The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.
Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.
Also, on a final note…
Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??
If you have the option to add something that humans don’t have, why wouldn’t you? As an example, humans don’t have gps either, but it’s very useful to have in a car
Unfortunately the answer to that is: Elon’s cheap and Radar is expensive. Not so expensive that you can’t get it in a base model Civic though, which just makes it that much more absurd.
Lidar isn’t that expensive, it’s more expensive than the cameras but it’s probably more useful than the cameras so perhaps you could install less cameras and more Lidar. Also the cost will go down as production rates go up, currently it’s high price has a lot to do with its limited applications and thus limited customer base. The more cars that have lidar, the more customers there will be, and the less each individual unit will cost.
Humans move with only feet so cars should be limited to using feet. And only 2 of them.
This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.
His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.
My vacuum robot uses lidar. How expensive could it be??
You need slightly more advanced lidar for cars because you need to be able to see further ahead then 10 ft, and you need to be able to see in adverse weather conditions (rain, fog, snow), that I assume you don’t experience indoors. That said, it really isn’t as expensive as he is making it out to be.
If the camera system + software results in being 1% safer than a human, and a given human can’t afford the lidar version, society is still better off with the human using the camera-based FSD than driving manually. Elon being a piece of shit doesn’t detract from this fact.
But, yes, a lot of “ifs” in there, and obviously he did this to cut costs or supply chain or blahblah
Lidar or other tech will be more relevant once we’ve raised the floor (everyone getting the additional safety over manual driving) and other FSDs become more mainstream (competition)