from Hacker News

Tesla Autopilot

by chetangole on 6/17/17, 2:40 AM with 340 comments

• by Animats on 6/17/17, 6:00 AM

  Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what's going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can't quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference.

  The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven. Object recognition is limited. It doesn't recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge. Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge. It probably can't drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video.

  This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That's nice, but it's not good enough that you can go to sleep while it's driving.

• by adanto6840 on 6/17/17, 4:28 AM

  This is quite interesting, I hadn't seen or heard about their intention to restrict like this, prior reading it tonight:

  "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."

• by billhathaway on 6/17/17, 4:31 AM

  Tesla sent out an email today.

  Autopilot Updates We just released the latest version of Autopilot. You can now experience Enhanced Autopilot features including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Autosteer, Auto Lane Change, Parallel + Perpendicular Autopark, and Summon. Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward + Side Collision Warning, and more advanced safety features are also active and standard.

  All Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. And Tesla vehicles continue to improve with over-the-air software updates, introducing new features and improving existing functionality to make your vehicle safer and more capable over time.

• by ilaksh on 6/17/17, 4:31 AM

  From this you can see, they are selling, and people are buying, a self-driving car.

  My theory is still that the demo video is actually from Nvidia's SDK and the actual autopilot they deployed is totally different and not actually in the 'self-driving' category at all at this point.

  But they are very aggressively rolling out updates and new features for more autonomy and yes they do intend to push for a complete door-to-door self-drive ASAP, ideally before the end of 2017 (at least as a new alpha version they can demo). Otherwise they would not sell it as such. But they do not plan to take another year to get there, based on Musk's tweets and the fact so many already paid extra for a full self-driving ability.

• by pilif on 6/17/17, 3:48 AM

  This is an old microsite from last October. Most features listed on that page are not available in production (or at all).

• by manav on 6/17/17, 6:25 AM

  I have an AP1 car and a AP2 loaner (for the last month). This is just reaching parity to AP1 autopilot capabilities. AP2 has been crippled since launch.

  There a few new features that my AP1 might not have like Perpendicular Autopark, but I won't know till I get it back. From what it seems it's just gotten to the level that they were with with the previous generation that was developed by or in conjunction with MobilEye.

  I think they will need a hardware revision for actual full self driving perhaps 2 years away.

• by EngineerBetter on 6/17/17, 5:17 AM

  This is not news. Current Tesla vehicles with Autopilot 2 hardware can do nowhere near this aspirational list. My AP2 Model X cannot even tell when to turn the windscreen wipers on.

  This is a statement of intent, and production vehicles are a long way from having software that enables this.

• by jonah on 6/17/17, 6:00 AM

  "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar." -- that'll teach you to make sure your schedule is up-to-date!

• by madengr on 6/17/17, 5:18 AM

  Will I get a DUI if I'm drunk and my car drives me home? Say I'm in the back seat.

• by rvalue on 6/17/17, 5:54 AM

  I don't think these autopilot systems will work well in crowded cities or cities with poor infrastructure for roads.

  The amount of objects for detecting and avoiding will be way too high.

  The tests shows almost clear conditions for driving. This should be tested on streets of NY or a busy city like Mumbai

• by jshap70 on 6/17/17, 4:12 AM

  I love watching videos like the one they have on there. theres something almost hypnotic about it

• by YeGoblynQueenne on 6/17/17, 10:30 AM

  Self-driving cars' marketing pitch is that they could reduce road accidents, but if we really want to reduce road accidents, might we not have a better chance at it if we removed cars from roads altogether? We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that.

  I think one big selling point of cars has always been that they grant the user a great amount of autonomy (unprecedented, in their time, taken for granted nowadays). You can ride your car and go anywhere you like! The cost of that autonomy of course is that some of us will be killed or maimed in road accidents, because you can't give silly little monkeys autonomy behind the controls of big powerful machines without death and carnage ensuing.

  Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place. What remains would be just a mindless automatic system carting the user to and fro. Well, in that case- we don't need to wait around for full level-5 autonomy. We already have dumb machines that can do that: trains, trams, all sorts of vehicles-on-rails.

  Why do we need self-driving cars, then?

  Answer: we don't. And I haven't for a moment believed that any of this is anything to do with road safety. Note that nobody even discusses the other 900 pound gorilla in the room: pollution.

  Guess what? Taking cars off roads completely would also reduce air and noise pollution tremendously.

• by SigmundA on 6/17/17, 4:28 PM

  Hopefully better than AP1: http://imgur.com/gallery/T5j32i9

• by _up on 6/17/17, 10:26 AM

  Autopilot for Batteries. What I wonder is, why isn't anyone building self driving batteries that park near the road and can follow you and give you more range if needed. They only would need to implement some kind of follow mode witch should be relatively easy. Cars could be build light and inexpensive and at the same time come with infinitive range.

• by redthrowaway on 6/17/17, 7:15 AM

  That car is driving oddly. It stopped for pedestrians who were on the sidewalk, and several times it stopped after making a turn. I could see that being really frustrating for other drivers and even dangerous if it's doing unpredictable things no human driver would do in those circumstances.

• by PinguTS on 6/17/17, 4:31 AM

  "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

  That claim is strong and false. What about Roadster and the old Model S with the old AP1 hardware?

• by bshimmin on 6/17/17, 6:35 AM

  I love the idea of Smart Summon - it reminds me of one of the Assassin's Creed games where you would whistle and your horse would magically appear a moment or two later!

• by make3 on 6/17/17, 5:40 PM

  Tesla plans to restrict the use of their car AI when it is for uber-like uses to their own to-be-announced network! That's probably the biggest news here, for me at least! "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."

• by arikr on 6/17/17, 4:05 AM

  > Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.

  I wonder what the current status is, both in terms of software validation, and regulatory approval.

• by BatFastard on 6/17/17, 3:54 PM

  No one seems to be commenting on the fact that they are doing this all with camera's and ultrasonic sensors. No LIDAR at all, which in the short term certainly provides for a better looking car. And considering the fact that it lowers the car price by a significant factor, seems like a pretty amazing thing!

• by Waterluvian on 6/17/17, 3:47 PM

  Progress will of course be incremental. But I think about the delta between summer in California and Canadian winter driving conditions and I think there's still such a long long way to go to full full autonomy.

• by aerovistae on 6/17/17, 7:26 AM

  I don't think this is a new page on their site-- why is this suddenly at the top of HN? There's no new info here; this isn't an update or press release.

• by vosper on 6/17/17, 6:30 AM

  I sure hope it works, for the sake (and lives) of people who own them. And for the people who have to drive alongside them (everyone).

• by f0under on 6/17/17, 5:57 PM

  Anyone identify which road the car is driving on? Looks familiar like the area around Foothills but couldn't tell.

• by welpwelp on 6/17/17, 1:18 PM

  There's so much room for error I can't wait to see how this will turnout.

• by swah on 6/17/17, 4:23 PM

  What kind of hardware supports all this signal processing? FPGAs? GPUs?

• by aladine on 6/17/17, 1:25 PM

  that is amazing offer from Tesla as hardward+software upgrade as a package. I also love the design of "call to action" buttons for buying 2 new car models.

• by theprop on 6/17/17, 4:07 AM

  Can it self-drive in snow and rain?

• by stdcall83 on 6/17/17, 8:05 AM

  Look ma! No hands!

• by neofromfut on 6/17/17, 2:13 PM

  Staged demo. Just driving on single lane, Occasional turns roads at best demonstrates advanced lane guidance. Do a cross country and you've shut everyone's mouth.