
Tesla Owners Can Edit Maps to Improve Summon Routes - AlexTrask
https://teslamotorsclub.com/blog/2019/11/04/tesla-owners-can-edit-maps-to-improve-summon-routes/
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_ph_
This is great news. OSM might not have gotten as much public awareness like
Wikipedia, but it deserves it. Having a global map data source, which isn't
only freely available, but to which everyone can contribute, is a great piece
of information infrastructure. The level of map details, especially off the
roads open for car traffic, is excellent around the place where I live.

With Tesla pulling map information used for routing in the summon feature from
OSM, this gives not only an overall incentive for Tesla owners to enhance the
OSM database, but also gives them the ability to add the data they personally
need, making the feature more useful in places which didn't have good data
yet.

I wonder though, if Tesla could use the data collected by the vehicles in
general to improve OSM. As Tesla seems to track special driving situations for
building and enhancing the Autopilot features, they could also automatically
detect wrong or missing map information, whenever a Tesla drives "off" the
map. Based on that information, they could contribute to OSM a lot.

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sabas_ge
Anonymized gps traces are a common way to contribute, and routing errors as
well. They could build a "Report an issue" feature which can be shared with
the community after being validated by their data team.

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HNLurker2
It's that hard to walk to a car we need to reinvent the wheel? It's getting
ridiculous

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braythwayt
One way in which this could (I am being very speculative) be useful is that
when we pass a tipping point and most cars are autonomous enough for
summoning, this could change the architecture of public buildings like malls,
condos, and offices:

Parking could be deliberately placed far away: Cars could drop you at the
front doors, then drive off and park themselves, returning to pick you up when
you are done.

This could revitalize downtown shopping districts, for example.

It may not be a hardship for able people to walk to their car in today’s
malls, but perhaps in the future your car could be parked a few kilometers
away.

That could be a big win for liveability: Imagine malls that didn’t need to be
surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt. Shuttles could carry people driving
“legacy” vehicles between the parking and the mall, but those with autonomous
vehicles wouldn’t need to wait for and share a shuttle.

~~~
close04
> That could be a big win for liveability

Somehow having a lot of traffic created by _empty cars_ is not a win in my
liveability book. Unless you're sharing the car and it's picked up by someone
5 minutes away as soon as you get out you earn very little besides some driver
convenience. Instead of acting like taxis that you drive yourself, they act
like limos and everyone gets to feel like they have a chauffeur to get dropped
off exactly at the spot.

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braythwayt
The whole premise of autonomous cars is that they behave like limos. I don’t
see how that is any worse than people driving their own cars, I see it as
better in many ways, including this.

Not as good as people sharing cars, or sharing a Big Urban Service vehicle, we
could build it to hold dozens of people... I guess it would be known by the
acronym “BUS...”

~~~
close04
> The whole premise of autonomous cars is that they behave like limos

Those would be the fully self driving cars. Cars that can somehow navigate
short distances to a parking spot where the next person takes over would be
the middle step. They sort of act like a valet service or a "self driven taxi"
(comes to you where you need it).

> I don’t see how that is any worse

A FSD is not worse. Just not better for anyone but the owner unless it's a
shared vehicle. The only way we all benefit is if the number of cars goes down
because they are shared or people move to more public forms of transport.

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michaelmcmillan
Uhm, anyone else worried about the security here? What if someone were to draw
a “parking lot” polygon that resulted in a path to water?

~~~
_ph_
I guess the key here is, that Tesla knows that that OSM isn't "trustworthy"[1]
and consequently treats the map information as it should be: just as the
source for the routing algorithm. So it uses the maps as the basis on how to
get from A to B, but the actual driving is based on the sensors, not trusting
the maps. So the worst case of false mapping information would be of trapping
the car in a place where it doesn't know how to get to its destination.

[1] Due to its open collaborative nature, there is an obvious risk for bad or
even malicious edits submitted to OSM. On the other side, "professional" and
closed mapping services can have errors too, especially they run the risk of
being outdated, so shouldn't completely be trusted either. Due to the
community efforts, overally the OSM data should be better maintained and
errors can be fixed resulting in better map quality. But the big thing is,
that you cannot trust any map data 100% - and if only it has been invalidated
by a tree falling onto the road.

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sabas_ge
Tesla can collaborate with the community and other business users to take the
feedback from their fleet and fix the issues upstream in the data. Facebook,
Apple, Amazon and others are already doing so.
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Organised_Editi...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Organised_Editing_Teams)

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rmc
Describing what those companies do as “collaborating with the [OSM] community”
might be a bit of a stetch. At best some companies have been dragged kicking
and screaming to actually talking to the OSM community.

~~~
sabas_ge
Hi Rory, better than nothing it seems, they were all in Heidelberg for
starters :)

