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.
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.
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.
“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
The term you are looking for is “external locus of identity”. And, yes.
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.
Oh yes I’m aware. I’m clearly missing, or at least have a reduced expression of, that gene. I play soccer multiple times a week, meanwhile I couldn’t possibly care less about watching soccer; or any sport for that matter.
And an attack on the stocks they bought
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creepy Mormon bros are crypto fascists.
Because the car actually does stop for things that aren’t fake walls made to look like a road.
This is the euro NCAP testing.
Note: not all of these cars have lidar, but some do.
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.
Right. Just because sometimes we have to accept something, doesn’t mean we have to like it.
They’re mad at themselves and taking it out on others.
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.
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.
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
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).
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”.
What’s worse is LIDAR systems exist in other cars that can do this.
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.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.”
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.
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. That’s stupid.
I get the impression it disengages so that Tesla can legally say “self driving wasn’t active when it crashed” to the media.
Except they can’t really because of the above which was explicitly to prevent that.
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.
The given reason is simply that it will return control to the driver if it can’t figure out what to do, and all evidence is consistent with that. All self-driving cars have some variation of this. However yes it’s suspicious when it disengages right when you need it most. I also don’t know of data to support whether this is a pattern or just a feature of certain well-published cases.
Even in those false positives, it’s entirely consistent with the ai being confused, especially since many of these scenarios get addressed by software updates. I’m not trying to deny it, just say the evidence is not as clear as people here are claiming
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.
If it knows it’s about to crash, then why not just brake?
Because even braking can’t avoid the crash. Unavoidable crash means bad juju if the ‘self driving’ car image is meant to stick around.
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.
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.
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
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 worst part is that LiDAR isn’t even expensive anymore. 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.
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.
Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?
Cameras are cheaper…that’s it
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.
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.’
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
A LiDAR sensor couldn’t add more than a few hundred to a car, surely
And thats a few hundred less profit, so we cant have that.
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 to make him think he’s a smart boy.
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.
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 $500 in components then that’s a lot of cost (probably a lot cheaper today but this was 10 years ago). Cameras are cheap and can be spread around the car with additional non-FSD benefits where as lidar has much fewer uses when the cost is not covered. I think he used his “first-principles” argument as a justification to the engineers as another way for him to say “I don’t want to pay for lidar, make it work with the cheap cameras.”
Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?
Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?
What makes you think people make rational decisions? Especially sociopaths like Musk?
Couldn’t he just use both… Like LiDAR as a contingency
I added a correction in another reply. Basically he stubbornly refuses to believe a powerful enough LiDAR exists. So I suppose he is all-in on “LieDAR” technology instead (yes, I kinda feel bad about this pun too)
He could. In fact Waymos, for instance, do and are fully autonomous commercial taxis while Tesla are still 2 years out from full self driving for the tenth year in a row
Every LiDAR system must use at least both. LiDAR can’t tell you about lane markings, what’s on signs, and state of traffic lights.
But absolutely, you could have multiple sensing technologies and have access to the best of all worlds.
Cost cutting. Lidar is cheaper now but was relative expensive and increased tech debt and maintenance. Also he legit thought that “human see good - then car see good too”. Tesla is being led by a literal idiot.
They cost hundreds of dollars!!
/$
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.
You can get a Tesla for $42,000… They aren’t that expensive.
With that said, they’ve really cheaped out and even removed the cheaper radar sensors they used to have because Elon wanted to save a buck and really thinks all you need is cameras because he’s an idiot.
Because Musk insists that cameras are better and that LiDAR is flawed
That’s not really true.
He use lidar in SpaceX because he knows it’s the right tool for their specific job.
His stance is it’s not that cameras are better, but that cameras have to be so good for a truly AV that putting effort into both means you’re not going to make your cameras good enough to do it and rely on lidar instead.
If the car can’t process and understand the world via cameras, it’s doomed to fail at a mass scale anyway.
It might be a wrong stance, but it’s not that lidar is flawed.
I think the bigger issue is that he is saying redundancy is not important. He thinks cameras could be good enough, well fine, but the failure results in loss of life so build in redundancy: lidar, radar, anything to failover. The fact that cutting costs OR having a belief that one system is good enough is despicable.
Hell, they don’t even have radar anymore, despite even a lot of low end cars having that.
Technically cost savings, but it seems mostly about stubborn insistence on cameras being enough.
Because Tesla makes money, with the byproduct of cars.
There was a comedy channel on Youtube aeons ago that would do “if x were honest” videos. Their slogan for Valve was “We used to make games. Now we make money.”
Light aren’t radar systems don’t work internationally because they’re functionally band in many asian and european countries. Instead of making one system that was almost complete finished, they went all camera and now none of it works right.
My 500$ 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?
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.
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?
