[netinstructions]

While you're waiting for the main event to start, here are some recent interviews with Elon about self-driving cars. He's very confident.

"To me right now, this seems 'game, set, and match,'" Musk said. "I could be wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of everyone."

I am eager to see what they unveil today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI

https://ark-invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast

[dforrestwilson]

Hmmm so then why is Tesla ranked last for autonomous driving by third party researchers?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR...

And Elon has a long history of making false claims about Tesla’s progress. For example in 2015 and 2016 he claimed that Teslas would be fully self-driving by 2018.

So why shouldn’t we be skeptical?

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-str...

[DeonPenny]

But Navigant curriculum was very unscientific. There no actual quantitive reason Tesla is worse. Is was based mainly on business factors like go-to market strategy and vision.

[navigatesol]

As opposed to the "scientific", "quantitative" reasoning behind Tesla being the leaders in FSD?

[DeonPenny]

Yes absolutely saying Tesla who gets camera data from it's a half million car doesn't give it an advantage is crazy. That not even including the fact it's the only company who can do its strategy. Google would need to get constant data and GM and legacy automakers would need sensor suites on all it's cars yesterday.

No one knows if Tesla strategy will work because they don't have the data collection in place.

[dforrestwilson]

Neither does Tesla which makes it a moot point.

They have no way to store or transmit the massive data you are describing off the platform do they?

My understanding is that they have very limited storage and transmit onboard.

[DeonPenny]

Based on their talk today and Andrew previous talk where he shows explicitly tools that do just that download data constantly is exactly what they do. https://vimeo.com/274274744

I mean saying a phone can upload videos to youtube but a can can't to tesla is a weird ledge to stand on. Even their windshield wipers work based on sending video data to tesla to be learned on.

[jerska]

The first article you link to sources another article as its source, which itself calls bullshit on the ranking.

Your link:

> According to Electrek, Tesla trails behind other companies in terms of autonomous driving tech based on a list created by Navigant Research, an independent research firm.

Electrek’s article:

> Electrek’s Take

> I think Navigant’s autonomous leaderboard is ridiculous. There are way too many brands that keep most of their development under wraps, which makes it hard to evaluate them and therefore, it gives very little value to a leaderboard like this in my opinion.

[dforrestwilson]

What is your point?

Electrek is not exactly unbiased. It's literally called EV and Tesla news. Fanboi site's opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Here's the Navigant executive summary directly: https://www.navigantresearch.com/reports/navigant-research-l...

[whamlastxmas]

What other major manufacturer has anything close to Tesla's autopilot in a car I can buy today? As far as I know, no one.

[leesec]

Only really GM with Supercruise on one of their cars, the CT6. And it is not advanced as Autopilot.

[ryanlol]

Some big time source laundering going on in here, https://electrek.co/2019/04/19/tesla-falls-autonomous-drivin...

Your "third party research" is obviously bullshit, they go as far as including Apple in their ranking.

This right here is just typical worthless marketing press release spam from a management consultancy firm.

[cflewis]

My guess is he means "on the highway". The scary bits of self-driving is person detection, crossing detection, roadwork detection, cyclist detection (e.g. coming up on the right when you are trying to make a right turn).

The Waymo end-game that I heard was "able to go through a drive-thru". I highly doubt Tesla is anywhere near that point.

[Xylakant]

There have been news reports about the model 3 autopilot getting its speed limits from maps, lacking any sort of sign recognition or manual override to adjust to local conditions. The maps seem to be outdated for germany (1). That’s an essential feature even on the autobahn. Given that test result I’d even be skeptical about any claims of being ahead of the game on the highway.

(1) https://m.heise.de/autos/artikel/Test-Tesla-Model-3-4400919....

[semi-extrinsic]

This is very strange though, is there any confirmation of this?

Basically, most other manufacturers like Opel, Audi, Mercedes, Hyundai, VW, Volvo, Ford, etc. has had for several years the feature to detect speed limit from computer vision recognizing the road signs. And it works reliably, as is pointed out in your link.

How can Tesla be a leader in using computer vision for cars, but not be able to read the road signs?

[jacquesm]

> through a drive-thru

The kind of drive-thru that Tesla is currently associated with involves semis rather than fast food and it would be really nice to hear that they've at least licked that particular bug (and for good, this time).

[dwighttk]

what does "for good, this time" even mean with their regression issue?

[jacquesm]

That was exactly the point, the fact that such a thing could happen, be fixed and then happens again in something mission critical is very scary.

[cr0sh]

> The scary bits of self-driving is person detection, crossing detection, roadwork detection...

Your point it very astute.

Among a few other ML/AI MOOCs, I completed Udacity's "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree - so when I'm out driving, I often come upon situations where I wonder "how would a self-driving car navigate this?"

Today, driving in to work (note: USA), I noticed one intersection I've been through many times before, and that question came to mind. The intersection is interesting, because on approaching it, the road curves to the right, and you can actually see one of the traffic lights on the left before you even see the intersection. By the time you see the intersection, you're already on top of it.

