> When a Tesla murdered a man by slamming him into a highway barrier, the fact his phone had run Candy Crush at some point during the drive was dragged out against him.
Look, I know this is a trope that people like to bring up a lot when hating on tesla. However, you have to consider a two points.
* This happened in 2019, 4 years ago. Quiet a bit of development has gone into telsa's autopilot stack since then.
* The car was going 70MPH. Mercedes's system only works up to 40MPH. For good reason. A telsa keeping the lane at 40MPH is fairly safe.
These are not "miles ahead" systems, they are comparable.
Now, what I'm not saying is whether one system is better/safer than the other. IDK because mercedes hasn't released their yet (I suspect you don't either).
Mercedes being the "first" to apply for this in NV doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. The fact that they are limiting it to low speeds (40MPH) where a wreck will pretty much just be a fender bender should also tell you something about how confident they are in the system.
Tesla has been reckless with the way they've managed their autopilot program. No doubt about that. They've also lied about being able to turn their cars into robotaxis (not a chance of that happening). However, their system is fairly comparable to what Mercedes is doing.
Looking at the hardware Mercades is putting in the cars, the main difference is the forward facing LIDAR. That gives Merc an edge that telsa doesn't have, they can pretty confidently handle things like underpasses (where telsa STILL struggles and is a major issue with their hardware stack).
My main critique of tesla is their hardware stack and dogged approach here to keeping it cheap (not enough redundancy, poor cameras). But that doesn't mean it's not still in a pretty similar league compared to merc.
I'm mostly going to ignore the half of this comment where you downplay the fact that Tesla's Autopilot killed a man in large part because of design flaws that have actually worsened since then (they doubled down on camera only, they've kicked and dragged every step of the way on attention tracking https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/tesla-driver-moni... they're expanding the domain they claim their self-driving capabilities operate in with FSD to some of the most dangerous roads possible, with pedestrians and complex situations being infinitely more common than on highways)
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As someone who works at an AV company and semi-regularly takes driverless rides, Mercedes is entirely miles and miles ahead of Tesla here because they're taking responsibility.
If you're not familiar with AVs it doesn't immediately jump out at you, but again, even for a lay person surely you realize that the fact that Mercedes is letting you do whatever you want as long as you stay awake and able to take over in 10 seconds is a quantum leap over anything Tesla has ever done.
And 10 seconds is not a normal AP panicky disengagement, they are giving you 10 whole seconds to context switch and take over. So it's not even enough that AP not disengage below 40 mph, it'd also need to never disengage urgently.
If Tesla tried to do that with AP, even limited to speeds of 40 mph, there would be absolute bedlam within a week. I've personally been rear ended by a Model 3 in slow moving traffic and while I was too angry about my car to let my inner AV geek ask exactly what configuration they had the vehicle in, but those are the kinds of mistakes Mercedes is essentially saying "we have solved"
And I mean the irony you want to talk about "confidence in a system" and here Mercedes is saying you can look down and stare at your phone and if this thing crashes we'll be liable... Elon loves to almost say things like this then ensure Tesla blames the dead person.
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This essentially boils down to you saying "Well Tesla hasn't made this quantum leap, but they totally could..." if you really think so go to TMC and make a simple poll: "Has AP ever made you react below 40 mph"
Mercedes is handling moving over for emergency vehicles so you have that full 10 seconds to take back control, meanwhile AP still likes to panic disengage because of sunlight, or a bad update, or because the planets aren't aligned with your chakras on this particular day.
Look, I know this is a trope that people like to bring up a lot when hating on tesla. However, you have to consider a two points.
* This happened in 2019, 4 years ago. Quiet a bit of development has gone into telsa's autopilot stack since then.
* The car was going 70MPH. Mercedes's system only works up to 40MPH. For good reason. A telsa keeping the lane at 40MPH is fairly safe.
These are not "miles ahead" systems, they are comparable.
Now, what I'm not saying is whether one system is better/safer than the other. IDK because mercedes hasn't released their yet (I suspect you don't either).
Mercedes being the "first" to apply for this in NV doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. The fact that they are limiting it to low speeds (40MPH) where a wreck will pretty much just be a fender bender should also tell you something about how confident they are in the system.
Tesla has been reckless with the way they've managed their autopilot program. No doubt about that. They've also lied about being able to turn their cars into robotaxis (not a chance of that happening). However, their system is fairly comparable to what Mercedes is doing.
Looking at the hardware Mercades is putting in the cars, the main difference is the forward facing LIDAR. That gives Merc an edge that telsa doesn't have, they can pretty confidently handle things like underpasses (where telsa STILL struggles and is a major issue with their hardware stack).
My main critique of tesla is their hardware stack and dogged approach here to keeping it cheap (not enough redundancy, poor cameras). But that doesn't mean it's not still in a pretty similar league compared to merc.