In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
To be fair, if you were to construct a wall and paint it exactly like the road, people will run into it as well. That being said, tesla shouldn’t rely on cameras
Yeah, the Roadrunner could easily skip by such barriers, frustrating the Coyote to no end. Tesla is not a Roadrunner.
It’s a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.
So, who’s the YouTuber that’s gonna test this out? Since Elmo has pushed his way into the government in order to quash any investigation into it.
My 500$ robot vacuum has LiDAR, meanwhile these 50k pieces of shit don’t 😂
Holy shit, I knew I’d heard this word before. My Chinese robot vacuum cleaner has more technology than a tesla hahahahaha
Vacuum doesn’t run outdoors and accidentally running into a wall doesn’t generate lawsuits.
But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar. I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.
…what is your point here, exactly? The stakes might be lower for a vacuum cleaner, sure, but lidar - or a similar time-of-flight system - is the only consistent way of mapping environmental geometry. It doesn’t matter if that’s a dining room full of tables and chairs, or a pedestrian crossing full of children.
I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.
Let me make it a but clearer for you to make a fair answer.
Take a .25mw lidar sensor off a vacuum, take it outdoors and scan an intersection.
Will that laser be visible to the sensor?
is it spinning fast enough to track a kid moving in to an intersection when you’re traveling at 73 feet per second?
You’re mischaracterizing their point. Nobody is saying take the exact piece of equipment, put it in the vehicle and PRESTO. That’d be like asking why the vacuum battery can’t power the car. Because duh.
The point is if such a novelty, inconsequential item that doesn’t have any kind of life safety requirements can employ a class of technology that would prevent adverse effects, why the fuck doesn’t the vehicle? This is a design flaw of Teslas, pure and simple.
But they do, there are literally cars out there with lidar sensors.
The question was why can’t I have a lidar sensor on my car if my $150 vacuum has one. The lidar sensor for a car is more than $150.
You don’t have one because there are expensive at that size and update frequency. Sensors that are capable of outdoor mapping at high speed cost the price of a small car.
The manufacturers suspect and probably rightfully so that people don’t want to pay an extra 10 - 30 grand for an array of sensors.
The technology readily exists rober had one in his video that he used to scan a roller coaster. It’s not some conspiracy that you don’t have it on cars and it’s not like it’s not capable of being done because waymo does it all the time.
There’s a reason why waymo doesn’t use smaller sensors they use the minimum of what works well. Which is expensive, which people looking at a mid-range car don’t want to take on the extra cost, hence it’s not available
Only Tesla does not use radar with their control systems. Every single other manufacturer uses radar control mixed with the camera system. The Tesla system is garbage.
I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.
and I think you’re suffering from being an arrogant sack of dicks who doesn’t like being called out on their poor communication skills and, through either a lack of self-awareness or an unwarranted overabundance of self-confidence, projects their own flaws on others. But for the more receptive types who want to learn more, here’s Syed Saad ul Hassan’s very well-written 2022 paper on practical applications, titled Lidar Sensor in Autonomous Vehicles which I found also serves as neat primer of lidar in general..
Well look at you being adult and using big words instead of just insulting people. Not even going to wastime on people like you, I’m going to block you and move on and hope that everyone else does the same so you can sit in your own quiet little world wondering why no one likes you.
You’re an idiot.
And the president is driving one of these?
Maybe we should be purchasing lots of paint and cement blockades…
When he was in the Tesla asking if he should go for a ride I was screaming “Yes! Yes Mr. President! Please! Elon, show him full self driving on the interstate! Show him full self driving mode!”
The president can’t drive by law unless on the grounds of the White House and maybe Camp David. At least while in office. They might be allowed to drive after leaving office…
I don’t think Trump can drive. As in, he doesn’t even know what the pedals do.
clearly knows what he is doing
He looks like he’s making the siren sounds and having a great time
He’s going to fall out of the cab on the next right turn.
Are his hands even big enough to hold the wheel?
The real question is, in a truly self-driving car, (not a tesla) are you actually driving?
Dang
If you own a tesla or a cybertruck you deserve it.
Lol yeah they’re “furious”
I have no clue what you’re trying to say, but the significant amount of outrage a day or two later that I suddenly saw explode on Twitter was mind boggling to me. Couldn’t tell if it was bots or morons but either way, people are big mad about the video.
Looney Tunes shit.
I keep praying that an anvil falls on Elon Husk next.
Okay, that is fucking funny. 😂
If you get any strong emotions on material shit when someone makes a video…you have 0 of my respect. Period.
Saw a guy smash a Stradivarius on video once. definitely had strong emotions on that one.
Really torn up about not having your respect tho…
I think you could argue that that’s not just material stuff though. That’s historical and significant culturally.
