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All this hi-tech seems to be just desperately looking for something to do. Overkill indeed. |
Completely impractical. There's just not enough room on the dash for the shark. |
The current best systems, in my view, are those which make a donkeys breakfast of providing a smooth and comfortable ride. They weave and jerk and so discomfit the occupants that the driver has to actively take control. All they do is keep an eye on the situation so that if the driver misses something - a person steppi... |
Sadly, in the case of the ‘too good’ system, where the driver is effectively the backup for the car, the driver is unlikely to be paying attention if disaster strikes and, even if they have got their eyes on the road and aren’t playing with the cars games and Easter eggs, their reaction time is likely to be limited. |
This is the main risk - over confidence. |
"Tesla’s is just too good." |
Another thing that people are much better at is seeing traffic far ahead slowing down or coming to a stop. Are auto nav systems going to recognize all of the brake lights ahead and start slowing down or think about getting off at the latest possible exit? |
It's actually possible to 'hack' conventional cars in a similar way to the stickers on the road. Just pop out and quickly move the traffic cones in a roadworks area. It's amazing how many carts blindly follow them straight into a dug up section of road or into oncoming traffic. |
I recall some yobs, in the middle of the night, taking the cones, flashing lights and barriers, which were stopping traffic from entering a huge excavation in one lane, placing them in the other with inevitable consequences. |
I wonder if autonomous cars will fare any better, or how they'll deal with 'invisible' IR reflective lane markers directing them straight into walls. |
"how they'll deal with 'invisible' IR reflective lane markers directing them straight into walls." |
3M has come up with machine readable road signs so autonomous cars can get speed, approaching intersection/roundabout, construction zone, etc information. I think it's IR or something like that so the road side can be read by humans as well. What if somebody hacks one of those signs and sets the speed limit to 200kmh o... |
You don't even have to move cones where I live. The city will do it for you and every night they remove them. And they'll paint temporary (for some value of temporary) lines around repair work and then not remove the temporary lines when done. The cones go but not the lines. |
Take the latest Rolls Royce Phantom, the gearbox talks to the satnav so it knows what gear it needs to be in for the next corner. What happens if the satnav fails or is broken? |
It defaults to conventional operation. You think the gearbox stops working as soon as the satnav looses its GPS signal in a tunnel or multi story? |
> You think the gearbox stops working as soon as the satnav looses its GPS signal in a tunnel or multi story? |
..or if Putin is visiting the area. |
"Tesla can't even do it right when they're designing the thing from the ground up." |
To be fair, Tesla isn't the only mob that is covered in fail with this issue. |
I'm really at a loss to understand how I could have lived all of these years with a car stereo that wasn't hooked into the CAN bus. |
Pretty much any modern mid to high end car now has a linked electronics system with infotainment and car systems on the same display and cable. |
Most conventional car systems are self contained with output only data eg ABS. |
That does not make it a good idea. |
Ford. 2.5 years old, straight from the factory. All the trimmings. |
I know this because the other day I had a dodgy SD card in for my music and the Ford Sync thing went absolutely ape... freezing, crashing, rebooting into maintenance mode, stopping the music for minutes and then skipping four tracks, etc. Turned out to be corruption on the SD card. |
Literally the only thing it affected... the infotainment and the A/C (which is controlled by the infotainment display). I was driving at the time and continued driving without anything flagging on the dashboard or any control issues whatsoever. |
Ford still make new cars that use the same isolation. Hell, you can swap out the infotainment for Android boxes online... it's a self-contained unit that gets a completely independent and isolated set of cables to read the sensors it needs to (e.g. GPS, USB, speakers, etc.) - and if you want OBD on that Android you lit... |
So, no, modern cars aren't all doing this on the same display and cable. Anything with half a brain is isolating them. |
And even if the *displays* are pulling data from both systems, that does not mean they can self-drive from the web browser. Anyone with a brain will be making one a read-only and isolating critical functions that - if they can be tampered with by something as simple as a bit of static on the user's fingers, or an MP3 c... |
He said modern "mid to high end" Ford is neither of those. |
"a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time [..] and should always be prepared to do so" |
That is something that Tesla should be saying more loudly and more often. |
But that doesn't seem very practical. If I drive and am in charge I've got stuff to do and I'm paying attention. If the car does everything a lot of the time I will not be paying attention, that's just how most humans work. |
Agreed. That is why what people call accidents are correctly described as incidents. |
This is what Google found with their self-driving cars. |
This is also what several different aircraft manufacturers have also found. |
Either you have the vehicle in autopilot mode where you, the human operator can trust the machine to get most of the decisions right and only ask you for help every so often, or you put the human in command with only a limited amount of help from the machine. |
What you don't do is take away the need for human input, but ask the human to pay attention to the autopilot whilst not actually doing anything. Human attention wanders fairly quickly if there's nothing to actually do, and when the need to do something arises, humans are truly crap at switching from daydreaming to acti... |
