- I hope you enjoy all the videos we just published
from Mercedes headquarters, cutting open the
S Class, seeing the car that drives and parks itself
and then also the Mercedes Benz Vault tour.
It was an insane week and we just got back yesterday.
While I was gone there was something interesting
that kind of ties into our trip,
that I wanted to talk about;
self-driving cars and the future of self-driving cars.
What I've learned over the last little bit,
through owning a Tesla and using Autopilot 2.O
and then also going down to CES and getting
the chance with Mercedes Benz to take part
in their Intelligent World Drive and to see
what they are doing and look on the inside
of the system of what Mercedes is doing
to prepare for fully autonomous driving
in the future.
To a lot of people, it causes some hesitation
when you see a car in Arizona
that's an Uber self-driving car,
fully autonomous car that's driving down the road
and it hit somebody and killed somebody.
This is the first death that we have,
basically a robot car killing a person.
That's a scary think because it doesn't matter
which auto company you talk about
they all have divisions where they are looking
at autonomous driving and they're preparing for it.
If you haven't seen the video,
I'm not going to publish it on here but there is a video
of the car when it hit the person
that was pushing their bike across the street.
The thing that really surprised me,
is this car is driving at full speed,
it looked like it was maybe 60 miles an hour,
and this car came and the person was walking,
it was nighttime, and they came into the shot,
the car didn't respond at all.
It just full on hit the person
and the person went flying off.
Super scary to see that.
The thing that makes you wonder it's,
OK you've got a car driving on the road
but shouldn't it react
when somebody walks across the street.
My first answer is, yes if fully should.
There's a thing on the top called Lidar
and when I was talking to Leslie about this,
she asked me, "What is Lidar?".
It's a good question.
There's a company called Velodyne,
that's I think in the Detroit area,
that makes these pucks
and these things on the top that can spin around.
The Uber car has a Lidar, 360 degree, 120 meter range
Lidar thing on the top that's sensing everything.
What's supposed to happen is,
that car is supposed to see
that person walking across the street.
It talks to the actual software in the car
and the car makes adjustments based off of that.
No adjustments were made.
Velodyne, the company that makes Lidar say,
"Our Lidar doesn't make the decision to put the brakes on.".
That makes sense, it is up to the car.
I had the unique opportunity
with Zack from JerryRigEverything,
Ben from Teslanomics and
Jared from Ellie and Jared to go down to Las Vegas
and ride in a Mercedes S Class
that was specially retro-fitted with TV screens,
monitors, with a server in the back of the car.
- This is not for making the car drive
this is just to store, log the data, as I said.
The local brain of the car is pretty much this device.
- [Vlogger] How much of this in the top part
is usually there in your regular autopilot?
- [Technician] That's the camera
and these are the surveillance cameras,
why we have them you'll see when we come back.
- The next step we have to do,
is of course get that technology on the road
for everyday use.
Nobody wants to buy a car while on one piece of road
you can drive autonomously,
if you turn left instead you turn right
it doesn't look anymore.
It's green on the left so I can change lanes.
In a further car I could do that automatically,
I will do it automatically on highways
above 80 kilometers an hour.
It can also see the steering angle has a very high impact.
This is 150 meters,
if I just turn my wheel very slightly
that blue line goes like a whip.
- The way we recognize pedestrians is,
you have a head section, shoulder, body, legs
and no matter if it's a small child or tall person
the general shape and the general way they move
is rather similar.
- [Driver] There he is. That's the guy right here.
- [Vlogger] There's the guy right There.
There he is right there,
walking across the street.
- To be able to recognize those and we are probably
in a good place where we can get some strategy
to deal with wildlife on the road.
- [Vlogger] If you look right here you see
all of these little lines that are moving,
take a look out here,
these are the cars that are all turning, right there.
Can you kinda see that?
It's looking at multiple data sets
for every single car
and it's not just the ones that are in your line,
right here but this traffic is all coming right now
all towards us,
you look down here and you can see every little car
that coming.
This is part of Level 2 autonomous driving
which is in, as you've seen in our Tesla model X
but it's also in the Mercedes S Class
that is currently available.
