Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

[SiliconWizard]

If you let the auto drive without human intervention for 99.9% of the time, the human won't be paying attention for the 0.1% ... it's as simple as that.

Yep.

The only way fully automated vehicles, without any human driver, will become a full replacement and even achieve better safety figures overall than human-driven vehicles (which is what they promise us), IMO, is if ALL the infrastructures become exactly adapted to them and there is no human-driven vehicle (or pedestrian, or ...) on the roads anymore. Not a single one. (I think it's been said already in some above posts.) Even though bugs are always possible (and even relatively common), machines do operate much better with other machines than with humans or anything unpredictable when it comes to safety.

Once we get there, most of the "AI" that we're currently working on for this will become pointless. If the only vehicles in circulation are all interconnected and all with compatible routing characteristics, avoidance will be a much simpler task.

And I kind of think at this point that this is exactly where people/companies working on and advocating autonomous vehicles are leading us to. A world, in fact, where only machines will be allowed, in the end. We will be just passengers, until we are not even needed anymore (that last part is a bit sci-fi, but the fictitious character is debatable.) The sophisticated obstacle avoidance AI stuff (and dealing with uncertainty in general) is entertaining a lot of people these days, but I'm not sure this has any future as is.

[james_s]

I've been saying this for a long time. The concept of a self driving car that requires occasional human intervention is fundamentally flawed because as soon as you take away the requirement to focus the brain finds other things to focus on.

Heck if I were king I'd ban automatic transmissions, can't stand them. I think if everyone had to actually drive the car we'd have a lot more attentive and engaged drivers. Additionally it would virtually eliminate all these "driver mistook the gas for the brake and plowed into a building" accidents. With a proper manual gearbox if you mash any two pedals the car *will* eventually stop and it's virtually impossible to unintentionally accelerate from a stop.

We've already had vehicles for decades that you don't have to drive yourself, they're called buses and taxis. If I can't even drive it then I see little appeal in owning a private car.

[coppice]

I've been saying this for a long time. The concept of a self driving car that requires occasional human intervention is fundamentally flawed because as soon as you take away the requirement to focus the brain finds other things to focus on.

Its not just a matter of attention. If people hardly ever drive their driving skills will degenerate (or for young drivers never develop). If you really automate driving (rather than just having the current driver assistance systems) you need to automate it entirely, because you won't be able to rely on a competent driver being present.

[james_s]

Yes that too.

What we need is *less* automation and more involvement, not more. All these driver assistance technologies are crutches that enable people to do things other than drive while they are driving a car. This creates positive feedback and people become worse, less attentive and less practiced drivers.

Driving is a privilege and it's a task that demands 100% focus of the person doing it. If a person doesn't want to drive or can't pay attention they should ride the bus, it's a far more environmentally friendly mode of transit than a private car anyway. At least this assistance nonsense hasn't spread to motorcycles and bicycles yet although the roads are ever more treacherous for those of us who choose those vehicles.

[thinkfat]

Yes that too.

What we need is *less* automation and more involvement, not more. All these driver assistance technologies are crutches that enable people to do things other than drive while they are driving a car. This creates positive feedback and people become worse, less attentive and less practiced drivers.

Driving is a privilege and it's a task that demands 100% focus of the person doing it. If a person doesn't want to drive or can't pay attention they should ride the bus, it's a far more environmentally friendly mode of transit than a private car anyway. At least this assistance nonsense hasn't spread to motorcycles and bicycles yet although the roads are ever more treacherous for those of us who choose those vehicles.

That is our view, as drivers who have come accustomed to owning a car and mastering it. But the landscape is changing. For many young people owning a car is no longer a desirable goal, especially in the larger cities it's more of a burden than an advantage. Together with more and more people striving to live in cities this creates a trend automobile companies are reacting to.

Also, there are countries where driving a car is a most boring activity and people engage in all kinds of distractions because there's just nothing else to do. If assistance technologies are keeping them and others safe I'm all for it. Myself as father of two small kids, I really appreciate automatic cruise control keeping a safe distance from the vehicle in front while the kids in the back are having a shouting match or creating whatever form of distraction they fancy this second.

PS: I hear automatic gearboxes are the new thing with motorcycles now.

[Marco]

I don't think there's a problem with assist. Drifting lanes? Sound an alarm and only then try to nudge the car back in lane. Trying to switch lanes with rear or side traffic incoming? Sound an alarm and try to nudge the car back in lane. Etcetera, etcetera.

If you make the alarm loud and annoying enough, people will not try to make the assist a standard feature of their driving style.

PS. thinkfat, doppler radar doesn't see stopped cars ... you're accepting the increased chance of killing or maiming yourself, your kids AND others by watching away. It's a dangerous gamble you are making for convenience.

[Jeroen3]

I recommend driving on Madeira. Straight flat road is unknown there. I'd like to know how Tesla handles those roads.

[jeremy]

doppler radar doesn't see stopped cars

Wouldn’t you get a Doppler shift on the carrier as your own car would be moving? I mean yeah, if your car is stopped and the other car is stopped there will be nothing, but I don’t think that’s a dangerous situation...

[thinkfat]

I don't think there's a problem with assist. Drifting lanes? Sound an alarm and only then try to nudge the car back in lane. Trying to switch lanes with rear or side traffic incoming? Sound an alarm and try to nudge the car back in lane. Etcetera, etcetera.