Really, the bulk of research in self-driving vehicles ought to be working out how to take advantage of the superhuman reaction times of the robot in an emergency scenario, and make vehicles react more safely in emergency situations; thought also should be given to making cars react so that they do not get into emergenc... |
"trust the machine to get most of the decisions right and only ask you for help every so often" |
That's still not good. You have to pry yourself away from your session of digital diddling, figure out what the car is whinging about and then pick a course of action. There might not be the time to sort all of that out before the big tree has pushed the dash into your chest. The system needs to work to many 9's so it'... |
I'd love to have a car that I navigate to the motorway, enter the controlled lane and have a nap until I'm 5 miles or so from my off ramp. That might not be too hard of a task, but there have to be safety systems that make sure the lane is not blocked in some way and there are holding areas so if you don't wake up when... |
When else do you think they should be saying this? |
I don't believe he has ever called it full self-driving. There is an option for full-self driving capable hardware but the software to do it has never been released to the general public. |
Its just another Musk lie. He claimed the cars had all the hardware needed for full self driving back in 2016, and had to backtrack on the promise that those cars would eventually be upgraded to full self driving via software. Willing to bet the same is true for today's cars. |
First of all, they should bite the bullet and stop calling it Autopilot. People have died for believing that it actually is an autopilot. It is not, it is a sophisticated cruise control. |
So name it Ultra Cruise Control, or Tesla Control, or something, anything that does not say autopilot. |
If you want the message to pass, you have to be coherent. This is not a coherent situation. |
On a plane, Autopilot is used to keep the plane following a particular heading. It's not a system to taxi the plane out onto the runway, take off, climb to correct altitude, follow the headings, descend, and then land and park up at a gate. It just does the job of keeping it going the correct way mid-flight. |
Tesla's is the same, really. |
That is what pilots know autopilot does; it's not what laypeople assume it does. Tesla is not marketing to pilots. |
Also, autopilot on a plane is in a very different situation because it doesn't have to perform any avoidance of other objects; it's assumed that will be accomplished by traffic control and the planned route. Even so, there have been accidents caused when autopilots suddenly disconnected and the pilots couldn't get back... |
Consider: In cruise flight in an airliner you're nearly always at least 5 miles away from the nearest stationary object. Even at 500 mph that gives you a minimum of 30 seconds of reaction time. Cars are often in situations where at best one or two seconds are available. |
As a pilot, I don't know why you were down-voted. While some very advanced autopilot systems can land an aircraft, It's not that common for the autopilot to fly all the way to touchdown. Pilots do use the autopilot to fly the approach most of the time, but usually not all the way down. |
I'm not sure I've ever seen an autopilot used for takeoff (outside of some drones, but even they are piloted remotely)? Most aircraft have a minimum height (above ground) where the autopilot can be activated. Usually about 400ft AGL. |
While I've seen some demos of autopilots used for taxing, they were done under very controlled conditions. Kind of like the so-called self driving cars; limited areas with good roads and surveyed maps. The demos where "see, we can do this now..." without mentioning that it's only at this one airport, and only if there ... |
Because you don't get traffic cones in the air. "Autopilot" for the ground is "cruise control" or "lane handling", but the term when applied to cars is far to blurred, compared to the clear understanding with aircraft (or even marine craft!). |
"It's not that common for the autopilot to fly all the way to touchdown." |
That is fair enough. Only engage the Tesla autopilot when at least 400ft above ground. |
Don't worry! We have a crack team of engineers on the way to sort this... from Boeing. |
Most pilots want to land the aircraft. If they see a runway incursion, there's wind sheer or something else happens, they can react immediately to pull up and go around. An autopilot isn't likely to see a lot of that. Take offs are another dangerous time where lots of things can go wrong. Once the plane is headed to th... |
It is probably more advanced than an autopilot. Most autopilot is not capable of detecting objects or encroaching aircraft and, usually, the Tesla does. Luckily there is less to hit and more time to react in the air than on the ground. |
"Most autopilot is not capable of detecting objects or encroaching aircraft" |
Most all commercial planes have RADAR and ADS-B is becoming more common. ADS-B broadcasts an aircraft's position, heading and speed that other aircraft and ground stations can pick up. That information could be used to avoid collisions. Planes flying IFR are being controlled from the ground normally and the autopilot k... |
How about the Tesla Overlord Musk cruise control? Too long? Shorten it to the TOM Cruise control. |
Auto pilot is a feature, sold and described to its users. The fact that it has an appropriate name that is grossly misunderstood by a proportion of the public is irrelevant. |
> "The fact that it has an appropriate name that is grossly misunderstood by a proportion of the public is irrelevant." |
In this instance, the true capabilities of airline autopilots are what's irrelevant: people ascribe a certain notion to the term and Tesla knowingly exploited it. |
