As an analyst this is dreadfully true. *Boss: Just make the numbers say what I want them to say
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I donât know if you have driven a Tesla on Autopilot but the car tells you to keep your hands on the wheel at all times and to be ready to take over anytime. Additionally it warns you if it detects little/no torque on the wheel after a few seconds and disengages the system all together if you do not apply force to the wheel. If one is having an accident on autopilot it means not only the Autopilot has failed but also that the driver was not paying attention and failed to break/steer. It is not like Autopilot locks out the driver from intervening. Driver is the redundancy/fail-safe factored in the mass beta testing.
Yes, because nobody is allowed to have their own opinion and should just drink directly from the cup of Musk.
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Yes, I understand that. And I live in LA, where drivers routinely donât pay attention and do a pretty horrible job with braking and steering on a regular basis; I have to honk at cars wandering into my lane multiple times per day (and that includes honking at Teslas).
What Iâm concerned about multiple things:
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That (some) drivers will have a false sense of security with something called âAutopilotâ and will ignore any warning informing them to pay attention
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That the Tesla hasnât adequately tested its summon (and other functions), which may result in crashes that would not have occurred with (an attentive) human driver
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The attitude the beta testing a car can (and should) be similar to beta testing a phone. My iPhoneâs phone app doesnât play well w/ T-Mobile on a regular basis. The kind annoying, but ultimately minor, annoyances we accept from our phones and laptops arenât okay in a moving car.
Iâm not against autonomous cars. I think they will be life-changing for people w/ limited mobility and possibly limited funds. But I think that, beyond some of the limited active safety system available today and adaptive cruise control, autonomous driving should not be allowed in public until full Level 5 autonomy is achieved. Either make the car unusable unless drivers pay attention or shut them out entirely (except for an override feature).
The in-between states are not safe, IMHO.
Agreed on all points but I should point out that the half-baked summon feature at least limits the speed to pretty much walking pace so very little risk of mowing over helpless people.
Tesla is trying to minimize the risks of self-driving development but there are inherent risks that cannot be zeroed if level 5 is going to be achieved at some point in the future. I am having a hard time believing that it can be achieved in my lifetime (I am 37) but you gotta start somewhereâŚ
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This is true. While an extreme example, I think Toyotaâs approach of creating its own city to test (among other things, I guess) autonomous driving is a good one (and certainly makes me think much more highly of it than of Tesla).
You are not alone in that belief. Toyoda himself has said he doesnât expect to happen in his own lifetime, although heâs way older than you are. 
Anytime you have a different opinion that sways from the Lord and Savior, itâs automatically FUD. Thatâs the single most used term when disagreeing with them. Itâs even FUD when pointing out a legit accident using autopilot.
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I donât have an agenda. But Uber and Lyft have been around a while now and weâre not actually seeing a reduction in overall dui fatalities/injuries. It should be really easy to show if it did. As one person mentioned and the article points out, in certain areas it seems to help (maybe Austin), but the proof is not conclusive like so many think.
Itâs been a steady 10k deaths a year for the last few years. But look at the numbers before 2010âŚ
Also this isnât per capita. As populations increase, fatalities are not. So thatâs likely a net decrease. I bet a lot of these fatalities are people in their 50s and 60s that dont use Uber also.
Thatâs my point. Uber hasnât widely been used that long. Cars are much safer than they used to be. Public awareness might be helping. Lots of people have tried to show Uber makes the roads safer but it hasnât really been shown yet. The best attempt yet (the study I posted) showed no decrease in injuries specifically in cities that temporarily halted then restarted Uber service
Cars are much safer then pre 2010? Around the time ride sharing started?
Thereâs a clear 40% decrease in fatalities. I donât think it can be chalked up to anything else.
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Uber wasnât even launched until 2009. It wasnât until 2015 that it became a thing. By 2009 when Uber was first launched, dui deaths were already at their current levels of roughly 10k per year. Do I think ride sharing helps prevent dui? Yes. But itâs hard to prove that. Alcohol kills more people in the USA than the âopioid crisisâ
Also, Uber wonât exist in its current form in 10 years. Itâs in terrible shape financially
Uber is set up to be a successful autonomous taxi company. Theyâre just doing everything they can to keep their head above water until they can get rid of all those pesky drivers. How long that takes is what will determine how long theyâre around for.
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Itâs sad when âemployeesâ pay for their job replacement. I took a gamble and bought some Uber stock at $30. Could be huge in 10 years, could be nothing. Risk reward itâs a good gamble
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Level five autonomous driving on highways isnât that challenging. With buy in from feds that could easily happen by the end of the decade. Would it be perfect, no but it would almost certainly be much better than the alternative, which is the status quo. Many seem to prefer 100 human caused deaths to one autonomous vehicle accident. Autonomous driving is far superior if it can be a little safer than the status quo. Imagine being able to nap, work, text etcâŚon commute to work.
The urban situation is much harder, level five autonomous driving is going to require massive investment and legal changes that are probably decades away.
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FUD they saidâŚ
CEO Don Walker told reporters that the industry is getting âmore realisticâ about how long itâll take before autonomous driving really takes off. As such, Magna plans to invest âwhere weâre going to get a higher volume,â CFO Vince Galifi said.
The CEO of a company trying to bring this to market: L5 is going to take longer than expected. The future is assistive tech up to L3.
Apple had 1000 people working on autonomous cars for a year before they stripped that team down to a dozen people because the hardware isnât all there yet.
If Federal regulators investigating over a dozen auto pilot crashes determine they could have been prevented with LIDAR, that wouldnât bode well for an Autopilot engineering team picked clean of itâs talent over the last year, that is already 3 years late delivering a repeatedly-promised Cannonball Run, with 3 generations of hardware and 2 of camera systems that think box trucks are craypaper.
Aside from the whole âjobs program for meat bags until software replaces themâ, they also just fully-exited their erstwhile toxic founder Travis. 
Edit: here is a comparable
Swiss bank UBS has estimated that a pilot is typically in full control of a jet plane for an average of just 7 minutes on each flight. It has also claimed that single-pilot commercial and cargo planes could take to the skies within the next five years.
Thatâs one way to take the edge off the pilot shortageâŚ
That or better pay and benefits for those starting out with regionals coming in with huge student loans.
Ten years is a long time. First, Teslaâs failure to use LIDAR is inexcusable but doesnât mean that the tech doesnât exist. Second and more impairments, AI is going to continue to advance and thatâs really a more important factor for autonomous driving. The tech of seeing roads and objects is relatively straight forward, how the car makes decisions is not. That all said, I donât think regulatory guidelines are going to allow self driving tech in America before 2030 while autonomous driving on highway will be possible in other countries.
Low pay for regional pilots is largely a thing of the past. I have a close family member who is working towards his 1500 hours now doing aerial surveying. He is already getting offers from both domestic regional airlines and International airlines. With Middle East and China offering 100k for relatively inexperienced pilots, the regionals canât be offering 30k anymore. Also, after hearing his training stories Iâd think twice before flying an airline from outside the US or EU. There is a reason none of SWA, AA, UA or Air Canadaâs 737Maxs crashed.
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Is the Savior running a sweatshopâŚ
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