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.
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.
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…
I think you could argue that that’s not just material stuff though. That’s historical and significant culturally.
And the president is driving one of these?
Maybe we should be purchasing lots of paint and cement blockades…
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…
The real question is, in a truly self-driving car, (not a tesla) are you actually driving?
I don’t think Trump can drive. As in, he doesn’t even know what the pedals do.
clearly knows what he is doing
He’s going to fall out of the cab on the next right turn.
He looks like he’s making the siren sounds and having a great time
He would be a much funnier person if he weren’t in a position of power (and thus didn’t have the ability to affect people), especially one as terrifying as being the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world.
I imagine when he’s driving around his golf course he makes voom voom noises
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 during the coup, but I could also see the driver being like “I can’t endanger you, mr president” and ignoring his requests.
Was Trump lying when he said the SS wouldn’t take him back to the capital on Jan 6?
Definitely not. There is no way in hell the secret service would have taken the president to that shit show. Doesn’t mean that they would have physically arrested him if he insisted going on his own, however.
You’re technically correct, there is no law prohibiting a current or former president from driving, but there is a policy preventing it and it is enforced by the secret service (who follow them around for the rest of their life). Many former presidents have gone on the record that the lose of their driving privileges really sucks (Bush 43, Clinton, and Obama have all discussed it on camera during various interviews). It’s been a policy since Kennedy was assassinated, lots of other policy changes too, but one was the no driving bit.
Random sources: https://www.smh.com.au/world/us-presidents-can-have-everything--except-the-car-keys-20140506-zr5we.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/28/presidents-arent-allowed-to-drive.html
And one just about some times they drove anyway:
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/3-u-s-presidents-got-around-no-driving-rule/
Policy can be changed. Quite easily.
Especially by the president, when it’s about the president.
Obama, Clinton, others, they don’t really lose their driving privileges. Effectively, they do, sure. But that’s because they’re not utter morons.
Even trump has yet to prove himself that stupid. He probably is that stupid, but he likes the pomp and circumstance, don’t get me wrong.
Other policies include screening people for firearms at rallies- trump over ruled that one, that day, too.
I never that proud of a french president than when I read this comment 😎
Mostly sarcastic, but there is a secret service rule that the president is not allowed to drive on public roads. The rest is all debatable because it hasn’t been litigated. They answer to the president, but a president can not refuse secret service protection.
The current understanding is that they can strongly suggest things, but ultimately, they have to figure it out if the president doesn’t follow.
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!”
It was super annoying how scared he acted when he knew it was styrofoam and it wasn’t even going to leave a scratch on the car. I would have like it much better if the car crashed into and actual wall and burst into flames.
Instinctively, human brains generally don’t like large objects coming to them unbidden at high speed. That isn’t going to help things, even if you’re consciously aware that the wall is relatively harmless.
The bar set for self-driving cars: Can it recognize and respond correctly to a deliberate optical illusion?
The bar set for humans: https://youtu.be/ks11nuGGupI
For the record, I do want the bar for self-driving safety to be high. I also want human drivers to be better… Because even not-entirely-safe self-driving cars may still be safer than humans at a certain point.
Also, fuck Tesla.
I mean it also plowed through a kid because it was foggy, then rainy. The wall was just one of the tests the tesla failed.
Right, those were the failures that really matter, and Rober included the looney tunes wall to get people sharing and talking about it. A scene painted on wall is a contrived edge case, but pedestrians/obstacles in weather involving precipitation is common.
It’s no longer an edge case if faulty self driving becomes the norm.
Want to kill someone in a Tesla? Find a convenient spot and paint a wall there.
Doesn’t even have to be an artificial wall, for example take a bend on a mountain road and paint the rock.
Next test I would love is what is the minimum amount of false road to fool it.
Have you ever seen examples of how the features that ai picks out to identify objects isn’t really the same as what we pick out? So you can generate images that look unrecognizeable to people but have clearly identifiable features to ai. It would be interesting to see someone play around with that concept for interesting ways to fool tesla’s ai. Like could you make a banner that looks like a barricade to people, but the cars think looks like open road?
This isn’t a great example for this concept, but it is a great video. https://youtu.be/FMRi6pNAoag?t=5m58s
I was thinking something that the AI would think the road turns left and humans see it turns right
A better trick would be to paint the road going straight when there’s a cliff. Much easier to hide the evidence that way.
