Cutting Edge Computing

Driverless Cars Are Decades Away, If At All May 31, 2021

I am not a fan of Elon Musk.  While at one level I appreciate his audaciousness, which seems to enable him to accomplish impossible goals through sheer force of will, the arrogance through which that force is delivered tends to cheapen it for me.  It is perhaps fortunate that he cares not one whit about what I think.

Nevertheless, one area that we disagree on starkly is the self-driving car.  Musk recently released a new version of Autopilot for Tesla, which he is referring to as Vision.  He believes that Vision will enable Tesla to achieve full driverless experiences within two years.

Um, no.  While Autopilot and Vision might seem a bit like magic, they have serious limitations.  And the complexity inherent in fully self-driving cars is far more enormous than we have tackled to date.  We tend to liken it to aircraft autopilots, which are charged with mostly maintaining straight and level flight on a given course.  Modern autopilots can also successfully land a plane, but that is a well-understood and relatively simple maneuver.

Equating self-driving cars to an autopilot is a bad analogy.  Cars travel in three dimensions, with unexpected obstacles and often poor weather.  Aircraft have multiple pilots that can take over immediately in case of unexpected events.  These pilots are also paying attention to the flight information, rather than sleeping or playing a game.

Effectively, the only way to have one fully self-driving car is to make every car on the highway self-driving.  You are not going to stop manual drivers from pulling out in front of you, or cutting you off, or driving more slowly than your self-driving car wants to go.  So every single car has to be under positive control.  And there may well need to be the equivalent of a staffed control tower to make sure traffic flows smoothly.

So Musk and Tesla will continue releasing incremental upgrades, always claiming that the ultimate breakthrough is only a couple of years away.  In reality, it won’t happen during my lifetime.