Self-driving cars or cars with autopilots have been getting a lot of heat recently especially after people kept on crashing their Teslas. Many of the crashes resulted due to the overreliance on the car’s autopilot system. People would turn it on and even proceed to sit in the backseat of the car. Clearly, they were misinformed or didn’t know that Tesla had said time and time again that their autopilot required constant driver supervision as well.
This is coupled with the fact that Tesla has yet to release their full version of the new software that they are calling Full Self-Driving or FSD. Elon Musk has promised timelines and dates that haven’t been kept and the company’s timeline for another update for the beta version of FSD has slipped yet again. This all led Elon Musk to admit on Twitter that making self-driving cars was harder than he expected.
Musk said that “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect”. Who can blame him though? Real-world situations present a lot of variables and factors that Artificial Intelligence just can’t cope with right now. You can’t train them for every possible scenario so you’re left with a system that works ‘most of the time’ and with something like driving that could get you in hot waters.
The current beta version of FSD doesn’t make the car fully self-driving. It costs $10,000 right now and was also released to some Tesla owners as part of a beta program. FSD provides all the features of the current autopilot system meaning the car will brake, steer, and accelerate all on its own. The car is also able to change lanes, act according to stop signs and traffic lights, and also park by itself.
Musk promised that version 9 of the FSD beta would release in August but not in 2021 but back in 2018. He first made a promise back in July 2018 but that didn’t happen. He then made a promise in 2019 that there would be over a million cars with FSD within a year and that didn’t happen either. It seems that the folks at Tesla are really struggling with full self-driving.
He also promised back in April this year that wide FSD 9.0 beta would come in June but here we are again 7 days into July. Guess it’ll come when it’ll come, getting slight Cyberpunk 2077 vibes from this one. Maybe Full Self-Driving won’t be as good even if it comes out.