They got an army of thousands of Indians to watch the road for you?
No, you’re thinking of Amazon.
They got an army of thousands of Amazonians to watch the road for you?
Ah, the ol’ reddit swi- oh wait…
Ah, the ol’ Lemmy Switcheroo!
Time for snoo-snoo?
don’t come with a requirement that drivers watch the road
Seems it’s like every other Mercedes then
Hey I’m watching it on my mirrors.
And they managed to do it without us obsessing about their CEO several times a day? I refuse to believe that!
…
As of April 11, there were 65 Mercedes autonomous vehicles available for sale in California, Fortune has learned through an open records request submitted to the state’s DMV. One of those has since been sold, which marks the first sale of an autonomous Mercedes in California, according to the DMV. Mercedes would not confirm sales numbers. Select Mercedes dealerships in Nevada are also offering the cars with the new technology, known as “level 3” autonomous driving.
…
Drivers can activate Mercedes’s technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on spec ific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven’t been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states.
…
U.S. customers can buy a yearly subscription of Drive Pilot in 2024 EQS sedans and S-Class car models for $2,500.
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Mercedes is also working on developing level 4 capabilities. The automaker’s chief technology officer Markus Schäfer expects that level 4 autonomous technology will be available to consumers by 2030, Automotive News reported.
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Hmm, so only on a very small number of predetermined routes, and at very slow speeds for those roads.
Still impressive, but not as impressive as the headline makes out.
And definitely not worth the $2500 a year they’re asking for the feature.
Chances are, If you can afford the car, then that amount is nothing to you.
Having known one, some of their customers love their feature loaded cars to brag about and feel extra special. Some will definitely pay the 2.5k gladly.
Conspicuous Consumption.
If they assume full liability for any collisions while the feature is active (and it looks like they do), then I can see that being fair.
Come on, you have been able to pay the price of that Mercedes in the first place.
These 2500 are not going to hurt.
Many people use credit to buy a car out of their league.
They may do so. I have no mercy for them.
I’ve seen this headline a few times and the details are laughably bad. The only reason this can be getting any press is because the headline is good clickbait. But 40 mph top speed on approved roads in 2 states only if a car is in front of you in the daytime is entirely useless. I guess it’s a good first step maybe? But trying to write headlines like this is big news is sad.
It’s starting in California where there are a meaningful number of high earners who are spending hours per day in 4 lane bumper to bumper traffic.
Having actual autonomy during those hours is still shit. But it’s a hell of a lot less shit than the tedium of the high attention requirements of sitting in traffic at a crawl.
Fucking subscription. No.
U.S. customers can buy a yearly subscription of Drive Pilot in 2024 EQS sedans and S-Class car models for $2,500
yeah, fuck that.
Those cars cost well over $100k each. The demographic buying that doesn’t care about $2500.
They’re also accepting full liability if anything happens while using this feature so it’s actually a type of insurance
I wonder how much cheaper it will make auto insurance. I also wonder if this will open transportation options those who have lost a license.
Not this. It’s limited to specific scenarios on specific roads. So you’re going to need a licensed driver.
Eventually with actually full self driving? I’d hope so, though it’s going to take legislation first.
Ok, then I’ll do it if I don’t have to pay for other insurance on the car.
I kinda like that system because eventually people will put their own OSes on the car, which the manufacturer obviously can’t cover. Having separate insurance/service eliminates having to pay for it if you’re accepting the liability yourself.
The conditions for the system to work are such that if you could find a policy to cover only those conditions, it’d probably just be like a couple dollars a month. Even behaving “badly” you would be unlikely to have an accident and even if you caused an accident, it’s probably just going to be a couple thousand in property damage with no medical implication.
Have you seen Tesla’s price for full self driving? And they don’t take liability
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I think you can afford that if you own an EQS
Paywalled.
Ty!
Paywalled.
On a different subject, why would someone downvote a one-word comment that accurately describes what the content is behind?
There are people who are pathologically contrarian. I’ve had to end a friendship over it—the endless need to say something negative about literally everything that ever happens and an unwillingness to be charitable to others.
Reddit 1.3 is just like that.
Doesn’t answer my question though.
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Nope. Someone absolutely downvoted him. Because, just like Reddit, the downvote button here is the ‘wow fuck that guy for saying a thing i don’t like’ button.
Also a “I don’t like you/this page/the content and will go out of my way to systematically down vote everything you have done and everything in this particular thread” button.
I have the theory that archive.is, waybackmachine and 12ft.io are no secret anymore, and that just posting “paywalled” comes across as too lazy to copy/paste or (a lot easier) to use this addon to reduce the work to a click. i dont mind, but i can understand why others might see it that way
and that just posting “paywalled” comes across as too lazy to copy/paste
Blaming the victim, and justifying paywalls.
or (a lot easier) to use this addon to reduce the work to a click.
My phone browser doesn’t use add-ons.
i dont mind
And yet, you took the time out to reply, to chastise me for saying it.
sheesh, you are quite aggressive, i did not want to offend. and as i said, i don’t mind it, i even posted the archivelink, for which you thanked me. check your target before firing, mate :-)
(also, theres always firefox mobile. can apple users use it with addons/firefox browser engine now? i don’t follow apple development actively)
Love how companies can decide who has to supervise their car’s automated driving and not an actual safety authority. Absolutely nuts.
