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.
I hope some of you actually skimmed the article and got to the “disengaging” part.
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, autopilot turning itself off right before a crash is sus and I wouldn’t put it past Tesla to do something like that (I mean come on, why don’t they use lidar) but maybe it’s so the car doesn’t try to power the wheels or something after impact which could potentially worsen the event.
On the other hand, they’re POS cars and the autopilot probably just shuts off cause of poor assembly, standards, and design resulting from cutting corners.
Rober seems to think so, since he says in the video that it’s likely disengaging because the parking sensors detect that it’s parked because of the object in front, and it shuts off the cruise control.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for autopilot to brake and try to stop the car instead of just turning off and letting the car roll? If it’s certain enough that there will be an accident, just applying the brakes until there’s user override would make much more sense…
I see your point, and it makes sense, but I would be very surprised if Tesla did this. I think the best option would be to turn off the features once an impact is detected. It shutting off before hand feels like a cheap ploy to avoid guilt
if it can actually sense a crash is imminent, why wouldn’t it be programmed to slam the brakes instead of just turning off?
Do they have a problem with false positives?
I’ve been wondering this for years now. Do we need intelligence in crashes, or do we just need vehicles to stop? I think you’re right, it must have been slamming the brakes on at unexpected times, which is unnerving when driving I’m sure.
So they had an issue with the car slamming on the brakes at unexpected times, caused by misidentifying cracks in the road or glare or weird lighting or w/e. The solution was to make the cameras ignore anything they can’t recognize at high speeds. This resulted in Teslas plowing into the back of firetrucks.
As the article mentioned, other self-driving cars solved that with lidar, which elon himself is against because he says AI will just get so good and 2d cameras are cheaper.
This is from 6 years ago. I haven’t heard of the issue more recently
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/tesla-autopilot-crash-analysis/
The tesla did not consistently detect that the thing infront of it was a truck, so it didn’t brake. Also, this describes a lot of similar cases.
I remember a youtuber doing similar tests, where they’d try to run over a fake pedestrian crossing or standing in the road at low speed, and then high speed. It would often stop at low speed, but very rarely stopped or swerved at high speed.
if it was european made, it would slam the brakes or swerve in order to at least try and save lives since governments attempt to regulate companies to not do evil shit. Since it american made it is designed to maximise profit for shareholders.
I don’t believe automatic swerving is a good idea, depending on what’s off to the side it has the potential to make a bad situation much worse.
I’m thinking like, kid runs into the street, car swerves and mows down a crowd on the sidewalk
Normal cars do whatever is in their power to cease movement while facing upright. In a wreck, the safest state for a car is to cease moving.
Yeah but that’s milliseconds. Ergo, the crash was already going to happen.
In any case, the problem with Tesla autopilot is that it doesn’t have radar. It can’t see objects and there have been many instances where a Tesla crashed into a large visible object.
That’s what’s confusing me. Rober’s hypothesis is without lidar the Tesla couldn’t detect the wall. But to claim that autopilot shut itself off before impact means that the Tesla detected the wall and decided impact was imminent, which disproves his point.
If you watch the in car footage, autopilot is on for all of three seconds and by the time its on impact was already going to happen. That said, teslas should have lidar and probably do something other than disengage before hitting the wall but I suspect their cameras were good enough to detect the wall through lack of parallax or something like that.
I’ve heard that too, and I don’t doubt it, but watching Mark Rober’s video, it seems like he’s deathgripping the wheel pretty hard before the impact which seems more likely to be disengaging. Each time, you can see the wheel tug slightly to the left, but his deathgrip pulls it back to the right.
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.
Older teslas HAD lidar. They were removed on newer models to cut costs.
They did not. They had radar, which was removed.
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.
The self driving system uber was working on also went downhill after they went full visual only.
yeah, you’d think they’d at least use radar. That’s cheap AF. It’s like someone there said I have this hill to die on, I bet we can do it all with cameras.
Good God it’s like you’re going out of the way to intentionally misunderstand the point.
Nobody is saying that the lidar on a car should cost the same as a lidar on a vacuum cleaner. What everyone is saying is that if the company that makes vacuum cleaners thinks it’s important enough to put lidar on, surely you’re not the company that makes cars should think that it’s important enough to put lidar on.
Stop being deliberately dense.
Stop being deliberately dense.
Its weaponized incompetence.
I bet they do the same shit with their partner when it comes to dishes, laundry, and the garbage.