Another upside to renaming Autopilot to something more appropriate is they can trademark the new name. Microsoft had to change the official name of their OS to "Microsoft Windows" as "Windows" could not be trademarked since it's a common word. "Tesla Control" or Tesla Streetaware" could be trademarked. |
The only alert I want to hear from my automobile is the growl of the climate-destroyer V8. Approx 1800 rpm @ 140 kph. Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel. Guess I'm old. |
Re: Growl of a V8, was "a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time " |
Hear Hear! I am a V8 junkie, my latest is a Classic Range Rover, the second one I have owned. Before that, some time ago, I owned a 59 Chevrolet "Gull Wing" station wagon (283 cu. in.). I was under the hood (bonnet) one day in the college car park, tinkering with the carbs, and when I walked to the back of the car to g... |
Would the 'over-banding' often used on repairs look like those magic stickers? Seems as though there is a bit much reliance on a clean road surface and the comment about being ready to take control only works if the 'time to crash' is greater than your reaction time. |
If you read the road signs, then you're bound to fall foul. For example there's a spot on the A1 at the junction of Tollington Road and Camden Road, where the signage is perfectly OK to a rational, thinking person who understands that the people who put the signs up make mistakes, and that can process the conflicting i... |
And rinse and repeat across hundreds of junctions nationwide where they didn't get it right. The very worst road sign of all is 611. They use that all over the place to mean "Routes pass either side of this divider", whereas it actually means, "Pass either side to REACH THE SAME DESTINATION", i.e. it should not be used... |
I can see this becoming much worse when the proposed speed limiters come in in 2022 - a few '20' stickers placed over selected signs that show a much higher speed is going to cause unexpected braking with all the 'fun' that could cause (especially for those behind who didn't have a limiter). |
The "20's plenty" campaign posters on the sides of bus stops? All the banners proclaiming "Islington -proud to be a 20 borough"? |
I think it'll be very interesting to see whether they actually apply the enforcement of *20mph* zones in-car. My take is that they are so universally exceeded that if they were enforced robustly (either by in-car electronics or by police) they'd be a backlash against them. |
I'm very much for safer driving, and a self-critical approach to one's own driving, but in the real world, in the majority of cases, I don't believe 20 zones are helpful. And by being universally ignored, they make a mockery of the law (and the rule of law). |
Round my parts, the council did a consultation on applying 20mph speed limits on all residential roads. During the consultation the Police said they wouldn't be enforcing the speed limit. |
I can't see the point of 20 zones. They claim to be environmetal zones but I find that I use 50% more fuel at 20 in second than at 30 in third. Also there several hills round north london which use 0 fuel if you descend in 2nd gear but the slope means that engine braking runs at 30. You either have to use the brakes or... |
Extra CO2, NOX, soot or brakedust (Asbestos in brakes was banned in 1999) is of no cash benefit and therefore no interest (yet). |
A study by Imperial college in 2015 found that emissions and fuel consumption was higher for petrol engined cars driving round a 20 zone than round an equivalent 30 zone. The reverse was true for diesels, however. |
So long as the campaign is not run alongside a Don't Drink and Drive campaign. |
In Switzerland they enforce that sort of thing. I got a ticket for doing 31 km/h. Ok, I probably was at 36, and the fine was 40 franc,. |
Err, just wondering, how does a Tesla on autopilot respond to potholes in the road? |
Is it the same as with these stickers? |
I was thinking the same. If it's fooled by a couple of small stickers, god knows what it'd make of the network of potholes, loosely linked with small bits of tarmac, that make up my local roads. |
I'd worry about how neural network based guidance systems respond to blowing snow, sand, trash, leaves, etc. They usually don't look like lane markers to me, but to a computer? Then there's the issue of lane markers being erased by repeated application of snow, rain, road salt, sand/grit, freeze/thaw and scrubbing by r... |
"Then there's the issue of lane markers being erased by repeated application of snow, rain, road salt, sand/grit, freeze/thaw and scrubbing by rubber tires. " |
You should try Las Vegas in summer when the asphalt softens and car tires pick it up and coat the road markings. You have to detect the marking by a textural difference in the road surface which is very low contrast. |
"Err, just wondering, how does a Tesla on autopilot respond to potholes in the road?" |
You should really only be using Tesla cruise control on motorways or major trunk roads. Not sure about where you live, but I rarely, if ever, see potholes on those sorts of roads across most of the north of England. |
Interesting, I found it rather amusing but I may have been to HK too often. As clips go, it was quite OK. |
Is anyone else thinking of that Bond film (Pierce Brosnan, BMW) where he's driving the car from the back seat, using his phone? |
Not really, that actually had short enough response time to allow decent control. This seems to have about a second delay between input and the car responding. Good enough to thoroughly crash a vehicle, terrible for driving it while getting shot at by angry baddies. |
Not really, that actually had short enough response time to allow decent control. |
That was more or less inevitable given that it was entirely fictional :). |
The stoned submariner still says it's fully self-driving - I didn't realise that "into oncoming traffic" still counts. |
It's so cool it can help you and innocent bystanders take the room temperature challenge in new and unexpected ways. |
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