Assuming a functional legal system, they’d be liable for damages if they lie about product safety.
That’s gonna do the people murdered by an algorithm a lot of good… /s
You can’t have a babysitter following every human to make sure they don’t do something dangerous. Except for high risk areas, liability is the most practical option.
They actually did get certified by an authority
An “authority” of people who fell for some marketing bullshit.
Read the dammed article, it literally said the DMV for California and Nevada. It’s the fucking government.
Spoken like someone who clearly knows nothing about the technology.
Who said there was no safety authority involved? I thought it was part of the 4 level system the government decided on for assisted driving.
Musk: Fuuuuuuu
Wonder how this works with car insurance. Os there a future where the driver doesn’t need to be insured? Can the vehicle software still be “at fault” and how will the actuaries deal with assessing this new risk.
Berkshire Hathaway owns Geico the car insurance company. In one of his annual letters Buffett said that autonomous cars are going to be great for humanity and bad for insurance companies.
“If [self-driving cars] prove successful and reduce accidents dramatically, it will be very good for society and very bad for auto insurers.”
Actuaries are by definition bad at assessing new risk. But as data get collected they quickly adjust to it. There are a lot of cars so if driverless cars become even a few percent of cars on the road they will quickly be able to build good actuarial tables.
I believe Mercedes takes responsibility if there is an accident while driving autonomously.
if it can drive a car why wouldn’t it be able to drive a truck?
I’m surprised companies don’t just build their own special highway for automated trucking and use people for last mile stuff.
We could make it work on a guide line and attach a bunch of trailers to one truck. You’re a genius.
This idea seems to be getting some steam. I’m all aboard it!
yeah that would be great. Say, you can save on that a little if you put wheel guides on the road since theyre all headed in the same direction, and maybe you can replace the tires with something that fits into that guide pretty well so that you don’t have to replace them as much. Matter of fact, all of these trucks can become electric if they run electricity through the track or above it. This is a revolutionary idea!!
On private roads in Canada, the mining giant Teck is starting to use autonomous transport trucks.
To me this is less frightening for public safety and more for reasons related to climate change, since this kind of industrial expansion will be less contingent on worker availability.
Mind you, the whole push toward driverless vehicles seems insanely redundant as a concept, since driverless tech in the form of high-speed rail has been around for decades in an infinitely more efficient way than could ever be offered by personal vehicles.
It’s called a train, no?
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According to who? Did the NTSB clear this? Are they even allowed to clear this? If this thing fucks up and kills somebody, will the judge let the driver off the hook 'cuz the manufacturer told them everything’s cool?
According to that teal light.
You do realize humans kill hundreds of other humans a day in cars, right? Is it possible that autonomous vehicles may actually be safer than a human driver?
Sure. But no system is 100% effective and all of their questions are legit and important to answer. If I got hit by one of these tomorrow I want to know the process for fault, compensation and pathway to improvement are all already done not something my accident is going to landmark.
But that being said, I was a licensing examiner for 2 years and quit because they kept making it easier to pass and I was forced to pass so many people who should not be on the road.
I think this idea is sound, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to address around it.
Honestly I’m sure there will be a lot of unfortunate mistakes until computers and self driving systems can be relied upon. However there needs to be an entry point for manufacturers and this is it. Technology will get better over time, it always has. Eventually self driving autos will be the norm.
That still doesn’t address all the issues surrounding it. I am unsure if you are just young and not aware how these things work or terribly naive. But companies will always cut corners to keep profits. Regulation forces a certain level of quality control (ideally). Just letting them do their thing because “it’ll eventually get better” is a gateway to absurd amounts of damage. Also, not all technology always gets better. Plenty just get abandoned.
But to circle back, if I get hit by a car tomorrow and all these thinga you think are unimportant are unanswered does that mean I might mot get legal justice or compensation? If there isn’t clearly codified law I might not, and you might be callous enough to say you don’t care about me. But what about you? What if you got hit by a unmonitored self driving car tomorrow and then told you’d have to go through a long, expensive court battle to determine fault because no one had done it it. So you’re in and out of a hospital recovering and draining all of your money on bills both legal and medical to eventually hopefully get compensated for something that wasn’t your fault.
That is why people here are asking these questions. Few people actually oppose progress. They just need to know that reasonable precautions are taken for predictable failures.
But then it’s good that the manufacturer states the driver isn’t obliged to watch the road. Because it shifts responsibility towards the manufacturer and thus - it’s a great incentive to make technology as safe as possible.
To be clear I never said that I didn’t care about an individual’s safety, you inferred that somehow from my post and quite frankly are quite disrespectful. I simply stated that autonomous vehicles are here to stay and that the technology will improve more with time.
The legal implications of self driving cars are still being determined and as this is literally one of the first approved technologies available. Tesla doesn’t count as it’s not a SAE level 3 autonomous driving vehicle. There are some references in the liability section of the wiki.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_self-driving_cars
Can’t the entry point just be that you have to pay attention while it’s driving for you until they figure it out?
