The reason I ask, is I’ve been seeing alot of news and cases of Tesla’s self driving acting up and being a point of contention. But back in 2016-17 my ex’s uncle and aunt got a Model X when they first dropped and they “auto-drove” us like 50 miles without any noticeable issue.
Was i just gambling my life or has the tech somehow gotten worse?
The tech hasn’t regressed, it just hasn’t progressed while the marketing has.
Look up the automation levels: https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/94559/is-your-car-autonomous-the-6-levels-of-self-driving-explained
My wife’s car is 6 years old, and is level 2. Nothing amazing now, but kinda cool in 2018.
Since then expectations have increased dramatically, and the problems you’re hearing about are cars expected to have the higher levels of automation but failing to achieve that.
It seems like this is one of those technical problems that gets exponentially more difficult to solve, the closer we get to solving it. What I mean is, suppose a human averages 100,000km per “incident”. It was easy to make a car do 90,000km per incident, less so to have it do 95,000km per incident, but we’re finding it very very difficult to get that last 5% performance.
to this, most cars with relatively high degrees of automation bounce out of it when there’s something that it feels it can’t solve adequately. Most of the time that works, but it would be like if a human were somehow able to only drive when everything was routine. (90% of our driving is routine. it’s that last ten percent that isn’t- and that’s when we crash. well. barring things like drunk driving or distracted driving. Humans are dumb. autonomous driving was designed by humans and isn’t any smarter)
Probably the best answer