
Tesla: Introducing Autopilot and Dual Motor All Wheel Drive - bradly
http://www.teslamotors.com
======
Animats
Their "autopilot" is basically a "driver assist" system: lane-keeping plus
adaptive cruise control. Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Volkswagen, Ford, etc.
already have that. Tesla's is rumored to be the Daimler-Benz system.

That's good enough for about 99% of freeway driving. The last 1% is a problem,
which is why none of the big car companies call it automatic driving. Most of
them put in systems to insure the driver keeps paying attention, such as
insisting on hands on the wheel in auto mode.

We're approaching the "deadly valley" \- automatic driving that's almost good
enough that the driver can stop paying attention. On the far side of the
"deadly valley" is full-auto driving, including automatic handling of unusual
and emergency situations, which is where Google and CMU/Cadillac are headed.

The minimum safe level is probably a system that can get the vehicle stopped
autonomously when it's headed into a situation it can't handle. Beeping the
driver to take over is not going to work in practice. As soon as hands-off
driving is available, people will use it when tired, drunk, or texting.

~~~
FeeTinesAMady
Who downvoted you? This is a very serious issue. A partial autopilot for cars
is worse than useless: it will create distracted drivers who can't react when
the car encounters something it can't handle. Self-driving cars need to be
either 100% or 0%.

~~~
Animats
I used to work on automatic driving. I ran Team Overbot in the 2005 DARPA
Grand Challenge. (We lost, but we didn't crash into anything.) So I'm
painfully aware of the problems of automatic driving.

You need to be both looking at the road with cameras and profiling it with
LIDAR. (Or terahertz radar, once that gets going.) It's not enough to just
sense the car ahead. You need to be able to detect potholes, ice patches, junk
on the highway, small animals, and similar problems. We could detect and avoid
potholes back in 2005. Since we were doing off-road driving, that was a normal
driving event.

The reason for a high-view LIDAR is that you want to see the pavement surface
ahead from a reasonably useful angle and get a 3D profile of the road ahead.
Google uses the Velodyne spinning-cone LIDAR scanner, which is a lot of LIDAR
units built into one rotating mechanism. That's a research tool. There are
other LIDAR devices more suited to mass production. Advanced Scientific
Concepts has a nice eye-safe LIDAR which can operate in full sunlight. It
costs about $100K, but that's because it's made by hand for DoD and space
applications. The technology is all solid state, not inherently that
expensive, and needs to be made into a volume product. (Somebody really needs
to get on that. In 2004, I took a venture capitalist down to Santa Barbara to
meet that crowd, but there was no mass market in sight back then. Now there
is.)

You can only profile the road out to a limited distance, regardless of the
sensor, because you're looking at the road from an oblique angle. Under good
conditions, though, you can out-drive the range at which you can profile the
road. That was Sebastian Thrun's contribution, and won the DARPA Grand
Challenge. The idea is that if the LIDARs say the near road is good, and the
cameras say the far road looks like the near road, you can assume the far road
is like the near road and go fast. If the far road looks funny, you have to
slow down and get a good look at the road profile with the LIDARs.

Automatic driving systems have to do all this. "Driver assistance" systems
don't. Hence the "deadly valley".

That's just to deal with roads and static obstacles. Then comes dealing with
traffic.

~~~
vl
But why LIDAR though?

Humans proved that for current level driving two not particularly high-
resolution cameras are sufficient. Seems like pushing in this direction will
remove this expensive component?

~~~
Ygg2
Humans, also posses a listening system, balance system, a highly advance
pattern recognition system filled with auto complete from a huge database of
pictures (which to this date hasn't been replicated - face recognition doesn't
count it needs to recognize cars, signs, people, animals, pavement, trees,
obstacles, etc.), not to mention knowledge of various possible scenarios,
various models of how their body/car/traffic works, etc.

You get to use worse hardware, but you need several order magnitude better
software.

~~~
x1798DE
I would guess that the processing power is all that matters. It's not
difficult or particularly dangerous to drive without being able to hear. I
would guess that people driving remote controlled cars with 360-degree views
but no other cues would perform very nearly as well as real drivers.

