[GTO]

As is usually the case with long-form Bloomberg articles, here is another superb one:

“It can’t drive itself perfectly, but the rate of advancement of the software is like—every couple of weeks you get an update, and the car’s driving a little more humanlike. It’s very eerie,” Qazi said. A few minutes later, a silver sedan cut into our lane, and the car smoothly braked to let it in. “See that?” he asked.

It’s not as if human drivers set the bar very high. In Los Angeles, on the day I met Qazi, an illegal drag racer died when his Mazda hit a parked truck; a motorcyclist fatally struck a broken-down van in a carpool lane; and a high school junior on a bicycle was critically injured after a car dragged him 1,500 feet and then sped away.

Releasing still-incomplete software to customers now, and hoping to work out bugs and add capabilities along the way, is, of course, how Silicon Valley often introduces smartphone apps and video games. But those products can’t kill people. Waymo, GM, and the others have rough drafts, too, but they’re installed in only a few hundred test models, deployed in a handful of carefully chosen neighborhoods around the country, and almost always supervised by professional safety drivers. Safety is an obsession, especially after an Uber test car mowed down a pedestrian last year. GM’s prototypes crawl San Francisco’s hilly streets at a maximum speed of 35 mph.

Musk, on the other hand, is putting his rough draft into consumers’ hands as fast as he can. This allows Tesla engineers to collect terabytes of data from customers and use the information to refine the Autopilot software based on real-world conditions. Even Teslas that aren’t on Autopilot pitch in: They silently compare the human driver’s choices with what the computer would have done. Every few weeks, Tesla completes a new and improved version of Autopilot and uploads it to the cars, to the delight of Qazi and other fans.

“Everyone’s training the network, all of the time,” Musk said in Palo Alto. He called this virtuous cycle “fleet learning,” comparing it to the way Google’s search engine improves with each of the 1.2 trillion queries a year it fields. Someday soon, he declared, the software will be so good, drivers will start unbolting the steering wheels from their cars and throwing them away.

[alpha1]

"As it is going to happen, someday soon, I declare, the software will be so good, humans will start unbolting their brains, their senses and their limbs."

[volkman10]

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta Causes Accident.

Link