I need ADAS asap (aka “how am I going to use the Tesla Roadster full throttle?”)
Its been more than a year I posted an article about autonomous driving . After re-reading the post today it looks like 5 years have passed by… It really is tremendous how fast the technology and the market are moving, in particular, this week felt like we crossed another milestone.
On 16.11.2017 Elon Musk unveiled Teslas’ brand new EV truck concept vehicle Semi model, but he also pulled off a Steve Jobs-ian like “one more thing” surprise, rolling a new Roadster sports car out of the back of a big rig on stage. And that “thing” is now the envy of ALL performance sports car manufacturers — top to bottom and left to right, it just nailed it! Not going into details on this, you can read all you want somewhere else on the specs. This is the interesting part: a couple of hours later a friend sent me a link to this video:
This is the short video of a test drive with a pro-pilot of a Tesla Roadster pre-owner (advanced with the deposit). The vid is 3 minutes long, but the interesting part takes about 1.9sec, really… You guessed it, thats the time it takes this vehicle to go from 0-to-60 mph. Maybe its worth sharing it is able to go up to 250mph top speed also. And although it is expensive, it is just a fraction of what “similar” sports cars ask for.
The Roadster is due in 2020. I dare to say that probably — thanks to EVs — more and more cars will be able to perform better and better. Maybe to a point where human driving is… well… not very well adapted to such (very) high skilled driving — even for a well seasoned pro-pilot, and simultaneously high risk for society in general. This took me back to old scholl sci-fi movies where the captain of the ship ordered to go into “warp speed”, and then the screen just went nuts, and we humans would no longer be able to watch what was happening (and thus not be able to decide on what to do). Warp speed is normally defining a speed greater than light speed, which is not the case, you might add. True. But the fact is that for certain accelerations and top speeds the human driver is not even remotely adapted to drive in those conditions. Adding to the fact that whereas in space, you have plenty of room for distractions, in down town Los Angeles, you will probably provoke a huge traffic jam after busting your car while driving at not-so-reasonable speeds.
Enter AI, ML and autonomous driving.
Enter AI, ML and autonomous driving. Surely I am addressing that high end Level 5 SAE. The level that will completely eradicate myself from the wheel. The level that is able to use a Roadster (and others alike) to its full abilities, without compromising road safety. I’m sorry for those of you who say “driving is a pleasure for me” (me included), but this is the future. And it is here already.
Said before, and will say it again: Mr. Elon Musk will leave a name in history big time. I guess he is just starting.
Damn, I wish it was ME going on that test drive — oh well…
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Roadster trailer:
other references:
Edit: added a pic to the top :p