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 roomba 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 mined 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.
You’re either taking to a fanboy or Elon on ket. You ain’t gettin’ through.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-lidar-sensors/
Waymo’s top-of-range LiDAR cost about $7,500… Insiders say those costs have fallen further thanks to continuous advances by the team. And considering that this short-range LiDAR is cheaper than the top-of-range product, the price is likely under $5,000 a unit.
This article is six years old, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re even cheaper now.
You’re bending over backwards to miss the point huh
So be clear about the point.
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 read that in Leslie Nielson’s voice.
Walk on by. I break down and cry.
It’s brake not break
In this case it might be both
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.
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.
Tbh false stopping is a lot better than driving over children by mistake
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.
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.
That is like writing musk made an awkward, confused gesture during a time a few people might call questionable timing and place.
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.
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?
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
Its the cars job to swerve into a less dangerous place.
Can’t do that? Oops, no self-driving for you.
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.
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
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.
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…
That’s so wrong holy shit
It always is that way; fuck the consumer, its all about making a buck
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.
“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.
I am not going to click a link to X, but this article covers that, and links this raw footage video on X which supposedly proves this claim to be false.
In addition to the folks pointing out it likes to shut itself off (which I can neither confirm nor deny)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/tesla-on-autopilot-runs-over-mannequin-hits-wall-in-viral-video-but-is
Some skeptical viewers claim Autopilot was not engaged when the vehicle ran into the wall. These allegations prompted Rober to release the “raw footage” in a X post, which shows the characteristic signs of Autopilot being engaged, such as a rainbow road appearing on the dash.
Tesla cars are stupid tech. As the cars that use lidar demonstrated, this is a solved problem. There don’t have to be self driving cars that run over kids. They just refuse to integrate the solution for no discernible reason, which I’m assuming is really just “Elon said so.”
It’s even worse than that. Not only is it a solved problem, but Tesla had it solved (or closer to solved, anyway) and then intentionally regressed on the technology as a cost cutting measure. All the while making a limp-wristed attempt to spin the removal of key sensor hardware – first the radar and later the ultrasonic proximity sensors – as a “safety” initiative.
There isn’t a shovel anywhere in the world big enough for that pile of bullshit.
“human eyes are like cameras so cameras are sufficient” is definitely a thought that came out of Elon’s brain while deep in a k-hole.
Yeah, it’s infuriating! Elon said something along the lines of Humans drive all the time just using their eyes, so we can replicate that with just cameras. Leaving out the fact that one of the benefits of a self driving system should surely be that it’s in many ways BETTER than humans which are often terrible at driving in fog, torrential rain, low light/night time etc!? It was almost a point of pride that his cars would be every bit as shitty as a human driver to a fault!
I guess his robots are going to be just as weak and frail as humans and need sick days and simulate getting tired and dropping things too?? I can just imagine one of his robots entering a room and saying What did I come in here for again?? I think I need a nap!?
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…
Idk if the video has reason to embue strong emotions then it’s fair
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
It cost too much. It’s 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.
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 panels are glued on. The glue fails when the temperature changes.
I can’t believe that this car is legal to drive in public.
Only in America
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.
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.
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!
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
It’s also very expensive.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Meep meep!
What do you expect when the company is run by a loony toon?
Please do not besmirch the good name of Looney Tunes.
If you own a tesla or a cybertruck you deserve it.
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.
Are his hands even big enough to hold the wheel?
clearly knows what he is doing
Dang
This isn’t true at all. I can’t tell if you’re being serious or incredibly sarcastic, though.
The reason presidents (and generally ex presidents, too) don’t drive themselves is because the kind of driving to escape an assassination attempt is a higher level of driving and training than what the vast majority of people ever have. There’s no law saying presidents are forbidden from driving.
In any case, I would be perfectly happy if they let him drive a CT and it caught fire. I’d do a little jib, and I wouldn’t care who sees that.
Current and past presidents are prohibited from driving.
you’re gonna have to drop a source for that.
because, no, they’re not. the Secret Service provides a driver specially trained for the risks a president might face, and very strongly insists, but they’re not “prohibited” from driving simply because they’re presidents.
to be clear, the secret service cannot prohibit the president from doing anything they really want to do. Even if it’s totally stupid for them to do that. (This includes, for example, Trump’s routine weekend round of golf at Turd-o-Lardo)
to be clear, the secret service cannot prohibit the president from doing anything they really want to do
Was Trump lying when he said the SS wouldn’t take him back to the capital on Jan 6?
I could definitely see him lying about that so he doesn’t look like he abandoned his supporters, but I could also see the driver being like “I can’t endanger you, mr president” and ignoring his requests.
You mean you’d do a little jig?
The real question is, in a truly self-driving car, (not a tesla) are you actually driving?
