Andrew J. Hawkins, Vox; The bill finally comes due for Elon Musk
"What is an autonomous car? It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is trickier than it seems. To help clear things up, SAE International, a US organization that represents automotive engineers, created a six-step guide to automation. Intended for engineers rather than the general public, it ranged from Level 0, meaning no automation whatsoever, to Level 5, meaning the vehicle can drive itself anywhere at any time without any human intervention.
And there’s plenty of room for error and misunderstanding. A problem we’ve seen is what researcher Liza Dixon calls “autonowashing,” or any effort to overhype something as autonomous when it’s not.
Most experts dismiss Level 5 as pure science fiction. Waymo and others operate Level 4 vehicles, but very few people really believe that Level 5 is attainable. Level 5 would require “an astronomical amount of technological development, maintenance, and testing,” Torc Robotics, a company developing self-driving trucks, says. Others call it a pipe dream.
Except Musk. At a conference in Shanghai, Musk said with supreme confidence that the company “will have the basic functionality for Level 5 autonomy complete this year.” That was in July 2020."
