Tesla's Autopilot is losing out to Ford, GM in self-driving tech Tesla's Autopilot "self driving" technology has slipped to the middle of the active driver assist (ADA) software pack, says the nonprofit Consumer Reports, as companies like Ford and General Motors have overtaken the Musketeers in the automotive code lane. Consumer Reports reached that conclusion after testing 12 different ADA …
You mean that the rich upstart company bankrolled by an insanely stupid billionaire that's basically gone bust multiple times in its 18 year history, which hasn't sold as many cars in its entire history as Ford does in a year, suddenly isn't able to compete even in its own area of "expertise" (*cough*) now that the traditional manufacturers are dialling down their ICE production (which was only there to make most use of its patents and tooling before they become obsolete forever) now that most countries have set a deadline for ending such engines?
You mean that as soon as the traditional manufacturers went "Sigh, yeah, okay then", their collective R&D budget (which outpaces Tesla's actual income many times over) absolutely trounces a so-called "tech" company at its own game, but in a safe way instead of a "let's just kill people but not mention it" kind of way?
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you. If only I said that... well, before most people had even heard of a Tesla.
The article clearly says that the reason why Tesla perform poorly in this mode, is that they are focusing on full self driving. Now, clearly you don’t believe in FSD, but that’s a separate discussion. The areas of lack in this mode are: driver alert, and being too aggressive about fallback. Neither of those are relevant to successful FSD. And, both of those are bolt-on capabilities relative to a “smooth, accurate, reliable” lane-following capability which Tesla has.
Clearly Tesla are missing important issues in this mode. But to say they aren’t capable, is just fanboi’ism for the legacy manufacturers. I’m not saying that Tesla is going to win this market. But one thing I do know: neither GM Ford nor VW are going to be household names in 2050. If it’s not Tesla, it will be some variant of Mobileye or Geely, with the assembly welders holding as much distinctiveness and pricing power as who makes the case on Dell laptops.
The “new features” are the ramp-up to FSD. You may have heard of FSD? People have mentioned it in the news.
I think you’re not being honest with yourself. You’re an FSD-denier, *as in fact am I*. I want to believe that FSD is coming in the next 10 years, but I think it isn’t yet, and Tesla is some way from having the best system even among those. Google is better.
And Musks refusal to use LIDAR is foolish. The lesson of most tech, is that the successful ones “cheat”. Cars aren’t faster horses. So I’m definitely not a Musk fanboi.
But this is all separate from “can tech firms win against legacy brands, based on new ADAS”. And the answer is, yes they can and will. Car manufacturers pride themselves on “not being able to do software”, and sub it all out apart from engine management. Car manufacturers profited as system integrators because they owned the engine. That’s all. That era is over as soon the engine becomes a commodity electric motor.
"Google is better."
You have to see how Waymo (google) is doing their navigation. They aren't on the "level" schedule with the way their cars work. The cars only operate on highly surveyed routes that are also equipped with specific nav aids and differential GPS to make necessary corrections to the inertial measurements.
Indeed, thats probably correct engineering tradeoff.Trying to make it all work by restricting yourself to only the techniques a human would use, is persisting to make a faster horse. The goal is to get people from A to B, not to prove some academic point whether this is really AI, or “humans are better drivers”. Globally, 90% of driving miles are on roads which have already been surveyed to the required accuracy, or could be.
In terms of cost-effectiveness, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that all the money spent on sleeping policemen (£2k each!) and speed bollards is a stranded asset. The infrastructure money is there, for autonomy upgrades, councils are just choosing to spend it on different road furniture. HS2 is going to cost £200 per *millimetre*, I think we can afford £200 per road to map it.
No leapfrog required. The levels are not an ordered list. You don’t *need* driver monitoring for FSD at all. And that’s one of two items that Tesla are being marked down heavily on.
A car is not a faster horse. An FSD vehicle is not a L2 modern car plus L5 features. Examples: smartphones are *really terrible* phones. The voice quality of a flagship Samsung falls well short of a 2005 Nokia flip-phone, which in turn is a dumpster fire for voice quality compared to a 1990 landline. Does anyone care? Apparently not.
The Tesla chassis is abysmal. Handling and bump tolerance is Seriously crap, an embarrassment to a Yank tank whale from the 60s. Does anyone care? Apparently not. Relevance for FSD? Because the figure of merit for a chassis on UK roads is whether it can handle a sweeping A-road with potholes and leaf-fall while pressing on. What will a FSD vehicle do? Ease off by 25mph to not stress the chassis performance. Job done. Fifty years of chassis development undone by software compensating to favour Lowest Common Denominator. The chassis simply no longer has to handle hard cases of fifty years of VW engineering design experience and skills, and as a consequence a chassis designed by some script kiddie is fine for sale.
