Tesla gears up for fully self-driving cars amid skepticism
Tesla gears up
for fully self-driving cars amid skepticism
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears poised to
transform the company’s electric cars into driverless vehicles in a risky bid
to realize a bold vision that he has been floating for years.
The technology required to make
that quantum leap is scheduled to be shown off to Tesla investors Monday at the
company’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters.
Musk, known for his swagger as
well as his smarts, is so certain that Tesla will win the race toward full
autonomy that he indicated in an interview earlier
this month that his company’s cars should be able to navigate congested
highways and city streets without a human behind the wheel by no later than
next year.
“I could be wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of
everyone,” Musk told Lex Fridman, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
research scientist specializing in autonomous vehicles.
But experts say they’re skeptical
whether Tesla’s technology has advanced anywhere close to the point where its
cars will be capable of being driven solely by a robot, without a human in
position to take control if something goes awry.
“It’s all hype,” said Steven E.
Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California,
Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45
years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t
have it and neither does anybody else.”
More than 60 companies in the U.S.
alone are developing autonomous vehicles. Some are aiming to have their fully
autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as
this year. Many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade
or more.
Musk’s description of Tesla’s
controls as “Full Self-Driving” has alarmed some observers who think it will
give owners a false sense of security and create potentially lethal situations
in conditions that the autonomous cars can’t handle. They also say they’re
waiting for Musk to define self-driving and show just under what conditions and
places the vehicles can travel without human intervention.
Some Tesla critics say Musk is
making the full self-driving announcement to distract from poor earnings
expected Wednesday. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first
quarter net loss based on disappointing deliveries. Even bullish analysts
expect bad news.
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, who
expects Tesla shares to outperform its peers, wrote in a note Monday that while
positive news is expected Monday, he foresees “a train wreck quarter.”
Meanwhile, Musk continues to use
both his Twitter account and
Tesla’s website to pump up a new computer now in
production for full self-driving vehicles. Once the self-driving software is
ready, those with new computers will get an update via the internet, Musk has
said. Currently the self-driving computer costs $5,000, but the price rises to
$7,000 if it’s installed after delivery.
Tesla vehicles equipped for full autonomy will rely on eight cameras that cover
360 degrees, front-facing radar and short-range ultrasonic sensors. It’s not
known how many will have the full self-driving technology. There are about
400,000 Teslas on the road worldwide.
That’s different from the
self-driving systems being built by nearly every other company in the industry,
including Google spinoff Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise Automation, and
Ford-affiliated Argo AI. They all use cameras and radar covering 360 degrees,
and also have light beam sensors called Lidar to the mix as a third redundant
sensor, as well as detailed three-dimensional mapping.
“Vehicles that don’t have Lidar,
that don’t have advanced radar, that haven’t captured a 3-D map are not
self-driving vehicles,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technical officer, said
during a recent interview with Recode. “They are great consumer vehicles with
really good driver-assist technology.”
Even Lidar doesn’t guarantee 100
percent safety. Waymo last year backed off of a pledge to run a robotaxi
service in Phoenix without human backup drivers for safety reasons. And an Uber
autonomous test vehicle with Lidar as well as a human backup driver ran down and killed a pedestrian last
year in Tempe, Arizona, the first known death involving self-driving
technology.
Amnon Shashua, CEO of Israeli
autonomous vehicle computing company Mobileye, says cars with 360-degree
cameras and front facing radar could drive autonomously, but they would not be
as safe as human drivers. Careful humans can drive 10 million hours without a
mistake leading to a fatal crash, but cars without full redundant sensors
cannot, he said.
Phil Koopman, a professor of
electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said Musk
needs to show his cars can handle all situations if he wants to claim they can
drive themselves. For instance, he wonders if Tesla has a plan for a big truck
splashing gallons of grimy water onto a car in a snowstorm, obstructing the
cameras.
“The rabbit hole goes pretty deep
if you want to make that (full self-driving) argument,” he said.
Tesla already has been offering a
system called “Autopilot” that can control cars on a limited basis with
constant monitoring by a human driver. On its website, it says the Autopilot
system steers your car in its lane and accelerates and brakes automatically for
other vehicles and pedestrians in its lane. But questions already have been
raised about Autopilot’s reliability after its involvement in three fatal
crashes.
In one, neither the driver nor a
Tesla Model S operating on the company’s Autopilot driver-assist system spotted
a tractor-trailer crossing in front of it on a Florida, highway in 2016. The
car drove under the trailer shearing off the roof and killing the driver.
In a 2017 report ,
the National Transportation Safety Board wrote that driver inattention and
design limitations of Autopilot played major roles in the fatality, and it
found that the Model S cameras and radar weren’t capable of detecting a vehicle
turning into its path. Rather, the systems are designed to detect vehicles they
are following to prevent rear-end collisions.
The agency also is still
investigating the two other lethal crashes, one last month in Delray Beach,
Florida, eerily similar to the 2016 Florida crash, and another involving a
Tesla SUV that was operating on Autopilot when it hit a highway lane-dividing
barrier in Silicon Valley.
Tesla maintains that its current
systems are only for assistance, and that drivers must pay attention and be
ready to intervene.
With “Full Self-Driving
Capability,” Tesla touts that you get automatic driving from the highway on
ramp to the off ramp including interchanges and changing lanes automatically to
overtake slower cars. Later this year, the cars will be able to recognize and
respond to traffic lights and stop signs and drive automatically on city
streets, the website says.
Those feats are something that
Tesla will likely have to prove to regulators in California — its largest U.S.
market so far — before its fully autonomous cars are allowed on the roads
there. But most other states don’t have the same requirements as California,
where Tesla would need a state permit and have to prove the cars can drive
safely on public roads without a human driver. And experts say there’s no
federal law requiring preapproval for fully autonomous driving, as long as a
vehicle meets federal safety standards, which Teslas do.
“Unfortunately, it may be
necessary for several people to die before regulators step in,” Shladover said.
Krisher reported from Detroit.
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