Let's talk Self Driving Cars again!

Saw this today:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gm-doubles-miles-open-super-123402290.html

https://www.cadillac.com/ownership/vehicle-technology/super-cruise

General Motors Co said on Wednesday owners of certain vehicles equipped with its Super Cruise assisted driving system will now be able to use it on 400,000 miles (643,740 km) of North American roads, doubling the current operating area .....


The GM system's sensors and software allow a motorist to cruise with hands off the wheel on highways that have been mapped in detail. But the driver is expected to stay alert and ready to take over the car. GM uses technology to monitor the driver, and Super Cruise will sound alarms or slow the car to a stop if it detects that a driver is not responding.

Starting later this year, GM plans to enable vehicles equipped with Super Cruise and the company's latest vehicle electronic system to operate hands-free on major, undivided highways in the United States and Canada, as well as additional miles of divided, interstate highways. Currently, Super Cruise operates only on interstate, divided highways.
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The map for the Chicago currently covers the express/tollways, and some divided roads like Palatine road up north-west, and 83 in the west 'burbs.

Drivers must pay attention to the road at all times. Our proprietary head-tracking software helps make sure your eyes are on the road, and it alerts you when you need to pay more attention or take back control.
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This is so much more than Tesla's "are you doing something with the steering wheel" approach. This should really help assure the driver is alert and engaged. It should be used, IMO, even w/o any driver assist tech. I bet it would save a lot of crashes/injuries/deaths.

-ERD50
 
ls99 said:
A few days ago I got to experience my Cadillac CT6 Supercruise.
After getting on a limited access highway which I knew had been Lidar mapped, I engaged the the gizmo, as per instructions in the manual, centering the car in the lane.
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Just curious. How do you know the road has been Lidar mapped? Who does that?

+1 on how great the adaptive cruise control is, and on how you can find yourself going 45 behind an aging VW bus on a lightly trafficked interstate posted at 65 mph. Thankfully, I've learned to notice such vehicles early in the slow-down process. One lane change and I am back to normal speeds.
 
ERD50 said:
This is so much more than Tesla's "are you doing something with the steering wheel" approach. This should really help assure the driver is alert and engaged. It should be used, IMO, even w/o any driver assist tech. I bet it would save a lot of crashes/injuries/deaths.

-ERD50
Click to expand...

Honestly, this driver-alert system, if it works (and it appears to) would be something I'd prefer to "self driving" systems. I've often found myself losing focus and needing a break. Such a system could save thousands of lives.
 
ERD50 said:
Drivers must pay attention to the road at all times. Our proprietary head-tracking software helps make sure your eyes are on the road, and it alerts you when you need to pay more attention or take back control...
Click to expand...

This is so much more than Tesla's "are you doing something with the steering wheel" approach. This should really help assure the driver is alert and engaged. It should be used, IMO, even w/o any driver assist tech. I bet it would save a lot of crashes/injuries/deaths.

-ERD50
Click to expand...


Tesla now has a "driver monitor" for its FSD. Here's the story about it.

Sometime after Tesla started producing the Model 3, some car owners discovered that the car had a camera hidden in the rearview mirror looking back at the car interior.

When asked about this in the Web media, Musk admitted to it, and said it was meant to monitor the riders when any Model 3 could be turned into a robot taxi. Remember how he said in an annual presentation that owners of a Tesla 3 could sign up to have their cars make taxi runs to make $100K a year?

Also, when someone asked to have a simple speedometer right in front of the driver, so that he did not have to glance at the center display, Musk replied "Why? Soon, there will not be any display, nor steering wheel, nor pedal input".

All the above really made people jazzed up, thinking they would be turning their Model 3 into money-making robot taxis real soon now. :)

Anyway, none of the above happened of course. Then, Tesla started to implement software to look at the driver's face when accidents started to occur with drivers totally trusting the car to drive itself.

Now, you know the rest of the story.


PS. I do not have a Twitter account. I don't follow anyone on any Web media. All the above info came from me gleaning articles published in Bloomberg, or MSN, or Yahoo Web sites. I have a particular interest in this fascinating SDC technology, and whatever I run across, I remember.

PPS. What Musk discovered, the same as politicians did, is that if you keep repeating something again and again, some people will believe it. The key here is to be consistent, and never deviate from what you said. Some people are that gullible and will dismiss all evidence to the contrary.
 
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Chuckanut said:
Just curious. How do you know the road has been Lidar mapped? Who does that?