What I think is interesting
is just like President Donald Trump has a red button
in his car that's probably a nuclear warhead that goes.
This one is not quite as scary
but this car does have a red button in it.
Say for example, you're driving and there is a deer
that does and walks across the road in front of you,
push the button, it records the past 30 seconds
of all of the data that this screen is capturing
and then you can talk for 15 seconds to the microphone.
Once they get to somewhere where there is the Internet,
they can send all of that data
to the different engineers
and then they take that information
and they can go and make possible future changes
to a car and say,
this is what is looks like when this happens.
Right now the car is parked right here.
They are looking at the data points that shows me
in the system to show exactly what I look like.
Zack is capturing that in the car right now.
That is the cool thing about this car
whether you're walking, we're going to walk across,
and they can see exactly where I'm going right now.
They can see my body moving,
so it's cool.
This is the stuff that's in the
Level 2 autonomous driving right now.
This is a new data set that,
maybe they'll have to capture this.
What happens when a vlogger is vlogging
in the middle of the road,
autonomous pilot needs to know that.
It's impressive to see what Mercedes is doing
to get to the forefront of autonomous driving.
95% of autopilot is super, not easy,
but it's easy to do, it's that last 5%.
I guess that's similar with a lot of things in life.
Is that what Pareto's principle, the 80/20 rule.
Now something important to know is that Tesla
does not use Lidar.
Elon Musk has said repeatedly that he doesn't believe
that you need to use Lidar in order to have
a fully autonomous car.
Now, I like this quote.
Scott Miller, the Director of Autonomous Vehicle
Integration at General Motors,
GM, one of the biggest in the world.
He says that Elon is full of crap.
He says the level of technology
and knowing what it takes to do the mission,
to say that you can be full level 5 with just cameras
and radars is not physically possible.
So what Tesla has, they have it on their website,
they have cameras all over the car.
They even have a radar that's in the windshield
that goes out.
Their radar goes a max distance of 160 meters.
Now that Lidar with the car that crashed
only goes 120 meters.
Either way, it should have been enough to be able to see
this person and cause a reaction but that's the way
the approach that Tesla's taking.
They think Lidar is way too expensive and
they think they can achieve autonomous driving
in different situations without having that Lidar
expensive chip on there.
Maybe there's different options in the way to do this,
while some people think that Tesla not having Lidar
will hold them back,
it's estimated that Tesla will have 11 billion miles
of driving data recorded to their system by 2020,
just from their current cars that are out
there in the fleet.
The thing that I think that they're missing
that Mercedes has a handle on is actually having
a person in there report things.
When you're just getting data
you don't know exactly what is was that came out on the road
or different things that may be tricky.
You need a person to actually report it
and to talk about it.
That something that Mercedes is putting in the time.
I definitely see the future of cars and driving
and being fully autonomous cars.
I think we're gonna get there in my lifetime.
In the next five years, possible ten years,
for sure 15 years.
I'm putting a bet on it right now.
You can come back to this video in 15 years.
Fully autonomous cars will be out there
but we need companies and cars to spend the time
and the capital to put a human person in there
tracking certain things and teaching the system
how to operate properly so that we don't have tragedies
like this when a person will come in front of the car
and get hit.
Let me know your thoughts.
What do you think about autonomous driving?
What do you think about Lidar, or cameras or radar?
What do you think about what Mercedes is doing, GM, Uber?
Are you excited about these cars?
Are you scared about the future of this technology?
How much testing should these companies do
before they are able to actually launch out there?
After seeing the events of this week,
the tragic events of somebody losing their life,
when I drive my autopilot I'm going to be extra-focused
to make sure because the technology is not perfect.
Level 2 autonomous driving is not quite there.
Level 3 still not quite there.
Level 4 and 5, once we get to that stage
then you could be OK to watch a movie on your phone
or watch a YouTube video.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts
and I hope that you enjoyed all of these car videos
over the last week.
We're not going to have any car videos for a while,
sorry about that if you like care videos.
If you're ready to get back to regular vlogs
and travel stuff and doing goofy things, that's coming too.