The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

  • kingthrillgore
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    7 months ago

    Full Self Driving shipping 2025 2026 2027 3098 4484 1e+156

                           ^
    
                       You are here
    
  • @[email protected]
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    97 months ago

    I purchased FSD when it was 8k. What a crock of shit. When I sold the car, that was this only gave the car value after 110k miles and it was only $1500 at most.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.

    This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.

    Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.

    • Moah
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      157 months ago

      Humans move with only feet so cars should be limited to using feet. And only 2 of them.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
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          57 months ago

          You mean promising to build battlemechs, and fucking around for 5 years while grifting his stock valuation sky-high, then coming forward with a cheap robot that can’t even walk?

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      If the camera system + software results in being 1% safer than a human, and a given human can’t afford the lidar version, society is still better off with the human using the camera-based FSD than driving manually. Elon being a piece of shit doesn’t detract from this fact.

      But, yes, a lot of “ifs” in there, and obviously he did this to cut costs or supply chain or blahblah

      Lidar or other tech will be more relevant once we’ve raised the floor (everyone getting the additional safety over manual driving) and other FSDs become more mainstream (competition)

    • @[email protected]
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      417 months ago

      Also, on a final note…

      Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??

      If you have the option to add something that humans don’t have, why wouldn’t you? As an example, humans don’t have gps either, but it’s very useful to have in a car

      • @[email protected]
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        137 months ago

        Because a global pandemic broke your sensor supply chain and you still want to sell cars with FSD anyway, so cameras-only it is!

      • @[email protected]
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        247 months ago

        Unfortunately the answer to that is: Elon’s cheap and Radar is expensive. Not so expensive that you can’t get it in a base model Civic though, which just makes it that much more absurd.

        • Echo Dot
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          7 months ago

          Lidar isn’t that expensive, it’s more expensive than the cameras but it’s probably more useful than the cameras so perhaps you could install less cameras and more Lidar. Also the cost will go down as production rates go up, currently it’s high price has a lot to do with its limited applications and thus limited customer base. The more cars that have lidar, the more customers there will be, and the less each individual unit will cost.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      Regarding point number 2, I have no doubt we’ll be able to develop systems that process visual/video data as well as or better than people. I just know we aren’t there yet, and Tesla certainly isn’t.

      I like to come at the argument from the other direction though; humans drive with eyesight because that’s all we have. If I could be equipped with sonar or radar or lidar, of fucking course I’d use it, wouldn’t you?

    • @[email protected]
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      167 months ago

      This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

      His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

      • @[email protected]
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        137 months ago

        His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.

        This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.

        • Schadrach
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          47 months ago

          To be fair, we achieved flight by copying nature. Once we realized the important part was the shape of a wing more than the flapping.

        • Echo Dot
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          27 months ago

          You need slightly more advanced lidar for cars because you need to be able to see further ahead then 10 ft, and you need to be able to see in adverse weather conditions (rain, fog, snow), that I assume you don’t experience indoors. That said, it really isn’t as expensive as he is making it out to be.

  • @[email protected]
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    847 months ago

    Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.

    how is it legal to label this “full self driving” ?

    • kiku
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      117 months ago

      If customers can’t assume that boneless wings don’t have bones in them, then they shouldn’t assume that Full Self Driving can self-drive the car.

      The courts made it clear that words don’t matter, and that the company can’t be liable for you assuming that words have meaning.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          Now go after Oscar Meyer and Burger King. I am not getting any ham in my burger or dog in my hot’s. They are buying a product which they know full well before they complete the sale that it does not and is not lawfully allowed to auto pilot itself around the country. The owners manuals will give them a full breakdown as well I’m sure. If you spend thousands of dollars on something and don’t know the basic rules and guidelines, you have much bigger issues. If anything, one should say to register these vehicles to drive on the road, they should have to be made aware.

          If someone is that dumb or ignorant to jump through all the hoops and not know, let’s be honest: They shouldn’t be driving a car either.

    • @[email protected]
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      167 months ago

      That’s pretty clearly just a disclaimer meant to shield them from legal repercussions. They know people aren’t going to do that.

      • @[email protected]
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        117 months ago

        Last time I checked that disclaimer was there because officially Teslas are SAE level 2, which let’s them evade regulations that higher SAE levels have, and in practice Tesla FSD beta is SAE level 4.

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          and in practice Tesla FSD beta is SAE level 4.

          In theory this is pure bull, and in practice it is level 4 bull.

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            That’s what I read from an article but I don’t think whether they’re level 4 or not doesn’t really matter. The point is they officially claim to be level 2 but their cars clearly function beyond level 2.

    • Chaotic Entropy
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      247 months ago

      “I freely admit that the refreshing sparkling water I sell is poisonous and should not be consumed.”

      • don
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        57 months ago

        “But to be clear, although I most certainly know for a fact that the refreshing sparkling water I sell is exceedingly poisonous and should in absolutely no way be consumed by any living (and most dead*) beings, I will nevertheless very heartily encourage you to buy it. What you do with it after is entirely up to you.