~~~
markbao
I think the key point is that it is _very_ difficult for software to parse
view-from-windshield images like this:
[http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska...](http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska%20064.jpg)

The human eye can instantly recognize the available driving paths, the
motorcyclist ahead, and project where people will walk. Software would have to
parse out where the open roads are, how far that motorcyclist is and whether
he can clear the intersection before the car reaches it, and what that sign on
the right-hand side is—using the same information, but it has to _parse_ it
first whereas we do that almost instantly. It's a totally different game.

~~~
x1798DE
Yes, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the other sensors the parent post
mentioned weren't actually important with regards to driving, just our ability
to parse the visual data into a meaningful model of the world around us.

------
IgorPartola
It is funny that on HN the discussion is mainly focused on driver assist and
its merits/drawbacks, while the real innovation is being ignored: this thing
has two engines, increased range (on all but top of the line versions where
range is decreased by only 10 miles), and is nearly a 10 second car, with 0-60
time in just over 3 seconds. Oh and roller coaster-like lateral acceleration
of 1 g. Also note that the range of the dual motor setup is the result of
software optimization of which engine to run at what power level at what
point. This is the really exciting new development here.

~~~
Shivetya
There is no innovation in having two motors in a car, unless your restricting
the statement to a purely electric car. Many cars produced by others do the
more difficult, combine and electric and petrol motor. There may even be
examples of dual electric motor vehicles.

The performance should be expected since they engineered for that. Electric
motors have their torque immediately and it becomes a balance of suspension
and tires in effectively using it.

What I am disappointed in that there is only ten more miles. Frankly why is a
100k car than only gets a little over two hundred miles lauded so much? If
anything its a demonstration that the technology IS NOT THERE.

I was really hoping D was double range. When a 100k electric gets 500 a charge
call me, then I will be impressed. Tesla better hurry, many of the big
manufactures plan to field 200 mile range affordable electrics no later than
2017

~~~
gfodor
Why does it matter if your ev gets a 250 vs 500 range? The only time this is
relevant is for long road trips, and in that case you have superchargers. For
most people the distinction is irrelevant.

The 200 mile range or so seems to be the sweet spot where you can plug the car
in every night and never think about it; on any given day you are not going to
drive 200 miles other than the rare days you have preplanned road trips. The
key point to remember is the car is recharged every night.

On the contrary, I think the reality of tens of thousands of people owning
teslas and never complaining about the range (in terms of practical effects)
is evidence that the technology _is_ there.

~~~
ElComradio
It is evidence they are willing to make trade-offs.

~~~
gfodor
What additional evidence is needed for someone to be convinced that technology
is "there yet" beyond the adoption of electric cars by consumers because they
are simply better products, as is the case with the model S? Clearly the
technology _is_ there, it's just only available (like most new things) in
luxury class cars. If the argument is that somehow Model S owners are
willingly sacrificing features (since the technology isn't 'there yet') in the
name of some higher good like helping the environment, that's ridiculous, my
wife has one and it's superior to a gas car for a long list of reasons. (With
the minor exception that if we decide to take a long road trip, we need to
plan ahead for a few minutes to ensure we can hit a supercharger.)

------
sxp
From
[http://www.teslamotors.com/models/design](http://www.teslamotors.com/models/design)

>Model S comes standard with a forward looking camera, radar, and 360-degree
ultrasonic sensors that actively monitor the surrounding roadway. Progressive
software updates over time will enable sophisticated convenience and safety
features that use these sensors to respond to real world conditions. These
features will ultimately give Model S Autopilot capability on the highway from
on-ramp to off-ramp.

That's a pretty nice TODO to leave in the code :)

~~~
dwd
At this stage all you need to install is the machine learning algorithm so it
can watch and learn what real drivers do when faced with the conditions it's
sensing.

