Yeah, we had this discussion before. I'm just saying that the SAE levels are useless to me. Waymo's car is Level 4. But since I don't live in Chandler it's of no use to me. I need to know if a car will work on the roads where I live, and no car company is going to publish a nation-wide map showing which roads their car will and will not drive on, or clear and precise promises concerning the weather limitations.
FWIW, I don't think Tesla ever says its cars are Level 2. It says you have to remain alert and ready to take over, which is the definition of Level 2, but it never mentions levels. I doubt that any car company will reference the SAE levels. They'll make vague claims, worded so as to give them plausible deniability in court, that seem to be promising more than they really are.
Websites like this are where we'll really find out what the cars can do.
I watched the Volvo presentation about their 2022 XC90 with Lidar. Their intent (not the promised feature at intro) is to provide completely supervised highway automation, where you can sleep or do whatever and any mishaps are Volvo's responsibility. And by the way I've seen no "ten second rule" in that expressed concept. The
implication is that it'll be more like L4 while on the freeway, but will give you minutes of notice (I guess gentle followed by not-so-gentle alerts) to wake up and re-engage, in preparation for exiting into the non-autonomous ODD, and would have a safe fall-back if you fail to re-engage in time.
But when asked a number of times, they were very clear that they don't want to communicate their system's capabilities using the SAE definitions because those aren't clear enough nor precisely applicable. Instead they insisted that they would use the language of
"supervised" (assistance) vs "unsupervised" (autonomy) and the corollary
"driver is responsible" vs "Volvo is responsible."
In reading the recent SAE-level discussion here, I do think that it's become too focused on the SAE definitions and possible divergent interpretations. There's some arguing over behaviors that meet the letter of L3 or L4 but are not very safe, convenient or valuable. I think such issues will get sorted in the marketplace, and here we shouldn't be overly fixated on SAE levels as the most important descriptor of each new system - that issue is leading to tedious side arguments and in
most cases, isn't even in the published description from the manufacturer. I do see that Daimler.com (MB) has officially described upcoming Drive Pilot as
"an SAE Level 3 conditional automated driving system"
I think this (referencing SAE levels explicitly) is a mistake on their part, and I predict that they will figure that out and remove such language for the reasons already mentioned.
Regarding the ten second rule and all its implications, I predict that if widely deployed it will turn out to be rarer and safer than the dangerous interpretations, and if not it will join the growing list of L3-ish highway systems that are Coming Soon but don't actually appear in any meaningful volume of production cars.