The tweet that referenced the YouTube video explicitly stated that there was one disengagement. A review of the video shows at least two disengagements.
Something like 90% of the driving was on highways -- which is no different than the Tesla Autopilot from 5 years ago.
So, by my math, you have 2 disengagements in the roughly 1 hour of 'city streets' driving. This is what passes for journalism today.
Honest question, why is this noteworthy? Isn't driving on the I-5 mostly pretty chill/straightforward? My understanding of self driving is that all the concerns are about handling potential incidents at high risk situations (e.g. intersections, construction, etc)
Statistically speaking, one disengagement in ~10 hours of self driving feels like it's nothing to write home about.
It's not and other companies (maybe even Tesla itself?) have been able to do this since at least the early 2010's. Tesla gets a lot of marketing bang for their buck by letting a couple dozen Youtubers pay for and test their autonomous driving software instead of paid safety drivers. It make it feels more like something anyone can buy now unlike the competitions self-driving cars... and you can pay for it now! just it doesn't come with the features you expect from watching the videos or seeing the name of the product.
The video came across as an 8 minute commercial, narrated by Andrej Karpathy, the head of the autonomous driving effort at Tesla. There is a lot of shady ways to push a product these days -- but slipping this into my 'news-feed' has to take the cake.
Parts of I-5 are a mess... only 2 lanes, with trucks slowing the right lane to 55 mph. Then a constant parade of cars cutting from the right lane into the bumper-to-bumper 75 mph left lane, nearly getting rear-ended, to avoid those slow trucks. Then switching back right, slamming on their brakes to merge in.
But maybe they drove it early morning on a weekday?
Something like 90% of the driving was on highways -- which is no different than the Tesla Autopilot from 5 years ago.
So, by my math, you have 2 disengagements in the roughly 1 hour of 'city streets' driving. This is what passes for journalism today.