When will your car be obsolete?
- Oversteer Cafe
- Apr 24, 2023
- 3 min read
When will your car be replaced with a self-driving one?
There have been major advancements made in this area one of which is Tesla’s autopilot system. Even though it’s not particularly used for city driving – mainly motorways. It’s still impressive, though, it uses cameras and sensors to read the traffic and stay within the lines. Given you have a Tesla newer than 2016 as it’s standard in all models thereafter. Even Mr. Elon predicted that by 2018 Tesla would have the logistics down but alas.
Now in 2023 they still aren’t here completely – of course with the exception of Tesla’s autopilot as mentioned previously.
How exactly does a self-driving car work?
As we all know, self-driving cars rely on AI. In 2010 AI struggled to tell the difference between a dog and a cat, today this is something trivial and AI spits it out for breakfast.
Even though AI is ever-evolving and rapidly improving. It’s still very difficult for AI to make real-life choices and decisions. Of course, there are simulators that they could use to generate this, but as it’s not the real deal, there’s no way of knowing if they’ve covered all the criteria if something like that had to happen in a real-life situation.
Even the most basic of tasks aren’t so basic as it turns out and that’s not to mention the risk factors that come with driving. Who or what does it run over first? A puppy dog or a puppy panda? This has been the biggest issue they’ve had to deal with and work with.
There has been progress, though, in Arizona Waymo cars do roam the streets freely and you can order one whenever to take you wherever,
manufacturers and engineers have been attempting this for decades. The idea is pretty much the same as Tesla’s autopilot system, fit a bunch of cameras and sensors around the car like a fly and let it do its magic, however, it’s not so simple. There are mundane things we as humans do while we drive that would otherwise be rather challenging for AI, For example, reading road signs, reading traffic, and knowing when to go or not to go.
See to accomplish this enormous task would mean the AI has to essentially ‘learn” all of these scenarios by studying 100’s and 1000’s of hours of videos and records from perhaps, dashcams or films and whatever materials are available. Even when that’s done, other scenarios might not be on record or they might not have enough to train the AI in that specific scenario.
All things considered, it’s easy to see why self-driving cars aren’t a thing yet.
All that being said though – it does raise questions of concern.
Would it all be interlinked with a network all working together? Or would it be like a taxi service and they’re all connected somehow by a bunch of computers only teenagers can fiddle with? What about maintenance? One day someone might fancy having one and they will then think they can do it themselves and they’ll make a big mess of it.
What would be done to try and either minimize it or prevent it because, let’s be honest, if it means the safety of everyone you wouldn’t want John the Plumber to be working on his car.
Comments