Driving across San Francisco on Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) Beta 10.12.2 (A new much improved FSD release is supposed to come out this coming week.) The videos show the AI robot car dealing with stop lights, traffic lanes, bicycles, motorcycles, cars cutting in and out, double parked delivery trucks, pedestrians, opening car doors... And to think that just a few years ago in the days of the DARPA challenges, the idea of a full-self-driving robot car in urban traffic would have been total science-fiction. The first video shows the car traveling across San Francisco south to north, from Bernal Heights (a middle class neighborhood in the south central part of the city) up VanNess to Marina Green where it backs into a parking spot. Then a bonus trip through the Marina (exceedingly upscale bayfront neighborhood) to the Palace of Fine Arts. Watch with the sound on, on full screen. [video=youtube] The second video crosses San Francisco west (somewhere near Laurel Heights in the fog belt) to east in North Beach, traveling along some of San Francisco's steepest streets along the way. Again, sound on, full screen. Compare the view through the windshield with the image on the "dashboard" screen. The windshield displays real life, the screen shows what the car is "aware" of and what it "intends" to do. And check out the tactile blue feeler out in front of the car on the screen. When the car is stopped at a traffic light, it's grey, displaying what the car is "thinking" about doing. Then when the car starts to move it turns bright blue, showing what the car is actually in the process of doing. [video=youtube]
FSD 10.69 beta just came out yesterday and was distributed to a small group of beta-testers. Here it is driving across San Francisco at night. Most of the changes in this newest version aren't immediately visible and are found in the system's reduced likelihood of becoming confused and making a potentially disastrous mistake. But the map feature on the "dashboard" screen seems to be new. [video=youtube] Production Teslas come with all the sensors to do this and owners have the option of allowing Tesla to download everything the car "experiences". More than a million vehicles are doing it. This totals gazillions of terabytes of data about how the cars "perceive" every imaginable road condition, at every speed, from any angle, that all go into Tesla's constantly growing "Dojo", already one of the world's most powerful (top 10) supercomputers (vertically integrated Tesla are building it themselves with their own in-house chips) that serves as the world's largest and most advanced neural-network training computer that educates the super deep neural networks that are the heart of the Tesla AI pattern-recognition abilities. The 'dashboard" screen in the video shows that in action, displaying what the car is "aware" of at every moment. It's not as simple as it sounds, since the cars' computers need to be able to turn raw pixels into cars, trucks, motorcycles, pedestrians, all with their velocities, etc., even as it perceives lane markers, traffic lights, speed limits and so on. (I recently read about the first time a self-driving Tesla in Texas found itself on a road behind a man riding a horse. The car couldn't decide if it was a dog or a pedestrian. The image on the dash screen kept switching between those. But it knew something was there even if it couldn't identify what it was, and the car took care to avoid hitting it.) Every time a Tesla gets confused and the confusion is reported back to the Dojo, all of the subsequent self-driving trained Teslas are prepared to recognize what's happening. They learn not just from their own experience, but from the experience of a million other Teslas. (And even earlier Teslas can get upgrade downloads.) When it becomes available to the public, Full Self Driving will be an option that adds $15,000 to the price of the car. (But that's cheap to get a car straight out of science-fiction.) https://www.tesla.com/AI?trk=public_post_share-update_update-text
Another Tesla self-driving music video, this time driving through most of the northeast quadrant of San Francisco, including downtown, at night. [video=youtube]
So, hey, do you happen to have any footage of the Tesla autopilot deactivating right before an collision in order to establish that the autopilot was not active at the time of the accident? Honestly, until that issue is resolved and the names of the individuals responsible are known, and the cupable are reasonably prosecuted under law, Tesla vehicles should not be allowed on the road.
