| In these videos, "Autopilot" is mentioned as the culprit, which seems to be a subset of the features Tesla has. It seems to me there are 3 layers: (level 0: Just Adaptive Cruise Control (use radar to adjust speed up to a max). Human still steers. - 1: Adaptive Cruise Control (use radar to adjust speed up to a max) + Autosteer (camera's watch the lane markers and follow them). This is referred to as "Autopilot" NOTE: This is where the accidents happen. The car isn't driving towards a barrier, it's following the lane markers and hits an error state. This is also NOT self driving. - 2: "Nav on Autopilot". This is an additional function you turn on where the car has more intelligent (use this word loosely) capabilities on highways. The car will still do everything on level 1 combined with lane changes (using cameras to detect objects and trajectories differentiating cars from trucks from pedestrians from bikes from motorcycles etc). It will still follow lane lines, but with a lot of additional information (is there an object? am I merging? am I exiting? etc) - 3: "Full Self Driving". This is an additional package that doesn't exist to the public. Internally I'm sure they're testing the functionality but this is using all of the sensors and algorithms and likely neural networks to decide what to do. A cool point though is that all Tesla's are likely running this code in "shadow mode" where data can be collected and assumptions can be tested without endangering any actual drivers. (see here for some cool data on this: https://electrek.co/2019/03/05/tesla-autopilot-detects-stop-...). "Hey, I think the car, if full self driving SHOULD take action X. *compare to what the driver actually does and log the data" over BILLIONS of miles So when a Tesla hits the barrier or gets in an accident, we're actually running "#1" and people start freaking out. But when we get to the capabilities of #3 a lot of the "object permanence and continuity" stuff starts to come into play. Full Disclosure:
- I drive a Model 3 every day on Autopilot 75% of the time
- I only 75% think self driving is capability under the current Tesla software suite but I bought the package anyways. |