Have you not noticed Porsche barely even makes sports cars any more? They make the Taycan. A shitcan box on wheels for super-obese Germans, paired with stonking horsepower. And it’s by far their most successful model. Stonking horsepower shitcan box on wheels for obese Americans, meet Tesla.
Cars are dead. Mourn their passing, I do, but accept they are DEADBEEF
Wow, ramble much? Teslas hit stationary vehicles and other objects in the road. They change lane unexpectedly. Tesla aren't avoiding required driving monitoring in their crap L2 because they are on the cusp of delivering L5, that's fantasy.
You sound like that kid at school who had a poster of a Ferrari on his bedroom wall, and thought his fantasy car was better than his older brother's real Capri. You have a fantasy, not a real thing, you get that?
Point is that L2 is not a stepping stone to L5. It’s a toy.
Tesla may well not win the race to L5: Waymo, Geely, pony.AI, autoX are all better. But notice how *none* of the contenders are legacy companies. Instead, Geely has already bought Volvo. That’s the future. Measuring autonomy progress by how quickly it buzzes the steering wheel when it all falls over in a screaming heap, is just ludicrous.
"Do you think it's going to simply require an over the air software update, and poof!"
I think that Elon and Tesla are going to get in some big trouble with this. The software and hardware will very much go hand in hand no matter how often Elon states that the hardware is already in place. The hardware that Elon said was ready to go was what was installed years ago. It's quite ancient at this point and a huge limitation. As a consumer, I love to have plenty of backwards compatibility so my purchases last as long as possible, but as an engineer, I know that it's a problem to drag the past with you.
I have no interest in a fully autonomous car. I enjoy driving and if I'd rather not, I take the train and other public transportation. For long trips, my preference is to take a train and then hire a car to get around locally. Overnight trains with a small room being the best way to go. Get settled in with a large G&T, have some sleep and wake up at my destination with a cuppa and a bun. It's the next best thing to a transfer booth (not holding out for that, btw).
"which was only there to make most use of its patents and tooling before they become obsolete forever"
A considerable amount of tooling is still very viable for the big automakers. Some of the smaller combustion engines will be going away, but there are still applications for larger engines where going electric isn't quite there yet. I believe that the biggest disadvantage that Tesla and the other EV startups have is the lack of depth in their parts bin. If Ford, GM or Daimler need a door handle or a HVAC damper, chances are they have one all designed and tooled up where somebody like Tesla has to start from scratch.
Back in the age of saber tooth cats, Popular Science Magazine had an article about the new "super highways". Each lane was for different speeds, 70, 80, 90, 100 mph. Your vehicle was controlled by a device mounted beside the engine and picked up signals from a wire embedded in the road. You got to speed in one lane, moved to the next and so on until you traveled at the desired speed. The device maintained safe distance between vehicles, kept speed at the desired rate, and handled all driving needs such as steering and selecting radio stations as you traveled across country. You put in the destination you wanted to get off and you were eased into the slower traffic toward your exit point.
They didn't address the needs of the driver and passenger, such as restroom and dining stops, or the need to refuel the vehicle. I guess there would have been male/female "relief tubes" to handle the wet end of that problem.
A really good idea that didn't catch on. Since the advent of EVs, this would have been a good way to power the electric motors on long trips, with a chance to recharge along the way. Toll stations at the exits would bill for miles driven for the EV.
And in our actual dumb modern world:
Sports car driver - I can accelerate faster than the fast lane before the onramp ends. (swerves into fast lane at 100 MPH)
Prius driver - Prius coming through! Prius heading to the Prius lane. (swerves into fast lane at 35 MPH)
Tesla driver - ... (texting)
12 cars totaled, 4 cars on fire, 5000 people stuck in traffic.
Rule one is to keep it safe.
Deliberately endangering a vehicle that is overtaking (irrespective of its speed) is illegal in most countries for fairly logical reasons - you are willingly exacerbating dangerous conditions and you're not judge and jury on other people's speed (not to mention the fact that you don't know why they're speeding, I've seen plenty of medical emergencies impeded by idiots).
you do not have to give way to anyone just because they want to drive faster.
Starting to overtake while you are already in the process of being overtaken is a multiple points offence in most countries I know. Irrespective of the speed, intention, gender and any other attribute you want to drag in to excuse this, it remains illegal for fairly logical reasons.
I've seen plenty of medical emergencies impeded by idiots
When I was being taken to hospital in the middle of a heart attack the ambulance I was in was heading off down the motorway at a decent speed [1] and, as is the wont, all the cars moved out of the way. Apart from one who (as related by my wife who was in the front) decided that they would use all the cars moving aside to go as fast as possible. The papmedic driving was deeply unimpressed and said that it happens all the time.
