Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch

Unfortunately when the vehicle in question is created by a company owned by a man operating a government agency, it's a valid question. He could have just never made the video, but making one that directly opposes the narrative of people you'd expect the "camera man's" political affiliation to be seems unusual.

Unacceptable risk to you. I’m guessing Elon is fully prepared to take the risk and minimise the consequences.

I'd be very curious to know how much cheaper it is. Sure, there's R&D to integrate that with everything, but that cost is split across all units sold. It feels like the actual sensors, at this scale, can't add a significant amount to the final price.

Exactly, my previous car (BMW) once saved me in the fog by emergency braking for something I wasn't able to see yet. My current car (Tesla) shuts down almost all safety features when the camera's can't see anything, so I doubt it will help me in such situations. The only time my Tesla works well is in perfect conditions, but I don't live in California.

vantablack Lidar won't be effected by vantablack out side of a lab experiment. It picks up contamination very quickly and can't be effectively cleaned.

On the other hand I can understand Tesla going “Humans use visible light only, in principle that has to be sufficient for a self driving car as well”, because, in principle I agree.

The whole idea is they should be safer than us at driving. It only takes fog (or a painted wall) to conclude that won't be achieved with cameras only.

On the other hand, if it would cost me 20k more down the road, and Cameras would reach the same safety,

You had a lot of hands in this paragraph. 😀

I'm exceptionally doubtful that the related costs were anywhere near this number, and it's inconceivable to me that cameras only could ever be as safe as having a variety of inputs.

Musk's ethos is clear, both in business and government. He will make whatever short term decisions his greed and the ketamine tell him to make, and fuck whatever happens down the road. Let's not work so hard to sanewash him like the media has Trump.

Most non Tesla brands that have some sort of self-driving functionality use lidar and/or radar. I've got a BMW iX and as far as I know it uses cameras, radar, lidar, and ultrasonic sensors.

Radar would not detect a Styrofoam wall either the return from Styrofoam is extremely low. Radar also can not distinguish elevation differences very well so an overhead road sign can be mistaken for a stopped vehicle or a stopped vehicle mistaken for an overhead road sign.

Does it? My 2023 model throws a shit fit if it's cold and I assume the camera covers are iced over.

Radar doesn't detect stopped objects at high speed. It'd hit the wall too on radar alone.

This has to be solved by vision and or lidar.

EU leading the world in consumer protection laws yet again

Interesting that in the most consumerist nation on earth, objects have more value than people.

Someone made a mural in Brazil but it was removed for safety.

https://www.jalopnik.com/real-life-wile-e-coyote-drives-fiat-smack-into-paintin-1765745078/

Because its fucking funny.

One of the first rules of robotics was always about not harming humans.

The first, in fact.

He probably just made Disney admissions and security even more annoying for everyone else.

Yes, there are mid-block crosswalks in some of the walkable parts of Austin. There are also roundabouts with yield signs and crosswalks and no lights.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I'll add that I've seen major cities that have overhead yellow flashing light boxes that mean "you must stop if there is a pedestrian crossing the road"

Not every pedestrian follows the rules of the lights though. And not every pedestrian makes it across the road in time before the light changes colors from red to green.

The cameras that do what is needed are 10's of thousands of dollars.

If only elon hadn't insisted on not using lidar or anything other than just visible light cameras

He also painted the line leading up to it, if I remember the gag correctly. The real road is off camera.

There's a reason GenX trained on hopper. Too bad the newer generations don't have something equivalent

If it's a feature of a car when you bought it and the insurance company insured the car then anything the car does by design must be covered. The only way an insurance company will get out of this is by making the insured sign a statement that if they use the feature it makes their policy void, the same way they can with rideshare apps if you don't disclose that you are driving for a rideshare. They also can refuse to insure unless the feature is disabled. I can see in the future insurance companies demanding features be disabled before insuring them. They could say that the giant screens blank or the displayed content be simplified while in motion too.

What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems.

If the risk is that insurance companies won't pay for accidents and put people on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, then people won't use autonomous systems.

This cannot go both ways. Either car makers are legally responsible for their AI systems, or insurance companies are legally responsible to pay for those damages. Somebody has to foot the bill, and if it's the general public, they will avoid the risk.

Not sure how it plays for Tesla, but for Waymo, their accidents per mile driven are WAY below non-automation. Insurance companies would LOVE to charge a surplus for automated driving insurance while paying out less incidents.

deliberately confuse them to crash

Won't the people doing that be committing attempted murder?

So many Acme products we need to test, I saw one guy already successfully tested an Olmec statue.