Idk if the video has reason to embue strong emotions then it’s fair
“Dipshit Nazis mad at facts bursting their bubble is unreality” is another way of reading this headline.
well yeah, happens every time I say something mad about their current favorite GPU-use fad.
I believe the outrage is that the video showed that autopilot was off when they crashed into the wall. That’s what the red circle in the thumbnail is highlighting. The whole thing apparently being a setup for views like Top Gear faking the Model S breaking down.
Autopilot shuts itself off just before a crash so Tesla can deny liability. It’s been observed in many real-world accidents before this. Others have said much the same, with sources, in this very thread.
well yes but as long as there’s deniability built into my toy, then YOU’RE JUST A BIG DUMB MEANIE-PANTS WHO HATES MY COOL TOYS BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ONE because there’s no other possible reason to hate a toy this cool.
As Electrek points out, Autopilot has a well-documented tendency to disengage right before a crash. Regulators have previously found that the advanced driver assistance software shuts off a fraction of a second before making impact.
This has been known.
They do it so they can evade liability for the crash.
The self-driving equivalent of “Jesus take the wheel!”
Any crash within 10s of a disengagement counts as it being on so you can’t just do this.
Edit: added the time unit.
Edit2: it’s actually 30s not 10s. See below.
Where are you seeing that?
There’s nothing I’m seeing as a matter of law or regulation.
In any case liability (especially civil liability) is an absolute bitch. It’s incredibly messy and likely will not every be so cut and dry.
Well it’s not that it was a crash caused by a level 2 system, but that they’ll investigate it.
So you can’t hide the crash by disengaging it just before.
Looks like it’s actually 30s seconds not 10s, or maybe it was 10s once upon a time and they changed it to 30?
The General Order requires that reporting entities file incident reports for crashes involving ADS-equipped vehicles that occur on publicly accessible roads in the United States and its territories. Crashes involving an ADS-equipped vehicle are reportable if the ADS was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash resulted in property damage or injury
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADAS-L2-SGO-Report-June-2022.pdf
Thanks for that.
The thing is, though the NHTSA generally doesn’t make a determination on criminal or civil liability. They’ll make the report about what happened and keep it to the facts, and let the courts sort it out whose at fault. they might not even actually investigate a crash unless it comes to it. It’s just saying “when your car crashes, you need to tell us about it.” and they kinda assume they comply.
Which, Tesla doesn’t want to comply, and is one of the reasons Musk/DOGE is going after them.
10n what
Oops haha, 10 seconds.
That makes so little sense… It detects it’s about to crash then gives up and lets you sort it?
That’s like the opposite of my Audi who does detect I’m about to hit something and gives me either a warning or just actively hits the brakes if I don’t have time to handle it.
If this is true, this is so fucking evil it’s kinda amazing it could have reached anywhere near prod.even your audi is going to dump to human control if it can’t figure out what the appropriate response is. Granted, your Audi is probably smart enough to be like “yeah don’t hit the fucking wall,” but eh… it was put together by people that actually know what they’re doing, and care about safety.
Tesla isn’t doing this for safety or because it’s the best response. The cars are doing this because they don’t want to pay out for wrongful death lawsuits.
If this is true, this is so fucking evil it’s kinda amazing it could have reached anywhere near prod.
It’s musk. he’s fucking vile, and this isn’t even close to the worst thing he’s doing. or has done.
The point is that they can say “Autopilot wasn’t active during the crash.” They can leave out that autopilot was active right up until the moment before, or that autopilot directly contributed to it. They’re just purely leaning into the technical truth that it wasn’t on during the crash. Whether it’s a courtroom defense or their own next published set of data, “Autopilot was not active during any recorded Tesla crashes.”
If it knows it’s about to crash, then why not just brake?
So, as others have said, it takes time to brake. But also, generally speaking autonomous cars are programmed to dump control back to the human if there’s a situation it can’t see an ‘appropriate’ response to.
what’s happening here is the ‘oh shit, there’s no action that can stop the crash’, because braking takes time (hell, even coming to that decision takes time, activating the whoseitwhatsits that activate the brakes takes time.) the normal thought is, if there’s something it can’t figure out on it’s own, it’s best to let the human take over. It’s supposed to make that decision well before, though.
However, as for why tesla is doing that when there’s not enough time to actually take control?
It’s because liability is a bitch. Given how many teslas are on the road, even a single ruling of “yup it was tesla’s fault” is going to start creating precedent, and that gets very expensive, very fast. especially for something that can’t really be fixed.
for some technical perspective, I pulled up the frame rates on the camera system (I’m not seeing frame rate on the cabin camera specifically, but it seems to either be 36 in older models or 24 in newer.)
