Tesla claims FSD is ready and the hold up is regulatory bodies. To that end there is no saying how long until its ready...

 

Tesla claims FSD is ready...

[citation needed]

 

As a side note, the full self driving only costs $3,000 if purchased immediately with the car, the Model S estimator suggests the price increases to $4,000 if it is activated after the car is purchased.

In regards to FSD being ready, Elon did say on Twitter many months ago that he expected FSD to be ready for testing in 3 months and for sure be available in 6 months, he has already overrun that timeline (I think he said that December last year? Perhaps I'm remembering wrong). That being said, since Autopilot 2.0 is still struggling, I speculate FSD is still quite a while away... Especially with the concerns brought forth with "Autopilot Hardware 2.1", which might suggest 2.0's hardware is not quite capable of FSD (but a spokesperson said if 2.0 hardware cannot FSD then an upgrade to FSD-capable hardware will be provided no-charge).

 

I think FSD is practically ready now, technically, but I think the issue will be regulations and when/how each state will start allowing it. Not sure if it's going to be Federal or state, thought they were aiming for Federal but someone will know better than I.
I think the laws will open up more in 1-2 years based on what Elon said in one of his Ted talks, but it's definitely coming and will be exciting.
Personally, I'm waiting even if it's $1,000 extra to do that, and one reason is I don't want to be an early "beta tester" for that until I'm more comfortable with even EAP, which I've never experienced yet.

 

Mr Musk has stated that the cars (with the hardware 2) will need to log about 3 billion miles to be ready for full self driving. I have not seen any indication that he has revised this view. My best guess is that currently we are at a few hundred million. A good start. If the ramp for Model 3 goes we will probably hit 3 billion about the end of 2018. My guess is that regulatory approval might go pretty smoothly after that.

 

Because of the unknowns, I think it is less interesting when full FSD arrives.

I'm interested how it will arrive.

• full FSD ar once, nothing before.
• first on highways, then secondary roads outside the city, then urban driving
• first short distance low speed (eg. get car from parking lot without driver), then a quiet street at 50 km/h, …
• first with heavy supervision required, increasingly less attention required by "driver"
• …

 

I found a nice thread by @Brokedoc in another subforum. He gives some good opinions about what EAP will do versus FSD.

https://teslaownersonline.com/threads/crash-course-on-teslas-cruise-control-eap-and-fsd.4515/

 

... we will probably hit 3 billion about the end of 2018. My guess is that regulatory approval might go pretty smoothly after that.

I hope you are right but I fear that it will be a long slow and difficult process.

• There will be fast jurisdictions that sort out the complex legal issues quickly and that quickly push through enabling legislation.
• There will be slow jurisdictions that take years to arrive at a position.
• And sadly there will be vested interests that attempt to stop the whole process.

 

There will be slow jurisdictions that take years to arrive at a position.

Ironically most of the slow jurisdictions will be "red" states which claim to oppose government regulation.

 

They intend to demonstrate FSD with a coast-to-coast, parking lot to parking lot drive of a vehicle by the end of this year, but I haven't heard of any updates lately.

And that was explicitly caveated to NOT mean ready.

There are states where FSD is legal already. If the software were ready, people would be demonstrating it in one of those places.

Thank you kindly.

 

... There are states where FSD is legal already. ...

Which States?

Do they have law in place that would enable ANY FSD car to drive within the State or is it a more limited arrangement that allows controlled testing of FSD vehicles on public roads?

If it is new FSD legislation, can you give me a link to the relevant legislation (even one example would be useful)?
There will be many jurisdictions around the world that, to help model their own, will be interested in seeing early examples of legislation that enables operation of FSD vehicles on public roads. I had been thinking a thread recording such legislation as it occurs would be really useful.

To assist in formulating new legislation, the Australian Capital Territory (equivalent of DC) is funding a study into human/self driving interactions. The study, using a Tesla, is being done under special (but restricted) provisions of existing legislation. My earlier post refers. https://teslaownersonline.com/threads/autonomous-car-tech-thread.1926/page-7#post-24424

 

As I understand it, EAP can be considered Self-Driving level 2. I think even the challenge of self-driving coast-to-coast could be considered only level 4. Level 5 would seem a very long way off, more the realm of autonomous robots not running on 4 tires.

I'm hoping that Tesla releases intermediate driver assistance. EAP doesn't seem a long way from following a GPS set route, even including non-automated stops at SCs, but with a driver behind the wheel and paying attention. I'm considering even paying for FSD, but not if I don't get anything until Tesla achieves the ultimate. What do we know about what Tesla has done in the past and what they might be considering in the near-term future?

