Of all the commentary on the Uber-Cali imbroglio, this from Uber's VP of autonomous (he co-founded Uber acquisition Otto and built Google's first self-driving car, now stand-alone Waymo) via TechCrunch may be the funniest:From Bloomberg, Dec. 20:
...Levandowski repeatedly compared Uber’s self-driving cars, which have been on the road in Pittsburgh since mid-September and in San Francisco this week, to Tesla’s self-driving technology. Tesla owners don’t need a special permit to drive their cars, he argued — so why should the Uber engineers who currently sit behind the wheel of Uber’s self-driving vehicles?In order to be considered truly autonomous, Levandowski said an Uber vehicle would need to be able to drive itself without human intervention and oversight. “We believe Tesla is right and our vehicles are just like Tesla’s...I can just hear Mr. Musk calling Mr. Kalanick: "Dude, what the hell?"
The Tesla Advantage: 1.3 Billion Miles of Data
Silicon Valley and Detroit can’t keep up with Elon Musk’s trove of real-world metrics.
There was, in hindsight, a clear element of risk to Tesla Motors Inc.’s decision to install Autopilot hardware in every car coming off the production line since October 2014. It paid a price, with federal regulators probing the deadly crash of a Model S while in driver-assist mode and critics slamming Tesla for rolling the technology out too soon.
But there was also a reward. The company has collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles operating under diverse road and weather conditions around the world. And in the frantic race to roll out the first fully functional autonomous vehicle, that kind of mass, real-world intelligence can be invaluable. In that way, for now, the electric-car maker has a leg up on competitors including Google, General Motors Co. and Uber Technologies Inc.
“There’s no question that Tesla has an advantage,” said Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist at the Rand Corporation. “They can learn from a wider range of experiences and at a much faster rate than a company that is testing with trained drivers and employees behind the wheel.”
The big promise of autonomous motoring is that it’ll save lives, and a Rand report in April that Kalra co-authored warned that cars “would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety.” Data is king; the more you have, the faster the algorithms will learn.
Of course, not all miles are created equal: there are semi-autonomous as well as fully self-driving ones, real-world vs. simulated, highway vs. those racked up in tricky urban environments. Still, Tesla is “in a very unique position to push the state of the art of algorithmic driving and machine learning in personal transport,” said Adam Jonas, the lead analyst at Morgan Stanley for autos and shared mobility, in a recent note to clients.
The autonomous autos Google developed have covered 2 million real-world miles—with employees on board—since 2009, according to the company. Parent Alphabet Inc. last week spun the self-driving project into a business called Waymo.
Uber, which has been piloting self-driving rideshare vehicles in Pittsburgh, recently deployed a fleet in San Francisco in its partnership with Volvo Cars. Each SUV is staffed with two employees, one ready to grab the wheel and the other on the lookout for pedestrians. (Uber made the move without approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and state prosecutors have threatened to seek a court order to force the company to stop. An Uber executive said it’s acting “just like Tesla.”)...MORE