“Dipshit Nazis mad at facts bursting their bubble is unreality” is another way of reading this headline.
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.
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.
If you own a tesla or a cybertruck you deserve it.
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.
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 if they didn’t comply. That’s stupid.
Generally things like that are meant more to identify a pattern. It may not be useful to an individual, but very useful to determine a recall or support a class action
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 trickery like that.
10n what
Oops haha, 10 seconds.
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.
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.
Which side has more money for lawyers though?
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
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”.
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.
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.
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.
When I tried it, the only unexpected disengagement was on the highway, but it just slowed and stayed in lane giving me lots of time to take over.
Thinking about it afterwards, possible reasons include
- I had cars on both sides, blocking me in. Perhaps it decided that was risky or it occluded vision, or perhaps one moved toward me and there was no room to avoid
- it was a little over a mile from my exit. Perhaps it decided it had no way to switch lanes while being blocked in
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
The self-driving equivalent of “Jesus take the wheel!”
If it knows it’s about to crash, then why not just brake?
AEB braking was originally designed to not prevent a crash, but to slow the car when a unavoidable crash was detected.
It’s since gotten better and can also prevent crashes now, but slowing the speed of the crash was the original important piece. It’s a lot easier to predict an unavoidable crash, than to detect a potential crash and stop in time.
Insurance companies offer a discount for having any type of AEB as even just slowing will reduce damages and their cost out of pocket.
Not all AEB systems are created equal though.
Maybe disengaging AP if an unavoidable crash is detected triggers the AEB system? Like maybe for AEB to take over which should always be running, AP has to be off?
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.
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.even your audi is going to dump to human control if it can’t figure out what the appropriate response is. Granted, your Audi is probably smart enough to be like “yeah don’t hit the fucking wall,” but eh… it was put together by people that actually know what they’re doing, and care about safety.
Tesla isn’t doing this for safety or because it’s the best response. The cars are doing this because they don’t want to pay out for wrongful death lawsuits.
If this is true, this is so fucking evil it’s kinda amazing it could have reached anywhere near prod.
It’s musk. he’s fucking vile, and this isn’t even close to the worst thing he’s doing. or has done.
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.”
Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?
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. That and cost.
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.
Tesla even uses lidar to ground truth their cameras
Edit: just adding a late example - Waymo, Cruise, and probably everyone out there still use humans to tell the car what to do if it gets stuck. I even bet Tesla will if they ever launch a robotaxi as they need a way to somehow help the car if it gets stuck. When we see these failures with Waymo and Cruise, it’s less “is something there” and more “I don’t understand this situation”. The understanding comes from vision. Lidar just gives the something is there, but it isn’t solving their problem.
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.
Because commonly they use radar instead, the modern sensors that are also used for adaptive cruise control even have heaters to defrost the sensor housing in winter
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. [Edit: I had hastily read the referenced article and am incorrect here; link to accurate statements is linked in a reply below.]
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.
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?
Elon felt cameras were better than LiDAR at a time when that was kinda true,
that was never true
Cameras are cheaper…that’s it
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.”
Honest Ads is still around, they’ve just moved off the Cracked channel like how PitchMeetings moved off the ScreenRant channel.
It wasn’t Cracked, it was a channel called Gaming Wildlife, last video on the channel was posted 6 years ago; I think they’re defunct. here’s the video in question.
Ah, sorry, it just sounded very similar. Still recommend the honest ads though.
It amazes me they’re still doing them; feels like Roger has been at it for a decade now.
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.
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.
Looney Tunes shit.
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.
Nice variable.
“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.
Important to note, this is a human weakness and not a <political group that isn’t mine> weakness.
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.
me waving a little handheld flag on a tiny pole that just says “Brand loyalty”
…what? No medal???
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.
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.
Hopefully with a Mythbusters-style remote control setup in case it explodes. And the trunk filled with ANFO to make sure it does.
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.
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.
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?
Because the car actually does stop for things that aren’t fake walls made to look like a road, and at least for people as tested by testing agencies
This is the euro NCAP testing.
Note: not all of these cars have lidar, but some do.
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.
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.
They’re mad at themselves and taking it out on others.
To be fair, and ugh, I hate to have to stand up for these assholes, but…
To be fair, their claim is that the video was a lie and that the results were manufactured. They believe that Teslas are actually safe and that Rober was doing some kind of Elon Musk takedown trying to profit off the shares getting tanked and promote a rival company.
