[aimkey]

The 11 minute mark is terrifying:

1) The car fails to accelerate to beat the truck as it merges (the safest option given the scenario, even with the yield sign)

2) The car almost collides with the trailer of the truck and it stops with its nose sticking out into the merge lane

3) The car sits there with its nose in the merge lane as other cars go by

4) When the car finally has an opportunity to merge after having done everything wrong up to this point, it sheepishly merges and takes forever to get up to speed. This is basically the least safe thing it can do when yield-merging into a high speed lane.

LOL. This is the best the autonomous driving world has to offer? 80% of this driving is an immediate failure for a teenage driver taking their road course. I think I can take pretty much any random 2 minute sample from that video and find more than a few inputs/maneuvers that would lead to failure in a driver's license test. Why would ANYONE with a brain put their life into the hands of this system?

OH, and do you want to know a little industry secret about these "unedited" long videos? Yes, the video is uncut. But guess what? They drove that route hundreds of times and only showed the best run. And they got laser-HD maps of the route that they won't have globally. This is what Zoox did for their infamous demo that got them bought out by Amazon. And it's what Tesla did for their "Full Self-Driving" video on YouTube that shows driving ability that their cars cannot match even today. Shhh, you didn't hear it from me.

[watt]

Sorry at (1) yield means yield. Maybe it shouldn't have stuck the nose so far out, but yeah you have to wait until proper gap in the traffic. The non-accelerating to highway speed is the real bug though.

[aimkey]

There WAS a proper gap in traffic if the car used its accelerator on the ramp. The car would not have impeded the truck at all if it drove the ramp faster. This is an incredibly common issue with autonomous systems: anticipation of other vehicles with an awkward angle of attack, which is common while merging or while other cars are merging. Also, autonomous systems also tend to be way too cautious, which is incredibly dangerous in merging scenarios.

A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed. Yield does not mean stop. A cautious driver slows before the merge point, maintains a roll, then mashes the accelerator to merge safely at next opportunity. A terrible driver (Mobileye) stop abruptly at the end of the merge junction, almost hits a truck, leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic, then dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough. You can even see how much this freaks out the human passenger. He thought he was going to get hit!

[nexuist]

> A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed

No. A good driver stops at the yield sign if an approaching vehicle is 2-3 car lengths away. It is dangerous to play guessing games with your car's engine and another driver's attention. If anything goes wrong (tire puncture, engine dies, slippery road, truck driver slams the gas) you have successfully managed to put yourself into the direct path of a speeding brick wall 5x as heavy as you. There is never a safe merging scenario where the right choice is to slam the gas pedal to beat another driver to the punch, especially not when merging onto an active freeway.

If there is a yield sign at the end of the onramp, that means prepare to yield. If there is not a yield sign, then the expectation is to keep merging. There wouldn't be a point to the yield sign if everyone treated it as if it didn't exist.

> leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic,

I also agree with you but this may be a byproduct of the camera's perspective and maybe it would look normal in the driver's seat. We don't really have a great view but the truck could also have been hugging the curb which would have brought it closer to the car than it should be.

> dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough

Fully agree here. If you merge you have to commit to matching the speed of nearby vehicles or else you're creating a dangerous situation. Mobileye should have sped up much faster than it did.

I'm not a neural network, fwiw.

[aimkey]

I think you should watch the scenario again. The car is only beat to the junction by the truck towing the trailer because the Mobileye car takes the wide-radius ramp at sub 22 km/h (13 mph). Normal human driver takes that ramp at 40-50 km/h, follows the hatchback out of the junction at flow of traffic speed, with 2-3 seconds of distance behind them for the truck to have a safe braking distance. The truck would have no need to modify speed, and the Mobileye car would satisfy the yield sign (not forcing another car to hit the brakes).

https://i.imgur.com/irkHBxc.png

I think people lower their expectations for autonomous systems. Driving the ramp at a speed a human would and taking that obvious gap to zipper-merge is the correct maneuver for a human. Perhaps you want the autonomous system to err on the side of caution, but I'm actually trying to hold it to a human standard.

But yeah, at the very least, don't get confused and sit there with your nose out in traffic. What's really scary is that this is the take Mobileye chose to go with. They probably had dozens more, with even worse blunders.