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Tesla shows off "full self driving," promises so much more


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At an event yesterday Tesla showed off their new "full self driving" stack, and Elon continues to be Elon, promising oh so much more.

 

In terms of concrete announcements, and in a rare case of Tesla delivering something when promised, they showed off the new computing hardware that will power their "HW3" self driving tech.

Tesla_Full_Self_Driving_Computer_2040.0.

The new chip ditches nVidia chips for some custom Tesla silicon. Boasting 6 billion transistors and 21x the performance of the old chip, while also having full redundancy, Tesla has apparently been shipping it in cars for over a month already. The chip is built by Samsung in Texas.

 

With the new hardware and improved software, Musk promised that self driving will be available in Telsas by the end of this year. They had a video of a car navigating a not-particularly-difficult stretch of road by itself.

 

Musk said that by the middle of 2020, you won't even need to pay attention to the road, and at that point Tesla will launch their robo-taxi driving service. Musk said their taxi service would be able to dramatically undercut typical ride sharing services, offering rides for $0.18 a mile. Musk said that within a year of launch, maybe even three months, they'd have a million robo-taxis on the road. Tesla owners would be able to add their cars to the fleet, making as much as $30,000 in profit a year.

 

(Of course, if you do the math on $0.18 a mile and $30,000 in profit a year, assuming 3 cents per mile in charging costs, that works out to ~550 miles per day (200k miles a year) your Tesla would need to drive. That's also almost two full charges in a long range Model 3. So I suppose it's theoretically possible, but insanely unpractical.)

 

Musk also said that soon Teslas should be good for at least a million miles.

 

So yeah. Elon continues to be Elon, and it certainly seems like Tesla is pushing ahead with their self driving deployment, ready or not.

 

 

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49 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Cool cool cool cool. And when it crosses the California state border and encounters rain or snow or fog and people die?

 

3 minutes ago, Boyle5150 said:

Then hopefully it’s less people than when a human is driving.  

This is exactly why I'm of two minds about the way Tesla is handling this.

 

I suspect that the "autopilot" driving that Teslas do now and what they showed off yesterday are probably safer than the average human driver in terms of both accidents and deaths per mile traveled. I'd also suspect that Tesla's self driving tech is not where the public or even Tesla's customers probably think self driving should be before it's widely deployed.

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29 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

They can't even seem to get auto-driving vehicles to work in heavy rain...so I have a feeling that waaaay more people would die in places where there is 6-month snow cover. 

“Can’t” and “haven’t yet” are two very different things. 

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2 hours ago, Boyle5150 said:

“Can’t” and “haven’t yet” are two very different things. 

 

Oh I agree that it will likely work well in those places someday, but it't not even close to that yet. So do they allow full auto-pilot in those places yet? Because I can imagine Musk allowing it and then someone dies in a snowstorm and he tweets out "go live somewhere warm, pedo!"

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4 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

Cool cool cool cool. And when it crosses the California state border and encounters rain or snow or fog and people die?

 

The chipset is equipped with BLAST PROCESSING which will alleviate your concerns and it makes Sonic run faster than Mario.

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21 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

Oh I agree that it will likely work well in those places someday, but it't not even close to that yet. So do they allow full auto-pilot in those places yet? Because I can imagine Musk allowing it and then someone dies in a snowstorm and he tweets out "go live somewhere warm, pedo!"

Yeah, I don't think it's quite ready yet, but look at the amount of progress we have made in very little time.  I believe we are very very close.  I can't wait because it will save countless lives around the globe when this tech is ready. 

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2 minutes ago, Boyle5150 said:

Yeah, I don't think it's quite ready yet, but look at the amount of progress we have made in very little time.  I believe we are very very close.  I can't wait because it will save countless lives around the globe when this tech is ready. 

I, for one, can't wait to see how well the low wage taxi cab/Uber drivers and the high wage semi truck drivers take being replaced so rapidly

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1 minute ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

I, for one, can't wait to see how well the low wage taxi cab/Uber drivers and the high wage semi truck drivers take being replaced so rapidly

I just hope we have some sort of UBI in place by that time.  I also find it foolish to believe that because of those low wage jobs we should somehow not move forward with the tech.  It's going to happen, but we need to be prepared for it by making sure we have something set in place for the disenfranchised because of it.

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I'm sure that there are actually smart people working at Tesla and making actual advances towards true self-driving cars, and that there will eventually come a day when this stuff will work, but I have no idea how anyone can see Elon Musk as anything except Lyle Lanley at this point. The Boring Company stuff is even worse.

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More than even just his grand promises about what the car can do (which we'll find out for ourselves soon enough, one way or another), I think the most interesting part of all this is how fundamentally different Tesla's approach to autonomous driving is than their competitors. The Verge covers much of it here.

 

Obviously the biggest difference is their insistence that regular cameras and some RADAR are sufficient sensors for everything. Elon calls LIDAR "a fool's errand," going further to say that anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. I just don't understand that thought process. Certainly I can see the argument that it's unnecessary, but I feel like the worst case scenario is that you build a more expensive car, and even that only seems like a short to medium term problem. If there were a few hundred thousand LIDAR equipped cars a year rather than a few thousand, I suspect the cost would come down quite quickly.

