JW Fas

Self-driving cars aren't perfect. They definitely have room to improve, but this was pretty funny. Skip to 25:24.


Supporting article: https://jalopnik.com/this-tesla-usin...lis-1848506189

Digger Goreman

Merde....

genec

Still not ready for prime time. But then, how many human drivers are?

rumrunn6

oh yeah, that screen isn't distracting

Iride01 

I don't think the Tesla feature in their vehicles currently being sold to the masses is intended to be autonomous. Their system is supposed to be monitored by the driver at all times. So any comparison or trying to liken accidents from them to fully autonomous vehicles is silly, IMO.

I didn't watch the video because videos waste way too much time that could be more quickly read in written word. So if they were talking about fully autonomous vehicles, then my mistake.

work4bike

If one of these "self-driving" cars hit me on my bike....Elon's going to owe me big time

scott967

I see that Tesla is putting out a software update in a recall to prevent the "full self-driving" feature from rolling through stop signs. Must have been designed by a cyclist.

Maybe we need Idaho stops for Teslas?

scott s.
.

livedarklions

Save you the trouble of viewing the video for the incident, the car actually attempted a swerve into a cyclist and the driver was able to pull it out of it in time. Point is that it actually was worse than if there was no AI feature at all.

CB HI

And the driver falsely claims that the AI would not have run the cyclist over.

I-Like-To-Bike

False claims about or from Tesla and other Elon Musk enterprises? Say it ain't so!

UniChris

The one that worries me at the most at the moment is actually aspects of some of the lighter "driver assist" systems that have been around for a while from a number of makers.

I've only ridden in, not operated such a car (and even then we never encountered this situation) but my assumption is that a lane-departure system is probably going to scold a driver with beeps if they properly pass a cyclist in a situation where there isn't a more leftward lane they can conventionally change into. We never encountered a cyclist, though it definitely did beep now and then when curves on empty rural stretches were sliced towards the fog or center line.

There's already a reality that no small number of well-meaning drivers simply don't know what they're allowed to do when passing a cyclist; adding technology that may reinforce a very bad way of doing so has me worried if the driver feels they're being "penalized" by the warning beeps - or worse, if the warnings end up a factor in one of the "impaired driver detection" algorithms they've been mandated to start working on.

And apparently I'm not alone in that concern - a little searching finds this article which claims that one of these systems will automatically return the car to a dangerous center-of-lane position unless the driver thinks to use their turn signal while passing the cyclist.

Though that's not to say that at first glance normalizing the use of a turn signal when passing a cyclist is necessarily a bad idea to make part of driving culture (though if I saw it in my mirror, I might assume the driver was actually turning, if there a place for them to turn into)

Actually detecting and automatically maneuvering around cyclists sounds great, but it would seem were a long way from that - and there was that whole "transponder beacon" argument a while back - and comes down to the same issue - automation that's anything less than 100.0000% trustworthy can actually create more problems than it solves.

livedarklions

The best I can say for Musk's version of AI driving is that it probably won't create much space junk.

prairiepedaler

PeteHski

Not been a problem for me. I find Teslas to have one of the least distracting UIs of any car I've driven. Some are just a cluster f*** of random buttons, mix & match lo-res displays and dials. The Tesla UI is slick and intuitive and will be copied by all in due course.

rumrunn6

good to know. I've never driven one

Genius777

it's funny for now, but in the next 100% years the job of taxi will dissapear for our planet. All the cars will be automated. And it's nasty, i love to drive car.

rm -rf

Elon has always been in the mode of "build it, then improve until it works." That's great for rapid improvement, but I don't like it when it's done with customer's self driving cars. And he wants to do self driving by only using camera vision. Other real self driving cars use lidar, radar, sonar, and cameras.

I-Like-To-Bike

Elon has always been about talking about and hyping building something or another, and sometimes it comes to pass, more often than not if anything is built, it is nowhere near as grand as promised.
Still waiting for that useful transportation hyper loop, as well those promised features (due in 2020) that will enable Tesla owners to rent out their vehicles as robo-taxis.

At the present time there are NO real self driving cars, only weather restricted, geo-fenced, intensely human monitored, not ready for prime-time prototypes. Don't hold your breath waiting for a real (i.e. Level 5 AV) self driving car to be available for public use.

livedarklions

On the other hand, who hasn't wanted to drive in a sewer under Las Vegas at 20 mph? Living the high-tech dream!

prairiepedaler

Funny!

genec

How much oil is pumped, and waste burned off to produce a gallon of gas? How many fracking sites are there, scattered across the plains of Texas, New Mexico and beyond. Ever see crude oil in the ocean?

Really, we do have to honestly compare these wastes.

prairiepedaler

Crude oil in Oceans have been occurring since before man knew what it was. Sea floor fault-line movement due to earthquakes can release pressurized oil (seeps). It's a natural process, which bacteria and other organisms breaks down over time. The real problem is all the un-natural engineered chemicals used during a spill to aid cleanup.

genec

Great... do we need to also aid the natural seeps with unnatural holes and the pumping of waste products back into fracking holes, which seep into the water table.

The planet is bathed in energy from the sun.
https://www.businessinsider.com/this...r-power-2015-9

Push our energy research toward solar and battery and renewable energy and storage methods, and we can stop punching holes in the earth for old dino juice.

Ever take a good look at west Texas, from a satellite view...
Texas, New Mexico, and other states are all "punched" full of holes for fracking...
So the environmental impact is not only the drilling, but the pollution into the air and the pollution pushed back into the ground to pump out the sludge from which oil is derived.
I marked a few with red marks... but that dot pattern is just a tiny example of what is being done.

prairiepedaler

The sun and wind won't meet energy requirements of modern societies. Neither will tidal. Everything you own or use has been touched by oil in some way. There is no replacement for it. That's just the way it is. But, oil is finite and riding a bike can help reduce it's use. Speaking of the Sun, it is the main driver behind weather and climate patterns here on Earth, not Man. All we can do is adapt to its' changes, which are largely cyclical BTW.

JW Fas

Since pollution is inevitable, I'd rather move from several hundred million uncontrolled sources of pollution to only thousands of controlled, heavily regulated, and relatively isolated sources of pollution.