Random musing from a dark rain soaked Autopilot commute: Autopilot has no object permanence.
It seems to me like the current state of the software is only analyzing the current frame and reacting to it - hence the vehicles that switch back and forth between classes, and occasionally appear and disappear, and the lane lines that rapidly jump back and forth when a merge happens.
The car is clearly quite good at analyzing and reacting to the current frame, but it seems to me like there is significant value in connecting those together - in comparing the cars and lines it sees in this frame and their locations to the cars and lines it saw in the last frame.
I would expect that this has the potential to make things smoother, to react earlier to some threats, and to help with cases where conditions obscure some of the necessary data.
YUP, this is almost exactly what I tell people the auto pilot is like. It can see and react, but it cannot predict. When you see someone in your rear view coming up next to you way too fast, they are not going to plow into the person in front of them, they are going to change lanes and keep speeding along.
I had a 60 day trial of self driving, and it was terrifying. The car would be in the slow lane, and would not slow down or speed up to allow other people to merge into traffic. The car only cares about what is in its lane. Made me look like a complete jerk
This is why I don't think that the current Teslas will ever truly be self driving> The hardware and computing power needed to see and accurately predict what other drivers will do is not there.