14 frames @ 24 fps is about 0.6 seconds@36 fps, it’s about 0.4 seconds. For comparison, average human reaction to just see a change and click a mouse is about .3 seconds. If you add in needing to assess situation… that’s going to be significantly more time.
AEB braking was originally designed to not prevent a crash, but to slow the car when a unavoidable crash was detected.
It’s since gotten better and can also prevent crashes now, but slowing the speed of the crash was the original important piece. It’s a lot easier to predict an unavoidable crash, than to detect a potential crash and stop in time.
Insurance companies offer a discount for having any type of AEB as even just slowing will reduce damages and their cost out of pocket.
Not all AEB systems are created equal though.
Maybe disengaging AP if an unavoidable crash is detected triggers the AEB system? Like maybe for AEB to take over which should always be running, AP has to be off?
Breaks require a sufficient stopping distance given the current speed, driving surface conditions, tire condition, and the amount of momentum at play. This is why trains can’t stop quickly despite having breaks (and very good ones at that, with air breaks on every wheel) as there’s so much momentum at play.
If autopilot is being criticized for disengaging immediately before the crash, it’s pretty safe to assume its too late to stop the vehicle and avoid the collision
This autopilot shit needs regulated audit log in a black box, like what planes or ships have.
In no way should this kind of manipulation be legal.
Because even braking can’t avoid the crash. Unavoidable crash means bad juju if the ‘self driving’ car image is meant to stick around.
Not sure how that helps in evading liability.
Every Tesla driver would need super human reaction speeds to respond in 17 frames, 680ms(I didn’t check the recording framerate, but 25fps is the slowest reasonable), less than a second.
They’re talking about avoiding legal liability, not about actually doing the right thing. And of course you can see how it would help them avoid legal liability. The lawyers will walk into court and honestly say that at the time of the accident the human driver was in control of the vehicle.
And then that creates a discussion about how much time the human driver has to have in order to actually solve the problem, or gray areas about who exactly controls what when, and it complicates the situation enough where maybe Tesla can pay less money for the deaths that they are obviously responsible for.
They’re talking about avoiding legal liability, not about actually doing the right thing. And of course you can see how it would help them avoid legal liability. The lawyers will walk into court and honestly say that at the time of the accident the human driver was in control of the vehicle.
The plaintiff’s lawyers would say, the autopilot was engaged, made the decision to run into the wall, and turned off 0.1 seconds before impact. Liability is not going disappear when there were 4.9 seconds of making dangerous decisions and peacing out in the last 0.1.
The plaintiff’s lawyers would say, the autopilot was engaged, made the decision to run into the wall, and turned off 0.1 seconds before impact. Liability is not going disappear when there were 4.9 seconds of making dangerous decisions and peacing out in the last 0.1.
these strategies aren’t about actually winning the argument, it’s about making it excessively expensive to have the argument in the first place. Every motion requires a response by the counterparty, which requires billable time from the counterparty’s lawyers, and delays the trial. it’s just another variation on “defend, depose, deny”.
They can also claim with a straight face that autopilot has a crash rate that is artificially lowered without it being technically a lie in public, in ads, etc
Which side has more money for lawyers though?
Defense lawyers can make a lot of hay with details like that. Nothing that gets the lawsuit dismissed but turning the question into “how much is each party responsible” when it was previously “Tesla drove me into a wall” can help reduce settlement amounts (as these things rarely go to trial).
It’s not likely to work, but them swapping to human control after it determined a crash is going to happen isn’t accidental.
Anything they can do to mire the proceedings they will do. It’s like how corporations file stupid junk motions to force plaintiffs to give up.
deleted by creator
If the disengage to avoid legal consequences feature does exist, then you would think there would be some false positive incidences where it turns off for no apparent reason. I found some with a search, which are attributed to bad software. Owners are discussing new patches fixing some problems and introducing new ones. None of the incidences caused an accident, so maybe the owners never hit the malicious code.
if it randomly turns off for unapparent reasons, people are going to be like ‘oh that’s weird’ and leave it at that. Tesla certainly isn’t going to admit that their code is malicious like that. at least not until the FBI is digging through their memos to show it was. and maybe not even then.
I think Mark (who made the OG video) speculated it might be the ultrasonic parking sensors detecting something and disengaging.
That does sound more reasonable.
Notice how they’re mad at the video and not the car, manufacturer, or the CEO. It’s a huge safety issue yet they’d rather defend a brand that obviously doesn’t even care about their safety. Like, nobody is gonna give you a medal for being loyal to a brand.
Always be wary of people who are angered by facts.
Kinda depends on the fact, right? Plenty of factual things piss me off, but I’d argue I’m correct to be pissed off about them.
These people haven’t found any individual self identity.
An attack on the brand is an attack on them. Reminds me of the people who made Stars Wars their meaning and crumbled when a certain trilogy didn’t hold up.