+1 on how great the adaptive cruise control is, and on how you can find yourself going 45 behind an aging VW bus on a lightly trafficked interstate posted at 65 mph. Thankfully, I've learned to notice such vehicles early in the slow-down process. One lane change and I am back to normal speeds.
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Two methods. One is Cadillac has a map online which shows Lidar mapped highways.
Another is, if on a limited access highway, press the supercruise button. If mapped system will lock on and light up the steering wheel LED. If not mapped DIC will say Roadway Not Mapped, supercruise not available.
GM hired some outfit to Lidar map highways,
 
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ls99 said:
Two methods. One is Cadillac has a map online which shows Lidar mapped highways.
Another is, if on a limited access highway, press the supercruise button. If mapped system will lock on and light up the steering wheel LED. If not mapped DIC will say Roadway Not Mapped, supercruise not available.
GM hired some outfit to Lidar map highways,
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To be fair, Tesla cars seem to drive on highways fine, just by the forward camera looking at the lane markings. What Tesla cars still have problems with is that they occasionally ram other cars or motorcyclists or have problems with road construction.

I don't see that a lidar map of the highway can help with the problem Tesla cars still have. A better sensor suite or better software for the vision camera is needed. I do not know much about GM system to know what or how they do better.
 
^^^ I know nothing about teslas sensors. On the Cadillac, in order to enable supercruise, the adaptive cruise control must be enabled, first. It will activate brakes if getting too close to any object. I don't know the gory details, but it has optical, infrared and radar sensors which detect objects and humans.
There is an infrared system which operates at all times and displays animal as well as human figures in the winshield in the HUD. The infrared screen can be made visible after dusk in the center display. It is fun to see humans and animals at night long before they appear in the headlight beams. Also can see hot power transformers on power poles, as well as thermal leaks of houses.
 
I'm no good at using the Search Tool, but I did try. With that in mind, did I miss it or has anyone mentioned The Dawn Project? https://dawnproject.com/

I just saw an ad on TV with a scathing attack on Tesla's "Full Self Driving" system. The ad shows some tests with the little kid (dummy) in the road getting hit by a Tesla every time. Apparently, Dawn Project has made Tesla its mission for now. Curious if anyone else has paid attention to this new wrinkle in the story? YMMV
 
^^^ No, I was not aware of the Dawn Project and Dan O'Dowd until you shared the above.

About the video you mentioned, I found a video on YouTube and shared below.

It is strange that on YouTube, I found many videos posted by Tesla FSD fans who were raving every time that they went on a 15-20 minute drive and the system performed reasonably well. They would exclaim "Robot taxi any day now". And the next video, the system hiccupped and committed a serious error.

These guys don't seem to grasp that in order to be better than a human driver, the system cannot commit a single error in thousands and thousands of drive. If you are going to have a fender-bender once every 1000 drives, then you will have an accident once every 3 years. I don't drive that poorly, do you?

And I am just talking fender benders, not catastrophic accidents.

 
Some Tesla fan, in reaction to that video of a child dummy being run over, asked parents to volunteer their child so he could prove his FSD-enabled car wouldn't run over a real child.

Read in The Verge: https://apple.news/AwY39rQtpRb6iUN3Ns13Zsw
 
Tesla has benefitted heavily from social media.
 
I just saw the following article on the Web about an accident involving a self-driving car in Germany.

I don't know how accurate it is, because of these factors.

1) I did not know the BMW iX had some self-driving capabilities that were allowed on undivided highways. I thought Germany had more restrictions on self-driving cars.

2) The BMW involved was a "test car", and it carried 5 people, including a toddler?


One dead, 9 injured after 'self-driving' BMW veers into traffic

One person has died and nine were seriously injured after an electric and partly-automated BMW test car veered into oncoming traffic in Germany, triggering a series of collisions involving four vehicles. The electric BMW iX, which had five people on board including an 18-month-old toddler, swerved out of its lane at a bend in the road in the southwestern town of Reutlingen on Monday, brushing an oncoming Citroen. The BMW, which costs at least £77,300 ($93,000), then hit a Mercedes-Benz van head-on, resulting in the death of a 33-year-old woman in that vehicle.
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AA10Jxkf.img
 
Argus AI, a startup to develop self-driving cars backed by Ford and VW, has been shut down.

Ford said it will divert attention to advanced driver assistance systems, and put truly autonomous systems on the back burner. Ford wrote off $2.7 billion invested in Argo.

From https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/ford-vw-backed-argo-ai-is-shutting-down/:

Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup that burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment, is shutting down — its parts being absorbed into its two main backers: Ford and VW, according to people familiar with the matter...

Ford said in its third-quarter earnings report released Wednesday that it made a strategic decision to shift its resources to developing advanced driver assistance systems, and not autonomous vehicle technology that can be applied to robotaxis. The company said it recorded a $2.7 billion non-cash, pretax impairment on its investment in Argo AI, resulting in an $827 million net loss for the third quarter.
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What's unexpected is that Argo seemed to be making progress. Perhaps this should make one wonder about the remaining projects on this SDC technology. Nobody seems to get any closer to true hand-off driving. The mood is certainly not as ebullient as it was 6-7 years ago.


