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Transportation Software Hardware Technology

Tesla's Autopilot To Get 'Full Self-Driving Feature' In August (reuters.com) 180

Earlier today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that its Autopilot driver assistance system will get full self-driving features following a software upgrade in August. Reuters reports: Autopilot, a form of advanced cruise control, handles some driving tasks and warns those behind the wheel they are always responsible for the vehicle's safe operation. But a spate of recent crashes has brought the system under regulatory scrutiny. "To date, Autopilot resources have rightly focused entirely on safety. With V9, we will begin to enable full self-driving features," Musk tweeted here on Sunday, replying to a Twitter user.

Musk said the autopilot issue during lane-merging is better in the current software and will be fully fixed in the August update. However, it was not clear what self-driving features would be included in the August update. Tesla's documentation on its website about the "full self-driving capabilities" package says that it is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.

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Tesla's Autopilot To Get 'Full Self-Driving Feature' In August

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  • Fake News (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11, 2018 @08:43PM (#56769358)

    Can we get a better law passed to make deceptive quoting and deceptive titles illegal? "begin to enable full self-driving features" is not nearly the same as "get 'full self-driving features'". No wonder the news industry is dying. It's all just bullshit, same as gossip.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This could be as little as adding the ability to read road signs, something that the old AP1 hardware could do but which the newer AP2 hardware has lacked for years.

      It's probably just Tesla finally enabling all the cameras that they have installed in the car. At the moment only half of them are actually in use.

      To get to fully autonomy they need to add the ability to read road signs, the ability to differentiate different kinds of vehicles (cars/bikes), and some kind of 3D vision (probably comparing consecut

    • Do airplane pilots have a different definition of "full" we are supposed to follow now too?

    • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      I just hope no one reads this and tries to take a nap the next time they turn on their Tesla autopilot.

  • by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Monday June 11, 2018 @08:53PM (#56769382)

    When approaching stopped car at high velocity, do not hit car. Hopefully they can expand that feature to cover other stationary objects as well, but I can see how that might be a "2.0” kind of thing.

    • "Oh yes we missed large concrete objects, we'll fix it OTA tomorrow."
      "Oh yes we missed large red firetrucks, we'll fix it OTA tomorrow."
      "Oh yes we missed police cars, we'll fix it OTA tomorrow."
    • When autonomously changing lanes to obtain preset cruising speed (set by driver in excess of posted limit), do not pull out where there is no lane, accelerate and crash into barrier to kill the driver as punishment for asking the car to do 75 in a 65 zone.

      https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]

    • do you even move fast and break stuff bro?
      • For things that are not safety critical, yes. For things that have health and safety consequences, no.
    • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      That safeguard code is easy to write:

      CASE WHEN IS Car THEN NOT KILL
      CASE WHEN IS Truck THEN NOT KILL
      CASE WHEN IS Bicycle THEN NOT KILL
      CASE WHEN IS Human THEN NOT KILL
      ELSE KILL;

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      When approaching stopped car at high velocity, do not hit car. Hopefully they can expand that feature to cover other stationary objects as well, but I can see how that might be a "2.0” kind of thing.

      The logic of "do not hit parked car" is not the issue.

      The issue is "is that a parked car or a leaf" and by the time computers have figured it out, they've hit it. OK if it was a leaf, shit if it was a parked car. In the rush to make self driving cars serious corners are being cut. The fact is that computers are not good at determining what objects are if given a long time to process the input data... They're even worse when they have to process it in less than a second. If an unidentified object in the r

      • Which is why you also have ultrasonic and radar sensor input to "vote" on an issue. You also have sufficient cameras and angles that the vision logic can vote as well among the different perspectives... and you have a lot more time as a computer than as a human, as your processing loop should take nowhere near a second to converge.

        If you can't do this, it isn't autonomous, and never will be.

    • It does already do some automatic emergency breaking and they are working on improving the performance of this; but it's not a trivial problem to solve.

      See https://youtu.be/kFF1AHeIf14?t... [youtu.be]

  • Liability insurance payments will skyrocket starting in August, as they will now be on the hook for any accidents that happen whilst running Autopilot. No more excuses of "it's just an aid, you still need to hold the wheel". Musk is explicitly claiming self-driving capabilities.
  • I knew a guy. He drove his car into an interstate overpass at 80+ mph. It was a failed suicide attempt (i.e., he lived).

