I'm currently driving a pretty new Mercedes (company car), and its lane assistant regularly tries to kill me in construction areas because it wants me to follow the regular, currently inactive lane markings.
It's gotten so bad that I'm switching off the lane assistant when I'm approaching construction areas.
I've talked to a guy at the car dealership, and he said "my mother complains about the same thing, it's a known issue".
I really, really hope they've managed to fix that for the autonomous driving models, or at least auto-disengage before construction areas. (And if they fixed it, can I get a software update please?)
So does my Tesla:( I always take control when entering any construction site.
I don't think any other than waymo has solved this yet. My telsa is good but the amount of times I have to take control from it is way too high. Snow is another area where autonomous driving sucks at the moment, and as a Canadian, man that makes my Tesla's self driving not useful 5 months of the year.
Waymo seems to be way out front and everyone else seem to be fighting for second here. Though I'm very happy that we're atleast at this stage and not where we were 10 years ago.
I just view it as we now have working lane keeping and adaptive cruise control for most new cars these days and that's a solid win.
That's correct, Cruise is doing driverless rides for employees in SF. I didn't know about Waymo's driverless rides, though-- can't say I follow the space that closely. Wow!
Just curious, what is your personal experience with Waymo that leads you to this conclusion? Also curious to know about Waymo’s performance in the snow because I haven’t heard much about that.
I took a couple of rides in Chandler recently. It was incredible to see a completely driverless car pull up and take me to my destination (and back). Never felt weird or unsafe in the vehicle and the driving felt very natural.
When you experience it, it's clear they have a mature system that's learned from driving millions of real world miles (and billions in simulation). And if you follow their research/tech stack closely, there's no doubt they are years ahead of everyone else. I'm not sure how successful of a business they will be, but their tech is solid.
As far as driving in inclement weather, Waymo is pretty transparent that it's very much a work in progress. They claim the 5th gen Jaguar I-Pace vehicles (the 4th gen Pacificas in AZ don't do as well) will be able to handle rain/snow/fog better due to upgraded sensors, but it's one of the big challenges remaining for them.
Do you not feel that their relative success during your ride in Chandler is at least partially due to the specific location (easy suburban streets) and the geofenced boundaries (they require high quality ground truth labels in order to be successful). If we took the car and dropped it in the middle of Manhattan would it work as well?
It’s easy to say Chandler is just “easy suburban streets”, but for a computer to drive by itself it’s completely non-trivial. In any case, they are already giving private beta rides in SF, so you will soon see how they tackle dense urban streets. They recently started mapping NYC, so I assume that’s coming in the near future too.
Waymo (and others) are very clear that geofencing and prior knowledge of roads are necessary for safe operations. Their safety standards are extremely high because there’s no driver for fallback — the vehicle is responsible end-to-end. Geofencing allows them to validate extensively and that means when they say it works, it really does.
I think the mapping argument is pretty overblown at this point. Most of them have figured out how to do it efficiently and keep it up-to-date.
They've claimed they can map efficiently and the maps are self-updating from the fleet [1]. Waymo and other SDCs have said in the past that mapping isn't as big of an issue, but we will have to wait and see.
just took a waymo fully autonomous (no safety driver, nobody in the driver seat, no manual override) taxi in scottsdale to lunch. was surreal. supposedly over 1m miles with no faults.
Well I'll admit my waymo experience I can't talk about publicly. I get that might be a bit of a let down:) so feel free to ignore the waymo portion of my comment and just assume that everyone is around the same level of ability
> Also curious to know about Waymo’s performance in the snow because I haven’t heard much about that.
Me too, i know almost nothing about their ability in snow.
Report it as a safety defect to the NHTSA (or your national regulator depending where you are). If enough people file similar reports then they do investigate and require manufacturers to recall the vehicles.
I use “Pilot Assist” in a 2018 Volvo V90CC, and on the one hand, it has all kinds of “issues” that require my active attention, including confusion about construction areas, or even just a general wandering when I’m in the RH lane of a highway passing an offramp, and it takes a moment to figure out how to keep going straight.
On the other hand, I have no expectation that it is doing anything autonomous, and this is backed up by the way it gets upset if I take my hands of the steering wheel. And unlike most other cars I hear about, it isn’t content to simply touch the wheel, it wants a hand on either “ten” or “two” specifically.
For my n=1 needs, it’s fantastic: When I commute during rush hour, it handles stop-and-go traffic for me, and lets me sit back and enjoy an audiobook. It does that so well that I’ve completely lost the anxiety/aggression that formerly would have had me trying to figure out which lane is moving faster and so on. Now I just relax. Yes, I am ‘still “driving,” my hands stay on the wheel and my eyes stay on the road.
But I’m more relaxed, and that is more important to me right now than whether I’m relaxed while driving or relaxed while being driven. Yes, for things like construction (and a few other cases I’ve learned to handle) I disengage it or simply override its choices with the steering wheel, accelerator, or brake.
But it’s a big win over old-fashioned cruise control. I never felt like cruise control lowered the stress of highway driving the way Pilot Assist does.
Mind you, none of my experience changes the fact that “Pilot Assist" is nowhere close to autonomous driving. I wouldn’t even look at it and say it’s something you can iterate on until it’s autonomous. It is what it says on the tin: Something that makes my drive easier, but doesn’t replace me as a driver.
There are some flat bulges at 10 and 2, and while I cannot hook my thumbs on them in any way, I can rest my thumbs on them if I put my hands at 9:30 and 2:30, instead of resting my hands on them at 10 and 2.
If I put my hands right on 9 and 3, those bumps don’t come into play at all, but I suppose I could hook my thumbs around the wheel while resting my fingers on the backs of the button-festooned spokes, which are at 9 and 3 themselves.
So yes, I can put my hands at 9 and 3 and ignore the bulges at 10 and 2. Or I can put them at 9:30 and 2:30 and rest my thumbs on the bulges. We’ll see how it goes unlearning 10 and 2.
And ... this is why I've always said it's either all or nothing and why FSD and similar are pointless until in, who knows, 10 years time(if that) it becomes ready for prime time.
Sure, youtubers can video it for fun and drink the kool aid but actual drivers will just turn it off after a hairy situation. Well, I will anyway.
Maybe this is why Tesla are touting their ridiculous robot ... it's a potential pivot or alternative use of the (no doubt) impressive AI tech behind FSD which, they've now realised, will take much longer to be properly driver ready.
Maybe FSD's fate is similar to the space program. The eventual secondary technology it spawns is more useful than its original purpose. Because I won't be going near these autonomous driving solutions for many years.
Yeah, give me a Dalek-style home robot instead for now.
I wonder if the presence of autonomously driving cars will change the design of our infrastructure. The way construction area are designed nowadays expects a lot of the drivers, especially road markings. Standardizing how construction sites design their temporary road changes might make it easier for manufacturers of cars to be able to handle them. Even just proper lane markings or perhaps improved paint, developed together with manufacturers might make this issue go away.
