A fan of Tesla might think that the automaker just can’t catch a break when it comes to its autonomous driving tech. It’s already subject to several federal investigations over its marketing and deployment of technologies like Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD), and as of last week, we can add another to the list involving around 2.4 million Tesla vehicles. This time, regulators are assessing the cars’ performance in low-visibility conditions after four documented accidents, one of which resulted in a fatality.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says this new probe is looking at instances when FSD was engaged when it was foggy or a lot of dust was in the air, or even when glare from the sun blinded the car’s cameras and this caused a problem.
What the car can “see” is the big issue here. It’s also what Tesla bet its future on.
Seriously though, wtf is up with Elon not liking LIDAR? I think pretty much every other manufacturer incorporates it into their higher-end driver assist stuff at this point.
First of all, Elon isn’t that smart.
Second, it would cost more money to put multiple types of sensors on the car. Spending money bad!
Personal speculation based on Elon’s past behavior follows:
Plus he wanted to focus on visual recognition stuff likely because it would have multiple possible income streams compared to a sensor that is just good at keeping a car from running into things. Focusing on the visible light spectrum means the possibilities for facial recognition, data collection by a fleet of Teslas, including the ones people bought, taking pictures, etc.
Basically he wanted to focus on the one thing that seemed more profitable and didn’t want to spend money on that stupid thing that just kept the car from crashing.
I can tell you the real reason: Cameras are cheap for the amount of stuff you can kinda-sorta manage with them. That’s literally it. There’s no other 4D chess game of data collecting or anything else. They’re cheap to add and integrate, and adequate for object detection in typical scenarios. No need to worry about the shape of the bumper or paint effecting the radar, no need to have a bunch of individual ultrasonics integrated into the bumper and the associated wiring/labor costs.
I worked with them, and there were numerous times where they came to us asking for new sensors because their cameras were too shitty for what they wanted to do, then once they got a quote, they miraculously didn’t need them and figured it out. It happened with corner radars on the Y, it happened with them removing the front radars on everything, and it happened with the ultrasonics.
They bet it all on cameras as a lie to consumers and defraud investors that their cheap shit-boxes would be income generating Robotaxis. Even worse, their own engineers had hard data showing that removing the radar would directly result in pedestrian/motorcyclist deaths, but they had to keep those bullshit production numbers going, so they took them out and it’s directly resulted in dozens of likely preventable deaths.
Anyone who’s ever worked with Tesla directly knows they’re an absolute fucking nightmare, and even compared to the shitshow of GM or Stellantis, the absolute blatant disregard for human life at that company is disgusting.
He’s probably stuck on his decision to cut on LIDARs and compensate it with machine learning on cam inputs alone. That doesn’t bring him the edge he wanted. Still, he doubles down as he’s not risking anything besides being proclaimed wrong with that decision.
It’s hilarious because every single time he speaks about some unique aspect of starship that goes against conventional rocketry wisdom, like “we don’t need flame trenches. You get more efficiency on flat ground”, we just have to wait a year or two and all of a sudden they’re adding back the thing they tried to do without (see tower 2 flame trench going in as we speak).
Then they brag about doing the thing everyone else was already doing as if it was some new concept and his Muskrats eat it up.
He needs to risk something to care. As long as his bubble keeps floating, he can sell everything to institutions, businesses and consumers. With existing baby mittens he is cared by, he can openly scam people and burn money with a flamethrower without any repercussions.
It sucks because the talent and skill on display over there is insane and incredible, they really work so hard to achieve never before things. But he has to speak and be the key man PR idiot and diminish those amazing accomplishments.
I know a lot of companies go with RADAR over LIDAR because of reliability issues. RADAR is much more reliable because you can do it solid state, where LIDAR either has moving parts or is subject to IR bleed. However solid state LIDAR is finally becoming a thing so LIDAR will start becoming more commonplace in the next few years.
How long till cars blind each other?
“Humans only need visible light”
Humans are bad drivers as well. Technology should try to do better than humans, not accept the limitations of humans. When Radar, lidar (and others - possibly including things not invented yet) exist we should use them to make cars safer.
You can still do better than human drivers wiith only visible light cameras by using more of them at different heights and angles than a person could pay attention to. I think mixing in other sensors and data sources would still be even better, but they’re already getting more data than a human could.
Humans can move their heads to avoid glare. They can shield glare from their eyes with visors.
Tesla cameras currently can’t do either.
Musk is of course right. The “only” thing he forgot was that his vision-only model needs full human level artificial intelligence behind it to work.
Very genius.
Musk is also forgetting that humans use other senses when driving, not just their sight.
I use echolocation by screaming at other drivers.
And even then, it would only be able to drive as well as a human, and humans kill tons of people on the highways.
If the Wright Brothers used the same logic their flying machines would have all flapped…