Tesla Whistleblower Says ‘Autopilot’ System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads::“It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”
Tesla Whistleblower Says ‘Autopilot’ System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads::“It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”
I lost all trust in their ‘Autopilot’ the day I read Musk said (Paraphrasing) “All we need are cameras, there’s no need for secondary/tertiary LIDAR or other expensive setups”
Like TFYM? No backups?? Or backups to the backups?? On a life fucking critical system?!
As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That’s how you know the priorities are backwards.
Also, my robot vacuum has LiDAR. It’s not expensive relative to a car.
Hell every iphone has lidar and the pro models have two lidar cameras. The tech is not very expensive, epecially not for a $80,000 car.
My partner’s econobox has lidar for its cruise control, but Tesla can’t seem to figure out how to make it work.
Around the time Elon made the claim Lidar for automotive purposes was quite expensive. That additional cost would make the self driving product a lot less desirable. Up selling cruise control into “self driving” earned them a lot of money.
Funnily enough all other aspects where Tesla has taken the expensive option the
cultretail investors would claim it was brilliant decisions because economy of scale would kick in and make it cheaper in the long run.Lidar was obviously exempt from any such scale and future tech improvements, because reasons.
It could be very expensive for Tesla to start using Lidar, because they’ve sold a lot of cars with the promise that they have the hardware for self driving. Retrofitting a million cars would not only cost a lot in terms of gear and work, but it would put additional stress on an already poor service network.
They have painted themselves into a corner. All because leadership thought self driving was a more or less solved problem almost a decade ago.
Rebrand to Ludicrous Self Drive and add back LIDAR.
Good point. I thought Teslas had radar for awhile though and they took it out?
Was lidar that expensive in a car though? Because Infiniti started adding it in 2014 for the cruise control and those cars usually sell new for $50k if you get it fully loaded.
And they could have added radar and sonar to assist the cameras at least. The radar couldn’t give 3d data, but it could say “yo bro that’s a solid object, not the skyline” at least.
Good point on the promises though. They really fucked themselves with Elon’s claims.
Skimping on cost is how disasters happen. Ask Richard Hammond. “Spared no expense” my ass, hire more than 2 programmers, you cheap fuck.
Edit: This was supposed to be a Jurassic Park reference, but my dumb ass mixed up John Hammond and Richard Hammond. That’s what I get for watching Top Gear and reading at the same time.
Were Richard Hammond’s many crashes a result of cost skimping? If so, I had no idea. Could you elaborate?
I was under the impression that Hammond’s serious crashes were a combination of bad luck and getting a bit too spicy when driving in some already-risky situations. I, too, would appreciate some corroboration.
Same here. I did a little googling and can’t find any corroborating evidence, but I also learned that Hammond’s Grand Tour insurance premiums are now more expensive than Top Gear’s budgets were for entire specials.
That has to be the real reason they’ve canceled Grand Tour
I mean… given that he has had two very well documented and life-threateningly catastrophic crashes in the course of making car shows… the insurance company underwriting his policies isn’t out of line.
I figured insuring him would be expensive, but it’s more the magnitude of his premiums that shocked me.
The crazier and stupier shit was that part of his justification was that “people drive and they only have eyes. We should be able to do the same.”
Its a stunningly idiotic justification, and yet here we are with millions of these “eyes only” teslas on the road.
That’s terrifying for showing how little he understands about the problem he is attempting to solve.
Humans use up to four senses at times to accomplish the task of driving.
@mosiacmango
@cm0002
I can add more, we don’t only have five senses. Elementary school propoganda that is. Here’s all the ones I can think of while driving.
And that doesn’t even consider higher order processing and actual integration of all these things which despite all it’s gains with Ai recently can’t match all the capabilities of the brain to integrate all that information or deal with novel stimuli. Point is Elon, add more sensors to your dang cars so they’re less likely to kill people. And people aren’t even perfect at driving, why would we limit it to only our senses anyways? So dumb
Licking the steering wheel makes it five
“Tastes like danger.”
Reminds me of Mao not brushing his teeth, because tigers didn’t brush theirs either.
Did he also eat his meat raw and sleep in trees?
Ah, but you see, his reasoning is that what if the camera and lidar disagree, then what? With only a camera based system, there is only one truth with no conflicts!