As far as I can tell, this Drive Pilot thing is precisely the existing lane assist product. What's changed is that they've heavily constrained it so that it disengages if you go over 60 kph, or outside the hand-maintained list of blessed areas. Presumably they feel they can detect and disallow construction areas and other complexities fast enough to avoid accidents.
Which is to say... this is mostly a stunt. Teslas are literally driving people around now[1], and the rest of the industry feels they need to do something. Announcing a "SAE Level 3" product, no matter how constrained, at least gets them marketing hits like this that look like an advantage.
[1] No joke: mine takes my kids to and from school reliably. FSD beta isn't finished, but it's really, really good. There remain some path planning and confidence glitches that force me to disengage every dozen miles or so, but in 500 miles since I got it I've yet to see the car attempt anything genuinely unsafe. Mostly it just annoys other drivers by refusing to enter traffic.
If Mercedes-Benz is able to define conditions where their self driving software is guaranteed to work fully autonomously without human intervention and Tesla can't, that in itself is an actual advantage over Tesla's system even if Tesla's system can do more with human monitoring in other conditions.
If Tesla is also able to get approval for this (which might be hard if they push OTA updates that completely change the way the software works all the time and can't guarantee there won't be regressions) then they should by all means do so.
That's sort of true in the abstract, but misses the point. Autonomy isn't about "defining conditions", it's about solving real problems. Cars that are L3 only in traffic jams on the Autobahn aren't very autonomous, nor useful. If it's stop go and the system gets above 60kph, it cuts out. If the stoppage is due to construction, it won't work.
I mean, sure, it's an advantage for people who actually need to drive in exactly those conditions.
But it's not a engineering advantage of the system. Fast forward a year and look at where Daimler will be and where Tesla will be. Who's going to get to a L3 system on general roads first? Who's going to be running L4 driverless vehicles first?
Which is to repeat: it's just a stunt. It's a way to "sound like" they're "ahead" in this area of technology, when clearly they aren't. In fact this car is doing more or less exactly what Teslas were doing in the first version of Autopilot more than six years ago. And note that in all that time, those Teslas haven't been hitting anyone in slow traffic jams on well-maintained limited access highways either.
Tesla "will be there in a year" since... 2016 or so? (Musk said in January that he is confident Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy in 2021, looking forward to that)
> those Teslas haven't been hitting anyone in slow traffic jams on well-maintained limited access highways either.
weird then that Tesla, despite showman Musk at the helm, hasn't been doing the simple stunt of putting their money where their mouth is, getting L3 permission for their system and actually taking the risk for something that is "never happening" instead of finding ways of blaming the driver every time. It would be an easy way of providing an additional actual useful capability to their users on top of what they already have.
No, it's not some massive technical leap, but "ok, we'll take the blame for our system failing" is still a big legal step.
> Autonomy isn't about "defining conditions", it's about solving real problems.
Sounds pretty hand-wavy. Autonomy is about defining conditions in which a self driving system can safely operate, also known as Operational Design Domain (ODD).
Of course, ODD as a concept is foreign to Tesla FSD because it is "50% of the time, it works every time" i.e. you don't know when it works and when it doesn't. It's a YOLO driver assistance system with a misnomer. Not sure how many "real problems" that is solving and definitely won't be L4 anytime soon.
> That's sort of true in the abstract, but misses the point. Autonomy isn't about "defining conditions", it's about solving real problems. Cars that are L3 only in traffic jams on the Autobahn aren't very autonomous, nor useful. If it's stop go and the system gets above 60kph, it cuts out. If the stoppage is due to construction, it won't work.
> I mean, sure, it's an advantage for people who actually need to drive in exactly those conditions.
> But it's not a engineering advantage of the system. Fast forward a year and look at where Daimler will be and where Tesla will be. Who's going to get to a L3 system on general roads first? Who's going to be running L4 driverless vehicles first?
> Which is to repeat: it's just a stunt. It's a way to "sound like" they're "ahead" in this area of technology, when clearly they aren't. In fact this car is doing more or less exactly what Teslas were doing in the first version of Autopilot more than six years ago. And note that in all that time, those Teslas haven't been hitting anyone in slow traffic jams on well-maintained limited access highways either.
If it's a race to see which company can develop fully self-driving cars that work in all conditions in the next 5 years than maybe Tesla could be "ahead" of Mercedes-Benz (although it seems to be way behind other companies like Waymo).
However, if we are actually decades away from fully self-driving cars that work in all conditions it is much more useful to have cars that can be trusted to operate without human supervision in limited but well defined conditions, because it is much more useful to be able to have a car that allows you to do something else other than focus on driving SOME of the time than a car that assists you more in some ways but requires supervision ALL of the time.
If Tesla's approach precludes them from making self driving technology work reliably under limited conditions like this, it doesn't matter whether their self driving technology works better (but not reliably) in other conditions, because in practice it won't be as useful as more limited but reliable self driving systems.
Some countries are already requiring the approach Mercedes-Benz is taking here for regulatory approval and based on the number of accidents Tesla vehicles have been involved in its possible that the US could adopt the same approach.
If this happens it will not be useful at all to have a more advanced but incomplete and unreliable self-driving technology in the short term (but perhaps it will be possible to keep developing it without shipping it in cars until it reaches a sufficient level of reliability).
> As far as I can tell, this Drive Pilot thing is precisely the existing lane assist product. What's changed is that they've heavily constrained it so that it disengages if you go over 60 kph
Nope - it's a new system powered by LIDAR and cameras and only works on pre-mapped roads, comparable to what Tesla and Waymo are doing (but erring on the side of caution).
The 60kph limitation is temporary because that's what the regulator was comfortable with.
Lane assist is a different tech stack and continues to exist alongside this for regular driving.
I don't see anywhere in those slides where that's substantiated. Tesla and Waymo (and Cruise and Mobileye, FWIW) are making navigation decisions: they'll change lanes, take turns, wait for traffic, use roundabouts, read street lights and speed limit sighs, etc...
Drive Pilot doesn't seem to be doing any of that. It's just a lane assist package: it will drive straight, in its marked lane, behind another vehicle, and that's all it will do. Maybe it will someday, sure. But it's not exhibiting these features anywhere, nor is Mercedes claiming that it has them. Am I missing something?
Seems like they are laser focused on the "stuck in traffic on the highway while on the way to work" scenario for automation, which is pretty clever. Focus on one use case and do it well. Heck people generally enjoy driving when the road is empty, especially on the Autobahn.
It's the part of driving that people hate the most + the stakes are very low (no pedestrians/cyclists, and the accidents are just fender benders). Perfect low-hanging fruit
> the stakes are very low (no pedestrians/cyclists, and the accidents are just fender benders)
It's a road without speed limits. Mistakes might be less likely - at least they are for humans, not sure about an overly cautious AI model - but the cost of a mistake is very high.
