Eno Deb
Active Member
There is a big difference between staging a demo video (that probably left out the parts where the system didn't work so well) on a pre-defined route, and actually implementing a fully working self-driving system. If the system was as far along as you seem to think, we would have seen the autonomous coast-to-coast drive by now that was originally promised for 2017. Here's what Musk later said during an earnings call (emphasis mine):Deb, did you see that You Tube vid from a year or two ago where the Tesla exec is driving around town without touching the steering wheel? Stopping at red lights, and stop signs, taking turns letting him out at a strip mall and then continuing to park itself. That would have been on the V2, if not V1, chip. So, it's not that it doesn't work.
“We could have done the coast-to-coast drive, but it would have required too much specialized code to effectively game it or make it somewhat brittle and that it would work for one particular route, but not the general solution."
Autonomous driving is one of those problems where the first 80% of the solution are easy, but the remaining 20% incredibly hard.