        *Exceptions may apply. You might be one.

    • @[email protected]
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      167 months ago

      It drives your full self, it doesn’t break you into components and ship those seperately.

      • @[email protected]
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        77 months ago

        legal or not it’s absolutely bonkers. Safety should be the legal assumption for marketing terms like this, not an optional extra.

  • Konala Koala
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    177 months ago

    Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.

    • @[email protected]
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      07 months ago

      Because self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, when implemented properly. A proper one is absolutely loaded with sensors, radar, laser, sonar; not just some cameras like Tesla’s system.

      If you ever get the chance to, hop in a Waymo and you’ll become a believer too (currently available only in Cali and AZ). These little robotaxis see everything at all times, not just what’s in front of them like humans. I trust them more than I’d trust any human driver. They can avoid accidents that you and I would never see coming. Witnessed this first-hand.

      • Konala Koala
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        07 months ago

        There is no proof they are safe, and we should stop trying to replace people.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          Again, ride in one yourself when you get the chance and I promise you you’ll change your mind immediately.

          • Konala Koala
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            17 months ago

            Again, not only no valid proof they are safe, but they are being used to put people out of work like Taxi and Uber drivers.

            • @[email protected]
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              17 months ago

              It’s for the better. They will find other jobs. You sound like the people crying about coal mines being closed down.

    • Cethin
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      147 months ago

      The bad news is people hitting and killing pedestrians is so common you don’t hear about it. Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed. Even the FSD system that was as close to perfect as possible would still occasionally kill someone in large enough numbers, because there’s too many variables to account for. If the numbers are lower than a human driving, it’s a positive.

      We should be trying to move away from cars though ideally. Fuck electric cars, FSD cars, and all other cars. A bus, train, bike, or whatever else would be safer and better for the environment.

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        Lets install adaptive headlights to stop blinding people or allowing manufacturers to install chrome accents on the rear of a vehicle to again stop blinding people or even just maybe make a smaller truck that isn’t lifting ego and instead actual building materials.

        NHSTA:

      • FuzzyRedPanda
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        17 months ago

        Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed.

        That’s easy to say, but do you want to be one of the people who gets killed? I don’t.

        • Cethin
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          37 months ago

          Yeah, it’s that easy to say and yeah, I don’t want to be one of the people killed, driverless or not. Cars are fucking deadly. 20 pedestrians die every day to cars. If we can get that number down but have them die to FSD vehicles, that’s better. I don’t care who or what is driving.

          I’d rather not have cars everywhere, but if we do I want them to be as safe as possible (for everyone, not just the driver). If that includes FSD we should do it, even if the number of pedestrian deaths doesn’t hit zero (it never will) because the alternative is well above zero.

    • @[email protected]
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      177 months ago

      Because it is generally proven to save lifes. You’ll never hear of “thanks for the auto-brake system no one got injured and everything was boring as usual” but it happened a lot (also to me in first person).

      I don’t like Musk but in general its a good thing to push self driving cars IMO. I drive 2 hours per day and the amount of time where I see retarded people doing retarded stuff at the wheel is crazy.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

        But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

        Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

        So do cars driven by humans.

        Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

        Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.

      • Konala Koala
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        07 months ago

        No, it is not generally proven to save lives, you are listening to lies somewhere. Its not a good thing to push self-driving cars and Musk is the one being retarded. Plus he supports Trump and not Harris.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          The technology behind it is proven to save lifes. The reaction time of a full brake to stop a car crash i had the “luck” of experiencing on a Volkswagen was outstanding.

          Same thing for the lane assist function if you are sleepy

          • Konala Koala
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            17 months ago

            Same thing for the lane assist function if you are sleepy

            If you are sleepy behind the wheel, you need to pull over, get off the road, and take a rest.

            • @[email protected]
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              17 months ago

              Thanks mom. I brought cases to prove my point I’m not saying you should go on a road trip while sleepy.

    • @[email protected]
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      07 months ago

      The government for letting tesla get away with false advertising. They let them do it because they swallowed the hype along with Musk climate saviorism.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        What about the people for letting the government get away with bad governing. They let them do it because they swallowed the hype.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          Still governement’s fault for brainwashing the population with neoliberal governemental donothing-ism which fedback into the system as paralysis and letting liars lie for clout and money (Yes, I mean the Musky one)

  • RubberDuck
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    57 months ago

    I wonder if they will now find the Emperor has no clothes.

  • @[email protected]
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    57 months ago

    Maybe have a safety feature that refuses to engage self drive if it’s too foggy/rainy/snowy.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      Preventing engaging something in bad conditions is a lot easier than what do you do if the conditions suddenly happen.

      If it’s suddenly foggy it needs to be able to handle the situation well.

      Cameras/Lidar don’t work well in fog. Radar does, but it isn’t a primary sensor and can’t be driven on safely alone in any circumstance.

      So now you need to slow down (which humans will do) but also since the sensors are failing or insufficient, safely get out of the way of what might be other incoming vehicles behind you, or slow/stopped vehicles ahead of you.