If you make the alarm loud and annoying enough, people will not try to make the assist a standard feature of their driving style.

PS. thinkfat, doppler radar doesn't see stopped cars ... you're accepting the increased chance of killing or maiming yourself, your kids AND others by watching away. It's a dangerous gamble you are making for convenience.

Doppler radar will "see" stopped cars because your own car is a moving reference system. The automatic cruise control will possibly choose to ignore it because it's an implausible signal, but the collision avoidance system will not. You'll get a collision warning that will definitely draw your attention back to the street. Also, it's not just Doppler, AFAIK there is a ranging radar as well. I remember seeing a teardown on TheSignalPath which involved a vehicle radar from an undisclosed manufacturer.

Also, it's not about voluntarily watching away. Distractions happen, they're unavoidable. We're all just humans, our attention span and ability to focus on boring things is very limited.

[coppice]

doppler radar doesn't see stopped cars

Wouldn’t you get a Doppler shift on the carrier as your own car would be moving? I mean yeah, if your car is stopped and the other car is stopped there will be nothing, but I don’t think that’s a dangerous situation...

A drawback with the wide beam radars on current cars is they can't accurately determine the resolved velocity of detected objects. With a doppler sensing radar its easy to correct for the motion of the vehicle down the boresight of the radar. However, when the beam is wide the edges of the beam need a very different correction from the boresight.

[Marco]

The resolution needed to ignore the road and all other static objects at long range is well beyond the current state of the art of car radar systems. Couple firetrucks and a police car disagree with the collision avoidance being much use at highway speeds on Teslas. Also the concrete road divider.

When people look away from the road they need a little adrenaline when they look back and they drifted lanes or see an upcoming obstacle ... the near misses keep you honest. That's why every automated intervention needs to give that same Pavlovian training. It can not be allowed to be convenient, it needs to be annoying. At least until they learn to not run into firetrucks.

[David Hess]

If you look at what aomma.ai can do with a single camera and essentially a cell phone processor, I'm not sure all that dedicated AI hardware is all that necessary.

Custom hardware might be required to address long term availability.  High performance cell phone processors are particularly bad about this.

Tesla might also want to avoid leaving their supply chain vulnerable to competitors.  The major car companies have a history of quashing competition by buying their supply chain.

[thinkfat]

I thought there would at least be a little beamforming and directing involved, with a phased antenna array. I can't believe it'd work otherwise. Imagine overtaking a truck while the road turns left. If the radar was always looking straight ahead, you'd get a collision warning. Yet, that is not what is happening. The radar seem to look along the road.

[coppice]

I thought there would at least be a little beamforming and directing involved, with a phased antenna array. I can't believe it'd work otherwise. Imagine overtaking a truck while the road turns left. If the radar was always looking straight ahead, you'd get a collision warning. Yet, that is not what is happening. The radar seem to look along the road.

If you look at the specs for most of the car radars they have two transmissions, working concurrently in different bands, with different beam widths. A fairly wide beam, and a very wide beam. How would you expect to build a narrow beam scanning radar at consumer prices?

[Marco]

How would you expect to build a narrow beam scanning radar at consumer prices?

How about we just give up radar and time of flight? Make 60 GHz cameras with a rectenna array and a metamaterial lens, plus a continuous 60 GHz beam for illumination.

Naive ToF systems are sensitive to interference and complicated systems are hard to do at high resolution. A camera though has a simple structure and with stereoscopy can see depth just fine.

[coppice]

How would you expect to build a narrow beam scanning radar at consumer prices?

How about we just give up radar and time of flight? Make 60 GHz cameras with a rectenna array and a metamaterial lens, plus a continuous 60 GHz beam for illumination.

Naive ToF systems are sensitive to interference and complicated systems are hard to do at high resolution. A camera though has a simple structure and with stereoscopy can see depth just fine.

I don't know if they use ToF or some variant of FM. My go to approach would be to transmit fairly wide band noise, and correlate the transmitted and received signals.

[Marco]

I don't know if they use ToF or some variant of FM. My go to approach would be to transmit fairly wide band noise, and correlate the transmitted and received signals.

My point was that to do that for a ton of pixels is hard ... the only alternative is to do it very fast and scan, but it's hard to get a tight beam with phased arrays and mechanical scanning is expensive and fragile.

A 60 GHz camera has a comparatively simple structure.

[thinkfat]

I thought there would at least be a little beamforming and directing involved, with a phased antenna array. I can't believe it'd work otherwise. Imagine overtaking a truck while the road turns left. If the radar was always looking straight ahead, you'd get a collision warning. Yet, that is not what is happening. The radar seem to look along the road.

If you look at the specs for most of the car radars they have two transmissions, working concurrently in different bands, with different beam widths. A fairly wide beam, and a very wide beam. How would you expect to build a narrow beam scanning radar at consumer prices?

Since the antennas are anyway a phased array (no space for something else), I can imagine that at least skewing the beam to "look" left and right, or/and the receiver pattern doing the same is possible. Anyway, you'd not have to create a narrow, scanning beam. It's enough to vaguely look in the direction of the turn to suppress unwanted reflections from targets not in you lane.