You’re either taking to a fanboy or Elon on ket. You ain’t gettin’ through.
I’m not being deliberately dense it just a seriously incomplete analogy. At worst I’m being pedantic. And if that’s the case I apologize.
I agree with the premise that the cars need lidar radar whatever the f*** they can get.
Saying if a vacuum company can see that a vacuum needs lidar (which is a flawed premise because half the f****** vacuums use vslam/cameras) then why doesn’t my car have lidar, none of the consumer car companies are using it (yet anyway). It’s great to get the rabble up and say why are vacuum companies doing it when car companies can’t but when nobody’s doing it there are reasons. Ford Chevy BMW f***, what about Audi what about Porsche? What about these luxury brands that cost an arm and three fucking legs.
Let’s turn this on its head, why do people think they’re not including it in cars. And let’s discount musk for the moment because we already know he’s a fucking idiot that never had an original idea in his life and answer why it isn’t in any other brand.
Is it just that none of these companies thought about it? Is it a conspiracy? What do people think here. If I’m being so dense tell me why the companies aren’t using it.
It’s a cost-benefit calculation.
- For a vacuum at the speeds they travel and the range it needs to go, LiDAR is cheap, worth doing. Meanwhile computing power is limited.
- my phone is much more expensive than the robot vacuum, and its LiDAR can range to about a room, at speeds humans normally travel. It works great for almost instant autofocus and a passable measurement tool.
- For a car, at the speeds they travel and range it needs to go, LiDAR is expensive, large and ugly. Meanwhile the car already needs substantial computing power
So the question is whether they can achieve self-driving without it: humans rely on vision alone so maybe an ai can. I’m just happy someone is taking a different approach rather than the follow the pack mentality: we’re more likely to get something that works
Edit: everyone talks about the cost-benefit, but I imagine it makes things simpler for the ai when all sensors can be treated and weighted identically. Whether this is a benefit or disadvantage will eventually become clear
Whether lidars are reliable enough to run on autonomous cars has nothing to do with whether they are cost efficient enough to run on vacuum cleaners though. The comparison is therefore completely irrelevant. Might as well complain that jet fighters don’t allow sharing on Instagram your location, because your much cheaper phone does.
You’re bending over backwards to miss the point huh
So be clear about the point.
10 - 30 grand
Decent LIDAR sensors have gotten a lot cheaper in the last 5 years or so, here’s one that is used in commercial self-driving taxis: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/X01-36020021-Nev-Auto-Parts-for_1601252480285.html
So that one sensor is $700. Waymo has 4 LIDAR sensors (all of which are physically larger and I would imagine fancier than the Alibaba ones, but that’s speculation), so just in the scanner hardware itself you’re looking at $2,800. Plus the computer to run it, plus the 6 radar receivers, and 13 cameras, I could absolutely see the price for the end user to be around $10k worth of sensors.
But to be clear, I don’t think camera only systems are viable or safe. They should at minimum be forced to use radar in combination with their cameras. In fact I actually trust radar more than lidar because it’s much less susceptible to heavy snow or rain.
Shit that’s pretty decent. That looks like a ready fit car part, I wonder what vehicle it’s for. Kind of sucks that it only faces One direction but at that price four them would not be a big deal
I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.
and I think you’re suffering from being an arrogant sack of dicks who doesn’t like being called out on their poor communication skills and, through either a lack of self-awareness or an unwarranted overabundance of self-confidence, projects their own flaws on others. But for the more receptive types who want to learn more, here’s Syed Saad ul Hassan’s very well-written 2022 paper on practical applications, titled Lidar Sensor in Autonomous Vehicles which I found also serves as neat primer of lidar in general..
Wow, what’s with all the hostility against him.
It’s maybe because i also know a bit about lidars that his comment was clear to me (“ha, try putting a vacuum lidar in a car and see if it can do anything useful outside at the speeds & range a car needs”).
Is it that much of an issue if someone is a bit snarky when pointing out the false equivalence of “my 500$ vacuum has a lidar, but a tesla doesn’t? harharhar”.
(“ha, try putting a vacuum lidar in a car and see if it can do anything useful outside at the speeds & range a car needs”).
Because no one suggested that.
So someone saying “why does my 500$ vacuum have a lidar but not the car” isn’t suggesting that?
I guess in some technical way you’re right, but it for sure is the implication…
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.
jesus man, how many alts do you have?
The price of lidar sensors has dropped by like 50 times since musk decided to cut costs by eliminating theny from their cars.
