Over the past two weeks, I have witnessed two amazing engineering achievements. One of them, I watched on TV. The other, I experienced firsthand.
Catching Skyscrapers
For the second time (in 3 tries), SpaceX caught the Starship booster stage:
The Starship booster is as tall as a 33 story building. During descent, it hits speeds more than twice as fast as a bullet fired from at AR-15 assault rifle. And SpaceX catches it within centimeters of accuracy. The booster has landing nubs (dunno what the correct term is) and articulating arms catch it:
This. Is. Impressive. I shed tears when SpaceX did this for the first time.
Driving In The Worst Conditions
I woke up a couple of weeks ago and peeked out the window to see our neighborhood covered in a blanket of snow. Yay! I love snow including shoveling it. Anyway, one of my first thoughts was this:
I want to see it the Tesla can drive in the snow.
#nerdery!
And by drive, I meant that I wanted to see how the Tesla’s self-driving capabilities (FSD) would handle the situation.
In October of 2023 when I purchased the car, FSD wasn’t great. Its movements were clunky and the car sometimes behaved dangerously (“No car, running over humans (or any sentient beings) is UNACCEPTABLE!”). Attempting to engage FSD in the snow a year ago would result in an error message. Something like:
Hell no. I’m not even going to attempt to drive in this sh*t. It’s on you human.
This morning, the road was completely buried in snow. Plus, snow was still coming down. These are the very difficult conditions to drive in and I didn’t think the Tesla would do well. But to my amazement, FSD drove perfectly. It stayed where it should have been in the lane. It accelerated and stopped with caution. It was completely amazing. Six months ago, FSD drove clunky in my neighborhood in ideal, summer conditions. In the most awful conditions, FSD drove much better. And I have the video to prove it:
Caveats…
As good as FSD did in the snow, if you watch the video to the end, it tapped out when the car started to slide. To be clear, conditions were incredibly bad. Despite the car having snow tires (the most important component to safe winter driving) and driving with an abundance of caution, the car still lost traction. Tesla will eventually have to learn to deal with these situations.
Note: It’s been cold and slippery in Colorado. The car has lost traction a couple of times since I recorded the video and it has not disengaged again.
Almost perfect, but… As good as FSD is, it still needs to get a lot better to be able to operate without a human standing guard. I’ve driven about 1,000 miles with the new software and had to intervene once. But to be ready for unmonitored autonomy, I’d guess that Tesla needs to be at least 10x as good. Will Tesla be able to get there with its camera/end-to-end neural net (NN) approach? Tesla is close. Very close. But those remaining, tail-end problems, are the really, really difficult ones to solve. It’s easy to train a NN what it’s supposed to do at a stop sign. It’s many magnitudes more difficult to train it what to do in a complex situation that may only surface once every 5 years.
I don’t think my car will ever be able to operate driverless: The Cybertruck, Cybercab and new Model Y now have front bumper cameras. I wonder if this will be necessary for driverless autonomy? Also, my car has version 4 of the FSD processor/camera suite. Version 5 is will be out at the end of this year. I wonder if version 5 will be required for driverless autonomy? If so, will I be able to upgrade my car? If I had to guess (and this is purely a guess), I don’t think my car in its current form will ever be able to operate without a driver. I hope that I’m wrong.
And then there are camera issues. FSD uses cameras to see the world. Cameras get dirty. FSD doesn’t like dirty cameras. Tesla will have to solve this.
We Live In Amazing Times
Autonomous cars will be an incredible advancement for society.
- They’ll be waaaaay safer.
- They’ll allow those who cannot drive to get around easier.
- Owning a car sucks. They’re expensive to buy. And then you have to pay to insure, fuel, and maintain them.
I look forward to a future when I can just pull up an app, specify where I want to go, and a robot car shows up 2 minutes later to take me to buy bananas. In some very small parts of the world where Waymo is, you can do this now. I hope I’m able to do this in my town this decade.
I know I won’t be able to teleport Star Trek style in my life. However, I probably will be able to go to Mars. Note that this sounds awful! No thanks! But it will be cool to see someone else go.
More 1500 Days!!!
You can also find me (and the dinosaurs) at:
