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Musk endeavours

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odysseus2000
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Re: Musk endeavours

#120898

Postby odysseus2000 » February 27th, 2018, 10:09 pm

andyalan10
And just as a slight counter to the general tone of postings on here.

Tesla did no autonomous driving tests in California last year, probably because when they did they were reporting human interventions per mile that were orders of magnitude worse than other vendors:-



Yes, Tesla motors is a bit of an head scratcher.

Some say Musk is too distracted elsewhere, others that their tech is too simple, others that this is all stock manship, let others think they are ahead & then do some incredible things.

Dunno.

If Tesla motors are in serious trouble there is no sign of it in their stock price, but the longer before model 3 is available in large numbers, the more the doubts will grow.

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woolly
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Re: Musk endeavours

#120981

Postby woolly » February 28th, 2018, 10:17 am

It's possible Tesla is keeping things under wraps until they have a shippable product - don't forget in December they announced they were working on custom AI silicon (https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16750560/tesla-custom-ai-chips-hardware).

This article https://insideevs.com/all-tesla-vehicles-in-production-are-equipped-with-self-driving-hardware/ is a bit ambiguous and doesn't explicitly say that models with the full self-driving option already have the custom chips - maybe Nvidia is providing the necessary processing horsepower for these cars. But it does give an update of where Tesla is with this - they seem confident their system will leapfrog the competition. We'll see...

Of note in the article is the specific T&Cs for Tesla self-driving - for-profit ride sharing is explicitly forbidden:
“Please also note 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.”
So Tesla is definitely aiming for a slice of the Uber and Lyft pie. Given that Tesla has paid close attention to real world logistics business models for the semi truck it would seem logical that they'd do the same for ride-sharing/taxis so I await news with interest.

Meanwhile even if full autonomous driving is perfected any time soon, it's going to take a lot longer for legislation, the public and insurers to catch up, particularly during the decades where autonomous and human-controlled vehicles share the roads.

odysseus2000
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Re: Musk endeavours

#121023

Postby odysseus2000 » February 28th, 2018, 12:13 pm

Woolly
Meanwhile even if full autonomous driving is perfected any time soon, it's going to take a lot longer for legislation, the public and insurers to catch up, particularly during the decades where autonomous and human-controlled vehicles share the roads.


It depends on the performance of the self driving cars.

If they work much better than humans the move to adopt them in the developed nations will be fast as insurers will start to ratchet up the cost of human driven insurance and the economics of having no human driver will be so overwhelming as to force everyone to adopt, those that don't being uncompetitive.

There is a belief that if this stuff works it will take decades, but there will be severe economic forces that will imho drive a rapid deployment.

Of course if there are a series of crashes that are shown to be because there are unfixable flaws then the whole autonomous business will be still born.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126178

Postby Breelander » March 19th, 2018, 9:58 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:It depends on the performance of the self driving cars.

If they work much better than humans the move to adopt them in the developed nations will be fast as insurers will start to ratchet up the cost of human driven insurance...

Of course if there are a series of crashes that are shown to be because there are unfixable flaws then the whole autonomous business will be still born.



Self-driving Uber kills Arizona woman in first fatal crash involving pedestrian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... zona-tempe

woolly
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Re: Musk endeavours

#126258

Postby woolly » March 20th, 2018, 8:14 am

Each day an average of 100 people die in (human driven) car crashes in the US alone - it's far worse in many other places. There are no global headlines about that because it's so common - this is news of the 'man bites dog' variety.

The aim with self-driving tech is to make the roads as safe if not safer than air travel, which also had somewhat shaky early days.

As for whether the general corporate culture at Uber, with its known cavalier attitude to people, is to blame for this particular incident - best leave that to the detailed investigation.

Of course, facts, nuances and details are irrelevant in forming concrete opinions - its only the headlines that matter... :)

Itsallaguess
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Re: Musk endeavours

#126312

Postby Itsallaguess » March 20th, 2018, 10:36 am

woolly wrote:
The aim with self-driving tech is to make the roads as safe if not safer than air travel, which also had somewhat shaky early days.

As for whether the general corporate culture at Uber, with its known cavalier attitude to people, is to blame for this particular incident - best leave that to the detailed investigation.

Of course, facts, nuances and details are irrelevant in forming concrete opinions - its only the headlines that matter...


