Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get
a lot of conflicting information on autonomous
driving.
On one side you’ve got people saying, “autonomous
driving is closer than you think.”
On the other side you have people saying,
“autonomous driving is years away at the
earliest.”
Tesla just held an autonomy investor day to
show off their latest tech and software, as
well as to show how the company plans to take
advantage of it.
So why did Tesla hold this event now and how
far off are we?
Before we dive in, take a moment and hit the
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I’m Matt Ferrell ... welcome to Undecided.
Now, let’s see if we can make a decision
on this.
So let’s kick this off by jumping into what
autonomous driving even is.
There are actually some guidelines for the
different levels of automation from the NHTSA:[1]
- Level 0 - No Automation.
- This is the majority of cars on the road.
- Level 1 - Driver Assistance
- This vehicle can assist with steering or
braking, but not at the same time.
Think adaptive cruise control.
- Level 2 - Partial automation
- This vehicle can assist with steering and
braking at the same time, but still requires
the driver’s full attention.
This is where most modern cars that have some
kind of “automation” fall today.
It’s basically lane assist and adaptive
cruise control.
- Level 3 - Conditional automation
- This is where a driver is still required,
but they don’t have to keep their eyes on
the road.
The car handles almost everything.
- Level 4 - High automation
- This is where companies like Waymo currently
operate.
A driver is only required in certain circumstances,
so if the conditions are right, then the car
can completely drive itself.
- Level 5 - Full automation
- Exactly what you’d expect.
This is when no human driver is required at
any point.
As of today, cars like Teslas are all falling
into the level 2 bucket of automation.
The car up until this point has basically
been a combination of lane assist and adaptive
cruise control, but Tesla has really upped
the ante recently with the seamless Navigate
on Autopilot firmware update.
The car can now pass slow cars on it’s own,
take you through highway interchanges and
ramps, and all without user interaction.
From today’s event they stated that over
100,000 automatic lane changes are happening
everyday.
All without an accident.
The driver still needs to be alert and ready
to take over, but the car is doing all of
the driving on the highway.
There’s also the underlying technology to
consider with self-driving cars.
Right now there are two basic approaches:
LIDAR[2] vs. vision.
Most companies, like Waymo, have taken the
path of LIDAR, which is shooting a spinning
laser into the environment and getting back
very accurate data for objects and distances.
One downside is that this technology is very
expensive, breaks down easily, and struggles
with certain conditions like fog and rain.
Vision, which is what Tesla is working on,
uses affordable cameras paired with ultrasonic
sensors and radar to see the environment.
One of the benefits of the vision approach
is that the car sees much of the environment
like we do, and if trained properly, could
learn to navigate our existing roadways.
See and understand stop lights and street
signs.
The downside is that this method requires
immense amounts of data for deep learning
to train the AI to drive the roads.
Which method is the better path?
That’s still up in the air as nobody has
fully cracked a self-driving car in all conditions
yet.
Elon stated very strongly that LIDAR is a
crutch and he expects all other companies
to back away from
that path.
I’d strongly recommend checking out Lex
Fridman, who is a research scientist at MIT,
and his YouTube channel for some great lectures
on the subject.
I’ll include a link in the description.[3]
So why did Tesla hold this Autonomous Investor
Day event?
It comes down to the fact that Tesla considers
themselves a leader in self-driving technology,
but they’re often overlooked by the marketplace.
Companies like Waymo and Uber tend to capture
mindshare around self-driving capabilities
and research.
Many also consider LIDAR the better technology
for self-driving cars as well.
Navigant Research created an autonomous driving
leaderboard based on a company's autonomous
vision and execution, which puts Tesla near
the back of the pack.[4] It’s a really strange,
and in my opinion deeply flawed, leaderboard
they’ve created because most companies are
still working behind closed doors.
There’s no real product on the market, and
for those that do it’s very limited in scope
at this point.
How do you compare companies autonomous driving
tech, strategy, sales, and product when most
of this is still a work in progress?
It’s really strange.
Add to that the recent IPO of Lyft and Uber’s
upcoming IPO, which some have valued at between
$76 and $120 billion.[5] That would give Uber
a much larger market cap than Tesla, which
is currently under $50 billion, even though
Uber doesn’t manufacture their own cars
or have a clear path to profitability.[6]
Ride sharing and autonomy is seen as one of
the next big things.
Tesla is trying to combat the perception that
they aren’t a leader in autonomous driving.
They don’t see themselves as just a car
company, they also see themselves as software
company.
They’re continually hammered by critics
around delivery numbers and company profitability,
rightfully so, but that's only one part of
the story.
Not only is Tesla successfully selling one
of the most popular luxury sedans right now,
but they’re also one of the companies that’s
closest to having a full self-driving car
on the market.
Unlike their autonomous car rivals, Tesla
has over 400,000 cars on the road (nearing
500,000) with the full sensor suite, which
includes 8 cameras, 12 ultra sonic sensors,
GPS, and radar.
Their competitors are in the thousands.
And when it comes to winning the machine learning
and autonomous race, data is the key.
The amount of data Tesla is collecting is
immense and dwarfs their competition, we’re
talking about over 1 billion miles logged
with Autopilot, which is something that often
gets glossed over when it comes to Tesla in
comparison to those other companies.
