Total madness!

[Suff]

In the Autumn of my life yes it will be ME! It will be a 'dumb' ICE job circa '28 or '29 and one that I can "drive" - manual, five speed box, aircon and fold-in mirrors when parked.

Just been on BBC HYS and there is a thread with 1299 comments and only about 3% are on your side, and some of them have caveats to their lukewarm support. It will happen, but it will only be for the few.

True, I probably won't see it either. No vehicle in my "want to afford" range will deliver before I'm too poor to buy one.

Then again in the "It will happen, but it will only be for the few", they said that about Battery EV after GM crushed their pathfinders. In 2021 191,000 Battery EV were sold in the UK and it was only so low due to supply.

Tesla vehicles for the UK are sold out for the next year. As their Berlin factory ramps up, volumes will rise in the UK too. If only because the models from Shanghai are now coming to the UK instead of Europe.

I will continue to watch this but the numbers on compute power being plugged into EV are huge. NEO is intending to put in 2,000 TOPS of Nvidia compute power into their latest EV to run self drive. For comparison, Tesla's own chip is 144 TOPS and it was 27 times faster than the prior Nvidia chip they were using. It seems that if you can't make it work, just use a BIGGER HAMMER.

[Suff]

For those who want to understand just how much BS is being put about concerning the level of capability of self driving.

I recommend taking 20 minutes of your life to watch this video of a car driving itself

For the uninitiated.

The video says no takeovers. This is correct but it is not no intervention. I counted about 7 or 8 interventions. The vast majority of which were about making it more positive in moving forward, prodding the accelerator to say "go on get on with it".

The reason the "passenger/instructor" is touching the wheel constantly is that the human in the car has to be ready to take over at any moment. It is a condition of use at this level of beta and if he did not do it the vehicle would gently move to the side of the road, put the hazards on and stop.

Watch the screen in the middle and the information it is displaying. See just how much it can actually see and what it is looking at. Note it is a 360 degree view and looks both behind and at the sides simultaneously.

There are two points in this video which show a level of maturity in the software.

One was when it came to a stop sign. The cross road had priority. The vehicle tracked the pedestrian crossing the road and the vehicle to the right which had to give way for the pedestrian, nothing coming from the left so it went, just like a human would.

The second one was the parked UPS delivery vehicle. It was slow, unsure, but it did, eventually, go around the UPS vehicle even crossing the double yellow lines then pull in front at the stop sign. You can see that the human behind did exactly the same. It's on the screen.

This is a vehicle driving itself around San Francisco in the middle of the day. Unlike the GM taxi's which can only drive between 10pm and 6am and only on pre mapped routes.

Right now the work is on fluidity of the drive, smoothness and driving more like a human. Lot of work in there but there is no doubt this is a vehicle which is driving itself.

[cromwell]

One thing that did strike me was when I read an article saying that the UK government expects the driver to take over if the self driving car goes wrong. How? If we become a nation where nobody knows how to drive anymore?
Another thought occurs. Currently you can't legally drive to the pub, have five pints and drive home. With these new self drive cars, you still won't be able to??

[Suff]

There are levels of "driver assistance"

Level 1/2 are just cruise with lane keeping and perhaps overtaking. No real logic or actual driving.
Level 3/4 are increasing levels of automation, the ability to drive the vehicle and take decisions based on junctions, traffic lights, etc. Even with Level 4, the driver can, under certain circumstances, be required to take over the vehicle.
Level 5 is full as in there are no controls are required in the vehicle. However controls may be present in a Level 5 vehicle.

Today there are no fully capable Level 5 systems. The GM cruise and the Mercedes offerings are Level 3. I.e. slightly better than level 1/2 but certainly not capable of driving as you could see in the video.

If you want to drive to the pub, drink 5 pints, then get the car to drive you home, then you need a level 5 vehicle and you need to be sitting in the back, or, it has no controls.

There are no laws, currently operative, which allow level 5 vehicles to drive on the roads. Anywhere. The closest are the Level 4 systems with backup drivers. The backup driver takes Level 4 to the point where it does not need a driver.

Tesla's FSD is a level 5 system in beta development and in "learner driver" mode. As such it cannot drive you without a fully competent driver ready to take over. Which means no 5 pints down the pub.

