Mercedes Beats Tesla To Hands-Free Driving On the Autobahn
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/12/09/2220251/mercedes-beats-tesla-to-hands-free-driving-on-the-autobahn
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Mercedes Beats Tesla To Hands-Free Driving On the Autobahn
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"Drive Pilot enables the driver to turn away from the traffic and focus on certain secondary activities," the luxury-car maker said in a statement. "For example, to communicate with colleagues via the in-car office, to write emails, to surf the Internet or to relax and watch a film." Mercedes got permission for the system only in Germany, but said it's aiming for regulatory approval in other jurisdictions as well. Drive Pilot will be an option for the S-Class and EQS models from around the middle of next year. The automaker hasn't decided how much it will charge for the system, which has approval to be used on around 13,000 kilometers of Germany's highway network.
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Hopefully we see more races like that.-
Yes. This is fantastic. Especially when it isn't just Tesla pushing at the regulators. This will give Tesla some more latitude, and give regulators understanding of where to go next. As the systems improve and statistics get better, they can raise the use-case profile and speed limits. One thing all the parties involved need to communicate is the statistical riskiness of these systems in comparison to meat-ware. If the systems are not perfectly safe, but safer than human driving, it makes sense to deploy th
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Also the races that will result on the no-speed-limit Autobahns as this technology matures.
Germany, the country where the taxis go at 150mph...
(been there, done that)
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That's a bit of a myth. There are plenty of speed restrictions on the Autobahns and plenty of German people who pretend those restrictions don't exist, drive 190 in a 120 zone and blink you impatiently, fully expecting you to merge into the side of the truck you are overtaking at the snails pace of 120 kph.
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Is that for when you're just about to exit? No one drives that slowly on the autobahn, do they?
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Unless there is very dense traffic, I find it actually dangerous to drive that slow on that kind of road.
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Only in stupid countries where no one checks their side view mirrors for fast oncoming vehicles before stupidly darting out. In Germany, it takes a lot of skill and learning to get a license.
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No. Skill and learning doesn't make a situation less dangerous. Using your mirrors doesn't magically allow you to match speed. The research is clear even in Germany, speed difference between lanes is dangerous. I will wager Germany will have fixed 130km/h nation wide speed limits within the next 1-2 decades.
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Skill, learning and mirrors allow you to not even attempt to match speed if you know you can't. Wait for the much faster car to pass. Danger averted.
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That's pretty much the rule everywhere in Europe that I've driven. The general rule is that if you are driving behind somebody and don't maintain proper braking distance i.e. you tailgate and the guy in front of you has to slam on the breaks and you rear end him you are at fault. I was driving down an Autobahn entry ramp in Munich a few years ago and had to slam on the breaks. The cargo truck behind me was tailgating me, he didn't hit me but his cargo went flying all over the inside of his cargo box. The g
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Nope, danger not averted. The inability to change lanes quickly and easily is a safety feature in and of itself. It's the fundamental premise overtaking laws exist in the first place - limit the amount of looking you need to do before changing lanes, i.e. you can merge right without worrying about who is behind you.
Regardless of how you cut it, not only is it dangerous to have mismatched speeds in different lanes but Germany's own statistics show driver training doesn't and hasn't solved the problem.
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If you are in the slow lane doing 80-90 km/h, how do you match speed with somebody doing 250 km/h in the fast lane?
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Accelerate.
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Either you have the space and accelerate, or you're stuck there until a long enough gap comes along.
Also: use downward slopes to your accelerating advantage.Every time I got stuck like that it was my own damn fault for not thinking ahead.
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Yep, very dangerous. It takes 100% concentration, especially the speed contrast between slow trucks and audis etc flashing by at >200km/h
But it is damn fun and exciting and it works. But yes, you do not want every highway to be an autobahn.
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If you drive 80km/h behind a truck in the "slow lane" (for example on a hill, the truck speed limit is 90 km/h on highways and trucks are self-limited to 90 km/h), how do you prepare for cars doing 250 km/h in the "fast lane"?
250 km/h is a common self-limiting speed limit for higher-end cars (Mercedes, Audi,...).
Just for reference, the speed difference is 170 km/h or some 45 m/s. That means a car 400 meters behind (a quarter mile) will reach you in 8-10 seconds.-
You wait until there's nobody in the left lane coming at you at 250km/h. Or you leave a bit more space between you and the truck and get up to speed before changing lanes.
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The speed limit is probably because at those speeds nobody gets killed even if the software majorly screws up.
As it is it's useful if you regularly drive in traffic jams. They now need to up this to 110 km/h and that's good enough, when you want to go faster or off-autobahn just drive yourself. But that may be a lot more difficult because, unlike in traffic jams, there will be cars around you doing much greater speeds (particularly in Germany).