[1] This was in the second ambulance - the first one went into limp mode so they had to stop and wait for the replacement..
A really good idea
No, it really isn't. Relying on automated systems to "maintain[] safe distance", for example, would have a high failure rate and terrible failure modes.
In most of the world, private automobiles are maintained by their owners (or at the direction of their owners), and are not subject to frequent rigorous inspection. (In many US jurisdictions, they're not subject to inspection at all.) Transponders will fail when the vehicle is traveling at speed, reducing the amount of information other vehicles have about the failing one. Other sensor systems will fail. Driving mechanisms will fail. Cars will experience catastrophic failures of basic physical integrity – I've seen a rear bumper, a window, and a wheel all come off other vehicles on the highway. These events are very difficult even for very flexible and capable autonomous-driving systems to deal with; they'd be absolutely beyond the sort of thing described in Popular Science decades ago.
Automated systems are similarly troubled by intermittent road hazards. In the past five weeks I've driven through mountain passes six times; four of those times it was snowing briskly, resulting in a roadway that was alternately fine and slippery, due to snow drifting and other factors. One of those times was at night, and I could only determine where the lane was by my distance from the reflective markers on the side of the road. (Autonomous system could use a map and GPS? Right. You get a precise, accurate, continuous GPS lock while winding between mountain peaks at 60 mph with snow pouring out of the sky.) Around here, it's very common on a sunny winter day to be driving on clear roads and come around a corner where the road is shaded to the south, leaving a patch of slick ice. I've encountered oil slicks on roads, too. It's tough to create an AD system that handles those sorts of situations well.
People would modify their cars to override the automated systems so they could cheat, driving over the set speed when possible, passing in the wrong lane, etc.
What's the transition plan? Do we take already over-subscribed highways and make some of them automated-car-only? Yeah, that's going to work.
Cars aren't trains. If trains are what we want, or more precisely what we need, then that's what we should be investing in. It'd be technically feasible to replace a lot of private-passenger and cargo-transport long-distance car and truck use with a built-up rail network, and use autos (with car rental or some other process at the train station) for local transportation. An autocratic government could impose that sort of scheme. Wouldn't be popular. But the fix for highways isn't "smart highways", because they simply won't ever be smart enough.
Elmo's insistence that they remove all the sensors except the cameras can't be helping. Humans can drive with only one eye, but the car doesn't understand what it's actually seeing so it will chase people carrying stop signs and various other stupid things. The real win comes in giving cars better sensors than people can ever hope to have (like LIDAR) and then working with that info.
It's not the cost that is the reason why Tesla don't use LIDAR, it's because Elon pissed off MobilEye to the point they refused to sell to Telsa. And then Elon went on a big rant about how bad LIDAR is and how it will causes crashes, so no other LIDAR company wants to sell to Tesla either as they fear that Tesla will blame their equipment for any issues with autopilot.
Cost cutting is also the actual reason for the touch screen. Physical buttons cost more. In general, this sums up the reasons why I will never buy a Tesla - I can see the cost cutting that has taken place and it would irritate me every time I'd drive the car because the cost cutting only benefits the shareholders, the car is still priced way too high for what it is. Also, I don't want to drive with my head in a 45º angle just to keep an eye on my speed on the tablet, nor do I think it safe to wade through menus while driving...
Cost cutting is also the actual reason for the touch screen.
This one is a double whammy, the touch screen is much cheaper for them to make but they can sell it as an enhancement and charge more for it.
Think of the profit
Some of my cars controls are on a touch screen and it's a pain in the arse. You can't (or at least I can't) press them without looking and given the state of the roads these days your hand is frequently being bounced around as you drive over potholes so hitting the right bit on the screen is tricky, far harder than working with a physical button where it necessary I can feel my way down a line of switches till I find the one I want then press.
My son was recently looking to buy a replacement car and the latest model of Golf has everything on the touch screen including the heater controls FFS. Forget that, let's look at the previous model then.
Don't worry, the next iteration (2023 Q2) will get rid of all the expansive cameras, and replace them with an AI powered through blockchain.
Of course, the software update will be deployed only after the Tesla engineers have completed the needed updates on Twitter, somewhere around January 19, 2038.
Consumer Reports isn't really an unbiased actor here. There methodology isn't robust and many of their criteria aren't that relevant. So from a credibility standpoint you might be tempted to write it off as hot garbage from a company that is now dependent on kickbacks and uses every dark pattern in the books to keep billing people.
Read between the lines it still points out a bunch of serious problems. Tesla FIRED most of the self drive team quite a while ago. The self drive system hasn't evolved much, and it has been losing features faster than is has been gaining them(many because they were unsafe/didn't really work).
