12.14 - Supervised fsd
Click or tap if you trust this link. Saturday, March 30, 2024
14th edition of the 12th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter
Tesla starts leaning into advantages of supervised FSD
J. Huang, March 18, "With the release and warm reception to FSD V12.3, it appears that Tesla is now leaning towards promoting the advanced driver-assist system as a supervised solution that can make driving a lot easier. This was hinted at in recently leaked emails from Elon Musk and Tesla's own posts on social media.
Tesla FSD V12.3 has been very impressive so far, with many users stating that the advanced driver-assist system can now navigate inner city streets like a fairly capable human driver. This does not mean to say that FSD has become a fully hands-free system, of course, but it does suggest that the system has improved to a degree where it can now navigate the intricacies of inner city driving confidently and safely.
While Tesla does seem to be changing its tone somewhat with regard to FSD's marketing, the company's focus on supervised FSD — at least for now — does help emphasize just how far ahead Tesla is compared to other automakers also offering advanced driver-assist solutions."
Hmmmm… Good, this is a beginning of a name change so the words "Fxxx, Syyy Dzzzzz" will not be uttered again by anyone at Tesla, and that the operative word becomes "Supervised xyz." Now, it is OK if xyz is FSD; however, "supervised" is not only by the driver to remind them that they are responsible if anything bad happens and by Tesla, to ensure that its product is not misused by the driver and the driver behaves while using "Supervised xyz". If the driver wishes to not be supervised in their use of Supervised xyz, then that person should, under no circumstances, be permitted to engage/use "Supervised xyz". End of story! Alain
Just Published!!! Go to Amazon.com… You can still be first on your block to have one J.
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Case-Driverless-Mobility-Vehicles/dp/0443236852/ref=sr_1_1
SmartDrivingCars ZoomCast 365 / PodCast 365 with guest Michael Sena- Toyota, Tesla, AI and more
F. Fishkin, March 25, "The importance of low earth orbit satellites, Toyota chairman's view of electric cars, Polestar's soap opera, Tesla pushing advantages of supervised FSD. That and more as The Real Case for Driverless Mobility co-author Michael Sena joins Alain and Fred on episode 365 of Smart Driving Cars.
- 0:00 open
- 2:04 from the Dispatcher – using low earth orbit satellites for transport
- 13:25 Toyota Chairman on coming growth of battery electric vehicles
- 32:50 Polestar…a soap opera
- 38:50 An interesting take on carbon offsets
- 41:50 When it comes to AI,.whom can you trust
- 53:25 Tesla pushing supervised FSD offering free demo to car buyers and training
- 59:50 GM slices budget of Cruise…may bring in more investors
- 1:08:15 Smart Driving Cars Summit 2 months away."
Feature: Using LEO Satellites for Transport
M. Sena, March 28, "N THE EARLY morning of the 11th of JANUARY 2024, while it was still pitch dark during the night of a new moon, when the stars are at their brightest, I left Vadstena for three-hour drive south to Göteborg. As I passed beyond the last streetlights at the edge of town and entered the black landscape, I saw a large, bright object in the southeastern sky. It appeared to be stationary, approximately 30 degrees above the horizon. It looked like a double cross and was visible for the next forty-five minutes until it was daylight, moving at about the same speed as my car. It was too large to be the International Space Station, although it had its shape. I have watched the ISS as a bright dot moving across the sky, 402 kilometers above the Earth. It travels quickly in its low earth orbit, five miles per second and orbiting earth every 90 minutes. Try as I might, I could not find any information about the mysterious object guiding me along my way on that cold January morning, but it started me thinking about the next frontier of vehicle communications: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites." Read More
Hmmmm… A very timely feature and much more. Enjoy! Alain
What we know about the Baltimore bridge collapse
B. Finley, March 30, "A cargo ship rammed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing the span to collapse and presumably killing six construction workers. The ship's warning enabled authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span. Read More
Hmmmm… Absolutely tragic. Even well proven transport technologies are not perfectly safe and have challenging corner cases.