In city streets, the car sometimes fails to correctly detect the speed limit, let alone driving autonomously. Also the Germans apparently love making the rules in every junction different, and while most people are capable of intense street-sign following (I feel like a robot when driving, yeah the irony is not lost on me), I doubt a computer can do that too, especially when every mistake has a bigger chance to end up with an accident, compared to (I imagine) anywhere else in the world, because a typical driver here doesn't want to calculate the risk of another failing to follow the rules correctly.
Look at driving fail videos from Germany and the ones from Russia and the USA, you'll regularly see something they show as "huge mistake OMG" in Germany being unremarkable (if not business as usual) when compared to others.
I've been in a Tesla running the self-driving beta in Manhattan and it is NOT fun or relaxing at all. The car is overly "jumpy", but by jumpy I mean "breaky." The way a lot of pedestrians cross streets (walk into the side of the road and get 2 feet away from a passing car before crossing right behind the car) causes it to slam on the break constantly while people "stage" their crossing. It's also terrible at left turns without a light. Both of these flaws are completely understandable because it's a complex safety situation, but people who think human drivers are replaceable within 5 years are naive.
I always wonder if this is a problem that has to be solved at all. Instead of cars recognizing the speed limits there should be government managed maps containing all the roads/lanes and speed limits.
When creating a construction site just add it to the map.
If you can legally rely on the speed limits in the maps, this should be much easier to do.
Recognizing speed limits seems to be a technical solution to an organizational problem.
In Germany a speed limit doesn't mean it's always reasonable to drive at maximum speed.
E.g. there are narrow streets in citys with cars parking on both sides. The official speed limit is 50 km/h. If you drive at this speed you straight up murder any pedestrian coming out behind of a car. If you do this you'll be pleaded guilty, because your speed was not appropriate to the situation. You even have to learn this exact situation when you make your drivers license.
An other funny example. Where i lived was road with a bend, where an ordinary person should maybe drive 50 km/h. It was borderline questionable to drive through there with 70 km/h and a good car.
Directly before the bend the speedlimit changed from 70 km/h to 100 km/h. There where a lot of accidents, because even germans don't understand the meaning of german speed limits.
I’ve noticed this on Polish vs Czech roads (I’ve driven mostly in the mountains border regions of Czechia so this maybe local). Polish roads have gazillion of signs and usually you’ll see a lower speed limit sign just before the curve or a bend if it’s not supposed to be driven at the speed limit of the main road. In my opinion there are way too many signs and I feel—as another poster commented here—like a robot. On the other hand in Czechia on a small mountain road there’s a general limit say 90kmh or 70kmh and there’s no way you make the bends with that speed— it’s your responsibility to slow down.
I’ve seen a similar differences in another border regions, e.g. Switzerland-France or France-Germany. It almost seems like there are two schools of thoughts that different countries subscribe to.
I Drive much and Usually I and others get curves etc more intuitively. One has to be a really bad driver to not have a Instinkt for the speed necessary in curves.
Btw German driver here and I find German has a good equilibrium of signs . I have to drive to Paris and Milano for work . Those places are pure mayhem of signs and confusion. I can’t imagine a self driving car mastering some of those places.
Prague, on the other hand, is oversaturated with signs. I guess someone makes money on them, because some are clearly superfluous (Segway bans in distant neighbourhoods where no one ever drove a Segway; Segways were only a bane of the touristy center).
The reason why Polish roads have so many signs is because producing and installing them is an opportunity to make money :) And usually that opportunity goes to a company owned by a relative of some local politician ;)
> In Germany a speed limit doesn't mean it's always reasonable to drive at maximum speed.
I didn't want to imply this. I was just talking about the task of finding the speed limit. Getting from there to a reasonable speed to drive at is a different issue and much more complicated, yes ;)
"Das Ende einer streckenbezogenen Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkung oder eines Überholverbots ist nicht gekennzeichnet, wenn das Verbot nur für eine kurze Strecke gilt und auf einem Zusatzzeichen die Länge des Verbots angegeben ist. Es ist auch nicht gekennzeichnet, wenn das Verbotszeichen zusammen mit einem Gefahrzeichen angebracht ist und sich aus der Örtlichkeit zweifelsfrei ergibt, von wo an die angezeigte Gefahr nicht mehr besteht. Sonst ist es gekennzeichnet durch die Zeichen 278 bis 282."
The translation of this is: If a speed limit is combined with another sign indicating a reason for the speed limit (e.g. construction work, dangerous curve, train crossing...) the speed limit automatically ends without any additional sign.
So basically the AI has to understand why the speed limit is there and decide when it has passed the dangerous part of the road.
When starting to drive the car has to recognize if it is inside the city (50km/h or 30km/h limit depending on location), outside the city (100 km/h) or on the autobahn (no limit). This is simply impossible without having a map. You could save the state from the previous drive. But what happens if the car gets towed from the autobahn into a city. Will drive through the city without any speed limit?
That sounds like an exception that could be easily addressed by adding an additional sign or perhaps in most cases making the rule hold for a maximum of 100 yards or so. Even detecting construction work is relatively easy: you have lots of cranes, people wearing helmets, cement mixers, scaffolding, traffic cones, yellow tape, etc. Easy to teach to a machine learning system.
Very true, it's kind of like when you try to automate existing human processes. There are often too many exceptions to make it easy enough to automate, compared to a company that automated this process from the beginning.
Humans are very good at exception handling, albeit slow, and this is implicit in any process involving humans.
Actually, the speed limits are not imposed randomly and you can usually "sense" the limit from the surroundings and the structure of the road. I don't really look at speed limits when driving, if I'm on a road that looks like a pedestrian can walk then I probably need to go slow and if there's a school ahead or the street is particularly narrow or the road pavement is not asphalt I probably need to go extremely slow.
TBF, now I'm not in Germany but when I was, driving on the autobahn usually involved religiously following the signs of speed limit and no speed limit(the limit-free coverage on the autobahn is patchy).
I wonder if the self driving systems asses the road type to determine the speed they should go. Is there a possibility for a autonomous car to speed up to 120kph around a school or in a residential area if the sign is missing or someone puts a bogus sign?
> Actually, the speed limits are not imposed randomly and you can usually "sense" the limit from the surroundings and the structure of the road.
This is, in fact, the legal standard in California! The actual speed limit is the minimum of (posted speed limit plus a substantial fudge factor) and (a subjectively safe speed for the road conditions). i.e. if the sign says 65mph, and the road is winding and a bit icy/rainy so that 45mph is the highest safe speed, you can be ticketed for speeding if you drive 60mph.
It's enforced by the courts generally with fines. You can lose your license with repeated infractions.
The legal standard, like many legal standards, is around reasonableness. Regardless of the posted limit, you may never driver faster than is safe for the current conditions.
And it is indeed borne on the judgement of the officer. Who else would ticket you?