As to states with legislation, this is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

 

I would expect an AP1 level of progress. Sadly AP2 still doesn't match those standards. By the end of next year it will help bad drivers become good drivers. Will not surpass a good focused driver ever, but most of us are never 100% focused. Always take our eyes off to check the radio, hot girls, etc. But as far as Autonomously working ubers you can forget about it for this vehicle. Governments will mandate Car 2 Car communications before they allow these things to roam independently. So, don't expect to nap in the car.

 

Here's what would make me feel more confident about getting Full Self-Driving on the initial purchase: a promise that if it hasn't been realized by the time I upgrade to the next Tesla, the FSD option will be transferred to the new car.

 

...

Love the hat.

Thank you kindly.

 

I think we are decades away from FSD.

1. People will not want to accept a computer controling their fate, even if statistics show it is safer than human drivers.

2. If God forbid a FSD car runs over a child to avoid killing many adults, the media would create madness

 

1. People will love a computer taking over a dull task. Especially if the task is to control heavy machinery and the computer does it safer.
2. Yes they will. How do you think they react to a human driver in the same situation? Or to [insert trivial news here]?

 

Hmmm... About that "... long slow and difficult process..."...? In recent months the U.S. Congress has moved to grant full authority regarding regulation of autonomous vehicles to the NHTSA. That would overrule any State or local restrictions that might bar them. The NHTSA has the strong belief that driver assistance and autonomous driving systems are a benefit to safety. The NHTSA has been working to streamline the process of approval for such systems in a proactive fashion.

"We at NHTSA remain committed to working with vehicle and equipment manufacturers to make proactive safety the industry norm. At the end of the day, we are all in roadway safety together, and the Proactive Safety Principles are a promising new tool to help protect our loved ones on America's roadways."​

 

totally agree, and expect the more common it becomes, the more faith the general public will have in it. It will get to be much like old-school cruise control. I am sure back in 1980-whatever when cruise became common in every car, there were some people that thought it was TACC. People will learn what it is capable of, either by being smart about it, or the hard way.

When I was growing up (we wore togas then), there was a story about a guy driving his camper who put his cruise control on and went back to have lunch.

 

Obligatory snopes link:
https://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp

 

Thanks for pointing that out, I forgot about it. Autopilot made such significant progress in 2016, and barely anything in 2017. I think Mobileye had a much larger contribution than we thought. I assume we can ignore the cross-country self driving promise, too. Thankfully the short stock owners seemed to have missed this.

I forgot about this as well, and really didn't read it then the way I'm reading it now. I now take it to mean that implementation of some FSD features will be pushed before regulatory approval. So, although a driver still may be required to be ready to take over by law, at some point the FSD package will be able to drive you from point A to point B with no driver input. You'll have to be in the driver seat ready to take over, but it will be different from EAP which will basically just be a glorified cruise control at that point by comparison. Although Musk was way optimistic on the 3-6 months, we have to assume that FSD features will be added in the near future and then we will begin to see a difference between EAP and FSD (e.g. the FSD will stop at stop signs/lights, but the EAP would only trail a car and stop when it stops). Is that how you all take it? If so, I guess I need to reconsider my decision to go with EAP-only....ugh!

 

I think we are decades away from FSD.

1. People will not want to accept a computer controling their fate, even if statistics show it is safer than human drivers.

2. If God forbid a FSD car runs over a child to avoid killing many adults, the media would create madness

Well that comment sure didn't age well: https://electrek.co/2017/11/07/waymo-self-driving-car-no-humans-public-ride-service/

 

https://electrek.co/2017/11/07/waymo-self-driving-car-no-humans-public-ride-service/

Am I the only one impressed by the path Waymo is taking here. I don't mean the expensive LIDAR vs cheap cameras debate, that's a whole different subject. I mean the way they are systematically working through the issues all of the other companies (including Tesla) seem to be ignoring: Human interaction, real world off-normals, and public policy.

In part, this pilot is testing the passenger control/display system they setup which has simple start, pull over, and get help buttons and a map display designed to give passengers confidence that the car knows what it's doing. In a way it's just a expanded version of the system Tesla already uses, sowing the cars position in the lane and the position cars around it, but it's my understanding that the Waymo system takes it a whole lot farther. It displays pedestrians, intersections, traffic cones, everything it can; just to give the riders comfort that they can trust the car. That is the kind of thing that will make it much easier to get users to actually adopt the new services.

They also setup a mock-up city where they could test the car in off-normal situations like construction zones, traffic jams with obstructions in the road, etc. I believe they actually had people trying to deliberately confuse the car (standing it's way and not moving, etc). Tesla may get that kind of experience just from the miles logged by human drivers in their existing cars but I bet it will actually be hard to translate that into software solutions because the humans involved in the situation will be reacting as much to the driverless car as the car will be to them (the human driver removes that feedback loop).

Lastly they are working with the cities involved on administration issues, training police and other first responders how to interact with the car (polling it over, directing it out of the way in an emergency, etc). We need that dialog and iterative process because there are legitimate safety and security issues with driverless cars. The solutions they come up with in the smaller test cities can lead to better national policies later. This is an important step in the process leading towards mass adoption of driverless cars.

