Things such as dumb cars thatcant figure out how cul-de-sacs workwithout a human operator.
And Tesla FSDs proclivity towardsdriving the wrong waydown clearly-marked one-way streets, for example.
That is to say, the exact number of autonomous vehicles Tesla has on roads right now is zero.
If there are a million Tesla robo-taxis functioning on the road in 2020, I will eat them.
A few years ago we were promised autonomous vehicles would be the norm by now.
A few years before that…it was the same.
Background:Ford, Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla arent the only companies working on the problem.
But youd be forgiven for thinking so because theyre the ones getting all the media coverage.
There are myriad other technology companies involved in solving the autonomy problem.
AEye is a company that specializes in LiDAR technologies.
And Steinhardts the former Chief Scientist for DARPA.
The first thing we wanted to know was why.
Why have driverless car technologies been just a few years away for what seems like a decade now?
Steinhardt relayed that the problem was a combination of invention and utility.
But, realistically, do we want machines that drive like humans?
How far can a vision-only approach take us?
This can be a crucial point of failure for vehicles that rely on external data.
Steinhardt mentioned a scenario a few years back where flooding caused a bridge to wash out.
Imagine a world where it was cost-effective and environmentally friendly to conduct sales and deliveries from a moving platform.
And the applications go far beyond consumer vehicles and robo-taxis.
