Best level 2-3 autonomous car on the market?

[FaceACA]

Please please please do not assume Autopilot is L3 autonomous on freeways. There is a TMC thread a few months ago that I can't find right now, but the owner had dashcam footage of the car tracking a set of lines 1 foot over instead of correct lane lines, resulting in a sudden swerve towards a nearby car. He was paying attention and grabbed the wheel back.

It's not an abnormal issue either: Autopilot swerving on freeway with distinct lane markings!


In this case, the car refused to track a bend on a highway, one that it had tracked successfully on other occasions: Tesla Owner in Autopilot Crash Won’t Sue, But Car Insurer May


Furthermore, you can find plenty of AP v7.0 and v7.1 videos of near-misses on mostly reasonable roads on Youtube. One of my friends ~2 months ago had a Bay Area Model X test drive that ended with the OA in the back seat screaming. AP on interstate 280 (a well-defined highway) lost track of the lane lines around a curve, started following the car in front to an offramp, and then suddenly decided to swerve back towards the freeway, but in doing so crossed the triangular lane markings dividing the freeway and offramp, thought that was a lane and began accelerating towards a metal divider!

Bottom line is, it still requires careful supervision. It can handle a lot of situations so well that it seems like a level 3 or better system to you, but if you let your guard down, it will only be a matter of time where the system messes up (tracks the wrong lane lines, doesn't follow a curve, doesn't slow down for someone entering your lane, follows the car in front into a highway exit). On straight or slightly curved roads where you don't have a lot of things you can collide with near you, you can even take your hands off the wheel, but you gotta be prepared to realize and correct any mistakes within a few seconds. What looks like an obvious situation to you as a human driver may look very different to AP's single monochrome fixed-angle camera looking at the road in a different perspective and colorspace!

Agreed. Looks like an article just came out that the 8.0 will "force" compliance to warnings and disengage AP until you park car if you don't comply

 

[adiggs]

Didn't say it was going to be easy, or happen in FW 8 in the next couple months - just that I thought it was possible and that Tesla might be going there.

As a level 3 system, AP doesn't have to manage that merge - it just has to realize that the merge is coming several seconds ahead and tell the human "Help, please?"

This is a good point - the level 3 system needs to recognize far enough ahead for a non-emergency reaction on the part of the driver to step in and handle the merge and negotiate past the problem on the road.

 

[adiggs]

I don't know of any of these happening on a standard freeway (no cross traffic and a barrier for on coming traffic). If there is, please link as I'd like to educate myself for my own saftey.

As mentioned in the post above, I worry that the AP is so good it lulls the driver to be less cautious over time and creates more problems than it solves. (NASA recently came out with a study that states the same)

All more reason to launch AP 2.0 now!!

Clearly, a standard freeway in the US does not have routine cross traffic. It's explicitly part of the design of the highway. Standard freeways also contain semi-regular turnabouts for emergency vehicles (or at least, the interstate highway system in Oregon does - I expect that design feature replicates throughout the country).

Freeways also mostly have wide shoulders for disabled vehicles to pull off onto, and therefore merge back onto the highway from.

And of course, *sugar* happens. I remember driving by a mattress that had apparently come out of the back of a truck on the highway, and thankfully landed leaning up against the barrier between the two directions of traffic. This was in an area with less than a bike lane width between the edge of the lane and the barrier, so that mattress flashed by my driver's side window REALLY close by. It could just as easily have been flat on the highway and fully covering the lane (which might have worked fine for many cars, but in the Roadster, I'd have been - at best - pushing it down the road in front of me while coming to an emergency stop). Then -I- would have been the unexpected stationary object in the middle of the freeway.


The central point is that with Tesla's AP today, the ability to reliably recognize upcoming problems on the road and get help can't be relied on by the driver. On any roads, including freeways. That doesn't make the functionality useless.

In fact, my belief is that what puts Tesla so far ahead is it seems like everybody else is pursuing a strategy of building full autonomy before they see a single "real" highway mile driven in one of their cars. I see this as a maturation process, where there is important learning from putting L2 autonomy onto the road and getting real miles with real people in regular cars. That learning is essential to then build L3 autonomy, which is in turn essential to putting L4/5 autonomy onto the road.

The only company I see engaged in that maturation and learning process is Tesla. Everybody else is using specialists in a small fleet of cars driving small number of miles in effectively a lab environment. Though I haven't read about it, I expect Tesla is ALSO operating the lab environment with their own cars and trained experts. Its the incremental learning Tesla is getting from real users of real cars in real situations that separates Tesla.

(Of course, that's what I believe and take action on - that doesn't mean that I'm right).