This quest for data and doubling down on automony
is also the driving force in Tesla’s decision
to include autopilot on all cars they manufacture
now ... it’s no longer an add-on option.
And as soon as Tesla has full self-driving
available, they’ll be able to activate their
own ride sharing service, the Tesla Network.
Hundreds of thousands of cars on the road,
that can start earning their owners money
by shuttling passengers around ... on their
own.
It’s not to say that every Tesla owner will
do that (I most likely won’t), but the fact
that Tesla could become a major player in
the ride sharing world overnight is something
Lyft and Uber should be worried about.
Tesla recently announced a lease option for
the Model 3, but with a strange twist.
At the end of your two year lease, you won't
have the option to buy the car.
Instead Tesla wants to hold onto these cars
and use them as part of the Tesla Network,
which means Tesla itself is going to own and
operate a fleet of ride sharing vehicles.
This changes the whole dynamic of cost of
ownership when it comes to a Tesla.
As Elon put it in a recent interview on Lex
Fridman’s Artifical Intelligence podcast:
“Buying a car today is an investment into
the future.
I think the most profound thing is that if
you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying
an appreciating asset — not a depreciating
asset.”
- Elon Musk[7]
Someone who spent $45,000 dollars on their
new Tesla Model 3 can start having the car
earn it’s own keep by acting like a taxi
in its downtime.
It’s conceivable, much like Elon is suggesting,
that your car could actually turn into a profit
maker for you as an owner.
That is just ... bananas.
Is self-driving really that close?
Well, if Tesla keeps to their word then, yes
... sort of.
I do believe Elon and Tesla that they’ll
have the new full self-driving computer and
software being pushed out to their fleet by
the end of this year.
But there’s a big difference between having
a car capable of full self driving and actually
being able to do it.
There are major regulation hurdles that Tesla
will have to jump through and prove that their
system is actually safer than a human driver
before anyone can take a nap during their
commute to work.
I conducted my own survey last week because
I was curious how others felt about self-driving
cars and how quickly they’d be willing to
jump on board.
I asked three questions:
- How likely are you to use a self-driving
car as soon as it’s available?
- Would you buy a self-driving car?
- What safety standards should a self-driven
car be held to vs. a human-driven car?
I had a hunch where the results would land,
but I was surprised by some of the responses.
On the first question I was expecting the
majority of people to fall in the middle somewhere.
In fact, I thought most people would be in
the, “yes, but in a very limited way”
group.
Instead, half of respondents actually said,
“very likely!
I’ll use it all the time.”
42% were split between “in a limited way”
and “I’ll wait until the bugs get worked
out.
But that still means 92% are open to self-driven
cars at some point and in some form.
On the second question, 83% said they’d
buy a self-driving car.
Again, that really surprised me.
I expected it to the be the majority, but
not by that margin.
On the last question, this fell in line with
what I was basically expecting.
55% said a self-driven car needs to be dramatically
safer than a human-driven car.
40% said it only needs to be as good or better
than a human driver.
Removing all emotion from the argument, it
makes logical sense that a self-driving car
only needs to be as good or better than a
human driver.
But we’re not a group of Vulcans here.
Emotion plays a big role in acceptance.
So that’s where my optimism gets a healthy
dose of cold reality.
It’s going to take a lot to gain the confidence
and approvals from regulators and the public
in order for drivers to be able to take a
backseat ... literally.
Elon made that exact point in the same Lex
Fridman interview:
”How much safer than a person does Autopilot
need to be, for it to be okay to not monitor
the car?
And this is a debate that one can have, and
then, but you need a large amount of data,
so that you can prove, with high confidence,
statistically speaking, that the car is dramatically
safer than a person.
And that adding in the person monitoring does
not materially affect the safety.
So it might need to be 200 or 300% safer than
a person.”
- Elon Musk
He says that would be measured by incidents
per mile, which includes all forms of crashes
and injuries.
Even after they release the full self-driving
capabilities, autopilot will still require
a driver to be attentive, hand on the wheel,
like they do today.
Elon’s suggestion that it might take 6 months
of that testing before they could go to a
driver kicking back and tuning out seems a
little optimistic to me.
It’s Elon time, so it might be better to
double or triple that estimate at the earliest,
but it’s still impressive that Tesla is
that close to having full self-driving capable
features out in the wild for people to start
using.
Again ... bananas.
The final piece that’s probably the biggest
factor is all of us.
How will people react when they see a car
driving itself through a parking lot?
How will people react if they’re driving
behind a autonomous car that they think is
to slow or cautious?
People that are angry and fear losing their
job driving a car for a living?
We already see people lashing out against
EVs with coal rolling or ICING charging spots.
We’re probably going to see more aggressive
behavior or vandalism of self-driving cars
... until it starts to become the norm.[8]
I do think autonomous cars are closer than
many people think from a technology standpoint,
and that Tesla will launch full self-driving
capabilities this year or early next year
... but that we won’t see regulatory approvals
for true self-driving for quite some time.
It’s going to vary wildly state by state,
country by country, and I’d guess that we’re
looking at quite a few years before it’s
rolled out to most places where current Tesla
owners reside.
What do you think?
Do you think that Tesla is going to hit those
milestones and have full self driving available
sometime in 2020?
Or do you think that autonomous driving is
just much further off?
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