      You could restrict hours the system can be engaged which will reduce the likely hood of certain events (e.g morning fog, or sunrise/sunset head on sun) but there’s still unpredictability.

  • @[email protected]
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    47 months ago

    Charge the stupid fuck Tesla chain of decision making with murder. This bullshit “self driving” advertising is premeditated, that’s no longer manslaughter.

    And charge the driver(s) with manslaughter under aggravating circumstances.

    But oh no, muh profts, hurr-durrr…

    • Echo Dot
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      17 months ago

      Wouldn’t it be death by negligence rather than pre-meditated murder. After all I don’t think anyone at Tesla actually wanted this particular person to die, they just didn’t really care to take any action to prevent it.

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        “I aimed my rifle at that person’s head and pulled the trigger, but I swear I didn’t want them to die”

        Tesla should be broken up and reassembled with zero overlap in management.

        And yes, legally it won’t stick, but the shitty south african oligarch should absolutely be tried for murder.

  • @[email protected]
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    67 months ago

    This is why you can’t have an AI make decisions on activities that could kill someone. AI models can’t say “I don’t know”, every input is forced to be classified as something they’ve seen before, effectively hallucinating when the input is unknown.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 months ago

      I’m not very well versed in this but isn’t there a confidence value that some of these models are able to output?

      • @[email protected]
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        47 months ago

        All probabilistic models output a confidence value, and it’s very common and basic practice to gate downstream processes around that value. This person just doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Though, that puts them on about the same footing as Elono when it comes to AI/ML.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            Are you under the impression that I think Teslas approach to AI and computer vision is anything but fucking dumb? The person said a stupid and patently incorrect thing. I corrected them. Confidence values being literally baked into how most ML architectures work is unrelated to intentionally depriving your system of one of the most robust ccomputer vision signals we can come up with right now.

            • @[email protected]
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              17 months ago

              Yes, but confidence values are not magic. These values are calculated based on how familiar the current input is to a previous observed input. If the type of input is unfamiliar to the model, what do you think happens? Usually, there will be a category with a high enough confidence score so that it will be chosen as the correct one, while being wrong. Now, assuming you somehow manage to not get a favorable confidence score for any decision. What do you think happens in that case? I never encountered this, but there can only be 3 possible paths: 1) Choose a random value. Not good. 2) Do nothing. Not good. 3) Rerun the model with slightly newer data? Maybe helps, but in the case of driving a car, slightly newer data might be too late.

              • @[email protected]
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                17 months ago

                There’s plenty you could do if no label was produced with a sufficiently high confidence. These are continuous systems, so the idea of “rerunning” the model isn’t that crazy, but you could pair that with an automatic decrease in speed to generate more frames, stop the whole vehicle (safely of course), divert path, and I’m sure plenty more an actual domain and subject matter expert might come up with–or a whole team of them. But while we’re on the topic, it’s not really right to even label these confidence intervals as such–they’re just output weighting associated with respective levels. We’ve sort of decided they vaguely match up to something kind of sort approximate to confidence values but they aren’t based on a ground truth like I’m understanding your comment to imply–they entirely derive out of the trained model weights and their confluence. Don’t really have anywhere to go with that thought beyond the observation itself.

  • @[email protected]
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    37 months ago

    Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions

    They will have to look long and hard…

  • @[email protected]
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    1407 months ago

    Eyes can’t see in low visibility.

    musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”

    FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes

    musk reaction -

    • aramis87
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      127 months ago

      What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.

      • @[email protected]
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        137 months ago

        I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.

          I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.

          • idunnololz
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            47 months ago

            I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.

            • @[email protected]
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              47 months ago

              ‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.

              • idunnololz
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                37 months ago

                It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.

    • @[email protected]
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      87 months ago

      The cars used to have RADAR. But they got rid of that and even disabled it on older models when updating because they “only need cameras.”

      Cameras and RADAR would have been good enough for most all conditions…

    • RandomStickman
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      237 months ago

      You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.

      Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That’s how he lives.

      • @[email protected]
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        257 months ago

        Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.

      • Jerkface (any/all)
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        57 months ago

        Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.

        • @[email protected]
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          347 months ago

          Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.

          Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.

          • @[email protected]
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            187 months ago

            They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.

            • Jerkface (any/all)
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              27 months ago

              I dunno what cameras you are using but a standard full frame sensor and an F/4 lens sees way better in low light than the human eye. If I take a raw image off my camera, there is so much more dynamic range than I can see or a monitor can even represent, you can double the brightness at least four times (ie 16x brighter) and parts of the image that looked pure black to the eye become perfectly usable images. There is so so so much more dynamic range than the human eye.

              • @[email protected]
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                37 months ago

                Do you know what the depth of field at f/4 looks like? It’s not anywhere in the neighborhood of suitable for a car, and it still takes a meaningful exposure length in low light conditions to get a picture at all, which is not suitable for driving at 30mph, let alone actually driving fast.

                That full frame sensor is also on a camera that’s several thousand dollars.