They actually do have a little bit of evidence for those claims:
- The wall changes between different camera angles. In some angles the wall is simply something painted on canvas. In other angles it’s a solid styrofoam wall.
- The inside the car view in the YouTube video doesn’t make it clear that autopilot mode is engaged.
- Mark Rober chose to use Autopilot mode rather than so-called Full Self Driving.
But, he was interviewed about this, and he provided additional footage to clear up what happened.
-
They did the experiment twice, once with a canvas wall, then a few weeks later with a styrofoam wall. The car smashed right into the wall the first time, but it wasn’t very dramatic because the canvas just blew out of the way. They wanted a more dramatic video for YouTube, so they did it again with a styrofoam wall so you could see the wall getting smashed. This included pre-weakening the wall so that when the car hit it, it smashed a dramatic Looney-Tunes looking hole in the wall. When they made the final video, they included various cuts from both the first and second attempts. The car hit the wall both times, but it wasn’t just one single hit like it was shown in the video.
-
There’s apparently a “rainbow” path shown when the car is in Autopilot mode. [RAinbows1?!? DEI!?!?!?!] In the cut they posted to YouTube, you couldn’t see this rainbow path. But, Rober posted a longer cut of the car hitting the wall where it was visible. So, it wasn’t that autopilot was off, but in the original YouTube video you couldn’t tell.
-
He used Autopilot mode because from his understanding (as a Tesla owner (this was his personal vehicle being tested)), Full Self Driving requires you to enter a destination address. He just wanted to drive down a closed highway at high speed, so he used Autopilot instead. In his understanding as a Tesla owner and engineer, there would be no difference in how the car dealt with obstacles in autopilot mode vs. full self driving, but he admitted that he hadn’t tested it, so it’s possible that so-called Full Self-Driving would have handled things differently.
Anyhow, these rabid MAGA Elon Fanboys did pick up on some minor inconsistencies in his original video. Rober apprently didn’t realize what a firestorm he was wading into. His intention was to make a video about how cool LIDAR is, but with a cool scene of a car smashing through a wall as the hook. He’d apparently been planning and filming the video for half a year, and he claims it just happened to get released right at the height of the time when Teslas are getting firebombed.
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.
So, who’s the YouTuber that’s gonna test this out? Since Elmo has pushed his way into the government in order to quash any investigation into it.
It basically already happened in the Mark Rober video, it turns off by itself less than a second before hitting
He needs to post footage of it turning off as he drives. An uninterrupted one-camera take from start to crash to finish.
He did, I don’t have the link unfortunately but he did post the unedited take from inside the car where you can see it turn off
It’s from the Philip DeFranco interview he did after the weekend it was released.
Right yeah that’s the one I was referring to
Lol yeah they’re “furious”
What would definitely help with the discussion is if Mark Rober the scientist left a fucking crumb of scientific approach in his video. He didn’t really explain how he was testing it just slam car into things for views. This and a collaboration with a company that makes lidar made the video open to every possible criticism and it’s a shame.
Discovery channel level of dumbed down „science”.
Found the Tesla owner!
😋
So Tesla owners have a monopoly on caring about the process of an experiment?
A logic conclusion by that is anyone not a Tesla owner is incapable of critical thought?
How is this a win?
What did you not like about his process?
I have no doubt the car will crash.
But I do feel there is something strange about the car disengaging the auto pilot (cruise control) just before the crash. How can the car know it’s crashing while simultaneously not knowing it’s crashing?
I drive a model 3 myself, and there is so much bad shit about the auto pilot and rain sensors. But I have never experienced, or heard anyone else experiencing a false positive were the car disengage the auto pilot under any conditions the way shown in the video with o sound or visual cue. Considering how bad the sensors on the car is, its strange they’re state of the art every time an accident happens. There is dissonance between the claims.
Mark shouldn’t have made so many cuts in the upload. He locks the car on 39mph on the video, but crashes at 42mph. He should have kept it clean and honest.
I want to see more of these experiments in the future. But Marks video is pretty much a commercial for the Lidar manufacturer. And commercials shouldn’t be trusted.
I fucking hate tesla and elon musk. Also I fucking hate people calling unverifiable shit science
You’re upset that made up people in your head called this video a research project or something? Because the closest thing I could find to what you’re complaining about is his YouTube channel’s description where it says “friend of science”.
He never claimed to be a scientist, doesn’t claim to be doing scientific research. In his own words, he’s just doing some tests on his own car. That’s it.