An attack on the brand is an attack on them.
Thus it ever is with Conservatives. They make $whatever their whole identity, and so take any critique of $whatever as a personal attack against themselves.
I blame evangelical religions’ need for martyrdom for this.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. These people have no identity or ability to think for themselves because they never needed either one. The church will do all your thinking for you, and anything it doesn’t cover will be handled by Fox News. Be like everyone else and fit in, otherwise… you have to start thinking for yourself. THE HORROR.
The term you are looking for is “external locus of identity”. And, yes.
Important to note, this is a human weakness and not a <political group that isn’t mine> weakness.
Agreed. You’ll see it more often associate with religion.
Thank you.
So literally every single above average sports fan?
The pathological need to be part of a group so bad it overwhelmes all reason is a feature I have yet to understand. And I say that as someone who can recognize in myself those moments when I feel the pull to be part of an in group.
That’s just tribalism in general. Humans are tribal by nature as a survival mechanism. In modern culture, that manifests as behaviors like being a rabid sports fan.
It’s evolutionary. Humans are social pack animals. The need for inclusion was evolved into us over however many years.
And an attack on the stocks they bought
They’re mad at themselves and taking it out on others.
The styrofoam wall had a pre-cut hole to weaken it, and some people are using it as a gotcha proving the video was faked. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
For more background, Rober gave an interview and admitted that they ran the test twice. On the first run, the wall was just fabric, which did not tear away in a manner that was visually striking. They went back three weeks later and built a styrofoam wall knowing that the Tesla would fail, and pre-cut the wall to create a more interesting impact.
Particularly disappointing part of that interview was Rober saying he still plans to buy a new Tesla. Safety issues aside, why would anyone want to do that?
Knowing the insanity of die-hard Tesla fans, it’s likely to try and protect himself.
“I love my Tesla, but” has been a meme for years now because if you ever went on forums to get help or complain what a giant heap of shit the car was, and didn’t bookend it with unabashed praise, you’d have people ripping you to shreds calling you a FUDster and Big Oil shill who’s shorting the stock and trying to destroy the greatest company the world has ever known.
People have learned over the years that even with the most valid of criticism for the company, the only way to even attempt to have it received is by showing just how much you actually love Tesla and Daddy Elon, and your complaints/criticism are only because you care so much about the company and want them to do better. Yes, it’s fucking stupid and annoying, but sadly this is the reality we’ve created for ourselves.
Because the car actually does stop for things that aren’t fake walls made to look like a road, and at least for people as tested by testing agencies
This is the euro NCAP testing.
Note: not all of these cars have lidar, but some do.
Creepy Mormon bros are crypto fascists.
Yeah, but it’s styrofoam. You could literally run through it. And I’m sure they did that more as a safety measure so that it was guaranteed to collapse so nobody would be injured.
But at the same time it still drove through a fucking wall. The integrity doesn’t mean shit because it drove through a literal fucking wall.
Yeah, because he knew that thing probably wasn’t gonna stop. Why destroy the car when you don’t have to? Concrete wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
Sounds like Rober gets to repeat this with a cinderblock wall and use the car as a tax write off then.
Sounds like Tesla fans should repeat this with cinderblock walls to show us how fake it was.
Hopefully with a Mythbusters-style remote control setup in case it explodes. And the trunk filled with ANFO to make sure it does.
me waving a little handheld flag on a tiny pole that just says “Brand loyalty”
…what? No medal???
Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?
Because commonly they use radar instead, the modern sensors that are also used for adaptive cruise control even have heaters to defrost the sensor housing in winter
Because Musk insists that cameras are better and that LiDAR is flawed
That’s not really true.
He use lidar in SpaceX because he knows it’s the right tool for their specific job.
His stance is it’s not that cameras are better, but that cameras have to be so good for a truly AV that putting effort into both means you’re not going to make your cameras good enough to do it and rely on lidar instead. That and cost.
If the car can’t process and understand the world via cameras, it’s doomed to fail at a mass scale anyway.
It might be a wrong stance, but it’s not that lidar is flawed.
Tesla even uses lidar to ground truth their cameras
Edit: just adding a late example - Waymo, Cruise, and probably everyone out there still use humans to tell the car what to do if it gets stuck. I even bet Tesla will if they ever launch a robotaxi as they need a way to somehow help the car if it gets stuck. When we see these failures with Waymo and Cruise, it’s less “is something there” and more “I don’t understand this situation”. The understanding comes from vision. Lidar just gives the something is there, but it isn’t solving their problem.
I think the bigger issue is that he is saying redundancy is not important. He thinks cameras could be good enough, well fine, but the failure results in loss of life so build in redundancy: lidar, radar, anything to failover. The fact that cutting costs OR having a belief that one system is good enough is despicable.