You’re deciding to prioritize economic development over human safety.
Only on closed courses. The best AI lacks the basic heuristics of a child and you simply can’t account for all possible outcomes.
I like to imagine somebody in a call center remotely driving your car.
Fine print will say it’s still your fault though if they crash
On a lever 3 system it’s not. If it is then it’s level 2.
How is that legal?
They got certification from the authorities, and in the event of an accident, the manufacturer takes on responsibility.
lol, ‘manufacturer takes on responsibility’ so… I’m just fucked if one of these hits me?
see a mercedes, shoot a mercedes. destroy it in whatever way you can.
No you’re guaranteed that the Mercedes that hit you is better insured for paying out your damages than pretty much anyone else on the road that could hit you.
lol corporations don’t have responsibility though. that’s the whole point of them. they’re machines for avoiding responsibility.
In this case the responsibility to pay will ultimately fall on everyone, not just on the pedestrian getting hit. Still not good, but you won’t be SOL.
If these have lidar (unlike teslas) then they might be better at detecting obstructions but I feel like real world road conditions are not kind to cameras and sensors.
Fixed lidar sensors are not as reliable as it’s made out to be, unfortunately. Dome lidar systems like those found on Waymo vehicles are pretty good, but way more advanced (and expensive) than anything you’d find in consumer vehicles at the moment. The shadows of trees are enough to render basic lidar sensors useless, as they effectively produce an aperiodic square wave of infrared light (from the sun) that is frequently inseparable from the ToF emission signal. Sunsets are also sometimes enough to completely blind lidar sensors.
None of this is to say that Tesla’s previous camera-only approach was a good idea, like at all. More data is always a good thing, so long as the system doesn’t rely on the data more than the data’s reliability permits. After all, cameras can be blinded by sunlight too. IMO radar is the best economical complementary sensor to cameras at the moment. Despite the comparatively low accuracy, they are very reliable in adverse conditions.
been hit before, not buying it. gonna be proactive about self defense.
I’ve been hit 4 times
The sad part of this is somehow thinking that payment solves any problem. Like, idk what they would pay me, just bring back my dead wife/child/father whatever. You can’t fix everything with money.
Human drivers are far more dangerous on the road, and you should be applauding assisted driving development.
This presumes the options are only:
- Human and no autonomous system watching
- Autonomous system, with no meaningful human attention
Key word is ‘assisted’ driving. ADAS should roughly be a nice add, so long as human attention is policed. Ultimately, the ADAS systems are better able to react to some situations, but may utterly make some stupid calls in exceptional scenarios.
Here, the bar of ‘no human paying attention at all’ is one I’m not entirely excited about celebrating. Of course the conditions are “daytime traffic jam only”, where risk is pretty small, you might have a fender bender, pedestrians are almost certainly not a possibility, and the conditions are supremely monotonous, which is a great area for ADAS but not a great area for bored humans.
It only works on a small handful of freeways (read: no pedestrians) in California/Nevada, and only under 40 MPH. The odds of a crash within those parameters resulting in a fatality are quite low.
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that paid for it to be, like everything else that’s legal?
How is this different from the capabilities of Tesla’s FSD, which is considered level 2? It seems like Mercedes just decided they’ll take on liability to classify an equivalent level 2 system as level 3.
Ummm, yeah, that’s the real difference between level 2 and 3 - who is liable
Ah so it’s marketing BS then, got it.
No… it means they’re confident enough to assume the risk, Tesla is not. They’ve been using their tech in europe for a while now without issue, Teslas meanwhile still love to hit a variety of new and exciting objects.
And that’s a huge difference for consumers. I would never use a self drive feature where I am still responsible, that’s pointless and would just create more anxiety for me.
They’re assuming liability but that doesn’t mean it’s safe or more capable than other systems.
According to the mercedes website the cars have radar and lidar sensors. FSD has radar only, but apparently decided to move away from them and towards optical only, I’m not sure if they currently have any role in FSD.
That’s important because FSD relies on optical sensors only to tell not only where an object is, but that it exists. Based on videos I’ve seen of FSD, I suspect that if it hasn’t ingested the data to recognize, say, a plastic bucket, it won’t know that it’s not just part of the road (or at best can recognize that the road looks a little weird). If there’s a radar or lidar sensor though, those directly measure distance and can have 3-D data about the world without the ability to recognize objects. Which means they can say “hey, there’s something there I don’t recognize, time to hit the brakes and alert the driver about what to do next”.
Of course this still leaves a number of problems, like understanding at a higher level what happened after an accident for example. My guess is there will still be problems.
It’s also limited to slow traffic on some roads
“DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz.” https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot#:~:text=DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz.
You’ve inadvertently pointed out how Tesla deliberately skirts the law. Teslas are way more capable than what level 2 describes, but they choose to stay as level 2 so they wouldn’t have to take responsibility for their public testing
Yeah it’s pretty much an insurance product. They came up with a set of boundary conditions someone would underwrite for their “stay between the lines” tech.
Guessing their insurance is privately funded
