Hope or hype? Elon Musk to make Tesla’s all self-driving cars
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said he is planning to transform the company’s electric cars into driverless vehicles.
Musk said earlier this month that his company’s cars should be able to navigate congested highwaysandcitystreetswithout a human behind the wheel by no later than next year.
And he told investors the company’s computer to enable its electric cars to become self-driving vehicles is powered by “the best processing chip in the world”.
Musk made the bold declaration yesterday during an event in Silicon Valley to show off Tesla’s plans to give the owners of its cars the option to turn all the driving over to a robot.
Tesla had never made its own computer chip before it hired an ex-apple engineer three years ago to design it.
Now, Musk boasts the chip is better than any other on the market “by a huge margin”.
“I could be wrong, but
it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of everyone,” Musk said ahead of an investor event to showcase the technology at the company’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters.
Experts have cast doubt on that claim however, saying they’re sceptical whether Tesla’s technology has advanced to the point where its cars will be capable of being driven solely by a robot, without a human in position to take control if something goes awry.
More than 60 companies in the US alone are developing autonomous vehicles, and most experts agree the technology will not be widespread for at least a decade.
“It’s all hype,” said Steven E Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”
There are about 400,000 Teslas on the road worldwide. Tesla vehicles equipped for full autonomy will rely on eight cameras that cover 360 degrees, front-facing radar and short-range ultrasonic sensors. That’s different from the self-driving systems being built by nearly every other company in the industry, including Google spinoff Waymo, which use cameras and radar covering 360 degrees, and light beam sensors called Lidar.
Even Lidar doesn’t guarantee 100 per cent safety. An Uber autonomous test vehicle with Lidar as well as a human backup driver ran down and killed a pedestrian last year in Tempe, Arizona, the first known death involving selfdriving technology.
Tesla already offer a system called “Autopilot” that can control cars with constant monitoring by a human driver – but questions have already been raised about it’s reliability after its involvement in three fatal crashes.