Ya, no redundancy is a problem for sure.
Light aren’t radar systems don’t work internationally because they’re functionally band in many asian and european countries. Instead of making one system that was almost complete finished, they went all camera and now none of it works right.
You can get a Tesla for $42,000… They aren’t that expensive.
With that said, they’ve really cheaped out and even removed the cheaper radar sensors they used to have because Elon wanted to save a buck and really thinks all you need is cameras because he’s an idiot.
Hell, they don’t even have radar anymore, despite even a lot of low end cars having that.
Technically cost savings, but it seems mostly about stubborn insistence on cameras being enough.
They cost hundreds of dollars!!
/$
Cameras are cheaper…that’s it
It’s a car that’s at least £10k
Cost cutting. Lidar is cheaper now but was relative expensive and increased tech debt and maintenance. Also he legit thought that “human see good - then car see good too”. Tesla is being led by a literal idiot.
Read about this somewhere. Iirc, Elon felt cameras were better than LiDAR at a time when that was kinda true, but the technology improved considerably in the interim and he pridefully refuses to admit he needs to adapt. [Edit: I had hastily read the referenced article and am incorrect here; link to accurate statements is linked in a reply below.]
Elon felt cameras were better than LiDAR at a time when that was kinda true,
that was never true
Found the article! I had breezed through the thing. I was incorrect about the LiDAR/camera thing. Instead it was: ‘Elon even admitted that “very high-resolution radars would be better than pure vision”, but he claimed that “such a radar does not exist”’
He, of course was incorrect and proven incorrect, but ‘the problem is that Musk has taken such a strong stance against [LiDARs] for so long that now that they have improved immensely and reduced in prices, he still can’t admit that he was wrong and use them.’
he claimed that “such a radar does not exist”
Lol just like his Nazi forefathers in WWII who refused to believe (more than once!) the British had the advanced radar that they actually did have.
That was the story but it was supply chain issues that lead him to that conclusion. Same reason why lumbar controls were removed from passenger seats.
I don’t even understand that logic. Use both. Even if one is significantly better than the other, they each have different weaknesses and can mitigate for each other.
It was always just to save money and pad the profit margins
And to make him think he’s a smart boy.
A LiDAR sensor couldn’t add more than a few hundred to a car, surely
They ditched radar at a time when radar only added probably about $50 a car according to some estimates.
It may technically get a smidge more profitable, but it almost seems like it’s more about hubris around tech shouldn’t need more than a human to do as well. Which even if it were true, is a stupid stance to take when in that scenario you could have better than human senses.
And thats a few hundred less profit, so we cant have that.
He didn’t think they were better. He thought Tesla could get away without the more expensive lidar. Basically “humans can drive with just vision, that should be enough for an autonomous vehicle also.” Basically he did it because lidar is more expensive.
Even if humans can drive with just vision:
- Human vision has superb dynamic range, auto focus and other features that cameras thousands of dollars could only dream of (for most).
- I don’t want self driving cars to drive like humans. Humans make too many mistakes and are prone to bad decisions (see the need for safety systems in the first place).
- Train and bus transport is better for most people. Driving is a luxury, we’ve forced people that should not be driving to do so in order to keep a job and barely survive.
Human vision is great, human attention is not and neither is their reaction time. Computers are 100x better at both of those. If you throw lidar into the mix, then a car’s vision is now much better than a humans.
IMHO self driving cars have to be statistically 10x better than humans to be widely implemented. If it passes that threshold them I’m fine with them.
I didn’t think it was about the cost. I think he just likes to be contrarian because he thinks it makes him seem smart. He then needs to stick by his stupid decisions.
I’m assuming it’s a cost because it makes sense to me. His goal was to build full-self-driving (FSD) into ever car and sell the service as a subscription.
If you add another $500 in components then that’s a lot of cost (probably a lot cheaper today but this was 10 years ago). Cameras are cheap and can be spread around the car with additional non-FSD benefits where as lidar has much fewer uses when the cost is not covered. I think he used his “first-principles” argument as a justification to the engineers as another way for him to say “I don’t want to pay for lidar, make it work with the cheap cameras.”
Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?
Couldn’t he just use both… Like LiDAR as a contingency
Every LiDAR system must use at least both. LiDAR can’t tell you about lane markings, what’s on signs, and state of traffic lights.
But absolutely, you could have multiple sensing technologies and have access to the best of all worlds.
I added a correction in another reply. Basically he stubbornly refuses to believe a powerful enough LiDAR exists. So I suppose he is all-in on “LieDAR” technology instead (yes, I kinda feel bad about this pun too)
He could. In fact Waymos, for instance, do and are fully autonomous commercial taxis while Tesla are still 2 years out from full self driving for the tenth year in a row
Because Tesla makes money, with the byproduct of cars.
