The reason I ask, is I’ve been seeing alot of news and cases of Tesla’s self driving acting up and being a point of contention. But back in 2016-17 my ex’s uncle and aunt got a Model X when they first dropped and they “auto-drove” us like 50 miles without any noticeable issue.
Was i just gambling my life or has the tech somehow gotten worse?
The tech never “evolved” in the first place. It was a deformity from the start. LIDAR was developed for this reason. But Tesla uses cheap ass cameras that try to interpret what it is seeing through the visual data. I’m guessing with my layman’s knowledge this is why they veer at semi trucks. Because the technology itself is based on a shitty premise.
In general I think you’re right about the tech just being shitty, but a slight correction: LiDAR was not developed for self-driving, it’s just a relevant application of the technology. LiDAR has been around for quite a while, and was initially best known as a remote sensing technology. It is effective at remote sensing because it can penetrate certain solid materials, most importantly foliage. So when an aerial LiDAR dataset is collected for a forested area, since the light can penetrate through most of the foliage, one can essentially ‘delete’ the vegetation from the resulting point cloud, leaving a bare earth model, which is a very close approximation of the landscape’s actual topography if there had been no trees. This can be especially valuable for archaeological research, as foliage is often a significant obstacle for accurately mapping large sites, or even finding them in the first place.
All of that to say, yeah, self-driving buzz made LiDAR well known as tech, but it wasn’t developed for that purpose.
The tech hasn’t regressed, it just hasn’t progressed while the marketing has.
Look up the automation levels: https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/94559/is-your-car-autonomous-the-6-levels-of-self-driving-explained
My wife’s car is 6 years old, and is level 2. Nothing amazing now, but kinda cool in 2018.
Since then expectations have increased dramatically, and the problems you’re hearing about are cars expected to have the higher levels of automation but failing to achieve that.
It seems like this is one of those technical problems that gets exponentially more difficult to solve, the closer we get to solving it. What I mean is, suppose a human averages 100,000km per “incident”. It was easy to make a car do 90,000km per incident, less so to have it do 95,000km per incident, but we’re finding it very very difficult to get that last 5% performance.
Probably the best answer
