.
Cited critically as evidence that early Autopilot 2 was unsafe and overpromised.
6 comments from Hacker News
That's terrible performance. The problem seems to be that Tesla's system is extremely dependent on a nice clear white line at the outer edge of the road. On this road, near the traffic islands, the roadside grass sometimes overgrows the road edge and obscures the white line. The white line has also been scuffed by cars near the edge of the road. [1] The Tesla runs off the road in that situation. There are two kinds of self-driving. One came up from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was off-road. That kind first looks at the terrain and obstacles, and figures out where it can physically drive safely. There's LIDAR profiling of terrain. Then it looks at road markings and figures out where it's supposed to go. If the road markings lead into an obstacle or drop-off, it will stop or go around the obstacle. That's Waymo. The second kind came up from lane-keeping and auto-brake systems. Those are very dependent on highway markings, and only work right on freeways. That's Tesla's original system. It's hard to tell about the others. Volvo has an extensive sensor suite. Otto seems to be mostly a lane-keeping system for freeways. Uber hasn't released much detail. [1] this video
I just saw their latest marketing literature on their website. They promise: > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. [LINK] It seems somewhat irresponsible to promise that you have enough hardware to achieve something that nobody has ever achieved before, with any hardware. Tesla has plenty of impressive-looking videos on their website of autopilot working well, but if you Google for "Tesla autopilot fail" you can also find plenty of stuff like this, which is just surprisingly bad: this video Tesla strikes me as over-promising and under-delivering here. I wouldn't want to work in a division like that.
Your comment made me wonder whether i hadn't miss anything : are car actually able to drive themselves in clear condition at the moment ? I've seen the demos of the start ups in the valley, the local experiments, but i'm still waiting for a single real-world deployment, even limited to local driving, such as city to city taxi driving, or item delivery. On the other hand, i did hear of the trouble with tesla's autopilot "2" not driving properly on regular roads under the sun ( this video ).
AP2 is truly dangerous. It's incomprehensible they would release something like this: this video I guess it's a good reality check for autonomous cars when you take away the LIDAR toys. One rather important point is that the car often doesn't realize it is screwing up, because quelle surprise, realizing you don't have a correctly detected lane can be just as difficult as detecting one in the first place.
This is the leaders performance on actual production hardware outside of fancy (postprocessed) videos with their "cameras only" approach: this video At this point I don't even care if they theorethically are the best, if they are willing to release this dangerous crap they are sooner going to go up in a big publicity fire than get actual autonomy to customers.