Tesla ap in foggy days

Rand think tank has made an evaluation of self-driving cars, that is, if a real self-driving system wants to meet the conditions of mass production application, it needs at least 1 1 billion miles (about170-1800 million kilometers) of road verification.

According to this condition, even if a fleet has 100 self-driving vehicles to conduct road test 24 hours a day, the time required to accumulate data is within "one hundred years". ...

According to our country's five-year plan, I'm afraid at least 20 five-year plans are needed to achieve the small goal of autonomous driving. Is it really so difficult? Not exactly.

According to a recent data released by Tesla AI Department, since the launch of 20 15, the driving mileage of Autopilot (AP) has exceeded 3 billion miles, of which NOA (automatic assisted navigation and driving) has exceeded 65.438+0 billion miles, the automatic lane change function has been executed more than 200,000 times, and the number of intelligent calls has exceeded 654.30 billion times.

However, it should be noted that this data is not accumulated by Tesla's own internal test vehicles. After all, in the autopilot report submitted to the California Vehicle Authority (DMV) last year, Tesla's own autopilot test mileage in California was only 12.2 miles (about 19.6 kilometers). ...

3 billion miles of Ap driving data are run by all Tesla owners who use AP function. Generally speaking, every Tesla owner who uses AP function is Tesla's free mouse.

Tesla's Ap system has a "shadow mode", which can run in the background even if the Ap function is not turned on, collecting real-time running data under real road conditions and feeding it back to Tesla's autonomous driving neural network for learning.

In fact, according to this statement, even if the AP function is not turned on, the driving data is also useful for Tesla. As early as 20 18, 1 1, when Tesla just delivered the 500,000 th car, the total mileage of Tesla cars in the world has reached 65.438+0 billion miles, which is almost close to the application conditions of mass production of autonomous driving systems of 65.438+06.5438+0 billion miles, and it is likely to have been exceeded now.

For comparison, Waymo? At present, the test mileage on the open road has just exceeded 20 million miles, while the cumulative mileage of domestic Baidu Apollo unmanned vehicles is less than 2 million miles, and the gap is almost exponential. It can be said that Tesla's current road test data is almost unparalleled.

So in the road test, with Waymo? Are other autonomous driving companies represented by Tesla unable to fight? Of course not.

In fact, there are currently two kinds of road tests for self-driving cars. One is the real road test in the development environment, and the other is the virtual test on the autopilot simulation test platform. At present, almost all car companies and autonomous driving technology companies are mainly based on virtual testing, supplemented by real road testing, with one exception, Tesla.

Of course, Tesla has such a huge data accumulation because it dares to let the owner be a "white mouse" instead of accumulating the original data by himself. Other players don't have this condition and can only use the autopilot simulation test platform for testing.

The autopilot simulation test platform can be understood as a large-scale game similar to GTA. Of course, the actual simulation test platform is much more complicated than the game. The advantage of virtual simulation test platform is not only time-saving, but also controllable, including modeling on virtual simulation test platform in various real environments.

For example, extreme rain and snow weather, different road conditions at night and so on. And it is not bound by the actual situation. For example, on the simulation test platform, tens of thousands of self-driving cars can run at the same time, and the daily mileage can be millions of kilometers.

Ali recently released the world's first self-driving hybrid simulation test platform. The mileage of virtual test can exceed 8 million kilometers per day, while the time to generate an extreme simulation scene is only 30 seconds, and the number of scene constructions that can be supported every day reaches one million. This is very difficult for a real road test.

Waymo also claimed that 25,000 test vehicles shuttled through their self-driving virtual test platform every day, and each test vehicle learned something new from its own experience and shared it with other cars to avoid similar dangers.

At present, although the test mileage of Waymo on the open road has just exceeded 20 million miles, the simulation test has exceeded 65.438+0 billion miles. Of course, Tesla is unique in that all its 3 billion miles of driving data come from real road conditions, not computer simulations.

In fact, for major car companies and autonomous driving technology companies around the world, virtual simulation testing is the main means. In the autopilot test, 90% of the scenes are completed by the simulation platform, and the rest 10% is completed by the test field and the actual road test.

After all, the cost and cycle of the actual road test are too high and too long. Extreme weather may occur once every few months, but it can be simulated countless times a day on the virtual test platform. Not everyone has the "courage" like Tesla.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.