    Point is, Tesla's autopilot is indistinguishable from a depressed, suicidal middle aged man that was just fired.

  • by slashdice ( 3722985 ) on Monday June 11, 2018 @09:27PM (#56769508)
    It's a nice car. It's a luxury car, nice interior. Kind of makes you feel like royalty, like a king. Or queen. More specifically, a princess. In particular, Princess Diana.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Jokes aside, the tesla interior is much closer in quality and style to a civic than a Mercedes.

      • This is very true. If you discount the flashy LED displays (which are extremely impressive), the materials and patterns of the interior are very underwhelming considering the price of the car. Step into an equivalently priced Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar etc. and you'll instantly feel, smell, and see much better quality interiors. The plain door panel on a Tesla, for example, is a plan swath of leather (maybe vinyl?) but in an equivalent German car, the leather is either quilted, patterned, or otherwise b
        • by eth1 ( 94901 )

          This is very true. If you discount the flashy LED displays (which are extremely impressive), the materials and patterns of the interior are very underwhelming considering the price of the car. Step into an equivalently priced Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar etc. and you'll instantly feel, smell, and see much better quality interiors.

          I own an Audi (2015) and a Porsche (2008), and I've been in a Model S (2016). The S is about equivalent to the Audi (a little better, maybe), and much better than the Porsche as far as interior quality goes.

          Mercedes, though, (the upper tiers, anyway) generally seem to have better interiors in general, not just compared to Tesla.

          • yup. The interior is actually made out of decent material, but, it is not fancy. However, they hired 2 ppl away from Volvo who did the XC-90's top end to re-do the interiors on tesla. So far, minor changes have been made. I think that Musk goals is to first get M3's production line solid, along with the hand portion, then re-do the M[SX].
    • Just a suggestion princess, buckle your seat belt.
  • does "self driving" mean what it means or is it a "self driving assist"?
  • by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:07PM (#56769838)

    Since 2016, anyone who paid Tesla for FSD got absolutely nothing over those who didn't. What feature will get rolled out in August is not publicly known, could be some trick the car can do that it couldn't before (e.g. warn you if it sees a stop sign or a red light, not guaranteed it will see one of course). Then again, given that Elon said the exact same thing in the past, "features rolling out starting December 2016", then "FSD coast-to-coast demo by end of 2017", and none of them came remotely true, I would not be holding my breath. Could be just a way to distract the media from NHTSA investigation results, or other news Elon wasn't thrilled to see.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem with all these little incremental improvements is that they just make the driver more and more reliant on features that are not reliable.

      • by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @03:55AM (#56770544)

        That actually is is a much bigger problem, and Google/Waymo and other researcher have concluded there is no safe way to implement a self driving car if humans have to supervise it and be able to take over in a split second (as per Tesla's fine print) when it does something wrong, such as try to kill you by driving into a concrete median:
        Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]

        Elon got it wrong, self driving is a separate problem and you can't get there incrementally by increasing the level of autonomy (think wanting to go to the moon - going farther and farther by car will never get you there):
        People who paid Tesla $3,000 for full self-driving might be out of luck https://arstechnica.com/cars/2... [arstechnica.com]

        • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @05:25AM (#56770728)

          Actually, you can. But you need to start from the other end.

          Start with automatic breaking to avoid hitting obstacles, including pedestrians and bicycles. Get that perfect. Then automatic stopping when the driver falls asleep. Then add automatic take over and stopping if the car starts swerving out of its lane. Add automatic stopping for red light...

          I.e. let the human drive, and the computer monitor ready to take over at a millisecond notice.

          Once all the safety features are working, all you need is to add the GPS subsystem that tells the car where to go.

        • Elon got it wrong, self driving is a separate problem and you can't get there incrementally by increasing the level of autonomy

          And Elon claims he has statistics that incremental autonomy improves safety in spite of the failures. The fact is that we don't know. We just have anecdotes.

  • by seoras ( 147590 ) on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:19PM (#56769880)

    This, this is courage.

    • Jobs made beautiful technology but Cook has a beautiful balance sheet.

      It turns out coasting on the past is more profitable than taking risks. For now (this scenario is why interruptors can emerge).

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It will fully self drive you into the barrier ... you won't have to lift a finger! (or be able to, afterwards)

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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