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.
E. Lon Musk. Supah. Geenius.
MEEP MEEP
I hope some of you actually skimmed the article and got to the “disengaging” part.
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, autopilot turning itself off right before a crash is sus and I wouldn’t put it past Tesla to do something like that (I mean come on, why don’t they use lidar) but maybe it’s so the car doesn’t try to power the wheels or something after impact which could potentially worsen the event.
On the other hand, they’re POS cars and the autopilot probably just shuts off cause of poor assembly, standards, and design resulting from cutting corners.
Rober seems to think so, since he says in the video that it’s likely disengaging because the parking sensors detect that it’s parked because of the object in front, and it shuts off the cruise control.
Normal cars do whatever is in their power to cease movement while facing upright. In a wreck, the safest state for a car is to cease moving.
I see your point, and it makes sense, but I would be very surprised if Tesla did this. I think the best option would be to turn off the features once an impact is detected. It shutting off before hand feels like a cheap ploy to avoid guilt
I’ve heard that too, and I don’t doubt it, but watching Mark Rober’s video, it seems like he’s deathgripping the wheel pretty hard before the impact which seems more likely to be disengaging. Each time, you can see the wheel tug slightly to the left, but his deathgrip pulls it back to the right.
It always is that way; fuck the consumer, its all about making a buck
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.
well, if they want to use military cyber trucks to invade canada, at least we know how to stop them lol.
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
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And the president is driving one of these?
Maybe we should be purchasing lots of paint and cement blockades…
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!”
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…
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)
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 looks like he’s making the siren sounds and having a great time
He’s going to fall out of the cab on the next right turn.
Are his hands even big enough to hold the wheel?
The real question is, in a truly self-driving car, (not a tesla) are you actually driving?
Dang
If you own a tesla or a cybertruck you deserve it.
Looney Tunes shit.
I keep praying that an anvil falls on Elon Husk next.
Okay, that is fucking funny. 😂
Lol yeah they’re “furious”
I have no clue what you’re trying to say, but the significant amount of outrage a day or two later that I suddenly saw explode on Twitter was mind boggling to me. Couldn’t tell if it was bots or morons but either way, people are big mad about the video.
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.
Idk if the video has reason to embue strong emotions then it’s fair
“Dipshit Nazis mad at facts bursting their bubble is unreality” is another way of reading this headline.
well yeah, happens every time I say something mad about their current favorite GPU-use fad.
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.
well yes but as long as there’s deniability built into my toy, then YOU’RE JUST A BIG DUMB MEANIE-PANTS WHO HATES MY COOL TOYS BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ONE because there’s no other possible reason to hate a toy this cool.
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.
The self-driving equivalent of “Jesus take the wheel!”
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.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.”
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.
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.
If it knows it’s about to crash, then why not just brake?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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
Which side has more money for lawyers though?
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.
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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.
I think Mark (who made the OG video) speculated it might be the ultrasonic parking sensors detecting something and disengaging.
That does sound more reasonable.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Just because sometimes we have to accept something, doesn’t mean we have to like it.
(Though the other commenter implied people commonly or always angered by fact, but then we have nothing to talk about.)
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.
“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
Nice variable.
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.
The term you are looking for is “external locus of identity”. And, yes.
Thank you.
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.
That’s just tribalism in general. Humans are tribal by nature as a survival mechanism. In modern culture, that manifests as behaviors like being a rabid sports fan.
It’s evolutionary. Humans are social pack animals. The need for inclusion was evolved into us over however many years.
And an attack on the stocks they bought
They’re mad at themselves and taking it out on others.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Creepy Mormon bros are crypto fascists.
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.
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.
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.
me waving a little handheld flag on a tiny pole that just says “Brand loyalty”
…what? No medal???
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
You don’t necessarily need to implement lidar the way Waymo does it with the spinning sensor. IPad Pros have them. Could have at least put a few of these on the front without significantly affecting aesthetics.
the way Waymo does it with the spinning sensor
There’s a reason they do that, he actually covers that in the video. Lidar spins a single line many, many many times a second. Processing the differences in that line scan to scene makes the point cloud generation many times easier allowing the scan to be exponentially more dense.
The iPhone uses a diffraction grating to shoot static dots at your face and looks for the subtle movements of your face and phone to generate a 3D scan.
The diffraction method is tiny and good for static identification but bad for high-speed outdoors.
The spinny towers give it a better field of view. you could probably put shorter towers on each corner, or even build them into the body panels, but it’s a delicate, expensive instrument and it’s not what’s currently holding back self driving anyway :)
Everyone and their dog uses radar for distance sensing for the adaptive cruise control. You take the same migh speed sensor and use it for wall detection. It’s how the emergency stop functions work where it detects a car in front of you slamming on the brakes.
It costs too much. It’s also why you have to worry about panels falling off the swastitruck if you park next to them. They also apparently lack any sort of rollover frame.
He doesn’t want to pay for anything, including NHTSB crash tests.
It’s literally what Drumpf would have created if he owned a car company. Cut all costs, disregard all regulations, and make the public the alpha testers.
The panels are glued on. The glue fails when the temperature changes.
I can’t believe that this car is legal to drive in public.
Right? It’s also got a cast aluminum frame that breaks if you load the trailer hitch with around 10,000 lbs of downward force. Which means that the back of your Cybertruck could just straight up break off if you’ve frontloaded your trailer and hit a pothole wrong.