One of the main issues with this death might not actually be the failure of the automatic driving systems to prevent the accident that led to the pedestrian's death, but the failure of the back-up person sat in the driver's seat to also react to the issue....

Perhaps one of the real stumbling blocks to the wholesale roll-out of this technology might not be the lack of trust in the computer-algorithms, but the complete lack of trust in the Plan-B human....

I'm also surprised that US litigation issues haven't prevented the roll-out of this technology onto normal roads. It might take a big US court case where someone puts the 'beta-testing-in-public' case to the test....

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126359

Postby Meatyfool » March 20th, 2018, 12:09 pm

Automated cars will not stop deaths on the road. As others have said, the jury as out in this case until the facts are made public.

All drivers know that stopping a car involves thinking distance and braking distance. If someone walks out in front of a human driver nearer to the car than the sum of those distances, there will be an accident. If the pedestrian is "very" near, then they may be in the "kill zone".

The same is equally true of an automated car, with the exception that the "thinking" time will be miniscule in comparison to the human driver. However, this simply reduces the overall stopping distance, and if the pedestrian steps out within that overall distance, there is still going to be an accident. The "kill zone" is still there but much smaller than before.

And here is the rub: if there is a kill zone even for an automated car, how the hell is the standby human driver going to be able to stop the car sooner, when he has to add on his own thinking distance (never mind the "this car is infallible" distance!).

I see no reason to be bothered that this will derail automation, until such time as the evidence is contrary to the above.

Meatyfool..

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126373

Postby JamesMuenchen » March 20th, 2018, 12:41 pm

Meatyfool wrote: All drivers know that stopping a car involves thinking distance and braking distance. If someone walks out in front of a human driver nearer to the car than the sum of those distances, there will be an accident. If the pedestrian is "very" near, then they may be in the "kill zone".

The same is equally true of an automated car, with the exception that the "thinking" time will be miniscule in comparison to the human driver. However, this simply reduces the overall stopping distance, and if the pedestrian steps out within that overall distance, there is still going to be an accident. The "kill zone" is still there but much smaller than before.

You're only looking at the reactive element, there is also a predictive element. Are automated vehicles as good at recognising when another road-user is (for instance) erratic, distracted or just clearly hasn't seem them, and taking some early actions like slowing down, using the lights/horn, or whatever. I bet they're not.

Meatyfool wrote:
And here is the rub: if there is a kill zone even for an automated car, how the hell is the standby human driver going to be able to stop the car sooner, when he has to add on his own thinking distance (never mind the "this car is infallible" distance!).

By taking control before a pedestrian steps into the car's breaking distance. It may not be always be possible, but surely that is the whole point of the human?

It's true though that we don't know exactly what happened in this case, yet.

odysseus2000
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Re: Musk endeavours

#126382

Postby odysseus2000 » March 20th, 2018, 1:08 pm

The most recent tabular data I can find for the uk indicates substantial Year/Year declines, but sadly still over 3 deaths per day on uk roads:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... sv/preview

There is much more recent data, but I could not find yearly tables.

If machines are, as Musk claims for 1st generation devices, 50% better than humans & over 100 % better for the current system, the case for machine driving is overwhelming. Reducing the 3 deaths per day & 27,000 injuries per year is well worth having.

But it all comes down to practice. Do machines fail for as yet unknown/unexpected reasons? Each accident will have to be investigated & results over many examined.

Imho machines will soon be driving, but until the data supports this we are in a test phase & that will take time.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126390

Postby JamesMuenchen » March 20th, 2018, 1:21 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:The most recent tabular data I can find for the uk indicates substantial Year/Year declines, but sadly still over 3 deaths per day on uk roads:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... sv/preview

There is much more recent data, but I could not find yearly tables.

If machines are, as Musk claims for 1st generation devices, 50% better than humans & over 100 % better for the current system, the case for machine driving is overwhelming. Reducing the 3 deaths per day & 27,000 injuries per year is well worth having.

Surely the important measurement should be not deaths per day, but deaths per distance travelled?
The chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Traffic_safety_compared_to_other_nations_by_traveled_distance
shows it as less than 10/billion KM

There's now been at least 2 deaths involving Teslas on autopilot, so their ratio must be very much higher.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126425

Postby odysseus2000 » March 20th, 2018, 2:15 pm

Tesla in November of 2016 had 1.3 billion miles on autopilot:

https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-au ... g-program/

If there have been two deaths then that is >0.650 billion miles per death, and since Nov of 2016 many more miles have been driven and if one converts miles to km then better still.

