BobbyD wrote:onthemove wrote:"Elon Musk’s enthusiastic public claims about Tesla’s self-driving technology have been privately contradicted by the car company’s own employees, who told authorities that the billionaire’s comments do not “match engineering reality”. .... a Tesla director told the regulator that the company was some way away from being fully autonomous."
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/elon- ... 27162.html
That's the second batch of declarations they've made to regulators recently which contradict Elon's 'confidence' in FSD delivery timeframe. There's a quote flying around where they pretty much couch it in those terms as well.
I notice in the referenced documents it says...
" Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ.Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation."
https://www.plainsite.org/documents/28j ... fsd-notes/
(For some reason the first sentence is white-on-white in the original, but if you select the invisible text and copy it into notepad, you can see what it says for yourself).So since it's been a couple of months now since I last watched a Tesla driver video, I've just specifically searched out a couple of newer ones..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKG3eDp ... el=AIDRIVR Hmmm... disengagement already @2:09 into the video. And again @4:31.
Either he was very unlucky, or it seems to me they are still some way from "1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction".
And the UK version seems somewhat worse...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqlVbFM ... eslaDriver "But it gets a little confused, it aborted, and sadly that is where we're still at ... to be honest, that's actually why I haven't done that many videos, there's not much more for me to show you"
Don't get me wrong... some of the things the FSD (at least US version) seems to achieve are very, very impressive. It's just for me, I have two major concerns...
(1) the number of driver interactions is still far too high... while there are a lot of things that it handles very, very well and is technically very, very impressive, there are also too many things it can't handle yet. And it is those where I suspect Elon is perhaps significantly underestimating the work remaining (though it sounds like some of the Tesla engineers internally seem to recognise the engineering reality!). But you can't have FSD without them all!
(2) the Tesla visualisations are still way too unstable. The Tesla visualisations of things around it are still jumping around far too much. There is just too much positional uncertainty in what the vision system is detecting. And when that is your main means of input, that is a BIG problem - when cars 'jump' a few feet from one screen refresh to the next - and I don't mean in the direction of travel; even stationary cars jump around - that is going to give the higher level planning algorithms a hard time to deal with; it's no wonder the Tesla FSD algorithm seems a lot more twitchy and changing its mind vs the Waymo taxis.
What I'm not sure is whether it's a case that Tesla are just being honest, and giving the raw view, and that perhaps Waymo are just stabilising the visualisation in order to reassure passengers (but internally it's just as jumpy)...
... or whether they're both giving the raw view, and the stability of the visualisation of what's around the Waymo taxis is down to the actual input system - that's to say, including the lidar - meaning that the Waymo cars really are getting a much better, far more accurate and stable model of the 3d world around them.
I'm leaning towards the latter, because clearly lidar is specifically designed to measure distance, and not only that, it takes many repeated measurements with its point cloud, so it doesn't just have one measurement to a target, it has multiple, so can constantly be averaging. When the waymo visualisation shows the periodic 'point cloud sweep' , it does look pretty clear and stable; you can recognise yourself what the things are and see where they are, so on balance, if I had to bet, I'd bet that Waymo really are getting far more stable inputs - particularly regards the position of things around the vehicle. Which is clearly going to help build a more stable, confident higher level driving system.
Like I said in my post a few weeks ago... are Teslas foundations strong enough to get it the final distance to FSD? I'm not so sure.
I mean, look at it this way... watch this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKG3eDp ... el=AIDRIVR @1:57 (just before he disengages it) and watch the vehicles waiting at the lights in the visualisation... if you were relying on that visualisation to drive (imagine you couldn't see out of the windscreen yourself, and that's all you had)...
...the way the cars waiting at the lights seem to be lurching forwards and backwards a couple of feet at a time (when in reality they are stationary), would have me really jumpy thinking that were potentially setting off! If you're passing a car waiting to join from a side road, and were to see it jump about like that, as a driver you'd be on a knife edge whether you'd need to take evasive action (brake or swerve).
But what you're seeing in the visualisation is what the Tesla FSD is using to drive - that is its world view! As a driver, would you be confident driving if that visualisation was your only view of what's around the vehicle? Would you be confident that you could do your daily commute, day in, day out, and have the same or fewer number of accidents vs driving while being able to see for yourself through the windscreen?
I can't help thinking that Tesla are perhaps having to 'damp down' the inputs (average them out quite a bit, to iron out the noise) in their FSD algorithm. But if they are, then potentially the car isn't going to be able to react as quickly and decisively when someone really does pull out in front of the vehicle! (It'll need to give it a second or two to realise that the car is pulling out for real!)
I wouldn't be surprised if many drivers who bought the "FSD" upgrade, end up never receiving it while they still own and use their vehicle. Or at least, not receiving any update that lets them take their hands off the wheel and sit in the back with "no one up front" (to quote the Waymo greeting)