Tesla readies fully self-driving cars
Announcement comes despite questions about technology
SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla expects that by the second quarter of next year, it will be selling fully self-driving cars in which humans won’t have to touch the steering wheel.
The company made the announcement during an investor conference at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters Monday, in which it outlined its bid to transform Tesla’s electric cars into driverless vehicles.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told investors that the company’s computer to enable its electric cars to become self-driving vehicles is powered by the best processing chip in the world.
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.”
Experts say they’re skepti
cal whether Tesla’s technology has advanced anywhere close 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.
“It’s all hype,” said Steven Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley 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.”
More than 60 companies in the U.S. alone are developing autonomous vehicles. Some are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in limited areas as early as this year.
Many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade or more.
Musk’s description of Tesla’s controls as “Full SelfDriving” has alarmed some observers who think it will give owners a false sense of security and create potentially lethal situations in conditions that the autonomous cars can’t handle. They also say they’re waiting for Musk to define self-driving and show just under what conditions and places the vehicles can travel without human intervention.
Some Tesla critics say Musk is making the announcement of full selfdriving to distract from poor earnings expected Wednesday. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first-quarter net loss based on disappointing deliveries. Even bullish analysts expect bad news.
Musk continues to use
both his Twitter account and Tesla’s website to pump up a new computer now in production for fully self-driving vehicles. Once the self-driving software is ready, those with new computers will get an update via the Internet, Musk has said. Currently the self-driving computer costs $5,000. The price rises to $7,000 if it’s installed after delivery.
On Monday, Musk said Tesla has a huge advantage over autonomous-vehicle competitors because it gathers a huge amount of data in the real world. This quarter, he said Tesla will have 500,000 vehicles on the road, each equipped with eight cameras, ultrasonic sensors and radar gathering data to help build the company’s neural network.
The network allows vehicles to recognize images, determine what objects are and figure out how to deal
with them.
That’s different from the self-driving systems being built by nearly every other company in the industry, including Google spinoff Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise Automation, and Ford-affiliated Argo AI. They all use cameras and radar covering 360 degrees, and also have added light-beam sensors called Lidar to the mix as a third redundant sensor, as well as detailed three-dimensional mapping.
“Vehicles that don’t have Lidar, that don’t have advanced radar, that haven’t captured a 3-D map are not self-driving vehicles,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technical officer, said during a recent interview with Recode. “They are great consumer vehicles with really good driverassist technology.”
But Musk on Monday called Lidar a “fool’s errand.”
“They’re expensive sensors
that are unnecessary,” he told investors. “It’s like having a whole bunch of appendixes.”
Amnon Shashua, CEO of Israeli autonomous-vehicle computing company Mobileye, says cars with 360-degree cameras and front facing radar could drive autonomously, but they would not be as safe as human drivers. Careful humans can drive 10 million hours without a mistake leading to a fatal crash, but cars without full redundant sensors cannot, he said.
Tesla already has been offering a system called “Autopilot” that can control cars on a limited basis with constant monitoring by a human driver. But questions already have been raised about Autopilot’s reliability after its involvement in three fatal crashes.
In one, neither the driver nor a Tesla Model S operating on the company’s Autopilot driver-assist system spotted a tractor-trailer crossing in front of it on a Florida, highway in 2016. The car drove under the trailer, shearing off the roof and killing the driver.
In a 2017 report, the National Transportation Safety Board wrote that driver inattention and design limitations of Autopilot played major roles in the fatality, and it found that the Model S cameras and radar weren’t capable of detecting a vehicle turning into its path. Rather, the systems are designed to detect vehicles they are following to prevent rear-end collisions.
The agency also is still investigating the two other lethal crashes, one last month in Delray Beach, Fla., similar to the 2016 Florida crash, and another involving a Tesla SUV that was operating on Autopilot when it hit a highway lane-dividing barrier in Silicon Valley.