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The speed limit is because of laws categorizing the lower speed differently
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You do for stretches of road work. Which is currently quite common in the East in these years as they are updating all the old DDR highways.
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60 km/h? That's a crawl. In the US work zones are usually 55-60 mph, about 90-100 km/h.
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Never been in the daily traffic congestion on the A5 Baustellen ?
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I had to travel to Frankfurt from the Wetzlar area for about 10 years and did that mostly by car, which is the A5.
Monday mornings towards Frankfurt and friday evenings away from Frankfurt were sometimes brutal. On a normal day I could manage the distance with driving too fast in about 45 minutes. But on these times, 2 hours were normal and on bad days it even took me up to 4 hours.
And it sometimes depended on 5 minutes. Leaving 5 minutes earlier and I avoided the traffic jams, leaving 5 minutes later and I
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Sorry, this should have been:
On a normal day I could manage the distance with*out* driving too fast in about 45 minutes. But on these times, 2 hours were normal and on bad days it even took me up to 4 hours.
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"A5 Baustellen" - I believe the traffic jam started in about 1975 and hasn't dissipated yet. There may still be some of the original cars in there too.
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You actually enter the exit lane at or near full speed (130-ish km/h). You go slower while on the exit lane, not before - that's what it's for.
But many times you have long stretches of construction sites limited ad 60 or 80. And then, of course, even longet stretches of traffic jams. On longer trips, or while commuting along large cities, I've actually wished many, many times I had a simple autopilot. The situation is stop-n-go rarely exceeding 20-30, never 60, extremely boring, and goes on for hours, while
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It's for queues. Not just the autobhan, it works on some other roads too.
It's not the first though. Nissan has had hands-free driving on Japanese roads for a few years now. Cadillac has had it on US roads for a few years too.
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The minimum speed for the Autobahn is 60km/h - it is meant for heavy trucks etc and is normally only for the slow lane (the center & fast lanes often have their own minimum limits that are higher). So I guess you can just barely hang on the slow lane getting abuse from most of the trucks that are not quite that slow...
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In Romania there is no minimum speed limit on the highways (you should adapt speed to conditions). However, vehicles with maximum speed 50 km/h or slower aren't allowed on highways.
Minimum speed limits usually are marked on "climbing" stretches with additional "slow climb" lane - if you can't drive faster than 60 km/h, you MUST stay in the rightmost lane.
Also, newer trucks have more and more powerful engines so they can stay at their self-limited 90 km/h as much as possible.
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"Drive Pilot enables the driver to turn away from the traffic and focus on certain secondary activities," the luxury-car maker said in a statement. "For example, to communicate with colleagues via the in-car office, to write emails, to surf the Internet or to relax and watch a film."
There is no way I would trust my car enough to do those things.
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Make that "... trust the *programmers of* my car...".
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It's not programmers. Not any more. This is a product of machine learning, so machine is learning from the data set provided by... drivers.
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Have you looked at machine learning engineer code? It's more terrifying than software engineer code.
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The only thing even more terrifying is having marketing managers pushing for the deployment of these models into the real world.
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The biggest problem isn't really the code. The biggest problem is the fundamental flaw in machine learning AI training when you train it on extremely wide range of material. If the code itself is buggy, that usually fucks up the process during the learning phase or the testing phase that follows it.
But when your system "learns a wrong thing from source material", even with perfect code and software design, your AI will learn some lessons that are fundamentally incorrect. And no one will know. Until this wro
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Does this use machine learning?
Seems like it doesn't need an "AI". It follows the lane markings, which are detected by image processing video from a camera using a fixed algorithm. That is well proven tech at this point, and will soon become mandatory (lane departure warning) on new cars.
Distance to the car in front is measured using radar. Steering inputs and speed control are via algorithm.
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This is a "crawl mode" for when you're stuck in traffic. I'd trust a 1st generation Tesla to do that. There's no where on the autobahn where people drive 60km/h voluntarily.
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>> I'd trust a 1st generation Tesla to do that.
Don't.
It drives fine, but you should never let you attention away.
This allowsthe driver to be distracted, whic is a huge difference.-
I see you've never been stuck in traffic. Hint: People don't pay attention. Full stop. The existence of self driving features don't change that. There's a reason most people are rear-ended in stop-start traffic.
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Such as playing video games [businessinsider.com] while driving. This is on top of Tesla vehicles plowing into emergency vehicles [slate.com] or the "self-driving" software which is inconsistent and sometimes dangerous [cnn.com] to both the drivers and those around them.
