Tesla chief
was obliged to make an ignominious admission to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. What Tesla dubs its “Full Self Driving Capability,” and charges up to $10,000 for, is actually, in the jargon of the industry, a Level 2 driving aid. In other words, no different from what other car makers, from GM to
Kia,
provide as an option or even standard equipment. It can steer and match traffic speed on the highway or in bumper-to-bumper situations. In no case, though, are you encouraged to take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road.
Tesla’s Level 2 package also appears to fail disconcertingly at a basic autonomous vehicle job, performed in many cars by a radar array costing less than $200. It doesn’t reliably avoid collisions with stationary objects such as emergency vehicles. A federal investigation has opened and we can already anticipate its findings: Tesla’s implementation of Level 2 is as good as anybody’s; the problem is caused by Tesla owners believing their cars to be more advanced than they are.
By now a succession of Mr. Musk’s claims have painted a trajectory to a universe still out of view. By last year, Tesla should have flipped a switch and turned every Tesla into a free-roaming robot taxi, earning its owner easy money when the car otherwise would be idle.
OK, it’s been three years since the media began backpedaling from its own role in self-driving hype. Uber and
have sold off their autonomous vehicle experiments.
But while self-driving is stuck in neutral, the technology underlying it has advanced by leaps: artificial intelligence, machine vision, graphical computation, mobile bandwidth.
The problem for autonomous driving is the real-world complications: a heavy object collides with another heavy object, causing injury, death, property damage and lawsuits. But the same technology is increasingly capable of creating digital representations of the real world in which these untoward outcomes never arise.
These artificial worlds, ironically, are already at work trying to fix the challenges of autonomous driving. In simulated environments, software is being trained on unlikely scenarios involving, say, a combination of bicyclists, defaced stop signs and windblown plastic bags that even teams of thousands of networked cars might not encounter in years of driving.
But then a question comes up: Who needs a self-driving car when you can have a self-driving car simulator?
Think about it.
You might still jump into a car to avoid a Zoom meeting in favor of a real-world encounter with colleagues or friends. But how about the option demonstrated by
Facebook’s
in which participants, using Oculus headsets, could feel uncannily present as a group of avatars, even hearing their voices from different directions? The avatars are Wii-like now but one day may be indistinguishable from real persons.
Facebook is not everybody’s bet to win the race for the “metaverse,” to use the word suddenly on the lips of every computing and telecommunications executive.
the graphics chip maker, recently launched an artificial environment suite called Omniverse, which tellingly includes Pixar’s (the animation movie studio) “Universal Scene Description” software. “The economy in the metaverse will be larger than the economy in the physical world,” predicts Nvidia chief
Jensen Huang.
In another self-driving irony,
has adopted Omniverse to maintain an exacting simulation of its plant in Regensburg, Germany. BMW uses the artificial environment to experiment with new ways of building cars that fewer people in the future might need if it turns out they prefer to inhabit artificial environments.
It will be easier and more fun to go places artificially. In the metaverse, you can arrive instantly, or if you want the experience of traveling, arrive at any speed. If you feel like having an accident on the way, you can. If you want to experience a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer, feel free, just for fun. If you want to drive through New York City at 200 mph, you can. Cher can be waving at you from every corner. A parade of brontosauruses can be waiting to cross at the next light.
Human beings already interact by the thousands in videogame worlds they prefer to the real world. In another self-driving irony, Elon Musk has been artificial reality’s greatest salesman, with his frequent musing that we already exist in a simulation.
Yes, the self-driving car is coming. In fact, it’s here. Waymo (the Google affiliate) operates on the meticulously mapped, weather-free streets of Phoenix. Self-driving vehicles will soon be turning up in other controlled settings. Stretches of highway may one day be engineered to let drivers turn their attention to their iPads for extended periods.
But the day may never come when a self-driving car will be able to take you most places a real driver can, in every kind of weather. And, by then, so much of our lives may be in the cloud that it won’t matter.
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