Yeah looks like it, chinese sensors are down to 700 a pop. Even if it’s a few grand, it’s decent, looks like chevy offers it on 7 models.
E. Lon Musk. Supah. Geenius.
MEEP MEEP
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.
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.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” ― Barry Goldwater
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.
Nice variable.
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.
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.
To be fair, and ugh, I hate to have to stand up for these assholes, but…
To be fair, their claim is that the video was a lie and that the results were manufactured. They believe that Teslas are actually safe and that Rober was doing some kind of Elon Musk takedown trying to profit off the shares getting tanked and promote a rival company.
They actually do have a little bit of evidence for those claims:
- The wall changes between different camera angles. In some angles the wall is simply something painted on canvas. In other angles it’s a solid styrofoam wall.
- The inside the car view in the YouTube video doesn’t make it clear that autopilot mode is engaged.
- Mark Rober chose to use Autopilot mode rather than so-called Full Self Driving.
But, he was interviewed about this, and he provided additional footage to clear up what happened.
-
They did the experiment twice, once with a canvas wall, then a few weeks later with a styrofoam wall. The car smashed right into the wall the first time, but it wasn’t very dramatic because the canvas just blew out of the way. They wanted a more dramatic video for YouTube, so they did it again with a styrofoam wall so you could see the wall getting smashed. This included pre-weakening the wall so that when the car hit it, it smashed a dramatic Looney-Tunes looking hole in the wall. When they made the final video, they included various cuts from both the first and second attempts. The car hit the wall both times, but it wasn’t just one single hit like it was shown in the video.
-
There’s apparently a “rainbow” path shown when the car is in Autopilot mode. [RAinbows1?!? DEI!?!?!?!] In the cut they posted to YouTube, you couldn’t see this rainbow path. But, Rober posted a longer cut of the car hitting the wall where it was visible. So, it wasn’t that autopilot was off, but in the original YouTube video you couldn’t tell.
-
He used Autopilot mode because from his understanding (as a Tesla owner (this was his personal vehicle being tested)), Full Self Driving requires you to enter a destination address. He just wanted to drive down a closed highway at high speed, so he used Autopilot instead. In his understanding as a Tesla owner and engineer, there would be no difference in how the car dealt with obstacles in autopilot mode vs. full self driving, but he admitted that he hadn’t tested it, so it’s possible that so-called Full Self-Driving would have handled things differently.
Anyhow, these rabid MAGA Elon Fanboys did pick up on some minor inconsistencies in his original video. Rober apprently didn’t realize what a firestorm he was wading into. His intention was to make a video about how cool LIDAR is, but with a cool scene of a car smashing through a wall as the hook. He’d apparently been planning and filming the video for half a year, and he claims it just happened to get released right at the height of the time when Teslas are getting firebombed.
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.
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.
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?
Creepy Mormon bros are crypto fascists.
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.
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.
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
Edit: having just watched the video, that was a very obvious fake wall. You can see the outlines of it pretty well. I’m also surprised it failed other tests when not on autopilot, seems pretty fucking dangerous.
To be fair, if you were to construct a wall and paint it exactly like the road, people will run into it as well.
this isn’t being fair. It’s being compared to the other- better- autopilot systems that use both LIDAR and radar in addition to daylight and infrared optical to sense the world around them.
Teslas only use daylight and infrared. LIDAR and radar systems both would not have been deceived.
The video does bring up human ability too with the fog test (“Optically, with my own eyes, I can no longer see there’s a kid through this fog. The lidar has no issue.”) But, as they show, this wall is extremely obvious to the driver.
The tesla would lose its shit if it sees this
They already have trouble enough with trucks carrying traffic lights, or with speed limit drivers on them.
I’d take that bet. I imagine at least some drivers would notice something sus’ (due to depth perception, which should be striking as you get close, or lack of ANY movement or some kind of reflection) and either
- slow down
- use a trick, e.g. flicking lights or driving a bit to the sides and back, to try to see what’s off
or probably both, but anyway as other already said, it’s being compared to other autopilot systems, not human drivers.
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.
It basically already happened in the Mark Rober video, it turns off by itself less than a second before hitting
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.
I thlamed my penith in the car door
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.
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.
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.
10n what
Oops haha, 10 seconds.
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.
I knew they wouldn’t necessarily investigate it, that’s always their discretion, but I had no idea there was no actual bite to the rule if they didn’t comply. That’s stupid.
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.
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.