However…
"The ship's warning enabled authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span." … This is a significant sliver of a silver lining…. A MayDay call was made, was heard, and police officers responded instantly and effectively stopped traffic in both directions instantaneously. That's a lot of good things happening perfectly in the dead of night. Failure by anyone would have substantially escalated the human toll…
"Two of the construction workers who were on the bridge were rescued. The bodies of four of the six others were still missing Thursday. Searchers recovered the bodies of 35-year-old Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and 26-year-old Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera on Wednesday. They were in a pickup truck submerged in about 25 feet (7.6 meters) of water.
The workers came to the Maryland area from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, according to diplomats from those countries.
One worker, 38-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, came to the U.S. from Honduras nearly two decades ago. His brother described him as an entrepreneurial and hard-working husband and father of two. And El Salvador's foreign minister, Alexandra Hill Tinoco, posted Wednesday on X that one Salvadoran citizen, Miguel Luna, was among the missing workers." Unfortunately, dedicated workers "repairing potholes" (it's 2024 and we haven't solved the "pot hole problem???) weren't the benefactors of a similar sliver of a silver lining. I'm sure we'll learn why not, and what simple thing(s) failed. The two who were saved and the six who perished deserve to be hailed as heroes for being out there in the middle of the night repairing the mess that we made while enjoying our cars. And we should fix our immigration mess – a complex situation that requires people with disparate perspectives to work together in order to implement solutions. I'm an immigrant. My family came over on a boat in 1951. Alain & Elizabeth
General Motors has sliced Cruise's budget by $1B, but says it may bring on new Cruise investors when it starts rolling robo-taxis back on the streets
J. Narra, Mathews, March 28, "After an accident last fall that led General Motors-owned Cruise to pull its robo-taxis off the streets, GM is weighing whether it will bring more outside capital into its autonomous robo-taxi subsidiary when it's finally ready to start putting its vehicles back on the road, a GM executive said earlier this week.
While speaking at a Bank of America event on March 26, General Motors CFO Paul Jacobson said that GM was considering bringing in other strategic partners for capital investment...." Read More
Hmmmm… Maybe spending less creates a better new product. Then again, maybe not. Why not focus on the Real Case for Driverless Cars? This technology's challenge hasn't been "we've spending too much". Alain & Elizabeth
6th SmartDrivingCars Summit Evening May 29 -> May 31, 2024
Alain Kornhauser, March 8, "We promise civil and lively discussions as to how to improve the Quality-of-Life (QoL) for many while disrupting the QoL to as few as possible. Focus will be on the business aspects…
Giving Oneself a Ride
- Latest on ADAS Safety, Functionality, Regulation and potential Collaboration (given anti-trust relaxation), consumer value
Getting a Driverless Ride
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By people and goods using public roads
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"Proof-of-Concept" (Safety Update and Last "50 feet" delivery concepts )
- "Proof-of-Market" (Arizona, California, Texas, ... rural & beyond)
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"Proof-of-Policy/Politics/Sociology" (Regulation + Opportunities for Collaboration on Safety (given anti-trust relaxation.))
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By people and goods on private property.
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"Proof-of-Concept" (Safety Update)
- "Proof-of-Market" (Return-on-Investment (RoI) focus on: Private "ways", Manufacturing, Ports, Terminals, Warehouses, Mining, Farms)
- "Proof-of-Policy/Politics/CorporateGovernance" (OSHA, Unions )
Workshop
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MOVES – Style Deployments "anywhere". (See Example)
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Design, Analysis, Simulation, Animation & Business Case
…." Read More
Hmmmm… Please pencil in the dates. We are to make publish the sponsorship and registration pages. Given the success that we've had with the past Summits and the quality of the program that we've been able to assemble to date, we fully expect to be sold out. Some sponsorship opportunities remain available. If interested, please simply contact me via email for 'right-of-first refusal" penciled-in commitments". Hope you'll be able to join in with us. Alain
Return of C'mon Man Section
(The following are but a few of the many recent click-bait postings)
Ghost ride the whip! Geely shows off AI chassis performing fully-autonomous drifting [Video]
S. Doll, March 27, "While many are still skeptical about the plausibility of 100% autonomous vehicles, Geely Auto is showing that its new AI digital chassis can not only safely operate on snow and ice without a driver but can also pull off fully autonomous drifting. See the EV in action in the video below.