There was a comedy channel on Youtube aeons ago that would do “if x were honest” videos. Their slogan for Valve was “We used to make games. Now we make money.”
Honest Ads is still around, they’ve just moved off the Cracked channel like how PitchMeetings moved off the ScreenRant channel.
The supplier he was using couldn’t supply lidar fast enough, and it was at risk of slowing his manufacturing.
So he worked in a way to not need it, and tell everyone this solution was superior.
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
You don’t necessarily need to implement lidar the way Waymo does it with the spinning sensor. IPad Pros have them. Could have at least put a few of these on the front without significantly affecting aesthetics.
the way Waymo does it with the spinning sensor
There’s a reason they do that, he actually covers that in the video. Lidar spins a single line many, many many times a second. Processing the differences in that line scan to scene makes the point cloud generation many times easier allowing the scan to be exponentially more dense.
The iPhone uses a diffraction grating to shoot static dots at your face and looks for the subtle movements of your face and phone to generate a 3D scan.
The diffraction method is tiny and good for static identification but bad for high-speed outdoors.
The spinny towers give it a better field of view. you could probably put shorter towers on each corner, or even build them into the body panels, but it’s a delicate, expensive instrument and it’s not what’s currently holding back self driving anyway :)
Everyone and their dog uses radar for distance sensing for the adaptive cruise control. You take the same migh speed sensor and use it for wall detection. It’s how the emergency stop functions work where it detects a car in front of you slamming on the brakes.
It’s also very expensive.
Relative to the car, it’s peanuts at large quantities
Sorry but I don’t get it. You can getva robot vacuum with lidar for $150. I understand automotive lidars need to have more reliability, range etc. but I don’t understand how it’s not even an option for $30k car.
You’re car’s not driving indoors at 1mph with the maximum damage being tapping but not marring the wall or vehicle.
You need high speed, bright lasers, and immense computation to handle outdoor, fast, dangerous work
The is Elon we’re talking about. Why pay a few hundred bucks to improve safety when it’s cheaper and easier to fight the lawsuits when people die?
he does not want to pay $1 for rain sensors and $2 for ultrasonic parking sensors, any price for lidar must be unacceptable
They were much more expensive years ago when the decisions were made to not use it. Costs have come down a lot. And cars can have more than 1 if you’re going to use it. That also means more compute needed so a stronger computer and more power draw meaning less milage, which means bigger battery for same mileage. It all adds up.
Edit: might even impact aerodynamics, which again means more battery, which is more expensive.
The power draw to process the LIDAR data is negligible compared to the energy used to move the car. 250-300 Watt hours per mile is what it takes to move an electric sedan on average. You might lose a mile of range over an hour of driving, and that’s if you add the LIDAR system without reducing the optical processing load.
LIDAR sensor housing can be made aerodynamic.
While it’s true that LIDAR was more expensive when they started work on self-driving, it doesn’t make sense for them to continue down this path now. It’s all sunk cost fallacy and pride at this point.
A mile per hour is probably about right, but that’s probably per lidar. Waymo has 4 for example, so on a 300mile vehicle that could be 17 miles at 70mph.
Even if you can make it aerodynamic it’s still not going to be as aerodynamic as it not being there.
Sunk cost fallacy make sense, but I’d say it’s also the fear of the massive lawsuit/upgrade cost if wrong due to his statements.
I tried to look up how much power these self driving systems are pulling, but it looks like that will require a deeper dive. The only results I got from a quick search were from 2017-2018, and the systems were pulling around 2 kW. I’m sure that’s come down in the 7-8 years since, but I don’t know how much.
I think you’re right on the lawsuit/upgrade cost. They are on the hook to supply Full Self Driving to all the buyers who bought the option. It’s clear they’re not going to be able to provide it. It looks like there are several class-action lawsuits currently underway.
I think the older Tesla system (HW3) was around 300w, but I think the newer system is more now as they beefed up the compute, but I haven’t seen a number on that. The old system is pretty much maxed out though with no room to grow other then making things more efficient vs just more raw power usage.
A lot of the older hardware back then wasn’t purpose built for driving and was more repurposed general graphical compute, so it was less efficient hence the 2Kw you were seeing. Tesla built ASICs for the driving computer to bring costs and power usage down.
With the newer purpose built Nvidia stuff I’m sure that has brought the power draw down a lot though, likely relatively close (better or worse I don’t know) than Tesla’s watt per performance.
edit: clarity
IIRC robot vacuums usually use a single Time of Flight (ToF) sensor that rotates, giving the robot a 2d scan of it’s surroundings. This is sufficient for a vacuum which only needs to operate on a flat surface, but self driving vehicles need a better understanding of their surroundings than just a thin slice.