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Neilâ(TM)s periodic anti-Tesla (always) articles have gotten to you, but they donâ(TM)t reflect reality. He freely mixes years-old technology with the present without differentiation. In the era where the Tesla hit a truck, the determination was driver inattention. Every, and I mean every, automotive system that used radar would have crashed because all were programmed to ignore stationary objects in order not to brake at large, fixed structures like overpasses. So, drivers were told, before the s
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"There is no way I would trust my car enough to do those things."
It works only on the Autobahn when driving under 37mph, so it's just Lane Keeping Assist with 'Follow that car'.
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Considering it only works up to 60 kph, and if it crashes they will be liable, it's probably fine. Basically all it does is follow the car in front in low speed traffic.
The main danger I can see is that the car comes to the end of a queue and everyone is accelerating up to 120 kph+. Meanwhile the driver of the Merc needs time to fold up and put down their newspaper, check the situation and take over driving. Then again that sort of thing happens quite a lot with vehicles that are slow to accelerate anyway.
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Exactly. In fact, it would have been more effective if they spent their AI development efforts in an AI that can do *those* things while YOU drive;)
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You really expected to go 37 mph on the autobahn like some kind of a hosenscheisser?
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Like Mr. Poopy Pants [youtube.com]?
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I see you've never driven on the autobahn before. Much of the network travels at speeds much slower than that. The lack of a speed limit doesn't solve the massive traffic jams at pretty much every major city.
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Pretty sure Audi was the first automaker to get this level of AI a couple of years ago, though perhaps limited to an even slower speed?
And why compare them to Tesla. Tesla isn't even among the frontrunners on self-driving, all Tesla have a mislabeled advanced cruise control. Compare them to Waymo or similar.
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Wouldn't it be easier and more appropriate to let the computer do those tasks while the human focuses on driving?
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Have they solved the insurance and responsibility questions?
If such a vehicle causes an accident while on auto, I guess that the vehicle's insurance will cover it just as for a human driver, but will the car maker pay the deductible since they are the driver? Will the insurance premium be higher if it allows the vehicle to be driven on auto, at least until these control systems have proven themselves to cause less accidents than humans do?
If it runs over and kills a person, will the car maker (who provided
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When a carâ(TM)s brakes fail, who pays? When a tree falls on a car, who pays?
If the accident resulted from willful negligence then whoever did the willful negligence will have to pay. That is established law. If the car encounters some weird not-anticipated or freak situation then it should be treat the same way as if a meteorite hit the car. As in, the insurance company has to suck it up cause that is what they are paid for.
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Don't make it harder than it is. You as the vehicle owner are trusting someone or something else to drive the car. If that something or someone messes, guess who pays. Ultimately, you chose to activate this system.
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I imagine auto insurance companies will do very detailed actuarial analysis on everything involved and that, as usually happens, prices will be the clearest indicative for the rest of us on which they know to be safer.
So, if cars with AI autopilots enabled and in use begin paying less for insurance, that'll be a clear sign of how they feel about it. If, on the opposite, they start costing more, then stay away from the technology until they don't.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Road deaths per 100K cars:
UK 5.7
Italy 6.3
Germany 6.4
Australia 7.4
France 8.4
USA 14.2-
Is that just per cars or per distance driven though?
Americans drive a lot farther than UK. -
"UK 5.7" - that is due to the British cars being mostly broken down and unable to drive.
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"Drive Pilot enables the driver to turn away from the traffic and focus on certain secondary activities"
Then their system is not Level-3 autonomous driving. In level 3, the driver must remain alert and ready to take control if the system is unable to execute the task [synopsys.com].
I understand that this is probably a mistake from the PR department, but this is very serious and it can eventually take away many lives, as already occurred in the fatal accident in Uber's self-driving tests in Arizona [bbc.com], in which the driver was
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Tesla hs difficulty with the most basic functions. Its windshield wiper is a public danger in automatic mode, underestimating and overestimating the rain to the effect of loss of road visibility and dry running, respectively. Either will prompt the driver to manually set it, then keep adjusting it manually. Wouldn't be bad but there's no physical control for it, you need to click a small button at the bottom edge of the screen to get to a modal window, and THEN you can set it, tapping on a small icon again.
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Seriously. They are a revered German company with considerable industrial clout in Germany so no surprise they beat Tesla.
That said, the dead move faster than 60 km/h on the Autobahn. Everything moves faster than 60 km/h on the Autobahn, even the asphalt. The off ramps might be the only place where cars move at that speed.
Note: while driving 240 km/h on the Autobahn, I was passed by a Mercedes (amongst others). Don't know what model, it went by too quickly.
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This is not much, on autobahn up to 60 km/h !?!? I can ride my tesla M3 autonomously on all highways in Europe up to 150 km/h. Yes, I need to keep my hands on the wheel , but this is not a big deal.
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