If The Prime Had This One Tesla Feature...

Most likely not for a long time. Toyota is a conservative company that isn’t willing to get into potential legal issues that come with self driving cars.

 

I think Tesla has worked a lot for their self driving AI. It'd be so cool if they would agree to share the source code of the AI so it can be implemented on other cars. Their system is definitely the best so far.

 

Yeah tesla has millions more miles of data to program their AI than tesla.

I don’t think it’s an investment they’d be willing to share.

 

you still have to stay alert and be ready to take over in a split second, what the benefit?

 

Ever seen a ditch digging project and notice there's always one guy standing there watching the others? He's the AI driver.

 

but if he falls asleep while watching, he could end up in the ditch.

 

Nah, he's well rested. The others down in the hole? Not so much.

 

Autodrive should be illegal until it's safer while the driver is asleep than a sober, rested, alert driver. In all conditions.

It's not even close right now which is why you're supposed to stay alert and holding the steering wheel while it's engaged (which makes it useless, by the way). But the idea of paying attention when you don't need to is contrary to our basic personalities. No one can do it well for a long time. That's one reason commercial airplanes with autopilot still require two pilots and ATC to pay attention to them. Another is that they don't work well except in near-perfect conditions.

 

Probably not the best example because of powerful unions, contracts, and the massively large and politically powerful military industrial complex that supplies the pilots. Tough nut to crack.

 

Nothing to do with any of that.

It's almost entirely about dealing with failures or difficult situations. That's a very, very hard thing to program and humans are very adaptable in this area.

 

I was at a self-driving car technical conference just last Monday.
Toyota was the only car company there to make a presentation...they are heavily investing in the technology but are a few years away from delivering anything. However so is everyone else, as far as a level 5 car (this is a car with no steering wheel). What Tesla has is level 3 (hands on steering wheel "required") and can successfully drive on Interstates, basically. The consensus, pretty much, was that most every car company will have this in at least one (expensive) model by around 2020 or 2021.

Mike

 

Autonomous car, e.g. self-driving cars, are coming to the whole industry. But they are still a number of years down the road, as the technology is not yet ready.

 

I understand that but Toyota doesn’t really have level 3 yet. And tesla has a fully capable self driving car, but the NHTSA won’t let them turn on those capabilities yet.

Besides, investment and research are vastly different from implementation, which tesla is doing and Toyota frankly is not.

 

Doesn't Waymo (Google) have even better self driving system than Tesla ?

 

I still think by the next couple of decades no one we'll own cars. Vehicles well all be self driving cars operated like Uber.

 

The most likely place for self-driving to begin is in the air freight business.

 

True, but at the Prius challenge, a few months ago, they said next year we'd be driving against an autonomous car...just not at the same time.

Not really. A full level 5 car has no steering wheel and can drive in all weather on all roads with poor GPS signals (underground, in tunnels and in cities with many tall buildings).


Mike

 

Doubtful, in that time frame. The average age of cars is about 11 years...so there are many cars that are 20 years old.
The first fully autonomous cars will be expensive. These will be luxury cars or fleet cars...because they will be expensive (at least $5k-$10k more than the equivalent conventional car).
We are 5-10 years away from this.
Now assume in 5 years they become popular enough to grab 5-10% market share (much faster than hybrids or EVs)
At this point 90-95% of cars sold are still not autonomous...still being sold and lasting 20 years.

Mike