Tesla putting ‘self-driving’ in the hands of its drivers
SANFRANCISCO » In a year when Tesla might have been forgiven for extending its timeline on a key initiative, Elon Musk is forging ahead with a vision for what he calls “Full Self-Driving.”
This week, a group of drivers was selected to receive a software update that downloaded automatically into their cars, enabling the vehicles to better steer and accelerate without human hands and feet. According to Tesla, hundreds of thousands of its cars will be able to drive themselves as soon as this year, probably making them the first large fleet of vehicles billed as autonomous owned by ordinary consumers.
Tesla is forging ahead despite skepticism among some safety advocates about whether Tesla’s technology is ready - and whether the rest of the world is ready for cars that drive themselves. An industry coalition consisting of General Motors’ Cruise, Ford, Uber and Waymo, among others, this week criticized themove by Tesla, saying its vehicles are not truly autonomous because they still require an active driver.
Self- driving is lightly regulated in the United States, and Tesla does not need permission to launch the new feature.
A point of contention among Tesla’s critics is that the company is moving ahead without a key
piece of hardware. Nearly all self-driving carmakers have embraced lidar sensors, which are placed on the outside of vehicles and can detect the precise size, shape and depth of objects in real time, even in bad weather.
Instead, Tesla is trying to achieve full self- driving with a suite of cameras and a type of radar that are constantly connected to an advanced neural network. Tesla’s technology can detect vehicles and pedestrians in the road and some objects such as trees, but it cannot always see the true shape or depth of the obstacles it encounters, according to some safety experts. That might not allow the car to distinguish between a box truck and a semi as it approached the rig frombehind, for example.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has decried lidar as “expensive,” redundant and “a fool’s errand,” calling anyone who relied on it “doomed.”
In addition, unlike autonomous vehicle companies such as Waymo and
Cruise, which have been testing their self- driving cars in controlled pilot programs, Tesla has decided to put its self-driving technology into the hands of consumers. That means the risks of a malfunction will be absorbed by ordinary drivers.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said itwill not activate full self-driving until it receives regulatory approval, though it remains unknown exactly what certification would be needed. Musk said on Twitter the self- driving beta rollout would be “extremely slow & cautious, as it should.”
Demonstrating the challenges, in one such recent update, some Tesla cars could detect red lights and stop signs but would not proceed through the intersection until the driver confirmed via the accelerator or steering wheel stalk that the traffic light was green, according to Tesla.
“The fundamental challenge of neural nets is achieving sufficient reliability to use in a safetycritical system,” said Edward Niedermeyer, communications director for the Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) campaign, a coalition of nonprofits seeking to help the public better understand driverless technology.
“I’mpuzzled as to where the confidence came from almost four years ago that they’d be able to do this,” said Niedermeyer, who wrote the 2019 book “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.” “The reason you do these things is because it’s an extremely hard problem, and it’s not realistic to solve this problem with some cameras.”
Silicon Valley regards autonomous vehicles as the holy grail of transportation’s future, enabling customers to deploy their cars as driverless robotaxis, making the owners money even when they would be typically parked in the garage, in Tesla’s case. It could also shrink the cost of an Uber or Lyft trip to just cents on the mile by eliminating the need to pay a driver.
Several companies are making slow but steady progress on that goal, too. Waymo announced this month it would be launching driverless vehicles in the Phoenix metro area, becoming the first entity to bring the vision of fully autonomous cars to consumers as part of a dedicated ride-hailing service. Last week, Cruise said it would launch driverless cars in San Francisco, becoming the first company to debut unmanned vehicles in such a complex city environment and the country’s second-dense st metropolis.