Most of this progress by Waymo will actually benefit all self driving car companies because it leads to standards and policies rather then patents. We may all have to thank Google in a few years when/if we get coherent federal (world) standards for these cars.

TL;DR; I think Waymo is working on important parts of self driving car tech that other companies are ignoring.

 

And remember, Waymo is area dependent. You (currently) can not drop one in an unfamiliar neighborhood and have it perform the same as where it has been ‘trained’.

 

I find myself incredibly annoyed by the coverage, in usually reliable sources, of Mr. Musk’s prediction that we would reach full autonomy in about two years and an order of magnitude improvement in another year. Although the current statement is accurately reported the bloggers and reporters then go on say that this shouldn't be taken seriously because Mr Musk had predicted two years ago that we would have self driving cars by now. This misrepresents what Mr Musk said two years ago.


At that time he did not say that we would reach level 5 by now: he said that we would have the technology for FSD,which is totally different. I am pretty sure that if you asked Mr Musk when we will have the the technology for FSD, he would say that all Teslas for over a year have had all the technology needed for autonomy , all that is needed is billions of miles of data. Clearly he knew such data is still a year or so in the future, late 2018 at the earliest. So did not say that we would have FSD by now, nor did he believe it.


We will not really know if the current hardware will support autonomy until we have a lot more data, but the historic statement is in no way inconsistent with his current position.

 

I find myself incredibly annoyed by the coverage, in usually reliable sources, of Mr. Musk's prediction that we would reach full autonomy in about two years and an order of magnitude improvement in another year. Although the current statement is accurately reported the bloggers and reporters then go on say that this shouldn't be taken seriously because Mr Musk had predicted two years ago that we would have self driving cars by now. This misrepresents what Mr Musk said two years ago.

At that time he did not say that we would reach level 5 by now: he said that we would have the technology for FSD,which is totally different. I am pretty sure that if you asked Mr Musk when we will have the the technology for FSD, he would say that all Teslas for over a year have had all the technology needed for autonomy , all that is needed is billions of miles of data. Clearly he knew such data is still a year or so in the future, late 2018 at the earliest. So did not say that we would have FSD by now, nor did he believe it.

We will not really know if the current hardware will support autonomy until we have a lot more data, but the historic statement is in no way inconsistent with his current position.

He did say that we'd see a coast to coast drive with no one touching any controls this year and that's not happening. He said in January that FSD features would begin surpassing EAP features in the now infamous "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" and so far not a single FSD feature has rolled out and EAP hasn't even caught up to AP1 yet. He definitely over promised.

 

I find it interesting how when people are asked their opinion on something they are suddenly quoted as having "promised" something. Then, if it doesn't happen, they are accused of breaking a "promise".

Dan

 

Since Tesla is a public company, there are rules for what are promises by a CEO and what not. Does anyone here know those rules?

Anyway, I'm less interested in when something was promised, or when it is delivered. I'm interested in what steps lead to making it real, and how we can see the steps being taken.

 

Frankly the longer we go without getting unique FSD features the better. As soon as that starts happening, Tesla will probably stop adding capability to standard enhanced autopilot in an effort to upsell. I would rather get all the features and tweaking possible before they start doing this.

 

So... Does anyone know if the FSD option needs to be made right at the time we are invited and configure in order to get the $3.000 price or is there a grace period, say within 30 days of taking delivery?

 

I preface my answer with I don't know for sure, but....

I don't think there is a grace period for "after delivery". You could however potentially get this added after initially configuring, but before taking delivery and get it for the $3k.

 

It's looking like Waymo is finally going to get their butt in gear and make their self-driving technology available first. They have a good ~5-year lead on everyone else, and detailed maps that are beyond what anybody else has available (read that link - it's quite fascinating).

Musk is good friends with Larry Page. I wonder if Tesla would consider licensing Waymo's technology at some point in the future.

 

Waymo is very map dependent though (level 4) and may be able to be fsd in places it’s been testing, will not be able to be dropped down just any place and be fsd, or drive between two known places

 

This is a pretty good summary:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/0...018/01/why-analysts-put-gm-and-waymo-far-ahead-of-tesla-in-driverless-car-race/

 

The Navigant report is crap, though. Seems to me they cherry-picked categories, and if they had chosen different metrics the results would have been completely different.

 

Invective + "seems to me" opinion isn't a convincing argument against the content of the Navigant report.

The 2017 disengagement reports should be out soon, which is one of the best windows we have into Tesla's self driving program and where they are in experience and success relative to Waymo and GM, who are undoubtedly in the lead in terms of miles traveled and successful navigation of complex urban environments in fully autonomous mode. 2016 was the first year Tesla had any fully autonomous cars operating on CA roads - their only testing on public roads - and the data was sad for those hoping for L4 features in their cars any time soon.

