Over the last few years, everyone has heard about self-driving cars and how they are getting closer to becoming a part of our everyday lives. There have been several videos on TikTok and Instagram showing people using the self-driving feature in their Tesla and many people in the comments mentioned how they would not trust this feature in their own car. While many people raised their doubts about the possibility of self-driving, Tesla is considered to be one of the pioneers for autonomous driving and has been able to make good progress over the years. We have discussed the concept of self-driving cars in class, but there are many roadblocks that stand in the way of this idea coming into fruition. There was an important update from Tesla yesterday concerning a large recall of their self-driving cars. This update alone could prove to be a major obstacle in making autonomous cars available sooner than later.
Tesla’s Progress
Around 2019, it looked very promising that Tesla was going to be able to sell self-driving cars in the near future as they continued to make significant leaps in their innovation. At the beginning of 2022, Elon Musk promised that Tesla would be selling autonomous cars by the end of the year. However, there have been many software challenges with making this a reality. Tesla began their “Full Self-Driving” Beta Software in 2020, and drivers interested in these self-driving capabilities were required to have a clean driving history in order to use the software. Recently, Elon said that “roughly 400,000 customers in North America” have access to the self-driving beta software. The high number of cars that have this FSD (fully self-driving) capability makes the recall much harder to tackle.
The Tesla Software Recall
Due to the recall, all 300,000+ vehicles that have the FSD beta software are forced to participate. Some of the main concerns highlighted in the recall were that the beta software may result in the car going straight in an intersection while sitting in the left-turn lane and may cause the vehicle to exceed speed limits, resulting in a higher risk of crash. However, Elon disagrees with the recall, saying it was “just flat wrong!” Elon has continued to make many bold statements about autonomous vehicles. For example, he stated that he thinks self-driving cars are safer and will make less mistakes than humans on the road.
Along with the recall, there is an ongoing investigation into Tesla’s vehicle systems. More specifically, the NHTSA, National Highway Traffic Safety Association, is looking into Tesla’s autopilot system as there are claims the system has caused hundreds of crashes. Tesla claims to not know of any incidents involving their systems and has received a request by the US Justice department to send more information concerning the features of their driving systems.
Other Companies Looking to Step In
While there is a lot of controversy involving Tesla, other companies are looking to get into the mix of self-driving cars. Yesterday, it was announced that Jaguar Land Rover is looking to hire more experts to develop their own autonomous car for the company’s next line of luxury vehicles. Jaguar Land Rover will be partnering with Nvidia, a very reputable AI computing company, to develop the self-driving car. In order to start the development, Jaguar Land Rover announced that it will be opening three brand new engineering hubs in Munich, Bologna, and Madrid. These new hubs will be fully focused on creating a luxury self-driving vehicle for Jaguar Land Rover’s next generation of luxury cars. More specifically, the partnership between Nvidia and Jaguar Land Rover will look to add advanced AI systems in the upcoming Land Rovers and Jaguars. These new luxury vehicles are expected to be released around 2025. It will be difficult for Jaguar Land Rover to match Tesla’s progress, but this partnership is a step in the right direction.
As someone who has always been very interested but skeptical in the idea of self-driving cars, I think it is great that other large car companies are starting to step in and try to create their own version of a self-driving vehicle for their future car generations. Tesla has done a great job experimenting with different possibilities in their software, but with other companies starting to test out the autonomous vehicle possibility, I think we will be able to have self-driving cars much faster than if it were just Tesla. I don’t see self-driving cars gaining the necessary momentum and confidence from consumers for at least 3-5 more years because it seems like whenever I search news about Tesla, there is an incident involving their autopilot or FSD features. However, it will be very interesting to see how everything plays out. Do you think that self-driving cars will become mainstream and have consumer confidence in the near future?
I absolutely love driving so I will be sad the day that self-driving cars are the norm, but it is impressive technology. There is a serious market right now for it and we can see that people are coming for Tesla with the commercial that was aired during the super bowl. I hope that this competition though helps advance the technology further, and quicker.
You know, I dont’ really need self-driving cars, but I would absolutely love some sort of “advanced cruise control” that would do the driving just on the highways. That seems to be a much easier problem to tackle, and would deliver 90% of the value I would have for autonomous vehicles.