Absolutely brilliant!

~~~
quonn
Machine learning can't do that and won't be able to for a long time even in
principle, to say nothing of doing it in real-time on a car. Autonomous
driving contains very little machine learning for all the sensing and high-
level parts.

It may contain some low-level classifiers for things like people and possibly
other cars, but this is not strictly required and car manufacturers generally
try to avoid it, because it is difficult to reason about. Traffic sign
classification is another candidate, but again, at least the Google car
probably pulls this from their precomputed map.

Finally, none of these classifiers are trained online, in the car, but always
offline, likely on carefully selected data on some GPUs for many days or
weeks.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Fire-and-forget machine learning may be a bit overexuberant, but one should
not discount the value of these data. On one hand, there is sensory data about
the real road environments these Teslas are traversing. On the other hand, we
have human driving decisions. Together, one has–at at a minimum–a rich test
environment. At a stretch, it could be analogous to the corpus on which Google
developed its translation capabilities.

The nightly reporting-home of Tesla's fleet shows how interconnectedness is
introducing network effects into unexpected places. Sort of like how map
quality is now driven–in part–by the user base.

------
yelnatz
Here's a quick demo of it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0)

~~~
dirtyaura
It seems that Tesla's autopilot is pretty similar to other highway autopilots
from manufacturers like Mercedes Benz. The new feature seems to be automatic
reading of speed signs.

~~~
bri3d
> The new feature seems to be automatic reading of speed signs.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_sign_recognition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_sign_recognition)

Tesla _might_ have the first US-compatible system, although since it's not out
yet it's hard to say if they made it first or not.

~~~
rl3
What happens when these systems fail to detect or otherwise read an obstructed
speed limit sign?

~~~
zyx321
Well, my GPS navigation app seems to know the speed limit most of the time.

Remember, even if the system isn't perfect, it can still outperform a human.

------
antoncohen
More impressive than the "autopilot" is the D option, at least to me. The P85D
has 691 hp and will do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. If that 0-60 holds true it should
the quickest accelerating production 4-door sedan, besting the E63 AMG S (3.4
sec). And 691 hp makes in nearly the most powerful.

The "autopilot" is similar to what Mercedes and BMW have had for a while
(software updates is a nice capability), but the performance is best in class.

~~~
simi_
For comparison, the Ferrari FF has something like 670 bhp.

------
chrismorgan
Ooh, I like
[http://www.teslamotors.com/en_AU/](http://www.teslamotors.com/en_AU/):

“Wir präsentieren Autopilot und Dual Motor Allradantrieb”

Did they confuse Austria (de_AT) with Australia (en_AU)?

~~~
blackdogie
There are no kangaroos in Austria , that's how I remember the difference ;)

That will confuse those Australians this morning.

------
tmsh
I don't understand why they don't solve the problem of sitting in traffic
(relatively safe) in a hands-free way first. Would help so many people be more
productive, etc..

~~~
lnanek2
It's already solved for highway driving. There have been radar assisted cruise
control since 1997 and consumer cars that can handle stop and go traffic
automatically since 2006. I don't think anyone who recommend or take liability
for taking your hands off the wheel, however.

------
lylebarrere
I am surprised that they did not stream the announcement or immediately put it
up for viewing. I think they have the opportunity to turn their announcements
into as much of an event as Apple does.

Certainly the amount of hype they got from Elon's tweet shows that people are
paying attention, I bet there are people clamoring for Tesla news in the same
way people are clamoring for Apple news.

~~~
Sammi
Your comment is from 9 hours ago, their video is from 8 hours ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk)

:)

~~~
lylebarrere
Thanks for the link. I checked the front page of their website, their blog and
the Vimeo channel their new car walkthroughs and the model X announcement were
on, I thought I checked the youtube page.

My point is more general, they are missing an opportunity to turn these
product announcements into as much of a event as they possibly can and vastly
increase their visibility.

Update: I show the video having been posted on October 10th. The event and my
comment were on October 9th. Their blog post is also on the 10th and starts
with "Yesterday we...".

They are missing an opportunity making the resources available the following
day, a Friday (take out the trash day) when news viewership numbers are way
down.

------
ck2
A strange thought but I wonder if their cpu uses ECC memory.

Autopilot is not a place I want bit level errors to happen.

ps. not really a car person but dang that Model X looks nice - announced Feb
2012 but still not shipping?

~~~
duskwuff
ECC? Yes, but that's not all; safety-critical applications like automotive
often use two cores running the same code in lockstep, each with their own
memory. If the behavior of the two CPUs goes out of sync, the processor can be
configured to take corrective actions, such as resetting, halting, and/or
going into a failsafe mode.

TI has an overview of the safety features in their Hercules microcontrollers
here:

[http://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry178/spry178.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry178/spry178.pdf)

~~~
m_mueller
Don't you need at least three actors, such that in a single failure condition
you can use an election algorithm? I guess two are enough if you do regular
snapshotting and the worst case time to restore from a snapshot is lower than
the real time bounds you need to comply with.

~~~
michaelt
It depends if, when two processors disagree, you can perform a simple 'stop'
action.

For example, if something goes wrong with the processor on your industrial
robot arm, you just stop all the motors and activate all the brakes. No need
to figure out which of the processors is right, have an engineer come out and
fix the bug that caused the disagreement.

On the other hand, if something goes wrong with the processor during your
space shuttle launch, it would not help to turn off all the rockets - better
to have an election algorithm so things can keep working.

Is a self-driving car more like the first case or the second? Depends if the
driver is ready to take the wheel :)

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
I'd argue the second case, generally.

There are far too many situations where a switchover time of [user initial
reaction time + initial response time] is high enough to be rather dangerous.

------
anonfunction
That's the most terse introduction ever. Where can we find out more
information?

------
wffurr
I really dislike the idea of vehicles capable of that kind of acceleration on
city streets. It could make for some truly spectacular accidents at
intersections.

It's a shame that superfast impractical cars like this get all the good press
and hype, while a sensible version with limited acceleration and top speed but
with much greater range would be boring. The latter would be a much greater
benefit to humanity.

~~~
chadgeidel
I'm sure you've seen all the same "street racing" videos with folks crashing
that I have. Yes, it's dangerous, but typically what you aren't seeing is that
the driver has completely disabled the (normally always-on) traction aids.

I hate hooligan drivers as much as / more than the next guy, and the
"horsepower wars" are getting a little out of control, but I don't think that
the Model S is any less safe than a Mustang Camaro, or Charger that one can
get for less than half the price.

(disclaimer: I'm a huge automotive enthusiast, and regularly take my car on
the track)

~~~
wffurr
I don't care to share street space with those, either. Or sport bikes, or
tractor-trailers, etc.

The track is an appropriate place for those kinds of vehicles. (Also an
enormous amount of fun!)

Not-fun is trying to drive a twitchy high-horsepower car in a congested urban
environment.

Somewhat fun is opening up that car for the one clear block that you get,
except that it's extremely dangerous for everyone around you. Only sociopaths
incapable of thinking about the effect of their actions on others do that kind
of thing. Not even street racing, just stepping on the gas out of frustration.

I'd be way more interested in the "autopilot" features if they worked in urban
settings, such as automatic braking for obstacles.

------
dakrisht
Quite a bit of hype here.

My 3-year old CLS can do most of not all of these "new features." Including,
parallel parking itself, alerting me to someone in my blind spot via audible,
visual and haptic feedback via the steering column shaking, keep its distance
from the car in front via Distronic Adaptive Cruise Control and slow to zero
(0) during a braking situation, alert me via haptic feedback (steering column
shake) if I swerve out of my lane and for shits and giggles has night vision
(totally useless for me in the city at least).

But what's even more impressive is that the brand new S-Class I just picked up
does all of this and then some: it has a pedestrian awareness system: the car
will brake if it senses a collision with a pedestrian. It has magic body
control: a system that scans the road ahead via stereoscopic cameras for
potholes and uneven pavement surfaces and adjust the suspension in real-time
for a smooth ride (this is an insane feature). It has active steer assist! It
will keep me in my line by applying brake pressure to the opposing wheels and
will not let you swerve out. It also has another two features that I simply
can't think of at the moment. But there is a really neat video from Mercedes
Benz on all of this somewhere.

I also believe Tesla's entire drive train and technology is made by Daimler-
Benz.

Finally, like Animats pointed out - all of these features are not necessarily
a good thing for the heavily distracted driver these days. These features open
the door for even more careless driving (texting, fiddling with Google on your
Tesla screen and etc.) I believe Mercedes actually have self driving
technology working for a few years now (they have a freight truck that is
completely autonomous) but decided to pull full self driving from the S-Class
due to many of these issues raised.

I guess what irks me most about a lot of these Tesla drivers (from reading
articles, blogs, posts and watching the news tonight after the unveiling) is
that they are so hung up on the damn hype, they do not see past the issues
that still remain for the company. Yes, Musk is a visionary guy, no doubt. But
too much hype here. Some dumb women even said on the news when asked how she
likes the new car "I'll let you know tomorrow morning." Clearly alluding to
her caring solely about the lousy $20k of shares she probably has in the
company.

I think another big problem for Tesla (and yes, going off track here) is the
fact that not everyone can afford a $70k+ car. Tesla needs to get a sub-$40k
car if they want to actually sustain this model. I just don't see how they can
by selling a niche car to a niche market.

Finally, like others said, we need to go 100% autonomous or 0%. The middle
ground is scary. I bought two Mercedes because I love how amazingly engineered
they are. They are at the pinnacle of modern engineering and perhaps the best
built cars on earth (most likely). I enjoy driving. I don't enjoy playing with
a touchscreen or texting. The features I have on my cars compliment the
driving experience, they make it better. I fear many people will start buying
cars (whether Teslas or cheaper) for these "lazy" features that allude to you
not having to concentrate as much any more. This is a scary premonition and I
don't see it ending well.