At the moment, it looks like GM (and probably Waymo) are likely to have a fully autonomous taxi service on public roads in 2019. I say this as someone very skeptical of previous projections, and informed by friends in the industry that are working on this technology. I just don't think Tesla is anywhere close to that timeline.

 

It's been all over the news this past year. You can google and find tons of information from all different angles. These will give you enough info to find more on your own:

Here are videos of some drives in gen-2 prototypes (modified Chevy Bolts) from about a year ago. It's a tough environment to test in, as you can see. I see the Waymo cars down here around Mountain View all the time, and they don't have to contend with anything like what is shown in these videos.
==================

NY Times article on their whole program and the gen-3 cars, designed specifically for L4/L5 automation with fully redundant systems (like a commercial airliner), of which they have made well over a hundred of now on the same line at Orion that produces the normal Bolt. These cars circulate SF 24/7/365 giving rides to GM and Cruise Automation employees for free. This article describes one such ride given to the author, and other publications have similar accounts of their rides on the demo day that you can find by searching:
==============
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/gm-driverless-cars.html

A news article about how they plan to begin testing Level 4 cars in NYC this year - the first in NYC. That's going to be an interesting challenge, no doubt.
==============================
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/17/16488330/gm-cruise-nyc-self-driving-car-test-cuomo

Recent news article about the gen-4 design, that has *no steering wheel or pedals* in the car. Again, these have fully redundant systems, and are designed to be produced on the line at Orion.
=====================
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16880978/gm-autonomous-car-2019-detroit-auto-show-2018

Here is GM's self driving safety report submitted to USDOT, referred to in the previous article. (So far only GM and Waymo have submitted this report as requested by federal government.) It has some details about the program, the cars, safety systems, etc.
http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/en_us/english/selfdriving/gmsafetyreport.pdf

GM is being seriously aggressive about this. They'll ruffle some feathers and have some high-profile failures because of that, but they will also continue to make very rapid progress, which is all that matters.

I know some engineers at a small startup that is in this fray too, and while they have good software tech, they are seriously up a creek without a paddle on how to manufacture a car. Waymo is somewhere in between that and GM, where GM's strength is obviously auto manufacturing, but their acquisition of Cruise and Strobe and big investment in expanding those efforts are closing the gap on the self driving tech very quickly.

 

Speeding up a video like this helps to hide all of the little mistakes the car makes. I noticed this with the video that Tesla released. Luckily, YouTube allows you to easily slow down a video. I watched Tesla's demonstration video at something closer to real-time speed, and wrote up a list of all of the anomalies I noticed. Maybe I'll find time to tackle this video too.

This is an older video that has been posted here before, in this thread. I actually watched this in real time and listed the anomolies.

Nice analysis, Melinda!
I decided to do one too.
0:13 After completing a left turn, it decides to stop because a bike blew through a stop sign coming the other way to make a right. It allowed the bike to pass it on the right.
0:16 Does not yet attempt rights on red.
0:26 Does a good job slowing down for a construction worker crossing the road.
0:30 Attempting left turn on yield green. Pulls out into intersection, then slows down to wait. Should wait for a clearing before pulling into intersection.
0:31 Worse, it starts to turn left before stopping. YOU SHOULD NEVER DO THIS! If you get rear-ended, you'll get pushed into oncoming traffic. Wait until you actually have a clearing before beginning to turn the steering wheel.
0:35 Driver hits a button on the steering wheel. Bad engineer! No cookie for you!
0:49 It seemed to slow down more than necessary to go around the hole in the middle of the road.
0:50 I disagree with Melinda here. The Bolt can probably sense that the oncoming car was decelerating rapidly to decide that it was safe to turn in front of it.
1:04 Why did it stop 12 feet before the intersection? I guess it didn't want to approach with a pedestrian crossing?
1:43 Why so slow on this stretch? Appears to have been confused by the bike lane separators.
2:06 Extra pause halfway through the intersection. Not clear why.
2:09 Here it pulls right up to an intersection where people are crossing. So why didn't it do this at 1:04?
2:30 Pulls up way too close to the parked truck before attempting a pass. Has to wait for other cars to pass both them and the truck.

In general, the car isn't very smooth on streets with on-street parking. It goes more to the right when there is an empty parking space, then closer to the center when there are cars. As a result, it seems to "swerve" a lot while driving down a road. They need to smooth out that algorithm some.

I've no doubt that GM is continuing to make big strides in this space, but so far it appears that their self-driving abilities aren't really much better than what Tesla has demonstrated.

So... I continue to believe that Waymo is 5-6 years ahead of everybody, including GM. But they need to partner with a car manufacturer soon to get this technology out to the public before everybody else catches up. Maybe the current partnership with Chrysler will turn into something bigger.