Like when the camera sees the broad side of a white truck as clear skies and slams right at it, there was never any conflict anywhere, everything went just as it was suppo… Wait, shit.
RIP Joshua Brown:
Lidar would still prevail over stupidity in this situation. It does a better job detecting massive objects cars can’t go through.
This (sensor fusion) is a valid issue in mobile robotics. Adding more sensors doesn’t necessarily improve stability or reliability.
After a point, yes. However, that point comes when the sensor you are adding is more than the second type in the system. The correct answer is to work into your algorithm a weighting system so the car can decide which sensor it trusts to not kill the driver, i.e. if the LIDAR sees the broadside of a trailer and the camera doesn’t, the car should believe the LIDAR over the camera, as applying the brakes and speeding into the obstacle at 60mph is likely the safer option.
Yes the solution is fairly simple in theory, implementing this is significantly harder, which is why it is not a trivial issue to solve in robotics.
I’m not saying their decision was the right one, just that his argument with multiple sensors creating noise in the decision-making is a completely valid argument.
Bot to be a hard-on about it, but if the cameras hace any problem autopilot ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver.
I aint no elon dicj rider, but I got FSD andd the radar would see manhole covers and freak the fuck out. It was annoying as hell and pissed my wife off. The optical depth estimation is now far more useful than the radar sensor.
Lidar has severe problems too. I’ve used it many times professionally for mapping spaces. Reflective surfaces fuck it up. It delivers bad data frequently.
Cameras will eventually be great! Really they already are, but they’ll get orders of magnitude better. Yeah 4 years ago the ai failed to recognize a rectagle as a truck, but it aint done learning yet.
That driver really should have been paying attention. Thee car fucking tells you to all the time.
If a camera has a problem the whole system aborts.
In the future this will mean the car will pull over, but it’'s, as it makes totally fucking clear, in beta. So for now it aborts and passes control to the human that is payong attention.
So I drive a tesla as well. Quite often I get the message that the camera is blocked by something (like sun, fog, heavy rain).
You can’t have a reliable self driving system if that is the case.
Furthermore, isn’t it technically possible to train the lidar and radar with Ai as well?
Of course it is, functionally both the camera and lidar solutions work in vector-space. The big difference is that a camera feed holds a lot more information beyond simple vector-space to feed the AI straining with than a lidar feed ever will.
Gracefully? LMAO
You can come back when it gives at least 3 minutes warning time in advance, so that I can wake up, get my hands out of the woman, climb into the driver seat, find my glasses somewhere, look around where we are, and then I tell that effing autopilot that it’s okay and it is allowed to disengage now!
Yes, that’s exactly how autopilots in airplanes work too… 🙄
I think camera FSD will get there, but I also think there are additional sensors needed (perhaps not lidar necessarily) to increase safety and like the point of the article states… a shitload more testing before it’s allowed on public roads. But let’s be reasonable about how the autopilot can disengage.
Tesla’s won’t. Musk fired all his engineers. Mercedes has a better driving record these days.
That was interesting for some people, before we had autonomy levels defined for cars. Nobody wants to know that anymore.
Starting off with 3d data will always be better than inferring it. Go fire up Adobe after effects and do a 3d track and see how awful it is, now that same awful process drives your car.
The AI argument falls short too because that same AI will be better if it just starts off with mostly complete 3d data from lidar and sonar.
Just in time to slam you into an emergency vehicle at 80…but hey…autopilot wasn’t on during the impact, not Musk’s fault.
What brand of car has better autopilot with other sensors?
Uhhhh…
…any level 4 car actually, according to the federal governments and all the agencies who regulate this stuff.
NAVYA, Volvo/Audi, Mercedes, magna, baidu, Waymo.
Tesla isn’t even trying to go past level 3 at this point.
Why the fuck did I get down voted for looking for an ev Tesla alternative… This place makes no sense. Are you all Tesla fan boys or what?
It sounded like sarcasm rather than an honest question. Like “Find me a better autopilot” rather than “What manufacturer would you recommend for autopilot?”
A 2014 Infiniti can drive itself more safely on the highway than a Tesla. The key here is they didn’t lie about the cars capabilities so they didn’t encourage complacency.
In the city though, yeah you’ll need to look at other level 4 cars.
All of them. The other automakers didn’t fire their engineers during a hissy fit.