Tesla released video of a car driving itself

https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-tesla-cars

by c54 • 10 years ago

477 10 10 years ago

sctb2• 10 years ago

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863.

berberous• 10 years ago

For what it's worth, I don't think you should have merged these stories. This is about the video, which was released a full day later. Curious to hear people's take on the video without wading through the old comments. You also now have people who wont notice that there's something new to discuss.

Guest98123• 10 years ago

Agreed, I watched the video and came here to see related comments. Now I need to wade through the other topic that I read yesterday, searching for new ones related to this post. In short, I'm off to Reddit to find a post about the video.

sctb2• 10 years ago

You're right, sorry! I had mistakenly thought that the video which now appears in the main announcement article was there originally.

falcolas2• 10 years ago

I want to be optimistic, I really do.

Winter is here, however, I'm looking forward to roads covered with snow, slush, ice, and animals. I'm looking forward to winds in excess of 30mph driving snow across the highway, limiting visibility to a hundred feet or so. I'm looking forward to inexperienced folks driving on ice and snow and being a good 20mph below the rest of the traffic.

People can barely handle these roads (a two day snow storm last week put dozens of cars and semis in the ditch); I'm not sure how a Tesla will handle them. What will it look for when there are no lines on the road to be seen? How will it know the difference between slush, powdered snow, and plowed snow (which is only slightly less hard than a concrete barrier)?

I'm sure the answer is currently "don't allow automatic driving", but these kinds of conditions can reign over half the year in the mid-west; what value is a self driving car which can't half the time?

efsavage• 10 years ago

What is the value of a "computer" that does math barely faster than a human? What is the value of a motorized vehicle that is slower and more expensive than a horse?

Remain optimistic.

falcolas2• 10 years ago

What is the use of a laserdisk system? What is the use of Moller Sky Cars? What is the use asbestos?

For every successful technology, another ten technologies have fallen by the wayside due to cost, complexity, or unknown unknowns. I firmly see self driving cars in that category until a fundamental shift in our ability to program occurs.

My ultimate fear is that the programs that will be responsible for making hundreds of decisions every second are still being written by people like us. Not NASA engineers, who will spend millions of dollars verifying all of their code; who spend years writing a few thousand lines of code to an incredibly tight spec.

Instead, they are people who are looking at data and going "that's our integration testing right there." Who write big, complicated bits of code which takes several seconds to render text on our screens and think "Yeah, that's good enough." Who look at accidents their cars have been in and go, "That's totally the driver's fault," instead of saying, "Here's how we will stop that from ever happening again."

whamlastxmas• 10 years ago

We have GPS in farming tractors that is accurate down to inches, if I recall correctly. I doubt the expense of this system is feasible for cars yet, but I am sure one day it will be.

t0mbstone• 10 years ago

Can we please leave the comments here? I just want to see what people have to say about what I saw in the video...

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Great demo. Curious if there were outtakes. It occurred to me when it parked itself that cars will probably want to distinguish subtle differences in parking spaces (like handicapped, loading, etc.)

Tesla released video of a car driving itself

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