All problems with cars… can be solved with better software. Only the lack of vision and brilliance by the world’s automakers has kept this solution away.
Move over, St. Jobs. Elon the Blessed is going to need part of that niche.
Care to elaborate?
Not some of my cars. Especially the Jeep.
Guessing it’s related to the new software update from Tesla that will let the car know when miles to dead battery is greater than miles to a charging station to help eliminate “range anxiety.”
Huh. the Fusion Energi I have for the weekend knows where the nearest charging stations are at any time, and the navigation app (in the whipping-boy MyFord Touch) can direct me to them.
Thanks for the “innovation” and “disruption,” St. Elon. Glad you think you’re awesome for figuring out how to do something other people were already doing.
I don’t need an idiot light (or pop-up dialog box) to tell me I’m already screwed.
I need one that predicts I *might *get screwed if I don’t do something different within the next 30 minutes versus what appears to be my current plan. And tell me about it then.
Get on it Messrs. Ford & Musk!
Amateur Barbarian may be speaking of this:
“Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer”
I’m guessing it’s adaptive cruise control with the ability to remain in a lane.
Which you can get on any number of cars right now.
Are they actually autonomous? I think they just warn you if you drift.
No, they’ll make adjustments as well. Here’s the Skoda version. It is something that may be fitted as standard on my next car (a fairly run-of-the-mill Skoda Octavia) it’ll also have adaptive cruise control and other sensors. So there is no reason why my car couldn’t do long stretches of uncrowded highway “hands-off”
nope. the Fusion Energi I referred to above has both adaptive cruise control, forward collision detection/avoidance, lane-departure warning with active lane-keeping assist, and auto park assist. If it senses you’re drifting out of a lane, it’ll use the electric power steering assist (EPAS) to “nudge” you back into the lane. If you’re driving along in with cruise control on, if traffic ahead is slower than your pre-set speed it will slow the car down to maintain a safe distance. If traffic ahead stops and the car doesn’t think you’re braking fast enough (or you’ve had your head up your ass) it will initiate braking on its own. I experienced this personally in a Lincoln MKZ. Kind of weird feeling the car brake itself.
so, with the right equipment we have cars which can already monitor their surroundings, steer themselves, accelerate themselves, brake by themselves, and park themselves (mostly.) The self-driving/autonomous car is 80% here. The last 20% of the work is going to be the hardest.
and to be fair to Tesla, the novel/innovative approach here is their ability to update customers’ vehicles over the air with these features so long as their cars have the required hardware. That is the part which has never been done before.
Of course, that last 20% consists of stuff like seeing a ball rolling out into the street, and knowing that this might mean a 5-year-old child is about to run out after it, or seeing a car approaching at a cross street, and slowing down because he’s coming up a bit fast and you’re not 100% sure he’s not going to blow the Stop sign. You know, the stuff that will get you into an accident even if you’re normally a good driver.
This is why Tesla has said that the autopilot will only work on highways (I assume you won’t even be able to activate it elsewhere). I think we have quite a way to go before we can eliminate that last 20%.
I’m guessing that Tesla will be (and maybe already is) monitoring drivers’ actions in concert with what the sensors are seeing in order to train their software for in town driving.
And there are still questions to be settled about liability in the case of accidents. If I purchase a self-driving car and it causes an accident, who’s responsible? Me? The car company?
I read that as “The novel approach here is the ability to have thieves/hackers steal/wreck your car wirelessly!”
Indeed. It should require a service visit with a hard connection to a port inside the car to do a software upgrade. There should be no way to ever wirelessly connect to a cars software.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. Why bother breaking into a car, or carjacking the owner, when you can just order the car to drive itself to the chop shop?
Actually, a savvy car thief would probably order the car to drive itself to some random parking lot or side street, then he’d disable the antenna (and anything else that might let the car transmit its location), and then he’d tow the car to his chop shop.
The story I saw said that they in theory could have t self drive everywhere but non highway driving has more variables for roads and signage and they don’t feel the software can handle it. That means it is just software problem and not a hardware problem so I suspect within a year or two they will get it fixed.
This is the other million-dollar question. If (let’s say) Toyota markets a car as being self-driving, and then tries to weasel out of its responsability when (not if) an accident occurs, the PR hit alone will be brutal. And it would probably kill self-driving cars for at least a few years before anyone dared to try again.
At the very least, the receiver should be decoupled from the rest of the electronics until you stop the engine and specifically choose to enable the wireless connection.
And that choice should via be a hardware switch. There should be no physical connection between the receiver and any CPU or program storage without someone physically flipping a switch that completes that connection.