Somebody with better animation skills than me make a cartoon where Wile E. Coyote is hunting cybertrucks using his old tricks and every single one of them works in his favor.

Didn't they dismantle them on Thursday?

“But humans can do it with their eyes!”

That's the best part, they kinda can't.
There are videos from before they pulled the sensors of some pretty cool stuff where teslas slammed the breaks before anything visibly happened, based on lidar sensors sensing trouble a couple cars up the road, completely blocked to vision.

super cool safety tech, and then they pulled it....

one example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIcC2ZMePKI

Don't give him ideas!!!

"But humans can do it with their eyes!"

The thing is, RADAR can see things humans can't. There was a whole article a while back about a Model X that avoided an otherwise unavoidable accident by bouncing radar under the car in front of it and seeing that car slam on the brakes.

dude is living proof brains are optional

The thing is, yes humans can do it with their eyes. But even with the giant amount of progressing power from the brain they are still not great at it.

So of the ultimate goal is to the minimum/cheapest to be almost as good as human then yes, optical sensors only are enough.

Of the goal is to prevent deaths and significantly reduce the number of accidents compared to then lidar is the best option.

Why did they shut off radar?

They pulled the RADAR from mine just before I took delivery, unbeknownst to me at the time. I received no sort of notification.

Absolutely the same timing for me. That was a big, oh that’s his logic?, moment.

for the youtube website interface click on the gear wheel, and you can select the audiotrack you want

Humans cannot, in fact, drive cars well. Humans kill tens of thousands of other humans with cars every year in the US alone.

And let me just add, Musk ordered the LIDAR removed against the engineers better judgement.

Small correction here: they never had LIDAR. Cars with LIDAR have big racks on top with a spinny thing measuring the surroundings. Teslas had radar but removed during the chip shortage (and disabled it on existing cars) and acted like it was an improvement. The radar was used for distance keeping on cars and could actually detect the car in front of the car by bouncing signals off the ground, it was really slick.

I'll add that every other self driving car company has a pretty good safety record, specifically because they do use LIDAR and RADAR so they can see better than humans.

That statement of him is not entirely wrong. But we humans have a very powerful bio computer that is perfectly tuned to process those visual inputs in realtime. Until a comparable performance is possible, removing LIDAR is very stupid.

IIRC Musk said it would rely on AI using the footage from all the Teslas and it’s better than LiDAR. That idiot was proven wrong once again.

Front-facing radar is the bare minimum needed to pass the test given (fake-road wall). Many vehicles use it for adaptive cruise control, and radar is even faster than either cameras or lidar for figuring out the range to an object. 1000 Hz measuring distance to an object is enough to find both the relative velocity and the acceleration of another object. This provides enough time to apply the brakes safely when approaching a vehicle or obstacle

LIDAR is even better, and also more compute intensive and expensive to install.

I think Tesla was very short-sighted in removing radar sensors, certainly. If they hadn’t, they could’ve spent more of their energy on making the FSD cars better instead of just making them sufficiently safe with insufficient sensors

Why do you think lidar is not mature? It is radar, except it uses light and can get much more resolution than an RF radar. Or was that a joke.... That was probably a joke.. if it was then nm.

The story of the disney thing as a reason for why to make a Lidar video, is a great "cover your ass" move.

No one will accuse him of doing it to hit Elmo's self driving taxi ambitions. but the timing is telling.
he could have made the video at any time, he chose to do it now.

paying attention

That's doing a lot of heavy lifting

That said, other cars, with more types of sensors, would probably have "seen" the obstruction on the road.

Well yeah, that’s sort of the entire point of the video. He ran the test with a lidar-equipped vehicle, and it saw the wall right away. Hell, a radar-equipped car (like early teslas) probably would have seen the “kid” behind the wall as well. But since Musk has decided that cars should be able to self-drive with only cameras, the newer teslas will just plow straight into the wall without braking.

I would have liked to see how a more typical car with automatic cruise control /braking functioned. I think they use ultra sonic sensors and would have done better than the Tesla.

I think the human brain hasthe edge in processing visuals since out brains are so much better at adapting than any computer system. We can improvise much better since we have our whole life experience to draw on.

How? Do you just walk into the road without looking or something?

I'm surrounded by waymos every time I go out and I can tell you that if they "almost hit you" three times then that's very likely a you problem -- and a reason for more waymos, not fewer.

Anecdotally, only once have I been in a situation where I've said, "do better, robot" because I was slightly inconvenienced by it.

By the numbers there are very few waymo incidents compared to human drivers and those include waymos being hit by bicyclists who aren't paying attention.

almost. Human driver would hit you in similar scenarios probably.