The somewhat self-driving capabilities on my mom’s Subaru are super neat to mess around with. Especially on the highway it eliminates a lot of the need to pay attention which is very scary but scary cool.
As Dr. Kane has mentioned I do not particularly want a self-driving car to the full extent. However, for long road trips being able to have cruise control for highways while I eat or do something that may distract my attention for a bit would be nice. My concern is if fully automated cars are developed and there is an accident with injury or death, who is at fault? What will the repercussions be for a company like Tesla with fatalities in its hands?
I always find it odd when people question the success of self driving cars. Yes there are bugs and they do make errors, but not nearly the amount of errors that humans make. I do love driving and I believe that there are cars that are worth driving, such as sports cars, or in terms of racing, however I also see a future in which people are no longer allowed to drive as its viewed as being too dangerous. At some point in the future, self driving cars will be accident-proof, and it will be hard to ignore the fact that while I can control my own car, I cant control the drunk driver next to me. I still trust an AI machine controlling a vehicle more than I trust the unknown person.
Hi Spencer, nice post! Honestly, I would not feel safe completely relying on a computer’s judgement when my life is in its hands. It is really cool upcoming innovation though and I applaud the people working so hard to achieve what we have been talking about for so long. I agree with Professor Kane’s comment about the advanced cruise control. If anything, these cars could use their new intelligence to avoid collisions and correct any mistakes us humans could make while driving. I am excited to see where this goes in the near future.
I’ll play the other side and say I hate driving. I find it boring (This could be because I drive an older car and it takes me a couple seconds to hit 60) but mainly it annoys me how people suck at driving (from not being able to park, braking for no apparent reason, not using their blinkers, etc). I agree with Dr. Kane that I do not want a full self-driving vehicle and would rather resort to the self-driving when needing to take a break as Chase stated. The idea of self-driving is fascinating alone but I believe it will take a fair amount of time before we see it become mainstream in society. There are many challenges to overcome for companies such as Tesla and Jaguar Land Rover and with safety there are no shortcuts. The Tesla recall clearly demonstrates this as they pushed vehicles out to the consumer and recalled them for a software update. Elon Musk is just wrong to not consider that a recall too.
I can see both sides to this issue. On one hand driving is enjoyable and allows you to decompress before a long day at work/wherever else you are going. On the other hand, when pressed for time it would be nice to have productivity during the drive. And with the introduction of self-driving cars, I predict that productivity will increase. Instead of spending time driving that time can be dedicated to work or other tasks to give time back to the day. I think prof kane’s idea of 90% accuracy cruise control would be a great first step for this technology and then over time, increasing to fully self-driving. I assume this progression would help the adoption rate of this technology too.
Hi Spencer! I think that self-driving cars will probably become mainstream soon just because of how much technology has advanced since the pandemic started, especially with AI. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily a good thing though. The example that you shared about the times where there were issues related to self-driving cars can lead to really dangerous situations. I think that all technology to some extent has the potential to run into an error, or not perform exactly how it was meant to, so I don’t think that something so important as self driving cars should be widespread. Also, I think if they are mainstream, there will be more restrictions related to driving the cars. Great post!
Hey Spencer! I loved reading this post because this is something I always thought about. I am so hype to see that cars will be fully “self-driving” but I do also believe that it is too early for that. I think that car companies should spend more time and experiment with these self-driving technologies before allowing the public to make use of it due to safety reasons. Seeing tesla re-calling almost 400,000 scares me a little, but it should give us an eye-opener on the “self-driving” world.
Hey Spencer, I see self-driving cars becoming mainstream, but not in the near future! I feel like a lot of people still have significant doubts about them. Even now, when you ask most Tesla owners, the self driving feature isn’t something that they use on the regular. I won’t ever want a full self driving car, even with 1 million advancement I don’t know if I could ever put my faith 100% in a car to drive me around everywehre.
Hey Spencer, my intial thoughts with this blog post is that the buzz about self-driving cars has increased so much in as little as 6 months ago but like others in the class have said before, I think we have a long way to go before a high percentage of cars on the road are self driving. I think for me, I wonder how well it will be able to react to a human driver making mistakes near it.