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Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes That Teslas With "Self-Driving" Computers May Never Be Able to Actually Self-Drive (futurism.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by VantaBrandon@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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"Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true."

Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming...

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[–] Jeffool@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Anyone knowledgeable about city planning? Why did we never put some type of signal in our roads? (I don't know. Passive RFID every few feet?) It would only cost what, ten, twenty thousand on top of each million spent paving every mile?

Seems it would be better baseline navigation than self driving cars and occasionally map apps. The cars would still have to do obstacle avoidance, of course.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about self driving tech or city planning. But if interstates are replaced every 10 years, and highways every 20, and Musk first made these claims in 2013? Then we'd have the base tech for every auto manufacturer to do moderately reliable self driving on interstates and a lot of our highways already.

Or maybe that large view pathfinding is the relatively easy part? That's why I'm asking. I'm sure there's something more obvious from an informed viewpoint that I don't know.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I imagine power is the tricky part. Badge readers and the like that use RFID also use wireless electricity to "power" the card. The range of that is limited without massive coils. You may be able to harness power from heat in asphalt (from traffic or sunlight beating on it), but I'd think that'd also be very limiting.

Better would be low power RF beacons set up at every transformer or every N utility poles. Something like BLE, maybe a little bit beefier. Power is readily available. They don't require data. All they need to do is broadcast their exact location and time (which they can get from GPS receivers).

[–] Jeffool@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Y'know GPS didn't even enter my mind. Hell, depending on GPS 3 accuracy (isn't it supposed to be in the centimeters?) my talk of signals is completely moot. That measured against a map of roads on a server somewhere would probably let you download an entire map of nodes toward your destination. Along the way the car just measures against its current location and does the math for obstacles. Great point. This is why I ponder shit out loud. Thanks.

[–] Prime@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

It is way more experience. Has to withstand great pressure and sheer forces. Updates as road changes. Heat of building asphalt and later of summer. Horrible road maintenance. And what does it provide exactly to a car that actually helps? How long until most roads are updated with it?