Only in America
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
The
frontback fell off.
it did cost too much at the time, but currently he doesnt want to do it because he would have to admit hes wrong.
The guy bankrupted a casino, not by playing against it and being super lucky, but by owning it. Virtually everything he has ever touched in business has turned to shit. How do you ever in the living fuck screwup stakes at Costco? My cousin with my be good eye and a working elbow could do it.
And now its the country’s second try. This time unhinged, with all the training wheels off. The guy is stepping on the pedal while stripping the car for parts and giving away the fuel. The guy doesn’t even drive, he just fired the chauffeur and is dismantling the car from the inside with a shot gun…full steam ahead on to a nice brick wall and an infinity cliff ready to take us all with him. And Canada and Mexico and Gina. Three and three quarters of a year more of daily atrocities and law breakage. At least Hitler boy brought back the astronauts.
I was mostly lambasting fElon, not Drumpf. You’re correct on Drumpf though. I was discussing the swastitruck, after all. Drumpf showed that he’s scared to drive any of the swasticars when he pretended to know how to sell anything, much less an EV.
Oh, and Drumpf bankrupted 3-4 casinos in the late '80s to early '90s in Atlantic City, NJ. Literally the golden age of AC casinos.
It’s all money laundering for russian mob/fsb. Still pretty hard to bankrupt a business that basically prints $$$ though. Epic levels of incompetence!
Not enough. Go on to do it four more times.
basically like oceangates stockton.
I mean, I haven’t ever heard of his father referring to Stockton as “retarded,” according to his teachers and professors, the way that I absolutely have heard about both Drumpf and fElon.
Other than that, yeah. Bullshit techbro shit, and landleech shit.
stockton california is named after family.
But without the happy ending.
It’s also very expensive.
Relative to the car, it’s peanuts at large quantities
Sorry but I don’t get it. You can getva robot vacuum with lidar for $150. I understand automotive lidars need to have more reliability, range etc. but I don’t understand how it’s not even an option for $30k car.
The is Elon we’re talking about. Why pay a few hundred bucks to improve safety when it’s cheaper and easier to fight the lawsuits when people die?
You’re car’s not driving indoors at 1mph with the maximum damage being tapping but not marring the wall or vehicle.
You need high speed, bright lasers, and immense computation to handle outdoor, fast, dangerous work
They were much more expensive years ago when the decisions were made to not use it. Costs have come down a lot. And cars can have more than 1 if you’re going to use it. That also means more compute needed so a stronger computer and more power draw meaning less milage, which means bigger battery for same mileage. It all adds up.
Edit: might even impact aerodynamics, which again means more battery, which is more expensive.
The power draw to process the LIDAR data is negligible compared to the energy used to move the car. 250-300 Watt hours per mile is what it takes to move an electric sedan on average. You might lose a mile of range over an hour of driving, and that’s if you add the LIDAR system without reducing the optical processing load.
LIDAR sensor housing can be made aerodynamic.
While it’s true that LIDAR was more expensive when they started work on self-driving, it doesn’t make sense for them to continue down this path now. It’s all sunk cost fallacy and pride at this point.
A mile per hour is probably about right, but that’s probably per lidar. Waymo has 4 for example, so on a 300mile vehicle that could be 17 miles at 70mph.
Even if you can make it aerodynamic it’s still not going to be as aerodynamic as it not being there.
Sunk cost fallacy make sense, but I’d say it’s also the fear of the massive lawsuit/upgrade cost if wrong due to his statements.
I tried to look up how much power these self driving systems are pulling, but it looks like that will require a deeper dive. The only results I got from a quick search were from 2017-2018, and the systems were pulling around 2 kW. I’m sure that’s come down in the 7-8 years since, but I don’t know how much.
I think you’re right on the lawsuit/upgrade cost. They are on the hook to supply Full Self Driving to all the buyers who bought the option. It’s clear they’re not going to be able to provide it. It looks like there are several class-action lawsuits currently underway.
I think the older Tesla system (HW3) was around 300w, but I think the newer system is more now as they beefed up the compute, but I haven’t seen a number on that. The old system is pretty much maxed out though with no room to grow other then making things more efficient vs just more raw power usage.
A lot of the older hardware back then wasn’t purpose built for driving and was more repurposed general graphical compute, so it was less efficient hence the 2Kw you were seeing. Tesla built ASICs for the driving computer to bring costs and power usage down.
With the newer purpose built Nvidia stuff I’m sure that has brought the power draw down a lot though, likely relatively close (better or worse I don’t know) than Tesla’s watt per performance.
edit: clarity
he does not want to pay $1 for rain sensors and $2 for ultrasonic parking sensors, any price for lidar must be unacceptable
IIRC robot vacuums usually use a single Time of Flight (ToF) sensor that rotates, giving the robot a 2d scan of it’s surroundings. This is sufficient for a vacuum which only needs to operate on a flat surface, but self driving vehicles need a better understanding of their surroundings than just a thin slice.
That’s why cars might use over 30 distinct ToF sensors, each at a different vertical angle, that are then all placed in the rotating module, giving the system a full 3d scan of it’s surroundings. I would assume those modules are much more expensive, though still insignificant compared to the cost of a car sold on the idea of self driving.
