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Poll of the week: When not have to pay attention to Tesla Driver

When level 3 or higher?


  • Total voters
    26
  • Poll closed .
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DanCar

Active Member
Oct 2, 2013
2,998
4,018
SF Bay Area
Elon at 9:45 said:
I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it the Tesla customer base next year.
He goes on to agree he means level 5 autonomy.
Elon at 11:15 said:
Yeah, but I think at least some jurisdictions will allow full self driving maybe next year.
Most of us agree that Level 5 isn't going to happen, not even in the slightest. But what is possible and when? For the purposes of this poll lets say level 3 or higher. Which means you aren't required to pay attention. For where it can happen, think minimally. Stop and go traffic on limited access freeways in a sunny state? Gated senior communities?
 
Most of us agree that Level 5 isn't going to happen, not even in the slightest. But what is possible and when? For the purposes of this poll lets say level 3 or higher. Which means you aren't required to pay attention. For where it can happen, think minimally. Stop and go traffic on limited access freeways in a sunny state? Gated senior communities?

I think Tesla could do L3 "low speed stop and go traffic jam" now if they wanted to. That's because low speed stop and go traffic is a very low hanging fruit.

However, Elon does not seem interested in providing limited ODD L3, He seems more interested in waiting and only removing driver attention when they can provide L5. He seems to be all or nothing.

Of course, I would love it if Tesla did provide L3 as soon as possible, even if it is very limited ODD.

It is also curious that Elon mentions deploying autonomous driving in limited jurisdictions. That sounds like L4. So will Tesla remove driver supervision but only in geofenced areas where they have the data to prove that FSD can handle it safely?
 
What I’m curious about is validation. Suppose you have a software version that is verified for Lvl 5 and validated by 1B miles of driving, and gets approved for sleeping in the back of the car.

If Tesla then updates the version and adds some new capability—or even retrains the NN for that matter...would it have to revalidate that new version with another billion miles of driving?
 
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Yeah, I think it is going to be a clutch call. Sometimes the new version will be worse, then previous version, but still better than the average driver, and sometimes it will be better. For large software releases there should be:
  1. Lots of unit tests
  2. Integration tests
  3. Testing in randomized and corner case simulation.
  4. Testing by quality assurance drivers employed by the company
  5. Testing by the early access peeps.
  6. Deployed slowly to the general fleet.
So validation is based on previous version testing, belief by the engineers that new changes are an improvement, extensive testing (millions of miles in simulation), and actual real word testing of what has changed. Tesla doesn't have the necessary simulation environment yet, but hopefully it will in the coming years. Waymo does have an extensive simulation environment and I heard most bugs are caught in their simulation environment.

When Elon says it will be validated by billions of miles of testing, I think he is referring to the cumulative testing across a range of versions. Not a billion miles on a single version. Tesla is moving to a rapid development and rapid release cycle so testing a billion miles on a single release, isn't easy, unless the entire fleet is "testing" it.
 
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For the purposes of this poll lets say level 3 or higher. Which means you aren't required to pay attention. For where it can happen, think minimally. Stop and go traffic on limited access freeways in a sunny state?

Before June 1 2021 in at least one US state, if we are going for limited use specifications sooner than that is possible. I have no guess on when that will be the case for 25+ states (the majority of the US).