This recent piece is a must read for anyone following this s
tory byTimothy B. Lee
Tesla is clinging to an old conventional wisdom
In 2014, the same year Tesla started shipping the first generation of
Autopilot hardware, the Society of Automotive Engineers published a five-level taxonomy
of autonomous driving systems that envisioned driver-assistance systems
(known as "level 2" in SAE jargon) gradually morphing into fully
autonomous systems that could operate without human supervision (levels 4
and 5).
But the last five years have seen a dramatic shift in industry
thinking. Most companies now see driver assistance and full self-driving
as distinct markets.
No company has done more to change industry thinking here than
Google, whose self-driving project was spun off as Waymo in 2016. Around
2012, Google engineers developed a highway driving system and let some
rank-and-file Googlers test it out. Drivers were warned that the system
was not yet fully autonomous, and they were instructed to keep their
eyes on the road at all times.
But the self-driving team found that users started to trust the system way too quickly. In-car cameras showed users "napping, putting on makeup and fiddling with their phones." And that created a big safety risk.
"It's hard to take over, because they have lost contextual awareness," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in 2017.
So Google scrapped plans for a highway driver assistance product and
decided to pursue a different kind of gradualism: a taxi service that
would initially be limited to the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix has
wide, well-marked streets, and snow and ice are rare. So bringing a
self-driving service to Phoenix should be significantly easier than
developing a car with self-driving capabilities that work in every part
of the country and all weather conditions.
This approach has some other advantages, too. Self-driving cars benefit from high-resolution maps. Gathering map data in a single metro area is easier than trying to map the whole world all at once.
Self-driving cars also benefit from lidar sensors, and the best ones
cost thousands—if not tens of thousands—of dollars each. That's too
expensive for an upgrade to a customer-owned vehicle. But the economics
are more viable for a driverless taxi service, since the self-driving
system replaces an expensive human taxi driver.
Over the last three years, most other companies working on self-driving technology have followed Waymo's lead. GM bought a startup called Cruise in 2016 and put it to work developing an autonomous taxi service in San Francisco. Ford made a similar bet on Argo AI in 2017—the company is now developing autonomous taxi services in Miami and Washington DC.
Volkswagen and Hyundai have deals with Aurora—a
startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, the former leader of the Google
self-driving project—to develop fully autonomous taxi services.
Technology companies like Uber and Zoox are planning to introduce
autonomous taxi services.
Tesla’s business model locks it into the old approach
Tesla, meanwhile, has stubbornly pushed forward with its original
strategy. For more than two years, Tesla charged customers $3,000 or
more for a "full self-driving" package. But progress has been slow. And
that has put Tesla in a bind. Abandoning the old strategy would likely
require refunding customers who paid for the Full Self-Driving
package—which would be both embarrassing and expensive.
Instead, Tesla's solution has been to move the "full self-driving" goal posts.
"We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said
during a January earnings call. "So from highway on-ramp to highway
exit, including passing cars and going from one highway interchange to
another, full self-driving capability is there."
Obviously, this statement comes with a big asterisk: the driver still has to supervise the car to make sure it doesn't crash.
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