Well, it was published, up to you to do a peer review I guess!
Also, this isn’t needing science, it blatantly shows that things does infact not function as intended.
Were is a robust description of the experiment? Or am I supposed to look frame by frame at the screen in the car to deduce the testing conditions?
All he had to do was tell us clearly what is enabled on each car and what his inputs are. That would solve all the tesla fanbois comments about him cheating. Maybe he didn’t for „engagement”.
Actually, his methodology was very clearly explained. Did you watch the whole video? He might have gushed a bit less about LiDAR but otoh the laymen don’t know about it so it stands to reason he had to explain the basics in detail.
Okay, but what would you like him to elaborate on, other than showing you that the Tesla is fooled by a road runner type mural, fog and dense rain?
How much more info other than just “car didn’t stop” (where other car did stop) do you need to be convinced this is a problem?
I have no doubt the car will crash.
But I do feel there is something strange about the car disengaging the auto pilot (cruise control) just before the crash. How can the car know it’s crashing while simultaneously not knowing it’s crashing?
I drive a model 3 myself, and there is so much bad shit about the auto pilot and rain sensors. But I have never experienced, or heard anyone else experiencing a false positive were the car disengage the auto pilot under any conditions the way shown in the video with o sound or visual cue. Considering how bad the sensors on the car is, its strange they’re state of the art every time an accident happens. There is dissonance between the claims.
Mark shouldn’t have made so many cuts in the upload. He locks the car on 39mph on the video, but crashes at 42mph. He should have kept it clean and honest.
I want to see more of these experiments in the future. But Marks video is pretty much a commercial for the Lidar manufacturer. And commercials shouldn’t be trusted.
My 500$ robot vacuum has LiDAR, meanwhile these 50k pieces of shit don’t 😂
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?
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 vacuum 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 mixed with the camera system. The Tesla system is garbage.
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.
The self driving system uber was working on also went downhill after they went full visual only.
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
So that one sensor is $700. Waymo has 4 LIDAR sensors (all of which are physically larger and I would imagine fancier than the Alibaba ones, but that’s speculation), so just in the scanner hardware itself you’re looking at $2,800. Plus the computer to run it, plus the 6 radar receivers, and 13 cameras, I could absolutely see the price for the end user to be around $10k worth of sensors.
But to be clear, I don’t think camera only systems are viable or safe. They should at minimum be forced to use radar in combination with their cameras. In fact I actually trust radar more than lidar because it’s much less susceptible to heavy snow or rain.
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.
Prices tend to come down on these things simply because the car industry widely adopts them. For example, accelerometers became cheap because they were needed for air bags. LIDAR might not come down as much as those have, but it won’t be tens of thousands of dollars.
You’re bending over backwards to miss the point huh
So be clear about the point.
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.
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.
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.
You’re either taking to a fanboy or Elon on ket. You ain’t gettin’ through.
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
Edit: everyone talks about the cost-benefit, but I imagine it makes things simpler for the ai when all sensors can be treated and weighted identically. Whether this is a benefit or disadvantage will eventually become clear
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.
Older teslas HAD lidar. They were removed on newer models to cut costs.
They did not. They had radar, which was removed.
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..
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?
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”.
But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar.
So they think self-driving cars should have lidar, like a vacuum cleaner. They agree, and think it’s a good idea, right?
I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.
…then in the next sentence goes on to say that lidar is not the correct tool. In the space of a paragraph they make two points which directly contradict one-another. Hence my response:
What is your point here, exactly?
They could have said “oops, typo!” or something but, no, instead they went full on-condescending:
I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.
I stand by my response:
arrogant sack of dicks
And while I’m not naive enough to believe that upvotes and downvotes are any kind of arbiter of objective truth, they at least seem to suggest, in this case, that my interpretation is broadly in line with the majority.
(“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.
So someone saying “why does my 500$ vacuum have a lidar but not the car” isn’t suggesting that?
I guess in some technical way you’re right, but it for sure is the implication…
The price of lidar sensors has dropped by like 50 times since musk decided to cut costs by eliminating theny from their cars.
Yeah looks like it, chinese sensors are down to 700 a pop. Even if it’s a few grand, it’s decent, looks like chevy offers it on 7 models.
Holy shit, I knew I’d heard this word before. My Chinese robot vacuum cleaner has more technology than a tesla hahahahaha
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I think it was a guess 🤷♂️ or maybe it’s a different currency?
