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The car does not (yet) drive itself

by admin

Yesterday I went to Milan to visit a robotic factory in Brianza and a friend offered to take me with his Tesla. It wasn’t the first time I got on a Tesla but it’s always nice. Elon Musk’s electric car is a pleasure for tech enthusiasts. To reach the destination my friend started talking to the car: “Take me to Cavenago di Brianza”. Nothing. Take me to Cavenago. Nothing. In Brianza. Nothing.

So I took my smartphone and asked Google Maps to take us to our destination. Now it may very well be that my friend has made some mistakes, it certainly will. But the anecdote reminded me of Musk’s bombastic promise to invade the world with a million robot-taxis, self-driving taxis, within last year, with that guy. who replied that if there really were a million self-driving cars in the world in 2020, it would have eaten them all. Here, we are not even close. The truth is, self-driving cars are a much more complicated problem than anyone anticipated. It was seen on Sunday at the historic Indianapolis circuit, where unmanned racing cars competed and in the end, of course, an algorithm won.

The car in second place was in fact programmed by mistake to do one lap less, the one in third suffered a GPS failure that made it blind. Overall they exceeded 200 kilometers per hour, a good result (these are the records with a driver instead), but not in a classic race: at the last moment the organizers opted for a time trial, so on the track the cars were alone every time . What are these competitions for? To study, to find better algorithms, which will help us one day to have unmanned and safer cars. In the meantime, we will continue to drive for many years.

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