Geely Auto operates as the primary marque auto brand under the larger umbrella of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd. Aside from its own branded EVs, the Chinese automaker owns stakes in plenty of other notable brands we often cover on Electrek, including ZEEKR, Volvo, Lotus, and Polestar.
With a knack for advanced automotive technology and nearly forty years of experience in scaled manufacturing, Geely is a notable name in the global EV landscape, pushing the boundaries of what mobility means..." Read More
Hmmmm… What???
This is not just bad click-bait journalism but outright insanity by the OEM.
"… pushing the boundaries of what mobility means". Who in the heck needs this feature to go from A to B @ time T? No one!!! Cut it out! This "feature" is totally useless!
The reason for "fully-autonomous" is to give people and goods safe affordable rides, not to do stupid stuff like this. We are NOT impressed by Geely's misguided junk and how it wasted China's money developing it. Don't even think about bringing this over here. US roads are not for brain-dead amusement. Nor are Chinese roads. This is so bad it doesn't even deserve a C'mon Geely. Just go away. Alain & Elizabeth
NYC takes first step in allowing driverless cars on city streets
M. Euxarraga, March 28, "Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday released requirements for a new permit program that would test the use of autonomous vehicles in New York City.
"Autonomous vehicles aren't just coming, they're here — they've been successfully operating across the country for years," … What??? The yellow highlighted is absolutely NOT true… said Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi. "We are doing our due diligence to get ahead of the AV revolution and ensure that if AVs are coming, they do so within a framework that benefits New Yorkers."
"New York City leads the nation in responsible innovation, and we're continuing to do so with this new autonomous vehicle program," said Adams. "This technology is coming whether we like it or not, so we're going to make sure that we get it right." Read More
Hmmmm… This is so bad!!! Maybe for Staten Island, but for Manhattan? Totally crazy. This stuff has barely worked in two places (Phoenix and San Francisco) and has struggled to deliver any net value in either of these places. Other than temporary amusement to those Manhattanites who already have access to great mobility (taxis, subways, buses, walking, ride hailing), one can't envision any positive contribution to these systems. While technologically, these systems might work in well behaved uncongested venues, NYC's vibrant street and sidewalk environment is the absolute last place in the USA, and maybe the world, that these systems have a chance of actually delivering net good to a community. There is as close to zero as possible of such systems delivering any net positive value to NYC before 2074. These systems were "coned", "hammered" and "torched" in San Francisco. They have no chance of being appreciated in NYC communities until they are so overwhelmingly successful in many other places, which isn't anywhere near happening the way this technology has been positioning itself.
Recall the greeting that Amazon got from the community when the top echelon proclaimed the solicitation of Amazon's 2nd HQ and its 50,000 new jobs. NYC is great, but you have to be truly great to make it better. Today, this tech isn't even close. Alain
Tesla 'Full Self-Driving' free trial announced for the US, but Elon Musk's bigger plans hit "roadblocks"
E. Cardinal, March 31, "All compatible Tesla vehicles in the US will soon be offered with a one-month free trial of the company's controversial, so-called 'Full Self-Driving' software, company boss Elon Musk has announced.
However plans by the outspoken executive for all Tesla US customers to be taken on a 'test ride' with Full Self-Driving software in their new car before taking delivery have been labelled impractical by experts.
A company-wide email sent by Musk at 2:00am California time on Tuesday morning – leaked and posted to X (formerly Twitter) – demanded Tesla delivery staff in the US must now "take customers on a short [FSD] test ride" before handing over their new vehicle...." Read More
Hmmmm… Here Tesla is making a real effort to change the name of their ADAS to Supervised FSD. My interpretation is that they are trying to emphasize that it must be supervised and trying to get away from that terrible name by calling it FSD. Unfortunately, journalist such as Ethan here, continue to use the old nomenclature. Is it in the hopes of more clicks? If so, please stop! Everyone knows it isn't Full anything. It was a bad mistake for Tesla to have been naïve about how tough it would be to actually have a computer drive a car. But they've made much progress. And their product seems to be pretty good, especially if users behave in using it. It is not a bad idea that we help them transition to a better new name that reduces misuse and thereby helps improve safety on our roads. C'mon, Ehan. You could help. Alain