The Battle for Best Semi-Autonomous System: Tesla Autopilot vs. GM SuperCruise

GM did a nice job there. They have a good solution to the &quot;expecting the driver to watch and take over&quot; problem. Their system watches the driver constantly to make sure they&#x27;re in position to take over, but doesn&#x27;t require a hand on the wheel. GM is also more careful about when to allow the control system to engage.<p>Tesla&#x27;s crashes on &quot;autopilot&quot; have mostly been in situations where the system should have detected an obstacle. Four times, a Tesla on autopilot has slammed into an obstacle partly blocking the left edge of a lane. All those crashes were in freeway situations, where Autopilot is supposed to be reliable. That&#x27;s inexcusable. Tesla&#x27;s radar has inadequate resolution for the job, the vision system doesn&#x27;t really recognize fixed obstacles, and they don&#x27;t have LIDAR. So they don&#x27;t detect big things like fire trucks and street cleaning trucks that are mostly on the shoulder and partly into the lane.

According to the article GM has decided to simply restrict the domain of their semi-autonomous offering to only work on divided highways. The author says that the result is innovative and brilliant. But the problems they&#x27;re trying to solve are not nearly as ambitious or challenging as those Tesla has decided to tackle.<p>While it can be argued that GM should received kudos for releasing a feature that can work reliably, I don&#x27;t see it as innovative.<p>It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They&#x27;re going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won&#x27;t take risks with technology.

(Slightly off topic) Has anyone else been around the Cruise Automation self driving cars in SF? I have and I can&#x27;t believe they are allowed on the road given how poorly they drive.<p>While biking to work today, there was a Cruise car behind me, driving at about 7 mph and just randomly stopping in the middle of the road constantly for no reason at all. Lots of cars kept on constantly honking at the car the whole time.<p>Last week I saw a Cruise car start to make a left hand turn at an intersection, but its sensors must have thought someone was in the crosswalk, so it stopped in the middle of the other lane of oncoming traffic causing other cars to abruptly stop and start honking.<p>If this was a normal car, I&#x27;d call 911 to report a drunk driver. I wonder if I should just call 911 for a dangerous driver in this case. Is there any way I can report this behavior and get their cars off the road?<p>In case anyone wants to do some investigative reporting, all their cars come out of a garage labeled Borden Decal Co. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;maps&#x2F;F85WPTwkmbQ2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;maps&#x2F;F85WPTwkmbQ2</a>). If you follow them around you can probably observe similar behavior.

It&#x27;s kind of a weird review. For example it rates Cruise&#x27;s lane changing superior -- &quot;as perfect as it gets&quot; -- because it simply <i>requires you to do it manually</i>. (The &quot;perfection&quot; is in how the UI clearly communicates auto&#x2F;manual transitions.)<p>I mean say what you will but that&#x27;s just a weird way to rate autonomous driving systems.

I&#x27;m really confused. When describing the &quot;Operational Domain&quot; The author explains that a Tesla he drove 18 years ago handled a sample drive on FDR with two disengagements, while the Cadillac wouldn&#x27;t stay engaged when he tried the same drive. Then says the Cadillac wins by a hair. How does a brand new system that doesn&#x27;t work reliably win over a system that&#x27;s been working better for over 18 months?

I&#x27;m not sure most readers know but SuperCruise has nothing to do with Cruise Automation. SuperCruise was a GM project long before Cruise was a company or acquired by GM. Different technology and teams all together.

I&#x27;ll be driving manually for a long time. I have no interest in beta testing anybody&#x27;s autonomous systems at 70mph.

My driver has had to catch the wheel on more than one occasion. When we’re in the carpool lane and the lane opens up for others cars to merge in the autopilot doesn’t see the edge of the lane and so starts swerving into the other lane. Also we did a trip to lax from San Diego and the dividers come pretty close to the edge of the lane, we were always little nervous the car was going to hit it. Overall it rides so smoothly but those few glitches make me quite nervous sometimes. It is kind of surreal to be riding in an almost self driving car. Tesla is taking steps to add safety features. Lately my driver sped up to overtake a car and the autopilot disengaged and wouldn’t re engage until we put it on park.

I see many people using this reason: Because there are people that drive drunk or text while driving or get distracted then we need the autopilot.<p>I think this is wrong, we just need an AI or other tech that detects this bad drivers or distracted drivers and don&#x27;t let them drive&#x2F;start the car or for distraction like texting safely stop the car, maybe report the driver, there must be other solution then allowing bad rrivewrs or bad AI to drive around.

sometimes i wonder how long it will take for these technologies to be available to poor people in Africa.

So I guess now we are settling for semi-autonomous vehicles. This would have been impressive 10 years ago (maybe more). They are just playing catch up while they could have been trying to be innovative all along.

Kinda of a pointless comparison when one of the vehicles compared isn&#x27;t and never will be commercially available...

&quot;Head to head&quot; is an unfortunate way to compare automobiles, like playing chicken.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sxooLC9EwII" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sxooLC9EwII</a>