CyberCab

[Lytning]

Like him, or hate him, you have to admit that Elon Musk and Tesla are leading the way, not only for hands-free driving, but for autonomous driving. I just had a great-granddaughter born, and she probably will never learn to drive or own a vehicle. She will just rent one to take her where she wants to go without vehicle purchase, loans, fuel, insurance, or it sitting in the garage unused for most of the time. I have read that Musk envisions millions of the CyberCabs around the world taking people where they want to go. If anyone can do, he can. Recall SpaceX recently capturing the 233 foot tall Super Heavy Booster in Mechazilla's arms.

And I am still stuck with BlueCruise 1.0 since July 2022.

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[sotek2345]

Sorry - I have no faith in the Tesla system moving forward until they add back in other sensors besides vision. Cameras are just too limited and too easy to compromise (snow anyone) to rely on as the only sensor for fully self driving vehicles. I think Waymo has the better approach here.

 

[josephalbert0425]

Go anywhere without a vehicle purchase, loans, fuel, insurance, or a vehicle sitting in the garage unused for most of the time?….you mean like what already exists with uber, taxis, buses, subways, and trains. also pretty sure Waymo is the one leading the front considering it’s actually on the road but even they are having trouble turning a profit. I do think it’s important to acknowledge that EV’s and maybe even autonomous driving systems wouldn’t be where they are today without his push and the fandom around Tesla that made electric vehicles so mainstream but he’s well known for overpromising and underdelivering on the stuff he says on stage. I wouldn’t trust a word of it. Remember, it’s just corporate puffery.

 

[broncoaz]

The self driving supervised in our Tesla with the vision system is damn impressive. I agree with adding some additional sensors and it definitely needs a front camera down in the front bumper for parking. Uber rates are seriously expensive where I live due to a lack of drivers (and probably customers willing to pay 3-4x what similar rides cost in the cities. I’m watching the cyber cab closely as I could see a small fleet of them being profitable for me.

 

[subseavet]

Sorry - I have no faith in the Tesla system moving forward until they add back in other sensors besides vision. Cameras are too limited and too easy to compromise (snow anyone) to rely on as the only sensor for fully self-driving vehicles. I think Waymo has the better approach here.

As an engineer in autonomous sensing and sensemaking, I couldn't agree more. Visual only is never going to work in any circumstances. If it did, we would not need other sensing modalities. In high contrast situations, extremely bright scenarios (sun in the picture, side of a HUGE white truck, back end of a fire engine), and when driving at high speed, visual sensing alone can't do the job reliably. I am constantly amazed by the human eye and brain that can quickly change from focusing on an object 100 feet away at 70mph to one 3,000 feet away at 70mph and quickly determine if either one is a threat that requires some driver action or if they are not. Likewise, short of staring directly into the sun or bright headlights at night, our eyes very quickly adjust to changing contrast and can tell that the huge white object that is across the road in front of you as you crest a hill is a truck trailer crossing the highway, requiring you to break or steer or both to avoid it rather than careening into it at full speed. Likewise, with an over-illuminated set of stationary emergency vehicles at night. We know exactly what that is, while most cameras, without drowning out the rest of the scene entirely through a normalization algorithm, see an enormous white blob of brightness and cannot determine what it is. To effectively enable vehicle autonomy at all speeds requires a mix of sensing modalities even to begin to touch what the human eye and brain can do at the speed of light, and even then, frankly, they mostly still suck and will have to fail conservatively to prevent accidents (that fun braking for no reason thing that some cars do all too often). Anyway, while I admire Musk's utopian or dystopian vision of the future of transportation, until several things change about his approach, we are a ways away from achieving that vision.

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