The CR staff roast Tesla for losing focus on the performance of self drive over other features, then with the other hand tars them for not implementing the same new features that the other manufactures did that aren't part of the self drive. The driver attention nagware is garbage too, but only to the extent that it distracts drivers by constantly cutting out the other driving features and making drivers fiddle with controls. They also tend to be badly biased in there performance, and the farther you are from the norm of what a GM systems engineer looks like, the more problems you will have. These systems are expensive, complicated, and not much more consistent.
Tesla's "attention" system is too far the other way perhaps, but so are the standard systems from most of the other majors. So it's disingenuous to call them out by name and not mention the others that don't offer it at all, or hold it back to some vehicles or trims.
And the article, like so many other cut and paste factoids keeps referring to the percentage of self drive accidents that are Telsas without clarifying how many crashes per vehicle/mile. More Teslas driving more miles = more accidents. Is this bad relative to the other companies they are shilling for this week? Is it better? And how many of those drivers were idiots? Were they even in the drivers seat? Impossible to say without more information, so why keep dropping the unqualified and misleading factoid?
I've read CR's car reviews since my first car back in 1972. In the ensuing years, not one of their reviews or opinions reflected my actual experience with the cars I've owned or driven. Some of their tests are so far from reality as to be laughable. How many people go down the road swerving back and forth like a slalom skier, except for drunks. I truly believe their reports are based on the comments made by the gripers and grousers who will complain if their ambient lighting (whatever the hell that's for) doesn't match their shirt colour. The ones who have no problems are quiet or ignored.
Swerving slalom style...
There's quite a few instances on that on roads near me.. I say roads, a mosaic of pothole and road. Judicious slalom moves needed to avoid the biggest & deepest damaging potholes.
Doubt any cruise system would deal with them though, no white line in centre or side of road, no pavement, road edges very poor quality & merge into vegetated rocky earth which any car vision system would struggle with in winter when most vegetation dead and so its quite dark & harder to tell road from soil (on occasion areas a bit more delineated as areas of dry stone wall)
"Doubt any cruise system would deal with them though, no white line in centre or side of road, no pavement, road edges very poor quality & merge into vegetated rocky earth which any car vision system would struggle with in winter when most vegetation dead and so its quite dark & harder to tell road from soil (on occasion areas a bit more delineated as areas of dry stone wall)"
Howdy neighbor!
I've read the whole review, I think it hangs together quite well. I don't see categories or their application bent to favour one company or category and the methodology is explained for each category and coherent. I may not entirely agree with their choices, but I don't find that much to disagree with.
brake booster, power steering and an auto trans
If it has those, it's not an old car..
(Admittedly, the Morris Minor has a brake servo and front disc brakes but that's because we fitted them.. No power steering, no auto box, barely any heating and a gearbox that doesn't have syncro on 1st. That's a *proper* old car! The mechanic who comes to collect it when it needs work often drives a 1930's Austin to pick it up..)
I have a 2014 Lincoln MKZ with the Technology package. I already knew its lane keeping feature will cause the steering to "rumble" if I cross the road line. It get especially upset if pass someone without using the turn signal (using the signals when changing lanes is mandatory under Ohio law). What I didn't realise until recently is it will keep the MKZ fairly well centered in the middle of the lane by itself. I discovered this during a sneezing jag. I wouldn't want to test it on a curve but it worked fine on the straight. That and the adjustable distance monitor are all I really need. Anything else is just more gimmickry and costly repairs.
Oh, and by the way, every car I've owned since my 1972 Pinto has had blind spot monitoring. It's called properly adjusting the wing mirrors.
it will keep the MKZ fairly well centered in the middle of the lane by itself.
That would be lethal round here. Narrow country roads with white lines along the edge, so the LCA systems force the car away from the verge into the centre of the road. Likely into the path of the oncoming HGV or bus which more than fills it's own 'lane'.
I'm waiting for the first tourist unfamiliar with narrow roads and these gadgets to be killed. The court case will be interesting.
After all, the real prize from being first to market with full self-driving tech is being first to all the lawsuits resulting from accidents involving autonomous vehicles.
Walking in later once the dust has settled means you get to rake in the cash without the risk of being bankrupted by compo seeking chancers.
How does this benefit Tesla? They're the only ones making promises that have not been kept, year after year, while other car companies actually do have the tech but so far have refrained from bringing theirs fully online because they have a whole industry to lose. Thus, Tesla is the only one under multiple investigations now.
"Advertiser Reports" is infamous for its surveys, rankings and reporting being biased towards OEMs that advertise with them and against OEMs that do not advertise with them. At times they have had to twist themselves in knots, and throw any credibility in the bin, to create rankings that do not show Tesla as the most popular or most effective EV.
I am not saying all fact here are automatically false, even a broken clock is correct twice a day, but they should never be taken as a credible source on any subject. They definitely have no interest in serving the "Consumer".
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