Steve Wozniak, aka Woz, co-founded a little company called Apple back in 1976. He later permanently left the company in 1985, but has stayed on as a paid employee in a ceremonial capacity (via Wiki).
Wozniak hasn’t been quiet about his love for the Chevy Bolt, having previously said he drives it more often than his Tesla Model S. Now Wozniak has opened up with Forbes with his thoughts on Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
Initially Wozniak was optimistic about autonomous cars, but after having owned his Tesla Model S for several years, he says he became “disenchanted” with Autopilot. His optimism for autonomous vehicles is now deep with skepticism.
After a while we’ve seen how many mistakes it makes. The dumbest human in the world would know how to do this, handle this.”
Part of his skepticism comes from comes from the fact his Tesla couldn’t react to unexpected objects in the road, like debris or a pothole. He stated he doesn’t “see Tesla possibly doing that”.
Related: Tesla’s Autopilot safety numbers continue to improve, now 9x better than humanpilot
What he doesn’t appear to realize is that Tesla’s are not fully autonomous, and Tesla has never made the claim that they are. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has even stated that when Full Self-Driving is feature complete, it will still require driver attention.
Another important aspect that he doesn’t seem to considering is that Tesla’s Autopilot system is getting incrementally better with each passing day due the neural network that trains the system based on previous experiences. Each day, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of driving experience is being added to the system.
No one has been able to achieve full autonomous driving yet, but when it does happen, it will be Tesla.
