All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware (opens in new tab)

Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read:

> However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.”

It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.

Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market.

These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla.

You can't win.

What I find really interesting about Tesla (and SpaceX and HyperLoop) criticism is that people think it will fail for what it doesn't do, instead of focusing on what it does do. What they don't realize is that all products in history that got hugely successful didn't do a ton of stuff initially. They just did some things really well.

Early washing machines were noisy as hell and got unbalanced all the time. But who cares? they washed clothes and everyone wanted one.

Early TVs were massive things with fussy screens and only in B&W.

The first iPhone was extremely slow and only had EDGE.

But rather than focus on what all of those things don't do, you only need to realize they do something really well, and that's why they are a huge success.

Even if the Tesla can't drive itself too well in heavy snow, or if the range is crap in really, really cold weather - WHO CARES? There are still tens of millions of people on earth that will lap them up because of the list of things they do so well.

Products don't fail or succeed because of what they don't do. They fail or succeed because of what they do do.

From the Wikipedia article [1] about Joseph Weizenbaum: "His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom."

So, asking "but what if ..." in a responsible way should always be a big part of any innovation. Just shouting "hey, we are hackers, lets innovate and be open" isn't always responsible.

As a bonus, there's a great archive [2] about Joseph Weizenbaum with audio and film clips for anyone interested. Most of the site and the documents are in german unfortunately, but some transcripts are available in english as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum [2] http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html

I'm not saying humans react perfectly in these situations, but self-driving cars are rule-based, and have zero ability to adapt to unanticipated situations. I'm not arguing that Tesla shouldn't push forward. However, I believe that so far, Tesla has demonstrated a lack of concern for user safety. Companies like Google, Mercedes-Benz, etc. have tech at least as good as Tesla's, but have been much more cautious about deploying it.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04435

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199

I like Tesla, just pointing out why people are right to demand they get it at least as good as humans before pushing it to market.

It simply isn't enough to post a video of a car driving in light traffic on a beautiful, California afternoon. That isn't what makes the problem hard. Mess up with your video-based system in the dark, or in bad weather, or...lots of people will die.

This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release. (Which, not incidentally, is why they haven't released anything other than a video.)

This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.

And why are you comparing iPhones to self driving cars? That's like comparing paper airplanes to commercial airliners. Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted.

If self-driving cars don't happen in my lifetime, it will be because companies piggybacked on the media hype too readily and shipped dangerously misleading technology to consumers before it's ready. A few CNN incidents later, et voila, no one's talking about self-driving cars anymore. The whole thing can grind to a halt just like that. Every overly enthusiastic, precocious CS undergrad who posts in forums about how incredibly inevitable self-driving cars are, and how it's basically a solved problem and a done deal, are helping to set up self-driving cars for failure by encouraging overly optimistic expectations.

For people who care deeply about the technology, the possibility of a company like Tesla putting something out there before it's ready and potentially causing CNN incidents can be more alarming than no one putting anything out there at all. Maybe some people are being too negative and nitpicky, or maybe not, but I think that's where the negative attitudes come from. It's from people who want self-driving cars to succeed.

With iPhone 1, people's lives were not at stake.

... and if you look back at the launch of the iPhone you'll find the response is roughly the same. A healthy degree of scepticism.

Differently from mobile phones, cars actually have the capacity to go horribly, horribly wrong. This is not something to have a "let's fix it in public beta" Approach on.

We don't know yet whether this is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars or the Newton of self-driving cars, a decade or more ahead of its time.

A cellphone isn't a car. There is a reason why people expect a LOT more perfection when it comes to trusting your life to a machine.

we are geeks, many happy to be early adopters (aka testers), but try to explain this to average middle class joe who sees this and thinks it's already there in point of perfection, no mistake possible.

I just hope for Tesla that they delivered an outstanding technology that will just work, too much at stake with it. For now, respect to engineering team behind this!

Step 2) Get paid

This says it all. Cars aren't phones. Cars can easily fucking kill people.

I think that we are talking days, not weeks, or probably that Teslas can have multiple teams testing various hardware and algorithms at the same time: Tesla plans on producing 500k cars per year from 2018. If all of them have this equipment, and they drive a conservative 10k miles per year in average, Tesla will gather data from 5 billion miles driven after a year. Next year they will have 15 billion miles. After 6 short years that will amount to more than 100 billion (B) miles accumulated.

