A Volvo engineer has made a huge claim recently that Tesla's Autopilot autonomous car driving technology is just hype and calls it a "wannabe."
This claim was reportedly stated in a recent Verge interview given by a senior technical engineer, Trent Victor, of Volvo's crash avoidance department. In the interview, he dismissed the technology used by Tesla as not being a true self-driving one, suggesting that the hoopla heaped on the system was not really warranted.
Victor based his comments on the rankings Tesla got in autonomous car technology. Guidelines on how these technologies should be ranked were issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation. The rankings start from 0 to 4 with 4 being ranked as full self-driving.
Tesla admitted that its Autopilot is Level 2 autonomous. But Mark Fields, Ford CEO, believes that it could be considered a Level 3 since the system takes over "safety-critical functions."
This Autopilot feature in Tesla allows a driver to take his hands off the wheel if he is driving down a highway for a long period of time.
But Victor doesn't see it that way. "It gives you the impression that it's doing more than it is," Victor said. "[Autopilot] is more of an unsupervised wannabe," he said.
However, another report said that Volvo is just trying to prop itself as the autonomous car king for some time now. According to this report, the truth is Volvo is trailing behind Tesla in its autonomous systems, making its recent comments appear like blind and dumb lashing out. His comparisons, said the report, were very strange.
But Tesla claims that as far as self-driving technologies are concerned, its Autopilot is one of the most advanced today. This technology is incorporated in beta form, in its latest flagship cars
Tesla's Autopilot uses a camera, ultrasonics, radar and GPS to sense the environment and steer the vehicle, maintain constant speed, change lanes, control motors, steering and brakes and allow drivers to get their hands off the wheel when the conditions are right.
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