If I understand the 10/billion km, that is 1 death every 0.1 billion km, substantially worse, assuming I have understood what the units mean.

My guess is that politicians will focus on total deaths and accidents and skip the miles travelled, although the miles travelled per accident is perhaps more useful.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126431

Postby JamesMuenchen » March 20th, 2018, 2:24 pm

To be clear, those are not miles driven on Autopilot (with Autosteer and TACC), but miles driven in cars with Autopilot first generation hardware. Tesla still uses the data even when the Autopilot is not active in order to feed its machine learning system and improve its Autopilot programs: Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, and Full Self-Driving Capability.

The actual number of miles driven with the Autopilot active is closer to 300 million miles at this point.

odysseus2000
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Re: Musk endeavours

#126450

Postby odysseus2000 » March 20th, 2018, 3:16 pm

To be clear, those are not miles driven on Autopilot (with Autosteer and TACC), but miles driven in cars with Autopilot first generation hardware. Tesla still uses the data even when the Autopilot is not active in order to feed its machine learning system and improve its Autopilot programs: Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, and Full Self-Driving Capability.

The actual number of miles driven with the Autopilot active is closer to 300 million miles at this point.


Yes, it all gets rather confusing with claim & counter claim.

One of the conference calls discussed something along the theme of Tesla collected data compared to Google data arguing that Tesla had many more learning miles than Google.

Added to this is the relative affluence of a Tesla drivers compared to an average driver & whether this is skewing the results if the premise of affluence equals more intelligence & common sense holds true.

We can discuss for a long time the data, but the reality is that road accidents kill a lot of people & anything that can reduce them will be smiled upon by the politicians. Whether the 0.65 billion miles per death is a likely reality or wishfully thinking will not be clarrified till (if) self driving cars become common.

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126498

Postby odysseus2000 » March 20th, 2018, 6:02 pm

Some initial commentary on the fatal Uber crash:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/1714 ... ult-police

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126649

Postby woolly » March 21st, 2018, 9:15 am

A good take on autonomous driving fatalities here: https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opi ... echnology/

Basically the author is saying auto driving tech should be classed with nuclear, hospital tech, etc in that even one fatal mistake is one too many.

Judging by the number of Range Rovers, Bentleys and other expensive cars I see hurtling down the overtaking lane in excess of 90mph regardless of conditions I'm not sure
if the premise of affluence equals more intelligence & common sense holds true

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Re: Musk endeavours

#126673

Postby odysseus2000 » March 21st, 2018, 10:59 am

Judging by the number of Range Rovers, Bentleys and other expensive cars I see hurtling down the overtaking lane in excess of 90mph regardless of conditions I'm not sure


Yes, there is the counter argument that the social classes who can afford expensive motors contain some of the most impatient & aggressive drivers. The advent of tracking logs may alter this, but Buffett was noting how texting while driving was pushing up his insurance payouts may affect all drivers.

Dunno it's all very complicated but the loss of life on the roads is a tragedy that it would be good to reduce significantly.

A

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Re: Musk endeavours

#127803

Postby odysseus2000 » March 24th, 2018, 3:59 pm


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Re: Musk endeavours

#128311

Postby odysseus2000 » March 27th, 2018, 2:04 pm

Tesla stock near bottom of 5 month range. Lots of conflicting stories on model 3, but if they can make them in volume, stock price can rally.

https://twitter.com/0_ody/status/978617428321153024

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Re: Musk endeavours

#128484

Postby paullidd » March 28th, 2018, 6:35 am

Elon Musk and SpaceX look to buy old US shipyard on LA coast for building Mars rockets.
[url]
http://splash247.com/elon-musk-plans-cl ... sion-mars/[/url]

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Re: Musk endeavours

#128509

Postby odysseus2000 » March 28th, 2018, 9:53 am

Interesting video showing the performance of motion eye & other systems compared to the uber system that was involved in the fatal crash (warning, shows the fatal crash):

https://youtu.be/QCCmqosHT-o

Regards,


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