For comparison, Google's self driving cars have driven less than 2 million miles until now and unless they team up with a car manufacturer or launch their own car, their project is soon irrelevant. I imagine this would only be accentuated as tech talent would prefer to work where their algorithms can be tested in a couple of days rather than where such test would take years.

EDIT: And just imagine how cool it is that since their cars drive all over the globe, in all traffic situations, under most traffic rules, in all conditions, and both winter and summer, day and night at the same time, a team can actually test changes to an algorithm on cars selected for certain conditions (500 cars in Minnesota's winter weather at the same time as 500 in Australia's summer, 500 during daylight in Asia at the same time as testing 500 driving at night in Europe, 1,000 cars in rainy weather, 1,000 cars in sun, 1000 cars in fog, 1,000 cars in snow, all within hours).

New hardware needs hours in the field, to verify failure rates and performance under real world conditions. Early deployment means Tesla's hardware will be ready for full service as soon as software is available. Autonomous driving then becomes "just a software problem", with hardware eliminated as a variable.

Does anybody make an antenna-level middle box for GSM phones? Something you hook into the antenna cable as a firewall/monitor?

Said another way: Is there a downside to parallelizing the collection process across a broader horizontal population of collection vehicles over a shorter period versus the traditional 1-2 year collection period?

In the future, would Telsa use these data for other purposes? ie after analysing the data, it finds that my driving behaviour risk and has a higher chance of accident. It could trigger high insurance premiums or restriction on which car I can purchase etc.

I wonder what safeguards the manufacturers have in place to determine that those tests are not gamed and are honest as presented. I am thinking of VW emissions scandal. Given the stakes it would be interesting to know what level of trust is involved vs. verify.

This move sounds like a terrible idea with respect to what you say!

It's like aerospace companies deciding to forego testing and calling that a "brilliant move!"

The issues with not being able to modify your own stuff is already really shitty, but its not something that the average Joe really can understand easily, and even less care about it.

But not being able to USE your car for some things? That just screams easy headlines and it's a reason I might not get a Tesla in the future.

I think I'll wait 15 years until a GPL autopilot comes out. AutGNUpilot?

Apple iOS ;) the iPhone 7 had (don't know if it has now) some camera features (autofocus and raw related) disabled that were present on the 6/6s because of software limitations.

This isn't that uncommon many times you can have a new product which comes with some features disabled/not working because the software did not catch up to the hardware yet for what ever reason.

Autopilot 1.0 was the precedent.

They announced that at the 'D' event that all cars shipping from then on would have AP hardware in.

The capabilities were progressively rolled out depending on the tech package you purchased over the next 12 months.

Will the new form of vandalism be any different than letting the air out of someone's tires, also rendering it incapacitated?

I've read about how hard it is to sell an aging Prius because the battery pack has to be replaced. Its apparently not easy to do and the part is very expensive. For used car buyers you're better off buying a gas civic if you want an efficient older car. ICE doesn't age like electric.

This is definitely done on start, and probably even during operation.

Good on you for being risk averse. Bad for all of us if you were in charge.

Risk will always be a factor when trying to push the envelope and bring new tech to life.

It's easy to put down most ideas on the basis of some risk - cars, rockets, medicine...

You have to build something and then you will discover how to improve on that eventually.

When Tesla shows me the same car driving in pouring rain, day or night, in snow, or such, then I will say "damn, they are truly making it work". Until then its a cheap magic trick and dishonest.

What is so odd is bragging about driving when people are least likely to need it, nice wonderful days. Safety systems have been aimed at providing control and reaction in the worst environments.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

(front page discussion of that story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 )

What innovation? Autonomous vehicles? Volkswagen is working with Stanford researchers and Mobileye (you know, the people who helped build Tesla Autopilot):

http://www.volkswagengroupamerica.com/autonomous.html

I mean, sure, if you don't leave the front page of HackerNews, you'd think that Tesla is literally inventing this stuff in real-time. But believe it or not there are lots of smart people and companies working on autonomous vehicles. They just don't market as well or as often as Tesla. And in some cases, yes, they're behind.