That’s why cars might use over 30 distinct ToF sensors, each at a different vertical angle, that are then all placed in the rotating module, giving the system a full 3d scan of it’s surroundings. I would assume those modules are much more expensive, though still insignificant compared to the cost of a car sold on the idea of self driving.
It costs too much. It’s also why you have to worry about panels falling off the swastitruck if you park next to them. They also apparently lack any sort of rollover frame.
He doesn’t want to pay for anything, including NHTSB crash tests.
It’s literally what Drumpf would have created if he owned a car company. Cut all costs, disregard all regulations, and make the public the alpha testers.
The panels are glued on. The glue fails when the temperature changes.
I can’t believe that this car is legal to drive in public.
Right? It’s also got a cast aluminum frame that breaks if you load the trailer hitch with around 10,000 lbs of downward force. Which means that the back of your Cybertruck could just straight up break off if you’ve frontloaded your trailer and hit a pothole wrong.
Only in America
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
The
frontback fell off.
it did cost too much at the time, but currently he doesnt want to do it because he would have to admit hes wrong.
The guy bankrupted a casino, not by playing against it and being super lucky, but by owning it. Virtually everything he has ever touched in business has turned to shit. How do you ever in the living fuck screwup stakes at Costco? My cousin with my be good eye and a working elbow could do it.
And now its the country’s second try. This time unhinged, with all the training wheels off. The guy is stepping on the pedal while stripping the car for parts and giving away the fuel. The guy doesn’t even drive, he just fired the chauffeur and is dismantling the car from the inside with a shot gun…full steam ahead on to a nice brick wall and an infinity cliff ready to take us all with him. And Canada and Mexico and Gina. Three and three quarters of a year more of daily atrocities and law breakage. At least Hitler boy brought back the astronauts.
I was mostly lambasting fElon, not Drumpf. You’re correct on Drumpf though. I was discussing the swastitruck, after all. Drumpf showed that he’s scared to drive any of the swasticars when he pretended to know how to sell anything, much less an EV.
Oh, and Drumpf bankrupted 3-4 casinos in the late '80s to early '90s in Atlantic City, NJ. Literally the golden age of AC casinos.
It’s all money laundering for russian mob/fsb. Still pretty hard to bankrupt a business that basically prints $$$ though. Epic levels of incompetence!
Not enough. Go on to do it four more times.
basically like oceangates stockton.
I mean, I haven’t ever heard of his father referring to Stockton as “retarded,” according to his teachers and professors, the way that I absolutely have heard about both Drumpf and fElon.
Other than that, yeah. Bullshit techbro shit, and landleech shit.
stockton california is named after family.
But without the happy ending.
I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well…
The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.
If I could pass one law, requiring multiple redundant scanning tech on anything autonomous large enough to hurt me might be it.
I occasionally go to our warehouses which have robotic arms, autonomous fork lifts, etc. All of those have far more saftey features than a self driving Tesla, and they aren’t in public.
The tl;dr here is that Elon said that humans have eyes and they work, and eyes are like cameras, so use cameras instead of expensive LIDAR. Dick fully inside car door for the slam.
The worst part is that LiDAR isn’t even expensive anymore. Hell, my phone has LiDAR. He originally said that to justify the fact that they were dealing with a component shortage and he needed to keep shipping vehicles. So he simply shipped them without the LiDAR systems that he couldn’t get ahold of, and claimed it was because he didn’t need LiDAR.
But now LiDAR is much more advanced and cheaper. But since he refused to admit it was because of a component shortage, adding LiDAR now would require Musk to publicly admit he was wrong. And we all know that will never happen.
I thlamed my penith in the car door
Are you thure it wathn’t your tongue?
Parapa the rappa!
You SLAMMED your PEnis IN the CAR door
Ah human eyes have never caused a car accident.
“Wow, such a brilliant CEO! Cutting waste where it truly matters.” - fanbois/bots everywhere
This is the same energy as blizzard saying “you’ve got phones don’t you?”
Teslas are cheap crap, for a premium price, this has always been the case
In theory he’s not wrong, except for that part where neither the optics nor (especially) the software come anywhere close to matching the performance of human eyes and brains and won’t for the foreseeable future.
And human eyes/brains aren’t good enough anyway. The whole hype about self-driving cars was that they were supposed to be better than humans.
The entire premise of the joke is that we could mistake a sufficiently detailed image of a road for an actual road. That humans are susceptible to such a failure does not mean it is reasonable for a robot to share the same flaw.
They used to have it but Elmo removed it years ago as a cost cutting move.
Now they’re the only self driving car that drives into immovable objects.
You might remember a few years ago a guy got decapitated when his Model S drove straight into the side of a semi trailer.
