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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Tesla CEO Elon Musk seems ready to turn the company's electric cars into driverless vehicles, with the risky goal of realizing his bold vision that he has been floating for years.
The technology needed to make this leap is expected to be presented Monday to Tesla investors at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Musk, known for his drive and intelligence, is so confident that Tesla will win the race to full autonomy that he said in an interview earlier this month that cars in his company should be able to navigate the highways and busy city streets without people. driving by next year at the latest.
"I could be wrong, but it seems that Tesla is well ahead of everyone," Musk told Lex Fridman, a research scientist at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in autonomous vehicles.
But experts say they are skeptical that Tesla's technology has progressed to a point close to where its cars could be driven by a robot alone, with no one in a position to take control in case of a problem.
"That's hype," said Steven E. Shladover, retired research engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, involved in efforts to create self-driving for 45 years. "The technology does not exist to do what he claims he does not have and nobody else either."
In the United States, more than 60 companies are developing autonomous vehicles. Some of them want their fully autonomous cars to start carrying pbadengers in small geographic areas as early as this year. Many experts do not believe that they will be widely used for a decade or more.
Musk's description of Tesla's orders as "self-driving" alarmed some observers who thought it would give homeowners a false sense of security and create life-threatening situations under conditions that autonomous cars can not handle. They also say that they expect Musk to define self-driving and just show under what conditions and which places vehicles can travel without human intervention, including specific data showing that they would be safer. that human drivers and whether the security of the system has been examined by outside groups or government agencies.
Meanwhile, Musk continues to use both his Twitter account and the Tesla website to pump a new computer currently in production for autonomous vehicles. Once the self-driving software is ready, new computer users will receive an update via the Internet, said Musk. Currently, the standalone computer costs $ 5,000, but its price can reach $ 7,000 when it is installed after delivery.
The more than 400,000 Tesla vehicles equipped for full range will rely on eight 360-degree cameras, radar sensors and short-range ultrasonic sensors.
This differs from the self-driving systems developed by almost every other company in the industry, including Waymo, the Google spinoff company, Cruise Automation of General Motors and Argo A., a subsidiary of Ford. They all use 360-degree cameras and radars, so beam sensors called Lidar's blend as a third redundant sensor, as well as detailed three-dimensional mapping.
"Vehicles without Lidar, no advanced radar, no 3D map, are not autonomous vehicles," said Ken Washington, Ford's technical manager, in a recent interview with Recode. . "These are excellent general-purpose vehicles with very good driver badistance technology."
Even Lidar does not guarantee 100% security. Last year, Waymo gave up its commitment to run a robotaxi service in Phoenix without human rescue pilots for security reasons. And a Uber standalone test vehicle with Lidar as well as a human rescue driver killed a pedestrian last year in Tempe, Arizona, the first known death involving a self-driving technology.
Amnon Shashua, CEO of the autonomous Israeli computer company Mobileye, said that cars equipped with 360-degree cameras and a forward-looking radar could drive autonomously, but that they do not would not be as safe as drivers. Cautious humans can drive 10 million hours without error leading to a fatal accident, but cars without redundant sensors can not, he said.
Phil Koopman, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, said Musk needed to show that his cars could handle every situation he wanted to be able to claim to drive themselves. For example, he wonders if Tesla has a plan for a big truck throwing gallons of dirty water on a car during a snowstorm, obstructing the cameras.
"The rabbit hole is deep enough if you want to make that argument," he said.
Tesla already offers a system called "Autopilot" to control cars in a limited way with constant monitoring by a human driver. On its website, it is stated that its autopilot system directs your car in its lane, automatically accelerates and brakes for other vehicles and pedestrians in its lane. However, questions have already been raised about the reliability of the autopilot after its involvement in three fatal accidents.
In one of them, neither the driver nor a Tesla Model S operating on the system of badistance to the driver of the company's autopilot, saw a tractor – Trailer to cross in front of her on a Florida highway in 2016. The car went under the trailer, cutting the roof into a kill and killing the driver.
In a 2017 report, the National Transportation Safety Board wrote that the driver's inattention and autopilot design limitations played a major role in the death, and revealed that the S model's cameras and radars Were not able to detect a vehicle turning in its path. The systems are rather designed to detect the vehicles they are following to prevent rear-end collisions.
The agency is also investigating the two other fatalities, one last month in Delray Beach, Florida, strangely similar to the 2016 crash in Florida, and the other involving a Tesla SUV used on the autopilot when he hit a barrier separating a taxiway in Silicon Valley.
Tesla maintains that its current systems are only for badistance and that drivers must be careful and be ready to respond.
With the "total self-driving capability," Tesla says you get an automatic ride from the ramp to the ramp, including the interchanges and lane changes to automatically overtake slower cars. Later this year, cars will be able to recognize traffic lights, stop traffic signs and automatically drive through the streets of the city.
These feats are probably something that Tesla will have to prove to California's regulators – its largest US market to date – before its fully autonomous cars are allowed on the roads. But most other states do not have the same requirements as California. And experts say no federal law requires prior approval of fully autonomous driving, provided a vehicle meets federal safety standards, as Teslas does.
"Unfortunately, many people may die before regulators intervene," Shladover said.
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Krisher reported from Detroit.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
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