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.
Looney Tunes shit.
If you get any strong emotions on material shit when someone makes a video…you have 0 of my respect. Period.
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!”
Any crash within 10s of a disengagement counts as it being on so you can’t just do this.
Edit: added the time unit.
10n what
Oops haha, 10 seconds.
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.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.
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
Defense lawyers can make a lot of hay with details like that. Nothing that gets the lawsuit dismissed but turning the question into “how much is each party responsible” when it was previously “Tesla drove me into a wall” can help reduce settlement amounts (as these things rarely go to trial).
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.
deleted by creator
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
It’s also very expensive.
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?
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 aerodynamics.
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.
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.
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.
basically like oceangates stockton.
But without the happy ending.
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.
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
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.
Ya, no redundancy is a problem for sure.
Hell, they don’t even have radar anymore, despite even a lot of low end cars having that.
Technically cost savings, but it seems mostly about stubborn insistence on cameras being enough.
They cost hundreds of dollars!!
/$
Cameras are cheaper…that’s it
It’s a car that’s at least £10k
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.
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.]
That was the story but it was supply chain issues that lead him to that conclusion. Same reason why lumbar controls were removed from passenger seats.
Elon felt cameras were better than LiDAR at a time when that was kinda true,
that was never true
Found the article! I had breezed through the thing. I was incorrect about the LiDAR/camera thing. Instead it was: ‘Elon even admitted that “very high-resolution radars would be better than pure vision”, but he claimed that “such a radar does not exist”’
He, of course was incorrect and proven incorrect, but ‘the problem is that Musk has taken such a strong stance against [LiDARs] for so long that now that they have improved immensely and reduced in prices, he still can’t admit that he was wrong and use them.’
he claimed that “such a radar does not exist”
Lol just like his Nazi forefathers in WWII who refused to believe (more than once!) the British had the advanced radar that they actually did have.
I don’t even understand that logic. Use both. Even if one is significantly better than the other, they each have different weaknesses and can mitigate for each other.
It was always just to save money and pad the profit margins
And to make him think he’s a smart boy.
A LiDAR sensor couldn’t add more than a few hundred to a car, surely
They ditched radar at a time when radar only added probably about $50 a car according to some estimates.
It may technically get a smidge more profitable, but it almost seems like it’s more about hubris around tech shouldn’t need more than a human to do as well. Which even if it were true, is a stupid stance to take when in that scenario you could have better than human senses.
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.
Even if humans can drive with just vision:
- Human vision has superb dynamic range, auto focus and other features that cameras thousands of dollars could only dream of (for most).
- I don’t want self driving cars to drive like humans. Humans make too many mistakes and are prone to bad decisions (see the need for safety systems in the first place).
- Train and bus transport is better for most people. Driving is a luxury, we’ve forced people that should not be driving to do so in order to keep a job and barely survive.
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.
Couldn’t he just use both… Like LiDAR as a contingency
Every LiDAR system must use at least both. LiDAR can’t tell you about lane markings, what’s on signs, and state of traffic lights.
But absolutely, you could have multiple sensing technologies and have access to the best of all worlds.
I added a correction in another reply. Basically he stubbornly refuses to believe a powerful enough LiDAR exists. So I suppose he is all-in on “LieDAR” technology instead (yes, I kinda feel bad about this pun too)
He could. In fact Waymos, for instance, do and are fully autonomous commercial taxis while Tesla are still 2 years out from full self driving for the tenth year in a row
The supplier he was using couldn’t supply lidar fast enough, and it was at risk of slowing his manufacturing.
So he worked in a way to not need it, and tell everyone this solution was superior.
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.
Always be wary of people who are angered by facts.
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.
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.
Agreed. You’ll see it more often associate with religion.
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.
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
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.
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.
me waving a little handheld flag on a tiny pole that just says “Brand loyalty”
…what? No medal???
Painted wall? That’s high tech shit.
I got a Tesla from my work before Elon went full Reich 3, and try this:
- break on bridge shadows on the highway
- start wipers on shadows, but not on rain
- break on cars parked on the roadside if there’s a bend in the road
- disengage autopilot and break when driving towards the sun
- change set speed at highway crossings because fuck the guy behind me, right?
- engage emergency break if a bike waits to cross at the side of the road
To which I’ll add:
- moldy frunk (short for fucking trunk, I guess?), no ventilation whatsoever, water comes in, water stays in
- pay attention noises for fuck-all reasons masking my podcasts and forcing me to rewind
- the fucking cabin camera nanny - which I admittedly disabled with some chewing gum
- the worst mp3 player known to man, the original Winamp was light years ahead - won’t index, won’t search, will reload USB and lose its place with almost every car start
- bonkers UI with no integration with Android or Apple - I’m playing podcasts via low rate Bluetooth codecs, at least it doesn’t matter much for voice
- unusable airco in auto mode, insists on blowing cold air in your face
Say what you want about European cars, at least they got usability and integration right. As did most of the auto industry. Fuck Tesla, never again. Bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes.
It’s brake, the car brakes.
It probably breaks as well, but that’s not relevant right now.
I read that in Leslie Nielson’s voice.
Walk on by. I break down and cry.
It’s brake not break
Frunk is short for front trunk. The mp3 issues mostly goes away if you pay for LTE on the car. The rest of the issues I can attest to. Especially randomly changing the cruise control speed on a highway because Google maps says so, I guess? Just hard breaking at high speeds for no fucking reason.
Our Mazda 3’s adaptive cruise thought a car that was exiting was in our lane and hit the brakes, right in front of a car I had just passed. Sorry, dude, I made the mistake of trusting the machine.
Incidents like that made me realize how far we have to go before self driving is a thing. Before we got that car, I thought it was just around the corner, but now I see all the situations that car identifies incorrectly, and it’s like, yeah, we’re going to be driving ourselves for a long time.
inb4 musk bricks his car remotely
I don’t think he’s actually driving it. Might even have been a rental.
I think it’s Rober’s own, I remember him doing videos in the past testing it out.
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.
The video if you haven’t seen it.
Nah bro that’s a short. THIS is the video:
Thanks! 18 mins is going to turn the current generation away! Lol
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!
😋
I fucking hate tesla and elon musk. Also I fucking hate people calling unverifiable shit science
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.
Just fyi, they used AEB in one car and cruise control in another. Far from even. I think it was a fail from the start considering they couldn’t get AEB to even fire on the Tesla driving without cruise control. Insane
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”.
deleted by creator
He made an elaborate test track specifically to make interesting observations.
He set up dozens of cameras to record interesting observations from multiple angles.
He collected footage of interesting phenomena he observed as they were happening in his elaborate test environment.
He then cut the footage up so much it’s impossible for us to say exactly what really happened.
If he went to all this trouble, and then made claims based on his experiment would it really hurt the video to explain the testing process a little bit more?
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.
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.
props to the LiDAR car for trying to drive through that heavy rain - does it just have enough resolution to see through the droplets to determine that there isn’t a solid object within braking distance?
Maybe because water is transparent? can lidar see glass? That’d be an interesting one, Tesla and Lidar car vs large sheet of acrylic.
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.
Sounds like they are mad at them selves and not realize it. Think it though people.