I know it’s not the correct way to do, and it stems from my experience driving, but I’ve always used the first digit in the speed limit signs for bends/corners on mountain roads as a guide for the gear to be in. 25mph curve? Whatever speed you can do in second is fine. 45mph, fourth gear speeds, etc.
Not entirely related but yeah, depends on road conditions and signage.
when there's a construction and the speed limit is 60kph, I really hate it when the car starts accelerating like it's in a race track the moment it sees the limit removed. it scared me a couple of times, so I imagine it's not impossible for that to happen.
it also takes the curvature of the road into account and slows for the traffic, but there's always a small empty town with straight roads...
it also sometimes messes up the steering when going through a construction site with yellow lines, so I really hope that they improved this system heavily in the last year since I bought my car.
Signs are also frequently wrong, even in Germany. This can get so bad that there are multiple maximum speeds on the same road in the same direction, all depending on where you came from.
No, the speed limit is always the same, regardless where you came from. If there is no speed limit posted after a junction, the default speed limit for this kind of road (unlimited, 100km/h, 50km/h, or zone specific as posted before entering the zone, usually 30km/h) applies.
But even a lot of Germans don't know this, I'm afraid.
While this is true it's also not uncommon for signage to be faulty, i.e. not following official regulations, or invalid unfortunately. Most often at construction sites.
Obviously this is nowhere near the level of sophistication of this car, but I love using adaptive cruise control in slow traffic. My car turns it off if I've been stopped for a few seconds, so it's not great in stop/go traffic, but it does ease the mental burden of changing speed as traffic fluctuates, especially on multi-hours drives.
The marketing maybe a challenge though. "Imagine being stuck in traffic every day, and now you can spend that time working while your car watches the road" does not really make one want to buy a car?
I had a non-AMG (but with the "lite" AMG body styling package) E350 coupe around 10 years back, and it was an absolute dream to drive - nicest car I've driven in 20+ years of driving, and it was a great space to be in on the rare occasions I was a passenger.
There is one thing I will never understand, why do a lot of people talk about speed limits as the speed you need to be driving? It’s the maximum speed you can reach before being fined, it doesn’t mean “oh man I’m driving at 90km/h and the limit is 100, that’s so wrong”.
Some roads (at least here in Italy) also have a minimum speed requirement when there is no traffic, which goes higher the more you go to the left lanes, but that’s another story.
Anyway I think that reading speed limits from road signs is quite stupid and frankly useless, most of the time the speed you need to be driving is contextual and the same applies to a lot of other dynamics of driving.
Well done Mercedes, one step at a time raising the bar once you manage to do “simple” things right.
It's not speed per se that is a problem, rather the aim of speed limits is to make sure you can control your car and not cause accidents.
If everyone is driving the 'recommended' speed of 130kmh on a German motorway then it is a severe risk if you drive slower. Road users need to be predictable. Trucks or motorhomes are slower, but you expect them to be slower. You see them from the distance and plan ahead. But a normal car that drives 60 when all others drive 130-140 is a massive danger as other drivers do not expect it to do so, so will lose precious seconds to react. You can get fined for driving unnecessarily slow.
In Germany you also cannot merge onto the motorway unless you have a certain speed already, and you cannot enter the motorway at all if your car can't do an appropriate minimum speed (or you have special transport papers and warning lights).
It's 60km/h to enter the motorway. You don't need to drive it necessarily (depending on your situation), but the top speed in your cars papers needs to be that or higher.
Driving "too slow" is often dangerous as well. You'll get failed in a UK driving test for going too slow and not keeping up with traffic or generally causing an obstruction.
If you are doing 40mph but everyone else is doing 65-70 then you cause a hazard for people as they have to take evasive action to go around you, then others have to brake to avoid hitting the people going around you, then a ripple braking wave starts behind you, then a BMW driver rear-ends someone half a mile behind you and suddenly you've caused a multiple pile-up where someone died today, because you were going too slow for the conditions.
That's a nice story that people keep telling because they don't like having to slow down.
But I seriously doubt that driving below the speed limit has a measurable increase in risk.
I would bet the opposite: That driving below the speed limit decreases risk of serious accidents.
One reason for that is that rear end accidents where both cars are going in the same direction are typically much less serious than head on collisions. So even if slow drivers increase the risk of rear end accidents (which I doubt is significant), they reduce the impact of head on collisions much more leading to a net positive.
People should drive slower, it's always safer. (Apart from dumb maneuvers like brake checking...)
Research from the 60s has a relative speed/crash incidence curve. It’s lowest for cars going a little above the median speed, about equally dangerous going either way from that in a U shape.
Some subsequent research affirms this curve, others call it into question. My own, informal read is that the stronger research generally affirms it.
Speed-CAUSED crashes don’t factor strongly into fatal crash counts. Also, a general trend of increasing rural road or freeway (urban and rural) speed limit increases in the US since 1995 has accompanied continued plunges into record low highway fatality rates.
Also, all crashes are relevant. Fatalities can’t happen when there aren’t crashes.
It doesn't matter if the primary cause of a traffic accident is speed. The relevant question is:
"Would this person have died if the cars were driving slower?"
And simple physics tells us that almost always the answer is "No".
If you try to argue that driving faster is safer, you need to provide strong evidence. Statistical correlation over a time frame where cars and roads have been made much safer doesn't really convince me. Even a correlation between driver speed and collision risk is meaningless -- eg. people with poor vision generally drive slower, but are still more dangerous than drivers with good vision.
(I'm not saying that driving fast is unsafe in general. On a well maintained road with good visibility you can drive pretty fast with minimal risk. All I'm saying is that, all other things being equal, driving slower is almost always going to be safer)
I don’t disagree with the idea that if you’re going to get into a crash, that a slower-speed crash is usually less risky. Where I disagree is that we can stop at basic physics and ignore so many other factors. A focus on physics is kind of like the “but if it saves one life” argument, which is fallacious because it’s contemptuous of all other views.
It is not simply the case that anti-speed crusades result in safer roads. The USA’s 55 mph experiment a was a failure in that regard, and Vision Zero campaigns aren’t delivering on promises.
We really need to focus on crash elimination, which is not a hyper focus on speed. Crashes that don’t happen can’t injure or kill.
My main point was that we shouldn't tell people to drive faster. Every time an argument like this comes up, people on the internet start arguing that slow drivers are causing accidents. Open a random Reddit thread and it's full of people bashing slow drivers.
But I really doubt that slow drivers are inherently dangerous. Especially since a lot of road users are slow and can't drive fast (big trucks, tractors, mopeds, bicycles, RVs, cars with trailers, etc). So the focus must be on making sure that drivers are attentive and have good visibility, not telling slow drivers to step on the gas.
Slow drivers do increase crash risk if their slowness is done irresponsibly, which many of us see all too often. We all need to be courteous to each other, and driving slowly does not absolve one of that.
Sometimes, the right thing is for slow drivers to speed up and go with the flow.