To be clear, Elon Musk removed radar from Tesla vehicles and not Lidar, but a) he had it removed even from vehicles that had the hardware for radar and b) radar would have been enough to pass all the tests in the video anyway.
It didn’t fool lidar… The car equipped with lidar stopped before hitting the wall because it saw the obstacle not what was on the obstacle
You didn’t see the quote in the above comment that specifically states Teslas don’t have lidar but other brands using it weren’t fooled?
The person I replied to said he wondered how it fooled lidar…
They wondered that before/while reading the article, then got to the quoted part that explains that Teslas don’t have Lidar, and understood that it did not in fact fool it: it just wasn’t there.
Yeah I’m dumb… Can’t Read
“Wondered” past tense, as in now they realise after reading the quote that the car they thought had lidar in it actually does not.
Well I’m an idiot… That’s all
I want to give you a mark up for self reflection but don’t want to seem like I’m piling on. Good on ya
More like liedar! /s
I see you didn’t catch just how dumb teslas are. If it wouldn’t result in actual human harm I would have liked to paint one of these.
tesla doesnt use lIDAR anymore, not since '18, it relies on cameras solely.
They removed radar in 2021 for cost-cutting reasons and have never had LiDAR, which Elon called “a fool’s errand”.
Source: I worked on their ADAS systems.
Painted wall? That’s high tech shit.
I got a Tesla from my work before Elon went full Reich 3, and try this:
- break on bridge shadows on the highway
- start wipers on shadows, but not on rain
- break on cars parked on the roadside if there’s a bend in the road
- disengage autopilot and break when driving towards the sun
- change set speed at highway crossings because fuck the guy behind me, right?
- engage emergency break if a bike waits to cross at the side of the road
To which I’ll add:
- moldy frunk (short for fucking trunk, I guess?), no ventilation whatsoever, water comes in, water stays in
- pay attention noises for fuck-all reasons masking my podcasts and forcing me to rewind
- the fucking cabin camera nanny - which I admittedly disabled with some chewing gum
- the worst mp3 player known to man, the original Winamp was light years ahead - won’t index, won’t search, will reload USB and lose its place with almost every car start
- bonkers UI with no integration with Android or Apple - I’m playing podcasts via low rate Bluetooth codecs, at least it doesn’t matter much for voice
- unusable airco in auto mode, insists on blowing cold air in your face
Say what you want about European cars, at least they got usability and integration right. As did most of the auto industry. Fuck Tesla, never again. Bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes.
It’s brake, the car brakes.
It probably breaks as well, but that’s not relevant right now.
I’m in full on rant mode, who has time to edit :>
I read that in Leslie Nielson’s voice.
Walk on by. I break down and cry.
This, if the so called Tesla fans even drive the car, they know all of the above is more or less true. Newer cars have fewer of these issues, but the camera based Auto Pilot system is still in place. The car doesn’t even allow you to use cruise control under certain circumstances, because the car deems visibility too poor. The camera also only detects rain when its pouring, every other situation it will just randomly engage/disengage.
I drive a Tesla Model 3 (2024) daily and I wouldn’t trust the car driving itself towards a picture like that. It would be an interesting experiment to have these “Tesla Fans” do the same experiment and use a concrete wall for some additional fun. I bet they won’t even conduct the experiment, because they know the car won’t detect the wall.
It’s brake not break
In this case it might be both
Frunk is short for front trunk. The mp3 issues mostly goes away if you pay for LTE on the car. The rest of the issues I can attest to. Especially randomly changing the cruise control speed on a highway because Google maps says so, I guess? Just hard breaking at high speeds for no fucking reason.
I know what frunk stands from: funky trunk, given the smell. And I had premium connectivity included, doesn’t do squat unless you use Spotify, which no thanks (for different reasons). I have carefully curated “car music” on an USB drive, but noo. Search will only return Spotify results.
Our Mazda 3’s adaptive cruise thought a car that was exiting was in our lane and hit the brakes, right in front of a car I had just passed. Sorry, dude, I made the mistake of trusting the machine.
Incidents like that made me realize how far we have to go before self driving is a thing. Before we got that car, I thought it was just around the corner, but now I see all the situations that car identifies incorrectly, and it’s like, yeah, we’re going to be driving ourselves for a long time.
Tbh false stopping is a lot better than driving over children by mistake
Had a situation driving behind a Tesla on a freeway in clear conditions with no other cars nearby, where they suddenly braked, strongly. I actually had to swerve to go around him. He looked over at me sheepishly. I was a skeptic about the FSD concerns before that happened. Now I try to be cautious, but there are so many Teslas on the road now, I can’t double check that all of them won’t suddenly freak out
You are supposed to leave a safe distance between the vehicle in front
