Autonomous driving has become the core proposition and selling point of intelligent electric vehicles. Musk also said that compared with the launch of new models, he pays more attention to the landing of autonomous driving technology. But as early as the end of 2018, Musk announced that his "fully autonomous driving technology" would be realized in 2019. In June 2019, Musk said at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting that Tesla users can use the autopilot function without human intervention in 2020, and all models produced after October 2016 only need to replace the autopilot chip to achieve full autopilot function. In 2020, Tesla launched the FSD Beta version, equipped with full autopilot testing functions on urban roads, but FSD can't do "full autopilot" In July of the same year, Musk added in a video interview with the World Artificial Intelligence Conference: "I think Tesla is very close to L5 level autopilot." I'm still confident that we'll be doing the basics of L5 autonomous driving this year. By 2022, five years later, the much-anticipated "fully autonomous driving" is still not happening. On the contrary, Tesla has now encountered many criticisms because of frequent autonomous driving safety accidents, and has also been recalled many times. The U.S. government also said that in the past 9 months, it has received 354 complaints from car owners about the "ghost brakes" of Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y models.
Musk
So what level does Tesla's autopilot belong to now?
According to the "Classification of Automobile Driving Automation" released in August 2021, Mainland China divides driving automation into L0 (Emergency Assist): Driving automation systems cannot continuously perform vehicle lateral or longitudinal motion control in dynamic driving tasks, but have the ability to continuously perform some targets and event detection and response in dynamic driving tasks. L1 (Partial Driver Assistance): The driving automation system continuously performs the lateral or longitudinal motion control of the vehicle in the dynamic driving task within its designed operating conditions, and has the ability to detect and respond to some targets and events that are compatible with the lateral or longitudinal motion control of the vehicle performed. L2 (Combined Driver Assistance): The driving automation system continuously performs the lateral and longitudinal motion control of the vehicle in the dynamic driving task within its designed operating conditions, and has the ability to detect and respond to some targets and events corresponding to the lateral and longitudinal motion control of the vehicle performed. L3 (Conditioned Autonomous Driving): The driving automation system continuously performs all dynamic driving tasks within its designed operating conditions. The L4 (Highly Automated Driving) Driving Automation System continuously performs all dynamic driving tasks and performs dynamic driving task takeovers within its designed operating conditions. L5 (Fully Autonomous Driving): The driving automation system continuously performs all dynamic driving tasks and performs dynamic driving tasks to take over under any drivable conditions. Where L3 is a demarcation point, L3 is called assisted driving below, and above is called automatic driving.
At present, Tesla's autopilot is still L2 level, and it is still some distance away from full autopilot.
Why? In the next issue, we will talk specifically about Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system.