Correct, and we’re missing these bad drivers since the basis of nearly every last traffic stop (yes, I’ve studied the data from several angles) is “speeding”. The further you lower limits, the more who are “speeding”.
Here in Norway posted speed limit corresponds to safe speed at typical weather condition. If you go slower you impede traffic and force people to overtake you. That is substantially more dangerous than just driving at posted speed.
And Norwegians will overtake - I drove from Bergen to Oslo and was astounded by how many people would whip past me at breakneck speed in those mountain passageways. And I’m not what I would consider a slow driver. I chalked it up to inexperience with the area.
Huh. I drove Bergen to Oslo and averaged something insane like 47mph or whatever the limits required (since I was terrified of their speed cameras) and was rarely passed in 6-7 hours of driving.
In some countries you're supposed to drive at close to speed limit. If the speed limit is 90, you're supposed to go at least 70. Main reason why horse carriages and bicycles aren't allowed on highways. Go way slower than the traffic flow and you're impeding traffic which is detrimental to traffic safety.
not sure why you getting downed, for highways this is totally the case. In my country your vehicle must prove to be able to sustain at least 70km/h, or else it's banned from highways and high-speed motorways.
I think it’s because 70km/h is not “close to the speed limit” and also because there are countless reasons why you cannot drive a bicycle or a horse carriage on a highway besides the speed you travel at.
> there are countless reasons why you cannot drive a bicycle [...] on a highway besides the speed you travel at.
What reasons other than speed are there for keeping bicycles off fast roads? Motorcycle can be very nearly just as small and vulnerable as bicycles, but they can keep pace with cars and consequently they're allowed on every road.
Bicycles are much more unstable than motorcycles, it’s more difficult for bicycles to avoid objects in some situations since you cannot brake and accelerate in a small timeframe, they take more time to return to a high speed after you brake, etc.
Same reasons why you cannot drive small motorcycles on highways here in Italy, even if they can easily reach 110km/h they are not allowed on even second tier highways.
I don't know what it's like in Italy, but in America bicycles are allowed on almost all roads, except for limited access highways. They're even allowed on most regular highways, to the chagrin of many car drivers. The poor acceleration of bicycles is the worst on roads where frequent stops are expected (for intersections) but bicycles are allowed on almost all of those roads, particularly city streets which obviously have abundant intersections. Limited access highways don't have intersections that would frustrate cyclists, but as a consequence of not having intersections those roads have much higher speeds that cyclists can't keep up with. Furthermore, heavy trucks have terrible acceleration, much worse than cyclists, but are allowed on all of the limited access highways that bicycles are banned on.
Maybe it's different in Italy, but in America the restrictions on bicycles really seem to be about top speed, not acceleration.
I get what you say, and sure laws are different from country to country.
Overall the reasons why you cannot drive bicycles on highways are many, but when you put them all together it mostly fall under one term: safety.
What I wanted to say on my original comment is that trying to put an autonomous driving car in a urban situation is not about checking the speed limit from a road sign, looking at a ground stop or other road signals. If you want a safe autonomous car in an urban center it must be aware of the context much more than “this is a stop sign” or “speed limit is 50km/h”, that’s why I praise Mercedes for trying to solve the solvable problems first and then move to more complex ones.
So, not quite. It’s that you can fail for “undue hesitation”, or driving dangerously, which could manifest as driving too slowly. But the act of driving to slowly isn’t a fail in and of itself.
'Undue hesitation' is something else (eg: failing to enter a roundabout when there's a safe opportunity to do so, especially if this causes other road users to also be unable to enter the roundabout).
'Appropriate speed' is definitely a potential minor (or major) error on your driving test (and you are marked as failing for either a single major or three or more minors in the same category).
Generally, it's up to the examiner's discretion whether speed is 'appropriate', but often lenience will not be more than 10% of the speed limit (unless there are other factors, such as weather, road surface, visibility, etc. which would make it unsafe to travel at the posted speed limit).
The maximum speed you are allowed to drive at is indeed, by definition, a limit. There is nothing wrong with the term.
That being said, driving laws, as far as I know, always say that you need to adapt your speed to the local conditions in order to drive safely, but you can never exceed the speed limit. Many (most?) jurisdictions have laws against dangerous and reckless driving and I expect it is possible to be found to be driving dangerously even when staying under the speed limit.
Where there is a minimum speed, which is also of course conditioned to current road conditions, it is also for safety. For instance, on a motorway where the traffic moves at 70mph it is dangerous for everyone if a vehicle decides to move at 30mph...
You should probably be driving quite close to the posted speed limit, unless there are weather or road conditions making that unsafe (then you should slow down), or if a lot of traffic is going significantly faster than that (then you should speed up). It’s not that odd to think that there should be one very narrow range of speeds that most traffic should be traveling at on a particular road and time, that’s pretty clearly the safest.
In many states (including California) you will get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic even if you are at or under the speed limit, e.g. if you are in the passing lane or not using turnout areas when on a two lane road. While you yourself don't have to speed, you do have to get out of the way of people who want to.
Ignoring everything that is happening around you, even if you are under the speed limit, is an incredibly unsafe way to drive.
German highways are special when it comes to this. Many of them have no speed limit at all.
If traffic permits, you can travel at 180 mph and it's perfectly legal.
You will see many Porsches doing so, you will see the electronically limited BMS do 155mph and you will see that things like vans travel at 100-110 mph as if it's a normal thing.
This 60kph speed limit would simply look out of place on an Autobahn as they call it, and I gather this stem is only to be used on the motorway, specifically designated.
German drivers are generally well-trained, and the mandatory car inspections means that cars are in good driving condition. The Autobahn is also in excellent condition compared to the Canadian highways I know.
I'd say that most cars drive at around 130-140 km/h in the center lane, and 170 km/h isn't unusual. This requires people to keep the left lane free, something I yet have to witness in North America.
But beyond that, the Autobahn is really boring to drive on. It's just like any other highway: almost straight, and completely isolated from the world around it.
> There is one thing I will never understand, why do a lot of people talk about speed limits as the speed you need to be driving? It’s the maximum speed you can reach before being fined, it doesn’t mean “oh man I’m driving at 90km/h and the limit is 100, that’s so wrong”.
Different traffic laws. In Germany, there's only a lower limit on the Autobahn, and there's an advisory speed limit that in precedent cases you must be able to maintain if your vehicle and road (and weather) conditions permit but in practice is somewhat overrun, which is legal.
Most states in the US penalize overspeeding, but also penalizes underspeeding on state and interstate highways if car, road and weather conditions otherwise permit. While counterintuitive, in highways (especially interstate ones) there's an expectation of a "belt" of vehicles that maintain more-or-less the same speed: different speeds of vehicles should be on different lanes (the innermost being the fastest lane otherwise posted in signage).
If you drove the limit on highways in Canada you'd be pushed off the road. People routinely drive 130 km/h+ on 100 km/h roads. Partly the fault of the engineers/province who designed them for those speeds and then tell people not to drive that fast.
