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.
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.
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.
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.
My 500$ robot vacuum has LiDAR, meanwhile these 50k pieces of shit don’t 😂
Holy shit, I knew I’d heard this word before. My Chinese robot vacuum cleaner has more technology than a tesla hahahahaha
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.
Older teslas HAD lidar. They were removed on newer models to cut costs.
They did not. They had radar, which was removed.
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.
The self driving system uber was working on also went downhill after they went full visual only.
I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well…
The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.
It didn’t fool lidar… The car equipped with lidar stopped before hitting the wall because it saw the obstacle not what was on the obstacle
The tl;dr here is that Elon said that humans have eyes and they work, and eyes are like cameras, so use cameras instead of expensive LIDAR. Dick fully inside car door for the slam.
This is the same energy as blizzard saying “you’ve got phones don’t you?”
Teslas are cheap crap, for a premium price, this has always been the case
“Wow, such a brilliant CEO! Cutting waste where it truly matters.” - fanbois/bots everywhere
If I could pass one law, requiring multiple redundant scanning tech on anything autonomous large enough to hurt me might be it.
I occasionally go to our warehouses which have robotic arms, autonomous fork lifts, etc. All of those have far more saftey features than a self driving Tesla, and they aren’t in public.
They used to have it but Elmo removed it years ago as a cost cutting move.
Now they’re the only self driving car that drives into immovable objects.
You might remember a few years ago a guy got decapitated when his Model S drove straight into the side of a semi trailer.
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.
E. Lon Musk. Supah. Geenius.
Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?
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.
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.
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?
To be fair, if you were to construct a wall and paint it exactly like the road, people will run into it as well. That being said, tesla shouldn’t rely on cameras
Edit: having just watched the video, that was a very obvious fake wall. You can see the outlines of it pretty well. I’m also surprised it failed other tests when not on autopilot, seems pretty fucking dangerous.
To be fair, if you were to construct a wall and paint it exactly like the road, people will run into it as well.
this isn’t being fair. It’s being compared to the other- better- autopilot systems that use both LIDAR and radar in addition to daylight and infrared optical to sense the world around them.
Teslas only use daylight and infrared. LIDAR and radar systems both would not have been deceived.
The video does bring up human ability too with the fog test (“Optically, with my own eyes, I can no longer see there’s a kid through this fog. The lidar has no issue.”) But, as they show, this wall is extremely obvious to the driver.
The tesla would lose its shit if it sees this
They already have trouble enough with trucks carrying traffic lights, or with speed limit drivers on them.
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.
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.
That is like writing musk made an awkward, confused gesture during a time a few people might call questionable timing and place.
Yeah but that’s milliseconds. Ergo, the crash was already going to happen.
In any case, the problem with Tesla autopilot is that it doesn’t have radar. It can’t see objects and there have been many instances where a Tesla crashed into a large visible object.
That’s what’s confusing me. Rober’s hypothesis is without lidar the Tesla couldn’t detect the wall. But to claim that autopilot shut itself off before impact means that the Tesla detected the wall and decided impact was imminent, which disproves his point.
If you watch the in car footage, autopilot is on for all of three seconds and by the time its on impact was already going to happen. That said, teslas should have lidar and probably do something other than disengage before hitting the wall but I suspect their cameras were good enough to detect the wall through lack of parallax or something like that.
But to claim that autopilot shut itself off before impact means that the Tesla detected the wall and decided impact was imminent, which disproves his point.
Completely disagree. You are assuming the same sensors that handle autopilot are the same sensors that disengage it when detecting close proximity. The fact that it happened the instant before he connected kind of shows that at a very close distance something is detecting an impact and cutting it off. If it knew ahead of time it would have stopped well ahead of time.
The original goal also wasn’t to uncover this, it was just to compare it to lidar per the article. I’m guessing we’re going to see a ton more things pop up testing this claim, and we’re likely to see tesla push an OTA update that changes the behavior so that people can’t easily reproduce it.
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.
if it can actually sense a crash is imminent, why wouldn’t it be programmed to slam the brakes instead of just turning off?