Other than the 250,000 drivers of Nissan Leafs... I think that's beyond twice as many as every Tesla ever built.

Currently, Tesla is the only one who is delivering practical innovation and success!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars#199...

[0]: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

Other than being able to charge a premium for activating later why install it on all the cars? Tesla is basically using data from sensors that'd be in a Fully Autonomous Vehicle, driven by a human for at least a year. Thats a lot of free valuable data being collected for the cost of just the hardware installation!

Instead of doing all the testing and tweaking once car is street legal for test runs as an autonomous car, Tesla benefits from putting every single piece of hardware needed for its future as early as possible, just to mine this data gold.

Sure LIDAR is more expensive but the data quality is very stable and good. Cameras won't work that well or at all in night or when the sun rays blend in morning / evening or in bad weather conditions like heavy rain or snow. All other self-driving cars I know of have at least a small LIDAR beside several other types of sensors.

All you have is two overlapping cameras with poor resolution and they let you behind the wheel, right?

This is a software and processing hardware problem only. Human beings drive OK for the most part and we don't have lidar/radar/sonar/etc.

With 8 cameras providing 360 vision and an advanced NVIDIA hardware suite, this problem is entirely solvable and this is a very reasonable solution to it.

It might rule out driving in fog or snow, but if the weather is OK then the sensor suite is probably enough for driving on any paved road.

I think you are underestimating how quickly Tesla's AI software can improve. The AI will always be running and checking to see if the driver does anything unexpected. For example if you brake or swerve suddenly when the AI did not expect you to do so, all the sensor data and state of the AI will be sent back to Tesla headquarters. Tesla will amass millions of these 'significant events' and be able to back-test updates to their AI logic against every single event. It will be test-driven development on steroids, allowing rapid software improvement while maintaining high quality.

Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future.

We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ?

I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people.

Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it.

[1] That is not hyperbole.

[2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.

I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.

You probably won't need to own one either, just hail one. So it may be very affordable.

I wrote a little more about this here: https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles

I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.

According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.

Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.

And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?

Yes, you're supposed to drive in the right lane when not passing - some localities are more strict about this than others. For example, here in Michigan, there's a fine for driving in the left lane and not passing anyone for...one mile? Two miles? I forget, it's never really used. And you're supposed to "FALL" into the First Available Legal Lane. But in practice, if the second lane is open, people will jump across the first lane for the second - just watch your rearview as you accelerate and make sure the oncoming car wasn't moving over for you.

This is more aggressive driving than I would have expected from an automatic algorithm, but perfectly matches my expectations for the driver of a luxury sport car like a BMW, Audi, or Mercedes - and probably a Tesla, or a compact car driven by a young driver. I would expect a minivan, hybrid, or small commercial vehicle to wait. And I would expect a bus, garbage truck, or semi truck to just pull out and force the oncoming car to merge into the left lane.

Also, it would be a safety risk, not a security risk.

Side note: People are not very strict about that rule here and nobody cares. Mainly because you're allowed to overtake other cars on both sides - not just only on the left. Isn't that dangerous? Yes, but there's everywhere a speed limit of around 65mph (104kmh) which makes overtaking other cars much easier / safer.

That used the be the norm in the US as well, but it has broken down over the past few decades. Some studies and motorist groups blame the nationwide 55 mph speed limit imposed in the 70s due to oil shortages. Slow drivers suddenly felt safe driving in left lanes and a whole generation has learned to drive like this. [1]

There are laws in many states against impeding traffic in the left lane [2], but they aren't that enforced. You also see signs occasionally on the highway, but my issue with these signs is that they say "Slower traffic keep right" (instead of eg, "Stay right except when passing"). I strongly suspect that very view people view themselves as "slow drivers" -- rather everyone tends to believe they drive the appropriate speed and everyone else is driving too slow or too fast.

[1] http://nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/more-states-are-cracking-do...

[2] http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

However, it's not a hard and fast rule, and a lot of people don't follow it. So I have to deal with morons who drive 5mph below the speed limit, in the left lane, on state routes. Every single day. As I drive up and down a decently large hill.

RE: Wrong lane: that Tesla driveway would be confusing to even a human driver. It's definitely not a regular road, so the car didn't understand it.