Until the law changes and it will only change when a level 5 system is fully demonstrated as able to function at level 5, then this will be the position. You might thin that this is a bit chicken and egg. i.e. they want the AI driver to be a fully trained driver without training it to drive. If you do, you'd be right.

[Suff]

Here is the SAE chart for autonomous driving.



You might note that, from this chart, the video you saw is SAE level 5. It can drive everywhere under all conditions. Tesla's don't have high definition maps and only use camera's to see where they are going and what is around them.

So why is it considered Level 2? You will note that the video you saw the AI was driving the vehicle, something SAE2 simply cannot do, it is impossible. The reason? Because it's a learner driver and because that way they can release the beta everywhere because SAE2 is supported everywhere. When it is done, then it is level 5. Mercedes? Certainly a traffic jam chauffer. Waymo? Uber? GM Cruise Taxi? Level 4 local driverless taxi. With human backup, geofenced and massively pre imaged routes.

[Kaz]

So if you need to have a licence, and need to be totally alert and sober in charge, can somebody tell me what the point of them actually is?

[Suff]

Before level 5?

I suppose you could ask why we have adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, collision avoidance or automatic lane change?

It depends on how much you drive too. If you drive a LOT, then these automation features are important to you. If you don't, then they are far less so.

For me the holy grail goes like this. You are one of the millions of wage slaves who drive to the train station every day to get the train to work. You have to pay an arm and a leg for the train ticket and then, to add insult to injury, you have to pay the other arm and leg to park your car all day whilst you are at work. Enter the level 5 automation vehicle. You drive to the train station, get out of the car and it goes home and parks. You come back to the train station at night and, insert required minutes for your car to get to the train station, you pull out your mobile and "summon" your car. You get off the train, step into your car and have a choice of driving it home or have it drive you home.

Equally you can do this for city P&R too. If your vehicle is electric, it can even go home, plug in and wait for the low price tariff to charge.

The other one is robotaxi's. The vast majority of the cost of a taxi ride is the amount of time the taxi sits, with a human in it, doing nothing because you didn't call it. Your driver in a robotaxi is free (once you have paid off the software cost, but that is less than a year's pay for a driver). As this driver is free, the taxi fare can be significantly lower.

But at levels below SAE5, you are unlikely to get much more than the benefits of current systems. Unless you have a Tesla and are on the Full Self Drive beta and you are in town traffic for a significant period of time, say 45 minutes. The vehicle does the driving, you only need to be there to take over if required.

Regardless. Unless we go through levels 1-4 with sufficient volume, nobody is going to fund level 5 on the off chance you buy it. So consider what we have today the price of truly pervasive autonomy where you don't need a license and don't need to be fit to drive.

You can understand why Uber is spending billions on robotaxi. No drivers, no driver employment litigation.

[Workingman]

So if you need to have a licence, and need to be totally alert and sober in charge, can somebody tell me what the point of them actually is?

They, along with EVs and AI, are necessary steps towards the Wall-E world we are heading for once we have cracked the 'soup in a basket' and 'chocolate teapot' problems. Look up Posthumanism to see what the future holds. iRobot or Daleks, only time will tell. I predict Daleks as we will have done away with stairs as being too difficult to navigate. All slopes will be smooth and run downhill to save energy - or charge our batteries.

I prefer to live in a world where technology aids us rather than 'is' us or controls us. Level 0 wins for me.

[cromwell]

Thanks for the explanation Suff. Until we get to level 5 then, everything is a compromise.

[Suff]

Level 0 is fine for some situations. Like when I am in a real hurry and speed limits area "advisory" or when I just feel like actually doing 60mph round the roundabout as the speed limit allows or when I'm on a particularly interesting section of road and want to see if the car really can manage the speed limit along it. Spoiler, my car can't and neither can most others.

However when I'm 20 hours into a 24 hour journey, I would kill for the ability of the car to drive for itself.

As I said, it depends on your journey and your expectations.

Most people drive cars like zombies, place to place, mind firmly switched off, using the satnav for a journey they do every single day. Why not let the computer be a zombie and do something more constructive. It is no more invasive than taking the bus. It is likely that the busses will lose their drivers before the cars so then where are you? It is incredibly inefficient having a human driving a car or a bus. A damned sight more dangerous too.