Make that moderate vexation for me. It’s rather like the ‘decimate’ definition changed.
I bought a slightly used Chevrolet Bolt in March and FSD is nowhere near an option. It was one of the Herz EV fleet slagoffs with 5,700 miles on it when I got it and had lane keeping assist but not adaptive cruise control. In town I don’t even engage the lane assist but probably will have it on for road trips.
It does have anti-front collision detectors and I have it set to warn as well as brake. It has gone off a couple times but if it was braking, I didn’t detect it because I was already jumping on them.
I suspect he means the corresponding product from Chevy. Which he’s obliquely pointing out doesn’t exist.
IOW FSD in the generic, like kleenex or xerox. Not like Kleenex® or Xerox®.
Like it or not, the trade names of successful first movers often end becoming the generic term for whatever tech they pioneer. In a few years, “FSD” may well be the generic term of choice for everyone’s mostly, but not quite fully, self-driving features.
In fact I’m a bit surprised that “to amazon” hasn’t already become a widely used generic verb for “Buy online from any supplier for shipment to your home”, much as “to google” has become a generic verb for “Use any search engine to locate information on the web”.
I’m guessing that when real self driving cars become commonplace, we’ll call them “cars”, and refer to manual-drive cars for the old clunkers we are steering around today.
There are already de-trademarked terms for this. They are called Autonomy levels. There are 6 of them. They are not as sexy of a term as FSD but they bring much needed gradation and nuance to prevent us from confusing different kinds of autonomy:
Level 0: no driving automation, aka old cars.
Level 1: driver assistance. Adaptive cruise control or lane center keeping. Not both! Luxury cars started getting this in the 2000s I believe?
Level 2: partial driving automation.This is where Tesla FSD is today, at the very top of level 2 but you must still be able to take over in less than ONE SECOND! AKA instantly, at any time, you must be paying full attention and have both your hands on the wheel and one foot on the break, or else you legally are responsible for your death if the AI fucks up.)
For Level 3 on up, you can relax and stop paying attention to the road and your insurance will not hold you liable, unlike all prior levels. This is HUGE.
Level 3: conditional driving automation: This is the best you can buy today: The Mercedes EQS drive pilot is L3-capable today with the huge following caveats: it only works on highways, traffic on the highway must be 40 mph or below, and you have to be in Cali, Nevada or Germany where it’s been approved. Kinda lame tbh
Level 4: high driving automation. No steering wheel or pedal is needed any more. The car should never ask you to take over as long as the weather is “good enough”. This is where Waymo are, from a customer perspective. However, they do cheat by having Remote human Waymo employees guide the car in a few tricky situations and that’s a pretty big caveat and a huge expense for Waymo, no doubt. True L4 doesn’t exist today and is the holy grail for everybody.
Level 5: full driving automation. Same as Level 4 but it can drive in any weather. Heavy snow, heavy rain, tons of fog, you name it, it can drive in it. At this point, no human should be able to drive better than the car, under any circumstances.
The other silly thing is assuming that because one EV brand offers driving automation, another EV brand should as well. Self-driving is unrelated to electric vehicles; many ICE brands are also working on adding self-driving.
They are not un-trademarked either. They are trademarked. You can’t advertise your car as “Level 3” unless you pay SAE for the privilege. Of course, we can use the terms to describe things, just like we can talk about Coca Cola or any other brand. But they are absolutely trademarked.
Simply setting aside the issue of whether the L-levels are somebody’s trademarks and whose trademarks they are …
@Gozu’s excellent, factual, and informative post utterly misses my point.
The public in all their unwashed ignorance will collectively decide what word it uses for cars that drive themselves well enough. And it won’t be some term from a staid bureaucracy like DOT, NHTSA, nor SAE. It’ll be some market leader’s catchy marketing term for their own product. Cuz that’s how the public rolls. 75 years later, it’s still kleenex; it’s not facial tissue.
And IMO the public will choose “FSD” as their term unless somebody else passes Tesla’s tech very very soon and very very decisively.
Thank you @hajario; I’ve fixed it. While I was writing I noticed that word sounded off-key but I was drawing a blank on the better one. Everyone repeat after me: Bathroom tissue is for the other end.
Oh, so did the NHTSA just uses the trademarked SAE terms? Gotcha. Not sure how I feel about such a thing being trademarked…
And yes certainly eventually people will choose their own words when such things exist but for now, these clunky levels are the best we have. That’s all I meant.
There are multiple definitions for various levels of automation and for some time there has been need for standardization to aid clarity and consistency. Therefore, this Policy adopts the SAE International (SAE) definitions for levels of automation.
FSD v12.4.2 may be be released to beta this weekend. If it’s anything like v12.4 or v12.4.1, it’ll be back to the drawing board. Those were disasters. But maybe…
FSD 12.4.2 (on SW 2024.15.10) is being released to employees and beta testers now. The last release was a disaster and was lambasted in early reports. Early reports for this version are positive so far but it’s still very early.
Supposedly 10-20% of the interventions of the current version. You no longer have to hold the steering wheel unless you are wearing sunglasses or a hat with a wide brim or your eyes are otherwise obscured.
