It would be easy to believe that we are on the verge of a fully self-driving
car revolution, thanks in part to this guy.
The Tesla car next year will probably be
90% capable of autopilot.
Yeah for sure, highway.
We're probably only a month away from having
autonomous driving at least for highways.
Like a model s and model x can drive autonomously with
greater safety than a person right now.
It's safer than a person by the end of next year.
Autonomous for Tesla next year.
And releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year.
I mean, it's looking quite likely that it will be next year.
So why are we still no closer to self-driving cars?
Tesla has been working on its driver assisted technology which they have branded as autopilot
since 2013 with varying degrees of success.
Problems range from running red lights.
Just ran that red light.
To not recognising tram tracks, to a serious love of bollards.
The company began beta testing its full self-driving system in 2020 but the difference
from most software testing is it's doing it with ordinary people driving real cars on public roads.
The drivers who are doing the testing for Tesla have each paid
$12,000 for the privilege.
You feel like it's worth it.
Do I think it's worth it? No.
But it's not just Tesla who are struggling to perfect self-driving technology.
Honda is working on it too.
As are Waymo owned by Google and Cruise owned by General Motors.
All these companies predicted they'd have full self-driving cars by 2020.
But as yet, none of them have.
Some have gotten close, like Cruise's robot taxis which required
licensing to carry passengers in unmanned cars in 2022 but they are far from perfect.
In July of this year, a fleet of robot taxis all drove themselves to an intersection in San Francisco
and brought traffic to a standstill for hours until engineers could remove them.
Creating full self-driving cars is much harder than car makers initially thought.
With the exception of Teslas, most cars need to have multiple sensors to feed information into
onboard computers which expend large amounts of processing power to map what's going on
and predict what might happen next.
Things that are easy for humans to predict, can present complex
problems for computers such as when someone at the side of the road steps off the curb and disappears
behind a parked van.
A human might expect them to reappear from the other side of the van and step
out onto the road but for a computer that's a very difficult calculation.
In 2022, Elon Musk outlined the real scale of the problem.
In order to solve full self-driving properly, you actually just
have to solve real world AI.
So far, nobody in any field is close to solving real world AI.
Simple things like driving at night or rain can bamboozle an automated car's computer system.
All the water or the sensors are probably going off right now, going crazy.
All the information the car will need to drive safely has to be learned by its computer.
This is why Tesla is using over a hundred thousand ordinary drivers to effectively
teach its evolving software how to drive in the real world.
These drivers are helping to identify edge cases the type of problems that rarely occur
but that require special handling by the computer.
Like here, when the car sees the red Wells Fargo banner on the side of the building,
interprets it as a stop sign and mistakenly engages the brakes.
The problem is, in the real world,
there are almost endless possibilities for what a car might be faced with so even
if you teach a car to avoid a cow in the road it might not take the same action if it meets a sheep.
As the true difficulty of achieving autonomous driving has become apparent, some companies have
simply given up on it altogether
with both Uber and Lyft selling their self-driving divisions.
The biggest issue facing all the companies is safety because the technology has to be 99.99999% safe.
And while the first one or two of those nines may have been achieved, there are more to go and
unfortunately each step gets significantly harder thanks to the sheer number of variables that need
computing.
There are five levels of automation before full driving automation is achieved.
Honda and Mercedes-benz say they have been certified at level three but still after a decade of work most
companies, including Tesla, are only at level 2 and this is what can happen under level 2 of automation.
Fortunately no one was hurt but since 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
has investigated 31 crashes involving Teslas equipped with automated driving systems.
19 of them were fatal.