If the posted speed limit is significantly lower than the natural speed drivers would drive or well below the actual average speed (both are often the case in the US), driving under the posted limit in clear/dry weather is more dangerous than driving at the posted limit.
Many of our highways are posted at 55 mph or 65 mph. Car traffic is typically 70-80 mph on those highways.
In the US you can and often will be pulled over for going too slow, because it’s suspicious. This effectively makes the speed limit the only speed you can drive without fear of police interaction.
I've had a few times in driving school where I'd interpret an end of speed limit wrong and go to the slower tier rather than the faster one. I got yelled at by the teacher on the passenger seat quite a bit. It's just not tolerated to go slower than the speed limit if there no good reason for it and it will lose you points in a driving exam, if not lose you the exam right away. At least that's how it is in France.
I was going to say the same thing. In France if the speed limit is 50 km/h, you have to go 50 km/h unless there is a good reason not too.
Outside of cities, on the main roads the speed limit is usually either 80km/h or 90km/h. A few times while learning to drive with an instructor, he told I had to reach the max allowed speed limit as soon as possible as to not slow down the traffic and failing to do that will make me lose points on the driving test.
If the road conditions were good, then breathalyzing somebody who's going substantially below the speed limit for no apparent reason seems prudent. If road conditions were poor, then obviously that's another story.
If I remember correctly, back in the 70's in the US speed limits were lowered to increase fuel efficiency. I think people advocating for increased speed limits or no speed limits at all should at least consider the increase in fuel consumption and pollutant emissions when looking at the pros and cons.
Which is a bad thing. Especially since it gives cops the opportunity to pull over anyone whenever, because the expectation is that you speed all the time.
L2/L3 is also at a point where the only reason to have a human in the control loop at all is to pass the buck for any accidents. A 2016 study found that reaction times are absolutely pitiful unless the driver is actively driving. After passing control from the automation to the human, it takes about 15-20 seconds for your reaction time to get up to the level of a drunk driver.
The human in the front seat of a L3 car isn't the driver. They're the scapegoat.
Daimler explicitly assumes liability if something goes wrong when driving autonomously. That is the key difference to other popular automakers that market themselves as pioneers but do not assume liability for their level 2 system.
Tesla is going the fastest route possible to complete autonomy.
What we are seeing now is the beta program to get there as fast as possible.
No one is forced into buying it.
I am really happy that they have the gusto to push things forward, if it weren't for them we wouldn’t have an EV race, a autonomy race, a rocket race.
This may be interpreted as the purchaser accepting known risks from a product, but no such consent exists from those around the car. Safety standards exist to protect people outside the car as well as inside, and may not be unilaterally waived on the part of those inside the car. Even assuming that the purchaser is fully informed about the risks when given consent, and is not misled by Tesla's erroneous use of "Full Autopilot" to describe something that requires continuous human oversight, not even that shred of consent exists from pedestrians struck/killed by self-driving cars (e.g. link below).
I don't see why Tesla can't do both. Production Autopilot is easily the most advanced ADAS on the market right now, why not add an L3 "mode" with the same limits (traffic jams only) and liability guarantees as Daimler?
How does this work in practise? I think there must be something in the legislation as well. I don't see the driver and car manufacturer could just transfer the liabilities to the manufacturer with mutual contract. Monetary liabilities maybe, but there can be also criminal charges on the table.
Polar opposite of what Tesla is doing. If they can't match this, that's the whole German fsd market gone for them, possibly whole EU, as they will harmonize the Requirements.
That's why Waymo decided to go all in with driverless vehicles, instead of progressively adding features and autonomy to a driver-lead car, they discovered "drivers" get complacent easily.
I like that solution much better. The assumption that most manufacturers make, that humans are capable of sustained focused attention on tasks which only require sporadic intervention, is a wildly inaccurate assumption.
I think it depends on how the handoff is being performed. If the automated system notices weather conditions beyond its training, then pulls over to hand off control, that is reasonable. If the automated system notices that it's getting into a dangerous and immediate situation, then the 15 seconds needed for a human to become engaged with the task are enough that the situation has already passed.
Found it, though unfortunately I couldn't find any non-paywall links.
It depends on how immediate things are, because you need a certain amount of warning to quality as level 3. A sufficiently rapid switchoff into danger puts you more in level 2 territory.
The liability concern is almost always raised by people who don't do actuarial math.
For a given set of parameters (car/driver/environment) it gets to an accident every X miles causing Y$ in damage. This Y$ is paid out by pool of insurance money which a group of owners have already paid for.
Self Driving car is no different. In fact, the Car manufacturers will have more data to ascertain the 'blame' and fewer accidents every X miles and they can actually insure the drivers directly at a much lower rate. Car manufacturers will pay the much lower Y$ from this insurance pool
> Self Driving car is no different. In fact, the Car manufacturers will have more data to ascertain the 'blame' and fewer accidents every X miles and they can insure the drivers at a much lower rate. They will happily pay from this pool
"More self driving capabilities means fewer crashes per mile which means they're cheaper to insure" hasn't really panned out with Teslas.
Teslas are also ludicrously more expensive to repair, and often parts availability is so bad that cars are "totaled" or the owner gets stuck in limbo - the insurance company says "well, we're happy to pay out, when you get the repair done..." and Tesla body shops and service centers have months long backups.
Result? Teslas, despite getting into fewer crashes per mile than the average, are much more expensive to insure than other cars.
The full self driving "beta" looks to be even worse, from sampling a couple of youtube videos of it "driving."
The average age of a car in the US is 12 years old, by the way, which significantly skews things away from all the cars that have ADAS features)
In my country there is a difference between insurance that covers others on the road (mandatory) and insurance that covers damages to your own vehicle (optional).
I'd imagine insurance companies have something similar internally when calculating premiums, as a $1,000 20yo Toyota involved in an accident could cause the same amount of damage as a $150,000 Mercedes with this tech to others.
That would be the part that would become cheaper as they will see over 1,000,000 miles the Toyota would have a higher rate of incidents than the Mercedes which has all these safety features (if it does what it says).
If your insurance also covers damages to your own vehicle, of course that's going to be more expensive, as repairs to the Mercedes will be much more expensive than the Toyota.
People who either completely overstretched their budget and can't afford it or people who are rich enough to save the insurance premium and simply buy a new one in the worst case.
> The average age of a car in the US is 12 years old…
Average age of a car in Britain is 8 years and it’s only recently got this high. I got given a 10 year old car a few years back and I paid to have it taken away by the time it was 12 years old because it was costing too much in repairs and I realised I would be spending the same money on car payments on a new car.
Tesla doesn’t have any self driving vehicles yet. We don’t know what will be insurance rates for L3 vehicles as Mercedes will be one of the first available to public.
