Autopilot vs Autonomous Driving - Discuss

[OutlawX3M]

This may need it's own thread -- Master Plan, Part Deux (Elon Musk)

So to keep it within the topic of this thread, here's 2 paragraphs on Autonomy :

With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager. Traffic congestion would improve due to increased passenger areal density by eliminating the center aisle and putting seats where there are currently entryways, and matching acceleration and braking to other vehicles, thus avoiding the inertial impedance to smooth traffic flow of traditional heavy buses. It would also take people all the way to their destination. Fixed summon buttons at existing bus stops would serve those who don't have a phone. Design accommodates wheelchairs, strollers and bikes.

I sorely need to see this design - "eliminating the center aisle"? "Putting seats where there are currently entryways"? Curious.

The latter part of this is "take people all the way to their destination" so to me this isn't a bus but a new mode of transport that replaces the multi-passenger bus into a small, nimble unit that goes from a predefined "stop" to a destination. Sounds very much like an autonomous Uber.

Autonomy
As the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car could break and your car will still drive itself safely. It is important to emphasize that refinement and validation of the software will take much longer than putting in place the cameras, radar, sonar and computing hardware.

Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.

I should add a note here to explain why Tesla is deploying partial autonomy now, rather than waiting until some point in the future. The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.

According to the recently released 2015 NHTSA report, automotive fatalities increased by 8% to one death every 89 million miles. Autopilot miles will soon exceed twice that number and the system gets better every day. It would no more make sense to disable Tesla's Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named.

It is also important to explain why we refer to Autopilot as "beta". This is not beta software in any normal sense of the word. Every release goes through extensive internal validation before it reaches any customers. It is called beta in order to decrease complacency and indicate that it will continue to improve (Autopilot is always off by default). Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed.

So again, Tesla's betting it all on in-vehicle systems for autonomous driving where I think the consensus here is that's a "one-legged system" that overlooks one key known/established truth -- human oversight leveraging a well planned monitoring system is what makes automation function safest.

Beta "decreases complacency" is just BS IMO -- it's a legal term that allows Tesla to limit culpability/liability bypassing express and implied warranty clauses.

Also, it's kind of a "realized truth" in software that BETA = Not ready for use in production. It's not reliable enough to trust it with your business/life because it hasn't been fully tested.

Now most people will think "it's full of bugs" which to the average person this is where the program crashes or an error comes up. There's actually more to this from a software development viewpoint and most people don't really care because to them, it's all a bug.

To me, a bug or defect is where the expectation was X but the end result is Y or lack of any result. There can be any number of root causes in these scenarios from poor coding to unreliable data or both! I spend alot of time on this in my day job with Fortune 100 companies. For a bug/defect, there needs to be code present in the software for that process/task otherwise it's a request for enhancement (RFE).

An RFE is where there's no code for that process/task present but there should be (usually because it wasn't in the requirement for the software to begin with). And this NORMAL in the software business because you can't think of everything without having some version of your product built.

This is why agile development is so popular today. And it's at the root of Tesla's "BETA" tag on their AutoPilot -- it's not mature enough.