Yes, totally a crash collision risk! I've witnessed this happened once in a Costco parking lot. Car A made a right turn onto the left lane of the crossing road and the oncoming car B didn't pay attention at the moment and bumped into it head on.

As of August, Google's self-driving cars have 2 million miles of real on-road experience, while Tesla's Autopilot systems have 140 million. They're beaming back data to Tesla the whole time.

It only has to be better than humans, not perfect.

You have to be kidding. The Tesla cheer-leading is immense. This is a competitive space within which Tesla might be a leader, but you make it sound as if everyone else around them is stagnant.

The majors are building this stuff, the large tech companies are building this stuff, and even big component providers are building this stuff. This is obvious if you look outside of the SV echo chamber.

But some of the risks they're taking are just completely stupid and unnecessary, such as calling their assisted cruise control "Autopilot." That's like waving the proverbial cape at the proverbial bull.

Actually, in regards to Tesla, they always stated (and were very open about it) that early-adopters pay premium to support research/growth/etc. First with Roadster, now with S (not sure about X). It can be expected that the same extra features (same hardware) on model will cost less. So the trade-off here is just that, being "first".

Sorry, but I seriously doubt they will have sufficient hardware installed to take it to level 4 or 5. It might be a stretch to get to 3 with anything they can deploy today simply because no one has demonstrated a real world working solution for these tiers. Oh you might be able to track demo one or controlled loop it.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss

EDIT: no idea why the downvotes, I'm all for self driving cars, but pretty obviously they could be scared of PR issues and lawsuits.

Many people are starting to realize that's the real test, especially those likely to be model S/≡/X customers.

Real consumer and public education on the nature of the problem is necessary though, especially if we want a safer self driving world.

Yeah this. Every demo I've seen is some suburban or sparsely populated area. As a Chicago inner city driver, I really want to see these things handle our rush hour, especially in the snow and rain before I start calling this stuff the future. Its a good start, but I imagine the 'hard' problems with automated driving haven't been solved yet. If they were then these demos wouldn't be in great weather on sunny days and in low traffic.

City driving, roadblocks, accidents, and other unusual circumstances definitely deserve to be called more difficult, though.

They could also shift to giving out more domestic or pedestrian tickets for things like music being too loud and jay-walking.

(Note: I don't really wonder this, because cops do not officially make stops in order to generate revenue, even though unofficially it's widely understood that they do.)

My experience driving in the UK, Netherlands, France & Germany suggests that citizens of those countries are much much more conscientious about driving etiquette than us North Americans.

There's no problem with speeding up demo footage if you indicate you are doing so, like https://youtu.be/PDPrFJazD3Q?t=3m34s

i'm not sure if it makes the car seem more capable though. if anything, i was worried that the car seemed to be accelerating and decelerating dangerously quickly until i realized it was sped up.

>It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.

>Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.

Not sure why someone would risk this money if they can activate it later on (even though for slightly more) to see how the functionality will be?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/788902908175618049

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

That, and judging by Tesla's history - if there was indeed something lacking, they might just retro-fit it for free onto people's cars. So I assume they're keen on getting this right...haha.

It boggles me that anyone even considers running things like antilock brakes, car security, and especially self-driving capability from an internet-connected device, no matter how nice and convenient it may be.

Hyper-exotics like Ferrari or Aston Martin can rely on driving enthusiasts to keep their brand alive, the others have to get self-driving tech and think about building an Uber-esque service. I can imagine Uber has a strong position of being able to sell their software/service to the manufacturers (the "Get a ride in a Mercedes" app will be the Uber app with Mercedes-branding, and it will run with Uber's servers), for a, say 5%, cut!

This is one of the few things that excites me about driverless cars. People should be driving below the limit (and the limits should be about 10mph lower in a lot of places) for pedestrian safety. The fatality rate drops precipitously around 20mph.

This statement is based on what he is aware of at the time. The most pessimistic side of it is purely a data game, and Tesla's ability to have 100k cars collecting data for them will give them a significant advantage to accelerate their progress.

Did you know about it because you saw it being bent or because you drove there before and knew that there should be a stop sign?

The real space age will again open up hardware, but make no mistake that software will play as important or more of an important role then to.