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.
If it knows it’s about to crash, then why not just brake?
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?
The self-driving equivalent of “Jesus take the wheel!”
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.
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.
Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?
Cameras are cheaper…that’s it
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.
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.
It wasn’t Cracked, it was a channel called Gaming Wildlife, last video on the channel was posted 6 years ago; I think they’re defunct. here’s the video in question.
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.]
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.
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?
Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?
What makes you think people make rational decisions? Especially sociopaths like Musk?
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
Looney Tunes shit.
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
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.
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.
it did cost too much at the time, but currently he doesnt want to do it because he would have to admit hes wrong.
What would definitely help with the discussion is if Mark Rober the scientist left a fucking crumb of scientific approach in his video. He didn’t really explain how he was testing it just slam car into things for views. This and a collaboration with a company that makes lidar made the video open to every possible criticism and it’s a shame.
Discovery channel level of dumbed down „science”.
Found the Tesla owner!
😋
I fucking hate tesla and elon musk. Also I fucking hate people calling unverifiable shit science
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…
The real question is, in a truly self-driving car, (not a tesla) are you actually driving?
I don’t think Trump can drive. As in, he doesn’t even know what the pedals do.
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end. Why is this even a thing? Like talking about box office results, companies financials and stocks…. If you’re not an investor of theirs, just stop. It sounds like you’re working for free for them.
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end.
My blackest pill in my adult life was the realization that we’ve leveled off as a species. This is as good as it gets.
Our brains made monumental leaps in development over the last half-million years, with the strongest changes being made during the last ice-age, times when resources were scarce, and survival was extremely difficult and humanity was caught up in many wars and fights with other humans and animals and weather alike. Our brains were shaped to do a couple of things better than others: invent stories to explain feelings, and join communities. These adaptations worked amazingly, it allowed us to band together and pool resources, to defend each other and spot signs of danger. These adaptations allowed us to develop language and agriculture and formed our whole society, but lets not forget what they are at heart: brains invent stories to explain feelings, and we all want social identity and in-group. Deeply. This shit is hardwired into us.
Nearly every major societal problem we have today can be traced back to this response system from the average human brain to either invent a story to explain a discomfort, and those discomforts are often the simple desire to have a group identity.
Our world will get more complicated, but our brains aren’t moving. We can only push brains so far. They’re not designed to know how to form words and do calculus, we trained our brains to do those things, but our systems are far more complicated than language and calculus. Complex problems produce results like lack of necessities, which create negative feelings, which the brain invents stories to explain (or are provided stories by the ruling class.)
So this is it. Nobody is coming. Nothing is changing.
We MIGHT be able to rein in our worst responses over enough time, we MIGHT be able to form large enough groups with commonalities that we achieve tenuous peace. But we will never be a global species, we will never form a galactic empire, we will never rise above war and hate and starvation and greed. Not in our current forms at least. There’s no magic combination of political strategies and social messages that will make everyone put down their clubs and knives.
This is it, a cursed, stupid primate on a fleck of dust spinning around a spark in a cloud of sparks, just looking at every problem like it’s either a rival tribe or a sabertooth-cat hiding in the bushes. Maybe if we don’t destroy ourselves someday our AI descendants will go out into the larger universe, but it certainly won’t be us.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. This is a nice piece to help those to self reflect once in a well, it feels…… grounding. Curious what the positive sequel would be…
Curious what the positive sequel would be…
On good days, I remember that the sheer finality and certainty of the state of our world, our universe, the idea that we may not even have free-will at all and this is all just an inexplicable, passing moment of a universe becoming aware of itself, the grandure of it does more for me than any religious ideas or poems or songs or inspirational messages. It’s wholly absurd and beautiful and we exist in the intersection of scales that are so immense they cannot be fathomed by our primitive minds… these ideas make all the struggles, pains and hardships I experience feel a lot less tangible.
I am aware that a lot of this sensation is simple disassociation from depression, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, disassociation is either a survival trick to keep us alive when our minds get the best of us, or it’s a consequence of something actual and special inside us, a type of awareness that seems to reside just outside of the things we can quantify and explain, a sum greater than its parts. Disassociation is like standing just outside yourself watching the story unfold, and it used to terrify me, now I realize it can’t be helped, we’re all on tracks and it’s just a ride. But if you look around, it can be a beautiful ride, even the shitty parts exist as a strange kind of reminder that the universe doesn’t owe us anything, take it or leave it, it’s all just experiences.
