> Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas
Seems like you could just get some data on that before declaring that "we're not even close". How do shipping Teslas do?
FWIW: my impression is that the things people think are hard aren't the problems that are actually hard. People here and elsewhere on the internet have spent years screaming about lidar vs. radar vs. vision. And... it turns out vision basically won. Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US are vision only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just fine. We're not having detection failures. It works.
If you watch all the FSD beta video being spread around youtube, much of it by drivers specifically looking for edge cases like this, most of the remaining problems are in pathing and decisionmaking, not detection. The cars see a busy intersection and then get paralyzed (there was an amusing clip from one guy of a car trying to make a left turn, giving up, and repathing a right turn that took it back in a loop only to fail at the same left turn repeatedly), or creep too slowly and annoy other drivers. Or they choose the wrong lane, or misread a multiple traffic light environment, or misread the need for detection (the one really dangerous video I remember had the car deciding to take a left turn across a broad street with a complicated blind corner instead of creeping out farther).
Those are bugs to fix, for sure. But they're not the bugs we thought we had to fix. Those bugs... got fixed.
So you can look at this as a pessimist and say "we'll never get there", or you can judge from previous experience that the hard problems won't turn out to be that hard in the end.
Personally, having been watching the progress in this space, my guess is that Tesla and Waymo (and maybe Mobileye -- no one else is close) get this basically fixed within a year or two.
At which point the debate will shift from "we'll never get there" to "we'll never be able to regulate this appropriately" or somesuch.
Seems like you could just get some data on that before declaring that "we're not even close". How do shipping Teslas do?
FWIW: my impression is that the things people think are hard aren't the problems that are actually hard. People here and elsewhere on the internet have spent years screaming about lidar vs. radar vs. vision. And... it turns out vision basically won. Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US are vision only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just fine. We're not having detection failures. It works.
If you watch all the FSD beta video being spread around youtube, much of it by drivers specifically looking for edge cases like this, most of the remaining problems are in pathing and decisionmaking, not detection. The cars see a busy intersection and then get paralyzed (there was an amusing clip from one guy of a car trying to make a left turn, giving up, and repathing a right turn that took it back in a loop only to fail at the same left turn repeatedly), or creep too slowly and annoy other drivers. Or they choose the wrong lane, or misread a multiple traffic light environment, or misread the need for detection (the one really dangerous video I remember had the car deciding to take a left turn across a broad street with a complicated blind corner instead of creeping out farther).
Those are bugs to fix, for sure. But they're not the bugs we thought we had to fix. Those bugs... got fixed.
So you can look at this as a pessimist and say "we'll never get there", or you can judge from previous experience that the hard problems won't turn out to be that hard in the end.
Personally, having been watching the progress in this space, my guess is that Tesla and Waymo (and maybe Mobileye -- no one else is close) get this basically fixed within a year or two.
At which point the debate will shift from "we'll never get there" to "we'll never be able to regulate this appropriately" or somesuch.