L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.
In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers.
Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?"
Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer, non-critical interventions per kilometer, accidents per kilometer, etc.
> In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers.
So how do you explain, succinctly, the difference between a car that can hold 55 mph (but do nothing else automatically) without driver intervention and one that can change from 25 mph to 55 mph and change lanes without driver intervention.
The differences between levels are drastic in terms of implications on overall utility of the technology. There's a reason the terms are used.
> L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.
Needed for what exactly? Each level has its own benefits. That's exactly the reason the levels were established. I want to be able to get into a car, put in an address and fall asleep for the whole trip. When do I get that? L4? L5? If I can't do other tasks while the car is driving, then the point of full autonomous is essentially pointless.
> not engineers.
Precisely. The levels have nothing to do with engineers. It's about understand the benefits for the population. For example - can I fall asleep in the back of the Tesla autonomous car? No, because it's not L5. That's the point.
It doesn't really matter so long as there are fallback drivers in all situations. An lower level autonomy car would remotely connect to the backup driver (in a third world call center) several times per hour in order to behave like a higher level one.
A higher level one would connect more rarely. The only difference I notice as a customer is I pay more out of the box for the higher level car and less as a subscription , while the lower level car costs less out of the box and has a higher subscription fee because the human costs are higher.
It's not an engineer's thing at all. The classifications are very specific differences in the overall system. From an engineer's point of view they are just creating a fully autonomous car. L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully autonomous car been tested through.
I think the key thing people need to realize from the SAE definition [1] of the levels is that they represent designs of the system rather than abilities of the system. I could slap a camera on my dashboard, tell the car to go when it sees green pixels in the top half of its field of view and stop when it sees red pixels. Then I could get out the car and turn it on, and for the 5 seconds it took for that car to kill a pedestrian and crash into a tree, that would be level 5 self driving.
So when people talk about a particular company "achieving" level 4 or level 5, I don't know what they mean. Maybe they mean achieving it "safely" which is murky, since any system can crash. Maybe they mean achieving it legally on public roads, in which case, it's a legal achievement (although depending on what regulatory hoops they had to go through, maybe they had to make technical achievements as well).
> L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the PR people will continue to use the term.
Which is precisely why so many people are critical of the term "fully autonomous".
> 99.999% cases covered
What cases? The point is that edge cases are the issue with autonomous driving. I can fall asleep on a train or a plane because I know there is human conductor who can handle the edge cases. This doesn't exist with L4. Everything else that doesn't let me fall asleep (read a book, look at my phone, etc.) is only marginally better.
I've always thought of L5 as a car that can operate via its sensors + onboard computing alone, at least as well as a median human driver.
No communicating with a server to download maps, no perfect performance, just a car that knows the state's traffic laws driving a brand new road in any reasonable weather, and getting into less crashes than a human would.
Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones.
I don't think any company wants to sign off on the notion that their software will handle all classes of problem, even ones they have no data for at all.
> Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones.
That point is taken into account under J3016_202104 § 8.8:
“There are technical and practical considerations that mitigate the literal meaning of the stipulation that a Level 5 ADS must
be capable of ‘operating the vehicle on-road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can reasonably operate a
conventional vehicle,’ which might otherwise be impossible to achieve. For example, an ADS-equipped vehicle that is
capable of operating a vehicle on all roads throughout the US, but, for legal or business reasons, cannot operate the vehicle
across the borders in Canada or Mexico can still be considered Level 5, even if geo-fenced to operate only within the U.S.”.
Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5 is not feasible.