It's been in the news that Elon Musk announced that he will announce Tesla robotaxis in August, 2024. Everyone thinks is he is full of shit, basically, because he has been full of shit about Tesla car autonomy for a very long time.
He might still be.
But! Here's what I think he will announce and why Elon might have less shit in him this time.
He recently announced that Tesla is no longer "hardware constrained" for car training. But Tesla has been hardware constrained for car execution for a very long time, since they shipped a bunch of hardware without fully understanding how their software stack was going to work.
And the latest Tesla "full self-driving", renamed to "FSD (supervised)", is really good. The big change was shifting (heh) away from a combination of neural network and logic in code to executing entirely out of the neural network. The result is pretty human-like driving. And it's pretty good at unprotected left turns. I have a buddy Eric R who lets his Tesla drive him all over the place - freeways, side streets, and even across country. He says you have to watch it like a hawk but even then it is less stressful than actually driving.
A couple of years ago two other buddies told me they had the "maxed out" FSD and both of them said they stopped using it after it tried to kill them three times. Which, BTW, it's probably worth pointing out that the Tesla statistics that say FSD is safer than human driving are nonsense, because anytime (in the past at least) that anything interesting happened, it was turned off. So, sure, it was good at the easy stuff.
So, overall, big improvements in FSD, and my view is that the limitation now is the hardware in the car.
I think the robotaxi announcement will basically reflect the technology they have now but with a major upgrade to the in-car computing and maybe better sensors. And I think it will be pretty good! And the new thing will be called "FSD - Unsupervised."
As for the sensors - Elon has said that if you don't solve vision, then you haven't solved anything. I don't agree with that, but even if that is your view - that the car shouldn't need more sensors than a human (wait, humans have two eyes, and Tesla's have, what, eight? [oh well]) - then you should add in sound and vibration. I get lots of hints from how the road feels when I drive. And I think the recent horrible accident from the Cruise vehicle where it dragged a person under the car could have been prevented with more tactile sensors.
BTW, Cruise, the GM self-driving company, has offices right near us at work. We had a picnic out on the lawn and a bunch of them came out and sat with us. One of the things I learned as we swapped stories about our respective businesses is that the the Cruise car is always computing an escape plan if something goes wrong, like it loses compute power. And I think that is what happened after that car accident - it flipped into "escape plan" mode to pull over without considering that it was dragging a body.
I have to admit that accident really bummed me out, because at the time (this is years ago) I was very impressed at how they had a built-in safeguard like that. And sadly, maybe it backfired.
One more thing. Back in 2005 an autonomous car succeeded in the DARPA Grand Challenge. I thought, yay, we're almost there! And I took into account something Bill Gates said (I think it was Gates), that people overestimate what is possible, computing power wise, in five years, but underestimate what is possible in ten years. So I thought, yay, in ten years, we'll have self-driving cars!
Well, shit. That didn't work out. I should doubled those numbers again.
Update 2024-06-17: AS PREDICTED: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/elon-musk-reveals-the-first-details-about-hardware-5-autopilot-computer-and-sensors-235405.html
Update 2024-12-06: ALSO AS PREDICTED: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/after-promising-full-self-driving-updates-for-years-elon-musk-finally-admits-that-most-existing-teslas-may-never-be-able-to-drive-themselves/
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