In July 2020, Elon Musk announced that we are “very close” to level 5 (L5) autonomous driving. He further claims that L5 autonomy would be attained in 2020. There are several problems with this:
- You cannot attain L5 until you have deployed at least one AV on a road in India. Till that happens, you will, at best, reach L5 with an asterisk. Terms and conditions apply. And the first condition for buying an AV would be – “Only developed country citizens”. I understand that there are a whole set of challenges associated with building AVs for traffic in developing countries, and I empathize with efforts for solving those problems (being an AV researcher myself). But to outright say that we are close to L5 is tantamount to saying, “We do not see sales happening in India or other East-Asian countries, where the traffic is more likely to follow the laws of brownian motion than of any organized motion model“. That’s almost racist.
- How are they testing when the roads are empty due to the global pandemic? You cannot replace on-road testing. And on-road testing is futile if you cannot test among dense traffic. Basic functionality of AVs in little to no traffic was solved years ago. How is one ready to claim L5 when the testing is happening in conditions that do not model the normal traffic conditions?
- The Tesla AutoPilot still cannot handle roundabouts and intersections. Even if Tesla is planning to roll out an update sometime later in 2020 where the AutoPilot handles these scenarios, it will quite literally be the first edition in which bugs and issues are inevitable.
Case in point, the ability to detect stop signs was released sometime in the summer of 2020. But while this is most definitely a milestone, the technology was far from perfect. Numerous corner cases inevitably arise that the algorithms are unable to handle. For instance, two stop signs one behind the other within a short distance, say at both ends across an intersection. There is an actual video demonstrating the failure of the AutoPilot in detecting the first sign and directly focusing on the second one.
These three concerns are something just off the top of my head ! An expert can craft more arguments with more evidence. These claims by Musk are simply an exercise in baiting and quite frankly, irresponsible. If you’re a Tesla enthusiast and simply looking to purchase the latest AutoPilot model, then think of this as the most “slickest” car salesman pitch.
Math and Autonomous Cars 