 

Another area that I'm slightly more sympathetic towards is the necessity of super high resolution maps. Most companies are relying on their maps to help reduce the workload the car has to do. It doesn't have to guess at the speed limit, it can anticipate certain "hard" features of the roads, it can place itself much more precisely than GPS, and it can put more processing towards tracking dynamic objects like cars and pedestrians. Still, I understand the idea that a car that can't operate without such a map is necessarily more limited than one that relies on them. If your car can navigate without prior knowledge of an area, that seems obviously preferable, though it seems more difficult.

 

 

 

18 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

Oh I agree that it will likely work well in those places someday, but it't not even close to that yet. So do they allow full auto-pilot in those places yet? Because I can imagine Musk allowing it and then someone dies in a snowstorm and he tweets out "go live somewhere warm, pedo!"

According to Musk, by 2020 they'll work in every condition. I'm not aware of them actually demonstrating that, so yeah.

 

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29 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Another area that I'm slightly more sympathetic towards is the necessity of super high resolution maps. Most companies are relying on their maps to help reduce the workload the car has to do. It doesn't have to guess at the speed limit, it can anticipate certain "hard" features of the roads, it can place itself much more precisely than GPS, and it can put more processing towards tracking dynamic objects like cars and pedestrians. Still, I understand the idea that a car that can't operate without such a map is necessarily more limited than one that relies on them. If your car can navigate without prior knowledge of an area, that seems obviously preferable, though it seems more difficult.

 

Yeah you should aim to be able to work without it but still use it when available. I mean, for most of driving history we didn't have GPS, and I can drive without one. But it would be stupid not to use it. With early technology, using all the help you can get is even more critical.

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3 hours ago, legend said:

Yeah you should aim to be able to work without it but still use it when available. I mean, for most of driving history we didn't have GPS, and I can drive without one. But it would be stupid not to use it. With early technology, using all the help you can get is even more critical.

The reason that I'm slightly sympathetic Elon's take is that I can imagine a scenario where the maps are a crutch that prevents the kinds of advances that are necessary for safety. So maybe a system that doesn't rely on any kind of static map is necessarily better equipped to deal with the kinds of hazards that driving will constantly represent, even within a mapped area.

 

Of course, I think it makes intuitive sense that a map would make things easier. Certainly the guys at Aurora think so. In a blog post they put up (which I think is worth a look in general), they argue that maps make everything easier: "if a system only has to handle changes relative to the map 1% of the time, we can be up to two orders of magnitude safer then one that must always rely on only its real-time perceptions of the world."

 

I feel like a lot of Elon's arguments are from a business standpoint and not a technology one. There's no way it would be feasible to sell a car with LIDAR right now. Even the cheapest ones cost more than the whole self driving package in a Tesla does. It would also be a terrible business decision to sell a car whose headline feature only works in a small number of geofenced areas. Of course Telsa favors real world vehicle data over simulations, they have more of it than anyone else.

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20 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

The reason that I'm slightly sympathetic Elon's take is that I can imagine a scenario where the maps are a crutch that prevents the kinds of advances that are necessary for safety. So maybe a system that doesn't rely on any kind of static map is necessarily better equipped to deal with the kinds of hazards that driving will constantly represent, even within a mapped area.

 

Of course, I think it makes intuitive sense that a map would make things easier. Certainly the guys at Aurora think so. In a blog post they put up (which I think is worth a look in general), they argue that maps make everything easier: "if a system only has to handle changes relative to the map 1% of the time, we can be up to two orders of magnitude safer then one that must always rely on only its real-time perceptions of the world."

 

I feel like a lot of Elon's arguments are from a business standpoint and not a technology one. There's no way it would be feasible to sell a car with LIDAR right now. Even the cheapest ones cost more than the whole self driving package in a Tesla does. It would also be a terrible business decision to sell a car whose headline feature only works in a small number of geofenced areas. Of course Telsa favors real world vehicle data over simulations, they have more of it than anyone else.

 

Yeah I completely encourage building to be able to work without a map at a level we consider sufficiently safely. I'm not in favor of ditching information when that can make it even more safe or usable. Unless there is a serious cost reason, abandoning useful information is stupid engineering.

 

As an analogy, at my company we've done some experiments with home robotics that dynamically learn new tasks you teach them. A few people at the company were initially of the mind "lets only use the camera pixel data through a neural net!" Yeah, you can do that (and we did some things using only the camera), but why would you want to? We can make learning new tasks so much faster and more robust when you couple it with SLAM. And that's what we did for more of our stuff, otherwise the robot would be taking ages to learn something you're trying to teach it :p 

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1 hour ago, legend said:

Yeah I completely encourage building to be able to work without a map at a level we consider sufficiently safely. I'm not in favor of ditching information when that can make it even more safe or usable. Unless there is a serious cost reason, abandoning useful information is stupid engineering.

 

As an analogy, at my company we've done some experiments with home robotics that dynamically learn new tasks you teach them. A few people at the company were initially of the mind "lets only use the camera pixel data through a neural net!" Yeah, you can do that (and we did some things using only the camera), but why would you want to? We can make learning new tasks so much faster and more robust when you couple it with SLAM. And that's what we did for more of our stuff, otherwise the robot would be taking ages to learn something you're trying to teach it :p 

Google's knowledge graph apparently put's Slam magazine as the top result, but I'm guessing this is what you were referring to.

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