Car manufacturers will pay the much lower Y$ from this insurance pool
They'll only accept that if they can charge a subscription fee to car owners, and car owners are legally required to have an up to date subscription. There is no way manufacturers will take on the burden of insuring their cars voluntarily.
Not really sure that should be a metric, given that Tesla Autopilot (which shipped, what, a decade ago?) still likes to ram into the back of parked emergency vehicles (a problem they have "acknowledged") and randomly brake heavily (a problem they haven't, but just hit up youtube and you can find dozens of examples of it doing it to varying degrees of severity.)
That's the point of parents comment: Tesla (and every other assist) is Level 2, and thus can always blame the driver for not paying attention and doesn't take responsibility in the same way a Level 3 product has to, which explicitly tells users they don't have to focus on driving but can do other things.
Yes, but Tesla uses the excuse that the driver is supposed to be paying attention at all times because it’s only a “driver assistance” system. (Not that the name would ever imply something else. No.)
But once you’ve explicitly told the driver they don’t have to pay attention, you don’t have that excuse anymore.
When I lived in Beijing, I took a taxi to and from work daily (from northeast to northwest Beijing on the 4th ring). It is really nice being driven around, you just chill and use your phone (would have taken the subway but being stuffed in with no available seating wasn’t very relaxing). Driving isn’t fun for a lot of people.
In cities where taxis are more ubiquitous, why isn’t level 5 simply replaces the taxi drivers with computers no? Then it’s not really a new paradigm, just that (a) traffic might flow better and (b) places where taxis aren’t cheap and plentiful (most of the USA, much of Western Europe) get to have an experience similar to a middle class lifestyle in a developing country.
There's a difference between driving in traffic jams to get to work and driving on twisty empty back roads. The former is a regrettable experience that is a necessary evil so that you can make a living. The latter is a hobby that lets you control the direction of the roller coaster.
Public roads are not a racetrack, and it's regrettable many people treat it as such. That society for some reason tolerates "spirited" driving, people using the road as their personal rollercoaster, is one of the worst lapses in our collective judgements. It probably grew out of cars starting out as toys for the rich, and the aspirational branding created around it.
Allowing high speed cars anywhere (even on the twisty "empty" roads) is the main reason the public realm is now objectively dangerous.
Driving should have been integrated in the culture as a solemn activity, only reserved to those with impeccable integrity and high moral standing, a true privilege in which the driver assumes responsibility for the lives of others, and accepts accountability commensurate with this duty.
Ending somebodies life, injuring others, causing damage, those are the inevitable by-products of careless driving, of driving for sport.
I'm exaggerating for emphasis. But driving as a hobby should be reserved to the racetrack. Just like shooting guns as a hobby is reserved to the gun range.
Recreational driving sounds a lot different from the daily grind or that t5 hour trip on I90 from Seattle to Spokane to see family that you’ve made a hundred times before. Self driving cars would really help with the grind, then maybe we can focus more on recreation with the time we save.
The kinetic energy of a car at 9 m/s (20 mph) is about 15 Wh, depending on its weight. The kinetic energy of a bullet is about 0.2 Wh.
This obviously doesn't quite translate, but the amount of damage you can do with a car is massive, even at that speed. Also consider the weight, eg when rolling over a pedestrian.
My point is, if I see a car coming, I'm not going to cross the street and let it hit me. That's the reason parents teach their kids to look both ways before crossing the street. Some idiot driver, human or otherwise, may not be controlling their vehicle in a predictable manner. At 20mph, as a pedestrian I can make a good decision about crossing the street.
I feel much safer about an empty driverless car at 20mph on local roads than one full of passengers at highway speeds.
(20 mph is entirely made up, it could be higher or lower in relationship to actual human reaction times)
human drivers do that all the time from getting distracted with your handphone, falling asleep in the driving seat, driving while drunk or otherwise impaired. So it is not much different. But AI cars are likely to be better drivers 2-3 years from now than what they are today humans will either be the same or worse.
I wonder if your insurance company will feel the same about your enjoyment, once the technology threshold is crossed well enough and they realize that automated driving is the new rail.
Or, would you be willing to pay higher premiums or even extra tolls and taxes in order to drive yourself?
I think this will eventually be a question that fails over into economics while people are arguing about it. Insurers will be in a good place to influence the future of automated driving.
Humans as a group can't even not drive drunk, still. Individuals are not predictable either. Our taste for control will have to be worked around. (Hopefully in ways that allow us more time to...for example drive in VR, on a better course, with an even more stimulating feeling of presence, while we are driven around...)
I'd pay. But I highly doubt that any autonomous vehicles will prove to be as efficient and as safe anytime soon. I'd wager they could be xor but not both in the next 20 years.
Cars sit idle 80-90% of their useful life. As an auto manufacturer I don't need to achieve L{n} autonomous to make money, I just need wheels moving not parked.
Wheels moving at 20mph on local roads, in-between paid trips with human drivers, is a huge market and with a lower risk profile than L4 or L5 autonomous. The fat margins here are in making idle capital more productive.
In my understanding, cars that drive more break faster, mileage being the dominant factor, not age.
So whether you have 10 cars serving 10 people, breaking after 30 years, or one car serving 10 people where you have to buy a new one every 3 years - seems about the same.
In the former model, car makers even have the opportunity to get people to buy new cars before they'd technically have to, which sounds like more money to me.
For society at large, the latter model seems better.
Not sure why you think this, empty cars really do require L4 if not L5, and if you've got actual L4 driving, taxis and freight are much bigger markets than renting cars in cities.
If all it took to take an L2 AI and make it L5 were reducing top speed, you'd see a lot more L5 AIs around.
The biggest problem with most self-driving cars is that they are easily fooled by various images, since they have extremely simplistic image classifiers to work with, rather than hugely specialized mamallian visual cortexes. Speed of processing is one aspect, but not nearly the only one. The Tesla that ran over that cyclist crossing that street at night wasn't missing reaction time, it simply didn't recognize the cyclist as an obstacle for whatever reason.
Now as far as I understand, lidar mostly fixes these false negatives (in good weather conditions), but at the cost of more false positives - and here speed could be a bigger help.
Even so, L4 and L5 would require planning skills and understanding of other traffic participants and road conditions that are still beyond us, at any speed. Note that the CEO of Waymo has plainly stated that L5 is not achievable with current sensor technologies.
Perhaps at some extreme low speeds (probably closer to human walking speed than 20mph) L2 could work as L3, but I think that's about it.
“Drive Pilot enables the driver to turn away from the traffic and focus on certain secondary activities,” the luxury carmaker said in a statement. “For example, to communicate with colleagues via the in-car office, to write emails, to surf the internet or to relax and watch a film.”
This can't possibly be a good thing. Nevermind if it works as advertised or not -- just from the very definition of what's claiming to do.
I know it certainly sounds like a good thing -- it will relieve the stress and fatigue of these slow-moving situations, leading to better reaction times, etc.