So as you round the curve, you see the lone traffic signal (red/yellow/green); if it is red, do you start to brake, or do you wait until you can "see" more traffic signals? If you wait - will you have time to slow down and/or stop? ...and so forth.

This and others are all kind of "edge cases" that will need to be trained on, and/or perhaps other cues for self-driving vehicles installed or set up so the vehicles can navigate such areas successfully. I know when I first went through the intersection it was a bit of a surprise; it's not a very safe intersection (going home in the opposite direction is not any better; in that direction, you're headed downhill, have to cross the intersection, and immediately start turning to the left after going through - the curve is really abrupt, and you have protected/unprotected left-hand turns both directions, etc).

[eaurouge]

Well they’re vastly ahead in one area: data collection. No other company is even close. You could argue about the quality of data but the platform is there and ever growing, and they can upgrade their hardware in the future and augment existing data.

[stefan_]

Don't kid yourself, the car has no bandwidth storage or performance to send back anything other than a few raw frames from disengage events or other rare triggers.

[DeonPenny]

Why would you say that? The car has LTE and connects to WIFI. It could easily send way more data than any care company at any time including over WIFI.

[11thEarlOfMar]

And we don't pay for the LTE bandwidth. Tesla covers the cost of uploading the data.

[navigatesol]

>It could easily send way more data than any care company at any time including over WIFI.

Except that it isn't, and even Karpathy said the quantity doesn't matter, it's the data quality.

[DeonPenny]

What they are sending way more data because from our knowledge GM and Ford are sending back 0 data and Waymo doesn't have half a million cars worth of data internally to pick from.

[navigatesol]

>from our knowledge GM and Ford are sending back 0 data

Yes, two of the autonomous vehicle leaders are not using any data whatsoever.

I thought this was the smartest forum on the internet?

[slg]

It depends entirely on how they design the system. They don't necessarily need to send all the data from the cars back home when they can send test cases to cars, run the tests in a shadow mode to collect real world results, then send the test results back home.

[grey-area]

The presentation makes it clear your claim is entirely false, you should watch it.

[jvolkman]

Which presentation did you watch? Karpathy said specifically "it's not a massive amount of data, it's just very well picked data" when talking about how the cars only send data when one of the configured triggers fires.

[grey-area]

There’s a large gap between ‘a few frames’ and a massive amount of data, and the amount sent lies somewhere in the middle. Clearly they can’t send all data (nor would they want to) but it seems it is sufficient for significant learning to take place and the examples shown were good quality over at least a few seconds, so hundreds of frames for each example.

[stefan_]

No, it's spot on. It's entirely what I said: the car can only deliver a few raw frames, and only in response to particular triggers.

Notice the cherry-picked examples in the presentation. There is a whole class of problems the field cars can never help with, since they lack the dead-reckoning sensor setup and precise odometry a development car would have.

[grey-area]

They showed video in the presentation which was clearly not ‘a few frames’, unless by a few frames you mean seconds of video.

[SheinhardtWigCo]

> There is a whole class of problems the field cars can never help with, since they lack the dead-reckoning sensor setup and precise odometry a development car would have.

Can you give an example? I'm curious what kind of triggers strictly require lab-calibrated hardware.

[toomuchtodo]

Short video clips from all cameras are sent back to Tesla when associated with a disengagement event, queued for upload when the vehicle is on wifi.

[saalweachter]

I hope to god they are sending back short video clips randomly sampling all driving conditions, not just the disengagement events.

[toomuchtodo]

They are.

[mirimir]

I wonder if Tesla is getting subpoenaed for video clips.

Other than for accidents, the SEC investigation, etc.

[nikofeyn]

how can you claim that? more than waymo? that would be extremely doubtful. google has been driving around cars with sensors and cameras for over a decade.

[danhak]

They have a fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars driving real-world miles all over the developed world.

[sangnoir]

It's still impossible for an outsider to tell - Waymo logs every single vehicle-mile in their entire fleet, but Tesla samples from a larger pool.

[DeonPenny]

But they don't have the cars. Every car on the road that is a tesla sends back data.

[tigershark]

Maybe too much confident if you ask me..

[netinstructions]

I agree. The interview with MIT researcher Lex Fridman was difficult to watch because it didn't seem like they were on the same page at all - Lex asking thoughtful and pointed questions and Elon dismissing them as if the questions themselves are moot because self driving is right around the corner.

It was mind boggling. I am hoping Tesla can provide some specifics today because it seems Elon is living in a fantasy world (albeit one I'd like to live in if we can actually get safe self-driving cars).

[LoSboccacc]

I'm gonna say Elon is being extremely bold selling a technology that's current leader in deaths behind the autonomous wheels.

also I can't reconcile how the new hardware is this huge leap ahead beyond raw computing power if, by Tesla own claims, previous hardware was perfectly capable of autonomous driving.

seems people were getting fooled either now or before.

[Hamuko]

I hope Elon has tested the autopilot in Finland during the winter then.