~~~
jp555
Is it fair to compare an S-class, which has been engineered into it's current
state over 60 years, to a car that did not exist at all 3 years ago?

You may have it backwards; Tesla is building the powertrain for the Mercedes
electric A-class E-cell.

~~~
smackfu
I think a lot of people pay attention to the new tech in the Tesla but don't
follow any other luxury sedans, so they do come off a bit uninformed.

------
Tharkun
Seems like more and more cars have radar/ultrasound sensors. Won't this
eventually lead to interference? Can such a system be influenced by, say, a
nutter with a stronger radar?

------
jonmrodriguez
video demo of Autopilot:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0&t=40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7quu551ehc0&t=40)

------
peterwwillis
I was about to get all OOH, CAR PORN STATS but then I saw the Dodge
Challenger/Charger SRT Hellcats... which are literally half the price, and
faster. Womp womp.

~~~
joyeuse6701
Somewhat... In a straight line ya, not in a road course (most likely).
Definitely agree with you on the point of price and yet, it's sort of hard to
compare them. If drag racing/street racing is what you're after yah, Dodge all
the way.

~~~
hnnewguy
>not in a road course (most likely).

For that, the GT-R is a monster, also $30k cheaper than the Tesla.

------
jhgg
Footage of the announcement:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6lZJWL_Xk)

------
Datsundere
I love tesla for it's all electric cars. But do we hate driving so much now
that we're taking drivers out of the driving experience? This is not just for
tesla but any other automaker.

If you're doing 'self driving' cars, why not make better technology for public
transportation which makes way more sense. Not to mention this picture:
[http://randomdude.com/images/car-bus-
bike.jpg](http://randomdude.com/images/car-bus-bike.jpg)

~~~
ceejayoz
> But do we hate driving so much now that we're taking drivers out of the
> driving experience?

For the most part, yes. Plenty of people in LA/NYC have multi-hour commutes
each day, and I imagine they'd be very happy to work in the car if the
computer could drive. I just finished an 8 hour drive to visit family, and
it'd have been much more pleasant if I could just hang out with the family and
play games in the car for that time.

> why not make better technology for public transportation which makes way
> more sense

In the US, because it's a political non-starter in most areas.

------
agumonkey
Does it improve battery life too ?

~~~
cfreeman
For the Performance model it loses 10 miles, all the others gain 10 miles.

~~~
CRASCH
According to the website the ranges are the same for the RWD.

S60 208

S85 265

P85 265

The dual motor configuration increases range on all models.

S60D 225

S85D 295

P85D 275

------
jolux
Offline :(

------
zatkin
Wow. It's incredible how far we've come with technology.

------
guelo
D is for disappointment.

------
aortega
Marketing fail. They should announce it as a 700 HP car with better
acceleration than the fastest Audi R8, while being big enough to take the kids
to the soccer club and go shopping.

