A number of Tesla owners have taken to Reddit after their front cameras fogged up and stopped working in cold weather, leaving several features, including the US$10,000 FSD Beta, inoperable. Tesla has declined to assist to these customers, despite many of their vehicles being covered under warranty.
Tesla Vision fails as owners complain of Model 3 cameras fogging up in cold weather::A number of Tesla owners have taken to Reddit after their front cameras fogged up and stopped working in cold weather, leaving several features, including the US$10,000 FSD Beta, inoperable. Tesla has declined to assist to these customers, despite many of their vehicles being covered under warranty.
What irks me about this is I own an ev (not a Tesla obviously fiat 500e) and I slog/bash that thing through mud/snow/rain/several inches of water on the regular and even do what id consider rally driving with it at times and it's fine. You know why? Because this was always a Tesla engineering failure and not an ev failure. But it sucks because people will think ev= unable to get wet which just is not true.
Neighbour in my old area got one of those "Gone to Plaid" (???) models, supposedly quite expensive. It had more panel gaps than my roomie's Golf, which was only a fraction of the price.
In fact the Golf has held up really well! He bought it second-hand for 160k, and is now looking to switch to a Miata. The dealership offered him 150k for it. He's been driving it for over a year.
Radar. Only a small handful of cars have LIDAR.
But your point still stands.
Outside of Elon being a humongous douche and completely unpredictable, the lack of sensors is the major reason for not wanting a Tesla.
The driving assist features of my Honda CR-V also stop working whenever there's snow or ice on the front of the car. Bad design for cold climates is not just a Tesla issue.
His argument makes sense. Human vision is not too different from just a camera. I see the argument for lidar but it can also be a bit more expensive to accomplish the same task. I'm open to listening to your argument as to why lidar technology would be a better path for self driving cars.
It seems to me that we want to make self-driving cars safer that human drivers. And to make them safer, you want them to use every kind of sensor that is practical to avoid accidents. LIDAR alone isn't the path. Neither is visual alone.
Also, suggesting that a car with cameras is equivalent to a human with a human brain that has eyes attached to it is a little silly.
The eye is the fucking whole argument for the stupid creationism. The most complex piece of machinery in the human body and shit.
That man thinks he's god, to create similar functionality.
Has he fucking tried to keep his eyes open in fucking cold weather?
Why not just use humans eyes outside of earth's atmosphere?!
He's just so fucking stupid. Rich and stupid. The shit he spends his "hard earned" money would be so much better and efficient if spent controlled by mostly anyone else.
Humans don’t just use eyes when driving. Sound, and touch also play big roles, for example when it comes hearing ambulances nearing or to feel road conditions. And we have a really good sense for depth and distance, that’s much harder to replicate with just cameras. And even Humans aren’t allowed to drive with headphones on (at least here in Germany), because it’s dangerous to limit the amount of sensors available to us.
Besides that, even our sight is faaaar from perfect either and there are quite a lot of accidents caused by drivers just not seeing another driver or some other obstacle. Our vision is pretty good, yes, but the amount of guessing our brain has to do for us to actually see what we do isn’t exactly small.
I don’t know about you, but I would prefer a self driving vehicle to be safer than a human. Because if it isn’t, why bother? And how could it be safer, if it uses less information than humans, who are shit drivers already?
And yes, lidar is more expensive but so what? It’s cheap enough to add it to phones. Expensive phones, yes but in the grand scheme of things, they’re still quite a bit cheaper than a car and Teslas aren’t exactly cheap cars either.
And Tesla used to include radar in their cars until they didn’t. And the cars didn’t get that much cheaper…
And to give a positive example: Mercedes Benz are the first to launch a Level 3 autonomous vehicle. And guess what? It uses Lidar, audio sensors, road condition sensors, etc. and actually achieved L3 autonomy, while Tesla’s FSD is constantly tested to be one if the worst performing Level 2 systems in the industry, despite their claims of greatness…
The obvious argument is that eyes are far from perfect and fail us all the time, especially when going fast. We are quite good at making up for it, but saying "We have eyes so my self driving cars will have eyes too" is pretty fucking dumb.
That argument doesn't make sense because human vision isn't that great either. When it's dark or raining or snowing or foggy our vision is pretty shit.
I'm not saying LIDAR is better but rather point out that actually you want different types of sensors to accurately assess the traffic, because just one type of sensor isn't likely to cut it. If you look at other manufacturers they're not using only LIDAR or only camera. Some use LIDAR + camera, some user RADAR + camera, some user LIDAR, RADAR and camera. And I'm pretty sure that as manufacturers will aim for higher SAE levels they will add even more sensor into their cars. It's only Tesla who thinks they can somehow do more with less.
Think of that Coyote and the roadrunner cartoon. If there's a graffiti that looks like a tunnel the coyote may run into the tunnel based on vision alone, but a secondary sensor will help telling that there's a wall.
Irl, If the vision failed to recognize that there's something on the road, at least a secondary sensor will protest that there's something on the road.
While I disagree with you that you think his argument makes sense, I'm upvoting your comment because it encourages discourse and provides more insight and depth to this topic. I wish more people on Lemmy did the same.
maybe its because you are blowing issues that affect a couple people and assume it affects everyone. like that time a tesla was flooded and the news went with "tesla's can't operate in wet conditions" and here you are repeating what you heard from tabloid articles.