Argo seemed to be gaining ground in the past year. The company’s self-driving Ford Fusion vehicles, and now Ford Escape Hybrids, were frequently seen testing on public roads in Austin, Detroit, Miami, Palo Alto and Pittsburgh, where it is headquartered. In the EU, Argo was using the all-electric Volkswagen ID. Buzz for its testing programs in Hamburg and Munich. Argo also has several pilot programs underway in Austin, Miami and Pittsburgh with Lyft, Walmart and 412 Food Rescue...
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Argo, Teslas never ending 'almost there' FSD iterations, and a few other 'setbacks' have led me to reconsider my expectations.

While I still believe we will see fully Level 4 or 5 self driving cars some day, hopefully in my lifetime before I'm unable to drive myself, I am nowhere near as bullish as I once was re: when that will happen.

And in turn, I wonder how much benefit a level 4 or 5 vehicle will add in terms of safety/accident avoidance versus a Level 3 vehicle with just the autonomous tech that's available today. IOW, maybe cars can be made such that it's nearly as unlikely for humans to have an accident in a Level 3 car versus level 4/5 where humans are only along for the ride. Instead of seeking to eliminate human involvement in driving, let the autonomous features live in the background until needed. I know we've all expressed legitimate concerns about the inability of a driver to intervene when it's increasingly on an exception basis. I've come to better grasp fewer accidents and less traffic/congestion are far more important goals than letting drivers disengage on the road to play with their smartphones...
 
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Midpack said:
Argo, Teslas never ending 'almost there' FSD iterations, and a few other 'setbacks' have led me to reconsider my expectations.

While I still believe we will see fully Level 4 or 5 self driving cars some day, hopefully in my lifetime before I'm unable to drive myself, I am nowhere near as bullish as I once was re: when that will happen.

And in turn, I wonder how much benefit a level 4 or 5 vehicle will add in terms of safety/accident avoidance versus a Level 3 vehicle with just the autonomous tech that's available today. IOW, maybe cars can be made such that it's nearly as unlikely for humans to have an accident in a Level 3 car versus level 4/5 where humans are only along for the ride. Instead of seeking to eliminate human involvement in driving, let the autonomous features live in the background until needed. I know we've all expressed legitimate concerns about the inability of a driver to intervene when it's increasingly on an exception basis. I've come to better grasp fewer accidents and less traffic/congestion are far more important goals than letting drivers disengage on the road to play with their smartphones...
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My feelings exactly. Just the added "safety features" inherent in self-driving cars that we already have are sufficient to save many lives and injuries. If we stopped now, we should still celebrate what is available.

I noticed the other day that my car (ancient technology) wandered across the center line when I lost focus while changing stations on the radio. It frightened me that just a moment's inattention could put DW, me and others is such danger. I had intentionally waited to adjust the radio when there was little traffic, but one never knows. Even a simple lane-departure warning would have been adequate to alert me to my situation. If I live long enough to buy another car (probably used) I will insist on some of this technology. Maybe it will make up for my degrading driving abilities. I hope so.
 
Yet the most important safety device on cars today is often neglected:

TIRES.

Good tread, good compound, not dried out and old, and so on.

Hopefully self driving cars will self drive themselves for proper maintenance of such a critical item. Or, at least refuse to drive. Self driving cars will self crash just as easily as a human drive car if bad tires are in use.

A fun subreddit I like to visit is r/justrolledintotheshop. War stories of mechanics. Like this:
 

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Koolau said:
What was that movie with Arnold? Was it Total Recall where he was in the "Johnny Cab" which had a silly robot driving the cab? IIRC he eventually ripped the "driver" out and took over himself.

Just don't think I'd ever want to ride in a driverless car UNLESS I was behind the wheel - just in case. YMMV
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I am just WAITING for some of my acquaintances to join me in a self-driving car some time in the future as it politely slows to let a car into its lane, and as it drops back to maintain 1 car length x every 10 mph of speed. And as it swings back into the right lane to leave the left lane open.

I can just picture the rage. Half the drivers in NJ would have apoplexies! Oh well, I've given up on "real" self-driving cars in my lifetime.
 
Pellice said:
I am just WAITING for some of my acquaintances to join me in a self-driving car some time in the future as it politely slows to let a car into its lane, and as it drops back to maintain 1 car length x every 10 mph of speed. And as it swings back into the right lane to leave the left lane open.

I can just picture the rage. Half the drivers in NJ would have apoplexies! Oh well, I've given up on "real" self-driving cars in my lifetime.
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Yeah, I can imagine self driving cars with "settings" like many cars now have for suspension and throttle response, etc. - you know. Economy, Sport, Track, etc. For the self driving cars the settings might be Granny, Polite, Aloha, Aggressive, Chicago, NJ, NYC.
 
Koolau said:
Yeah, I can imagine self driving cars with "settings" like many cars now have for suspension and throttle response, etc. - you know. Economy, Sport, Track, etc. For the self driving cars the settings might be Granny, Polite, Aloha, Aggressive, Chicago, NJ, NYC.
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I want a Geezer mode, which is should be more aggressive than Granny.

How my Geezer mode compares to Polite, I am not sure.
 
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