Tesla's self-driving efforts rank last in study of self-driving companies

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-sef-driving-not-in-top-ranked-autonomy-guidehouse-research-2023-3

by Luka78 • 3 years ago

23 30 3 years ago

hartator2• 3 years ago

It seems biased. Tesla exaggerated claims feel scammy, but at least they have a product out there. None of these “leaders” have something you can test yourself.

cassianoleal• 3 years ago

Perhaps because none of them are actually ready for usage in public?

That would say a lot more about Tesla's practices than about the ability of the others to deliver a product.

croes• 3 years ago

You mean the others don't make public beta tests.

hartator2• 3 years ago

At least we are not beta testing a vaccine.

steveBK1235• 3 years ago

Charging $15k for software that doesn't work yet, and encourages dangerous behavior by untrained testers on public roads, for years, is not brave.

throwntoday• 3 years ago

They make it clear that it's not ready yet at time of purchase and there is no definitive launch date. You are by no means required to pay for it and most people don't.

encourages dangerous behavior by untrained testers on public roads

There are idiots everywhere. The functionality has been locked behind their driver safety score to ensure only responsible drivers can beta test. There's a delusion that it is dangerous based on the amount of press coverage any Tesla involved incident gets.

Do I trust that their car is better at driving than me? No. But is is better than most people on the road. I'd rather be driving near a Tesla than a Prius.

manishsharan• 3 years ago

You are never testing as self-driving car only by yourself. Any time you take a self-driving car for testing, you are also including other cars and pedestrians in your experiment. (unless you are doing it on a closed track )

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

Anyone can get in a Waymo right now.

deweller• 3 years ago

If you are in Phoenix, AZ. And it only operates in a well-defined area.

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

Baidu, Waymo, and Cruise all offer driverless taxis right now. Tesla is far from offering such a service.

jbotz• 3 years ago

Maybe it's because to do cutting edge self-driving you need cutting edge software and machine learning engineers, and software engineers are less likely to put up with Elon's crap because they have more options?

Tesla and Space X get heavy talent (despite the downsides of working for Elon Musk) because in their primary fields they are the leader by a large enough margin that if you're one of the best there aren't a lot of other places to go that are going to really challenge you. That's just not the case for the software involved.

sbuttgereit• 3 years ago

I'm underwhelmed by the article's quality. First, it's an article about a consultancy's opinion of the marketplace. The most said about methodology:

"To come up with the list, Guidehouse weighs factors such as a company's vision, go-to-market and production strategies, partners, tech, commercial readiness, and more. Guidehouse sorts the companies it ranks into four categories: leaders, contenders, challengers, and followers."

Oh dear. How much mere opinion and supposition went into this one I wonder. Did the companies evaluated provide information? Where they even requested to do so? Did only some of them do so? What are the relative weightings of different factors? etc.

Another, perhaps more familiar way to this audience, to read this report is to think about the credibility you'd give to a news article with a title like "Company XYZ Comes in Dead Last in Gartner Group Study". Yes, you know others with important decision making power may weigh such a Gartner Group report in their decisions, but that the report tells you more about the thinking, biases, and objectives of the study authors than anything terribly objective or important about the marketplace itself.

ragog• 3 years ago

theshrike79• 3 years ago

Tesla's camera-only driving is a gamble. It has the _potential_ to be the best in the business.

...but it also takes a ton of computing power to determine how far objects are just from a moving image. A LIDAR unit would give you range + position instantly.

jfengel2• 3 years ago

"Not hitting things" isn't really the hard part of driving, though. Yeah, it does sound like the absolute minimum level of effort, but it doesn't get you anywhere. It just tells you some of the places not to go.

You need to read lane markings, locate cross streets, interpret signs, stop at traffic lights, etc. All of that requires a camera... and if you can do that, you might as well use it to not hit things.

LIDAR would be great in a belt-and-suspenders way, and it seems as if it would have saved some lives already. The other stuff is all incredibly hard; it's not ready and may never be ready. But if self-driving ever works, it would have to be able to work without LIDAR, because it has to solve the harder problem that also encompasses the things that LIDAR could help with.

lm284692• 3 years ago

"Not hitting things" isn't really the hard part of driving

Until your tesla hits a stopped firetruck at 60mph, then it's a real hard part

steveBK1235• 3 years ago

Also assumes the current camera suite is high enough resolution, high enough dynamic range, sensitive enough at night, and positioned in correct locations to provide the data the compute needs.

Arguably that is not true still.

The issue with the camera-only model is it is very non-deterministic.

Personally, every accident I have gotten into is a result of some sort of inattention, distraction, or fatigue. Computers don't experience these things.

Nonetheless, Tesla's occasionally do unpredictable insane things like turn directly into a bollard, cross in front of a moving trolley (that it can see & has rendered on screen), run right into a firetruck, run over child size dummies, etc.

It's worse than supervising a teen driving because a teen will fail in somewhat predictable ways, generally in being either overconfident or over hesitant. You can verbally coach a human as a situation approaches. With FSD you either let it ride, intervening at last moment.. or you need to constantly step in proactively.

propogandist2• 3 years ago

The market research firm that put this together is in the business of selling expensive reports and custom consulting engagements to auto manufacturers to aid with automotive strategy.

They have a business interest to make lesser known firms appear to be the biggest threat as it makes their services more valuable. Any manufacturer can benchmark self-driving performance on the widely available Tesla, but it will be difficult to know what all the other firms are doing as they're all, comparatively, niche players.

They fact they don't even have Comma.ai on the list suggests this is a garbage tier ranking study.

ahahahahah• 3 years ago

They fact they don't even have Comma.ai on the list suggests this is a garbage tier ranking study.

They also don't have my OS self-driving hardware and software plans. Comma.ai is a cool toy, but it's a joke in the world of real self-driving.

make lesser known firms appear to be the biggest threat

Lesser known firms like their top four Waymo, Baidu, Mobileye and Cruise? Yeah, okay.

daveguy• 3 years ago

I dunno. Have you seen the video of the electric cars trying to park?

Edit: here it is https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

propogandist2• 3 years ago

Waymo, Baidu, Mobileye and Cruise?

2 of the 4 don't have anything available for mass market, and they are money losing ventures.

Mobileye is the only player that matters of the lot, given Baidu will effectively be limited to CCP friendly markets.

The ability to take a 1.5K "toy" to make a standard car have partially autonomous is also pretty nice. A great toy that is pushing the industry forward to make sure self-driving is available at reasonable prices vs $15K premium for a "beta" software that will never make it to production.

smaryjerry• 3 years ago

Deceptive title and report as this is ranking based on factors like like “company's vision, go-to-market and production strategies, partners, tech, commercial readiness…” Basically everything except for actual driving ability, which makes this highly subjective and biased.

Tesla's self-driving efforts rank last in study of self-driving companies

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