In this particular case, it's likely a manufacturing defect that caused the sensors to not be sealed properly causing moisture to get in. You are not smarter than 100's of engineers.
Well, designed and built in SoCal, an area not known for its incliment weather, and Tesla is too cheap to do any sort of environmental testing. No real surprise they have so many issues the moment it rains or the temp drops below 50F
Who said anything about bad weather? Jeez, you can always count on muskrats to make the dumbest arguments based on ridiculous assumptions when Daddy Elon needs to be defended.
Since you seem to know a lot about Tesla: when people pay those $12,000 for the "Full Self-Driving package," does Tesla tell them they can't use it when it gets cold outside?
Speaking as someone who lives in a wet/cold climate in Canada - many products (especially tech) are only ever tested on sunny SoCal days. It is actually quite shocking just how many products are completely unfit for use elsewhere in the world. I honestly wish it was something that was brought up more often.
That's been evident for years. Like the 3 that when it was released hadn't been tested in rain so when you opened the back door all water poured into the car...
No point in doing warranty work when you don’t have a fix for the problem, this is what happens when you buy hard goods from a manufacturer that runs itself like a software company.
I'm only answering because you sound sincere in your desire for the opinion of others. I'm not a Musk fanboy (years ago I was, admittedly). I'm not looking for a fight. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, here is mine because you asked for it:
Other EV brands are shockingly (no pun intended) behind in technology or implementation. Most other EV manufacturers are making cars today that are closer to what Tesla was making 5 or 10 years ago, including lots of design or construction mistakes with those other manufacturers. Add to that, I know the idea that Tesla cars are expensive in still in most people's minds, but Model 3 (available now at $31k USD) is one of the least expensive EVs on the road today with the tax credit from its fully domestically built battery. Non-Tesla charging infrastructure (in the USA, and even in Canada) is a joke to try to depend on it. Its also nice to be able to buy a car that supports the American workforce. A Tesla (bought in the USA) is the most American car you can buy! The top 4 "most American made cars" are Y, 3, X, and S. The number 5 slot is the Honda Passport.
Lastly, at least in the USA, buying a car from any other brand (except maybe Polestar now) means having to go through a local dealership, which is a horrible and exhausting experience. Buying a Tesla is refreshing in how transparent and low pressure the sales process is. No surprise fees, no dealer markup, no high pressure extended warranty or service plan sales.
I despise Musk's childishness and politics, but the product and buying experience tops every other EV on the market today. The other brands have need to mature very quickly. However it doesn't appear that Tesla is slowing down its growth either.
TLDR; Tesla makes the cheapest, most domestically produced, highest performance, most charging supported, best buying experience, most advanced mass market EV on the road today by a large margin.
I bought mine in 2019 before I knew Elon is a lying turd. I bought FSD because I like tech stuff and I was doing a lot of highway driving at the time. My opinion of Elon and the car might be less negative if I didn’t feel like I got scammed out of $6000 for FSD. It’s been a good car otherwise, but I wouldn’t buy another one.
Because they're pretty great in most ways. They are one of the most energy efficient EVs, they are the most fun to drive of all the EVs I've driven (best acceleration and handling), I love not needing keys anymore. I love being able to control my car from the app. Tesla has almost twice as many high speed charging stations as every other charging company combined. They are more affordable than most other EVs. The lane assist is better than any other car on the market.
Sure Elon is a dick, but Tesla has some adults in the room making good design decisions. It's certainly not perfect but it's a solid choice if you're looking for an affordable, fun, and efficient car.
From an Australian perspective, I wanted an ev and I wanted to be able to take it on road trips. The supercharger network is the most comprehensively built out infrastructure here and frankly the only way to reliably make long road trips.
The minute they open it up to other manufacturers that advantage disappears; similarly if we had any genuine effort from any corner to build out competing infrastructure.
It's easy to shit on Tesla because, well, , but in some markets they still hold a distinct and compelling competitive advantage.
Meanwhile my anecdotal n=1 stranger on the internet story is that I've not had any issues with my model 3 so far: for me, it's been a great car. When I purchased it, the decision came down to the 3 or the polestar 2, and at the time polestar had zero service capability here: based on 12 months of driving I feel I made the right decision.
With all of their flaws, they remain one of the best EVs on the market. And at least for the very short future, they are some of the few cars that can use the only charging network that doesn't suck. Though, that very notable advantage will be gone in about a year.
Or just heat the lenses, air force and army have been doing it for fucking decades. You never hear about an F18 TGP or Abrams commander sight "fogging up" lol
They aren't normally sealed in most integrations, but will often have heater wires around them or embedded in the windshield that will heat up the windshield/sensor enclosure, just like the defog on a rear window or mirrors.
I was very happy with my 2019 model 3. I upgraded to a new model y a month ago, and the vision stuff definitely feels like a downgrade. I already have a scratch because the vision based park assist is so bad.
That interesting. I find the auto park so slow to use, it just bugs me that it can't park in one swift motion. I have a model Y that went from radar to vision and FSD is definitely better now than before, but they also don't have car-length based follow distance anymore.
The latest update added "follow the speed/flow of traffic" and that works excellent. I drive 200 miles a day in heavy traffic a few times a week and it is far less stressful in the Tesla w/ FSD.