Do they have a problem with false positives?
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end. Why is this even a thing? Like talking about box office results, companies financials and stocks…. If you’re not an investor of theirs, just stop. It sounds like you’re working for free for them.
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end.
My blackest pill in my adult life was the realization that we’ve leveled off as a species. This is as good as it gets.
Our brains made monumental leaps in development over the last half-million years, with the strongest changes being made during the last ice-age, times when resources were scarce, and survival was extremely difficult and humanity was caught up in many wars and fights with other humans and animals and weather alike. Our brains were shaped to do a couple of things better than others: invent stories to explain feelings, and join communities. These adaptations worked amazingly, it allowed us to band together and pool resources, to defend each other and spot signs of danger. These adaptations allowed us to develop language and agriculture and formed our whole society, but lets not forget what they are at heart: brains invent stories to explain feelings, and we all want social identity and in-group. Deeply. This shit is hardwired into us.
Nearly every major societal problem we have today can be traced back to this response system from the average human brain to either invent a story to explain a discomfort, and those discomforts are often the simple desire to have a group identity.
Our world will get more complicated, but our brains aren’t moving. We can only push brains so far. They’re not designed to know how to form words and do calculus, we trained our brains to do those things, but our systems are far more complicated than language and calculus. Complex problems produce results like lack of necessities, which create negative feelings, which the brain invents stories to explain (or are provided stories by the ruling class.)
So this is it. Nobody is coming. Nothing is changing.
We MIGHT be able to rein in our worst responses over enough time, we MIGHT be able to form large enough groups with commonalities that we achieve tenuous peace. But we will never be a global species, we will never form a galactic empire, we will never rise above war and hate and starvation and greed. Not in our current forms at least. There’s no magic combination of political strategies and social messages that will make everyone put down their clubs and knives.
This is it, a cursed, stupid primate on a fleck of dust spinning around a spark in a cloud of sparks, just looking at every problem like it’s either a rival tribe or a sabertooth-cat hiding in the bushes. Maybe if we don’t destroy ourselves someday our AI descendants will go out into the larger universe, but it certainly won’t be us.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. This is a nice piece to help those to self reflect once in a well, it feels…… grounding. Curious what the positive sequel would be…
Curious what the positive sequel would be…
On good days, I remember that the sheer finality and certainty of the state of our world, our universe, the idea that we may not even have free-will at all and this is all just an inexplicable, passing moment of a universe becoming aware of itself, the grandure of it does more for me than any religious ideas or poems or songs or inspirational messages. It’s wholly absurd and beautiful and we exist in the intersection of scales that are so immense they cannot be fathomed by our primitive minds… these ideas make all the struggles, pains and hardships I experience feel a lot less tangible.
I am aware that a lot of this sensation is simple disassociation from depression, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, disassociation is either a survival trick to keep us alive when our minds get the best of us, or it’s a consequence of something actual and special inside us, a type of awareness that seems to reside just outside of the things we can quantify and explain, a sum greater than its parts. Disassociation is like standing just outside yourself watching the story unfold, and it used to terrify me, now I realize it can’t be helped, we’re all on tracks and it’s just a ride. But if you look around, it can be a beautiful ride, even the shitty parts exist as a strange kind of reminder that the universe doesn’t owe us anything, take it or leave it, it’s all just experiences.
Also, I realized recently that because all of our current stories, all of our current narratives of “forces of good versus evil” and all the political drama and inexplicable human decisions we see being made in the highest levels of power, are actually really dumb stories of people just saying shit and trying to be liked… this isn’t even new, these people doing all this stupid, absurd bullshit are genetically identical to the creatures who ruled empires in the past, who led armies, who had songs written about them going down thousands of years… so that tells me that all our great epics are probably mostly bullshit, and the reality was a lot more stupid.
The idea that most of history was stupid people doing stupid things and then writing fancy stories about it later, that is also strangely reassuring. These are just people, just idiots like the rest of us. Everyone is just improvising as we go and trying to make the best of it.
I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
“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.