But just think about for a second. When you're at the wheel, the most you should be doing on the side is talking to people, and occasionally checking your GIS. You just should not be engaged in other attention-demanding activities like reading emails, surfing the internet, or watching movies. Period.
What's going to happen is: someone's leg's are gonna get crushed, because (foolishly or not) they walked between cars in a slow-moving traffic situation (like they always do). Because, you know, a human driver would have seen them. And then the same debates will start up all over again, completely missing the point. It's not the overall statistics of this happening, or that the driver didn't respond to the flashing red light that must have gone off in time (because they were zoned out, of course).
It's that they're pushing this inherently risky technology out there (which by definition cannot be fully validated until subjected to extensive real-life conditions), not to save us from drivers who are temporarily incapacitated at the wheel, not to warn us from approaching objects we might miss ... but to let us watch Netflix while driving.
Definitionally, L3 is not ready for the human to stop paying attention. I would argue that you need at least L4 automation before you can explicitly advise users that they can do distracting things in the car, and even then only in good weather and on specific roads (e.g. highways).
The autobahn is a good, easy testing ground for cars. Almost on par with, say, Arizona. The real difficulty is little town streets in winter with snow.
And India. Nobody has even thought of tackling third-world-country roads, and with the slow and city-specific progress that is being made, I think there will be a huge gap in self-driving capabilities between countries, akin to the huge internet divide in the 80s/90s.
You don't even need to go that far. Starting from Germany, driving becomes more and more chaotic as you approach Turkey, and only get worse from there. Same as you head towards Sicily. I wouldn't trust a self-driving car in those environments.
I saw this news somewhere else, in a much better article which I’m having trouble finding in my browser history.
The purpose of the system is basically to take over in bad traffic, doing everything for you, until things are good enough to drive again yourself.
This makes a certain amount of sense. Obviously the slower the car goes the more time it has to react to situations. It will also cause less damage if it makes a mistake.
Driving on the highway isn’t bad at all, especially with radar cruise control. I think I would rather have a system capable of handling bad traffic for me totally.
Just a tangent: why do a transport-related website list this in mph? It should be km/h before mph in this instance because it's the native speed measurement in the Autobahn.
It seems to be a new trend where people think that translating to English means using imperial.
This is the same thing in YouTube video, they feel compelled to use inch, lbs and whatever unknown measure
half of all the driving I did on the autobahn on my way to France this summer was crawling slowly through trafficjams so it makes sense. Also who would want to let a autopilot do +100k h while manual drivers whizz by at double that speed?
Seems best to start low until the system proves itself. At 60 km/h on the Autobahn, the minimum speed, you don't need a system that can overtake or even switch lanes.
You don’t need it. But you will be overtaken - by everything including the heaviest trucks. 60 is not a safe speed to drive on the Autobahn. It forces others to overtake and take the left/middle lane, which can impact vehicles there driving at much higher speed.
But I think driving 60 on the right lane is also not the scope of the system - it’s about handling traffic jams.
Note quite, rather, if your vehicle can't reliably sustain that, you aren't allowed on the Autobahn.
There is no minimum allowed speed as-such, though there might be problems if you drive slower than that for no reason.
>“Drive Pilot enables the driver to turn away from the traffic and focus on certain secondary activities,” the luxury carmaker said in a statement. “For example, to communicate with colleagues via the in-car office, to write emails, to surf the internet or to relax and watch a film.”
Does this phrasing seem unusual for others? It made me look to see if this was a satirical news site.
Because they are not really secondary activities for driving itself, it sounds like they are secondary in a broader context. A secondary activity for driving is, perhaps turning on the the wipers or something like that. But doing office work is a different activity, not a secondary one. That’s how it sounded like to me, at least.
These L3 driving systems are largely a gimmick with fewer capabilities than even Tesla autopilot. I’d rather have a L2 system that can takes turns / follow navigation than an L3 system that only does the most basic highway driving.
That might be true, but as opposed to Tesla, Mercedes is willing to take on the liability if something happens while the system is online.
If I'm not mistaken the law requires a 10 second take over period before it disengages.
For the moment Tesla can't or won't do the same. Not in Germany, Not in America. Nowhere.
In the end we will see who is better (it might be Tesla, or another company, or all of them in close succession).
But right now Tesla is saying and implying a lot of things but still requires the driver to be in full control at any moment (wink-winknudge-nudge), while Mercedes decided that there are situation where they got this.
> There is absolutely no way this has better capabilities than Tesla.
Why would there be absolutely no way? People keep forgetting that Tesla is actually a small newcomer in the automotive sector.
They were ahead of the peak because established automotive companies slept on the market, but that does not mean these behemoths just gonna keep sleeping on it and leave it to Tesla without even trying to compete.
Expect to see more of this happening over the next decade, these companies might be slow to adapt, but once they get momentum behind their mass it will be very difficult for Tesla to keep up with them.
Tesla achieved their mission of accelerating the worlds transition to sustainable energy.
Unfortunately Tesla will be dead in that future.
It’s already happening in California. Young FAANG engineers respect Teslas less, compared to 5 years ago. And a higher % of techies are considering Audi, BMW, and Porsche EVs.
Well, the massive difference is that the L2 system requires you to still drive if you want to have any chance to react when it does something stupid, while the level 3 system allows you to read a book, even if it's just on a congested straight road at minimum speed.
> The automaker got the green light to sell its Drive Pilot package for use on stretches of the country’s Autobahn network at a speed of up to 37 miles per hour, Mercedes said Dec. 9.
Kind of stupid that this headline implies Mercedes is beating Tesla when Autopilot obviously supports speeds above 37mph. It would be like if a car manufacturer offered a package called "Full Self Driving" that wasn't actually level 5 self driving.
I genuinely can't tell if this is deadpan humor or not, since Tesla's build-to-order page as of this moment refers to this option package as "Full Self-Driving Capability."
It was, unfortunately Full Self Driving will probably actually be full self driving before we figure out how to communicate sarcasm across the Internet
Nope. Even at 10 mph / 16 kph, Tesla requires the driver to pay attention.
Tesla forces drivers to apply resistance to the steering wheel and the interior cabin camera (and cabin infrared camera starting 2022) will ensure the driver is looking up.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Level 2 and 3 have enormous gaps in terms of how you design, what are your failures modes, liability, redundancy, etc, etc.
Comparing autopilot to level 3 system is like saying that fly is more advanced organism than a dog, because it can fly.
Who said a goal of level 3 system is the same as a goal of an level 2? As I said, apples to oranges.
Autopilot is a drivers aid system that will actively try to kill you as a part of a design (like any other level 2 systems). Level 3 system goal is not to kill you.
It's gotten so bad that I'm switching off the lane assistant when I'm approaching construction areas.
I've talked to a guy at the car dealership, and he said "my mother complains about the same thing, it's a known issue".
I really, really hope they've managed to fix that for the autonomous driving models, or at least auto-disengage before construction areas. (And if they fixed it, can I get a software update please?)