Tesla Whistleblower Says ‘Autopilot’ System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads::“It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”
Tesla Whistleblower Says ‘Autopilot’ System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads::“It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”
I lost all trust in their ‘Autopilot’ the day I read Musk said (Paraphrasing) “All we need are cameras, there’s no need for secondary/tertiary LIDAR or other expensive setups”
Like TFYM? No backups?? Or backups to the backups?? On a life fucking critical system?!
As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That’s how you know the priorities are backwards.
Also, my robot vacuum has LiDAR. It’s not expensive relative to a car.
Skimping on cost is how disasters happen. Ask Richard Hammond. “Spared no expense” my ass, hire more than 2 programmers, you cheap fuck.
Edit: This was supposed to be a Jurassic Park reference, but my dumb ass mixed up John Hammond and Richard Hammond. That’s what I get for watching Top Gear and reading at the same time.
Were Richard Hammond’s many crashes a result of cost skimping? If so, I had no idea. Could you elaborate?
I was under the impression that Hammond’s serious crashes were a combination of bad luck and getting a bit too spicy when driving in some already-risky situations. I, too, would appreciate some corroboration.
Same here. I did a little googling and can’t find any corroborating evidence, but I also learned that Hammond’s Grand Tour insurance premiums are now more expensive than Top Gear’s budgets were for entire specials.
I mean… given that he has had two very well documented and life-threateningly catastrophic crashes in the course of making car shows… the insurance company underwriting his policies isn’t out of line.
As someone who hasn’t much watched Top Gear, I was cracking up at your Jurassic Park reference until I saw your edit and was like “Wait a minute.”
Top Gear? Jurassic Park? Either way: Hold on to your butts.
😆
The crazier and stupier shit was that part of his justification was that “people drive and they only have eyes. We should be able to do the same.”
Its a stunningly idiotic justification, and yet here we are with millions of these “eyes only” teslas on the road.
That’s terrifying for showing how little he understands about the problem he is attempting to solve.
Humans use up to four senses at times to accomplish the task of driving.
@mosiacmango
@cm0002
I can add more, we don’t only have five senses. Elementary school propoganda that is. Here’s all the ones I can think of while driving.
And that doesn’t even consider higher order processing and actual integration of all these things which despite all it’s gains with Ai recently can’t match all the capabilities of the brain to integrate all that information or deal with novel stimuli. Point is Elon, add more sensors to your dang cars so they’re less likely to kill people. And people aren’t even perfect at driving, why would we limit it to only our senses anyways? So dumb
Licking the steering wheel makes it five
“Tastes like danger.”
Reminds me of Mao not brushing his teeth, because tigers didn’t brush theirs either.
Did he also eat his meat raw and sleep in trees?
Nah that would be silly.
Did deflower a generation of young girls though, who would suffer the agony of his presumed halitosis
Ah, but you see, his reasoning is that what if the camera and lidar disagree, then what? With only a camera based system, there is only one truth with no conflicts!
Like when the camera sees the broad side of a white truck as clear skies and slams right at it, there was never any conflict anywhere, everything went just as it was suppo… Wait, shit.
RIP Joshua Brown:
Lidar would still prevail over stupidity in this situation. It does a better job detecting massive objects cars can’t go through.
This (sensor fusion) is a valid issue in mobile robotics. Adding more sensors doesn’t necessarily improve stability or reliability.
After a point, yes. However, that point comes when the sensor you are adding is more than the second type in the system. The correct answer is to work into your algorithm a weighting system so the car can decide which sensor it trusts to not kill the driver, i.e. if the LIDAR sees the broadside of a trailer and the camera doesn’t, the car should believe the LIDAR over the camera, as applying the brakes and speeding into the obstacle at 60mph is likely the safer option.
Yes the solution is fairly simple in theory, implementing this is significantly harder, which is why it is not a trivial issue to solve in robotics.
I’m not saying their decision was the right one, just that his argument with multiple sensors creating noise in the decision-making is a completely valid argument.
Doesn’t seem too complicated… if ANY of the sensors see something in the way that the system can’t resolve then it should stop the vehicle/force the driver to take over
Then you have a very unreliable system, stopping without actual reason all the time, causing immense frustration for the user. Is it safe? I guess, cars that don’t move generally are. Is it functional? No, not at all.
I’m not advocating unsafe implementations here, I’m just pointing out that your suggestion doesn’t actually solve the issue, as it leaves a solution that’s not functional.
If they’re using such unreliable sensors that they’re getting false positives all the time the system isn’t going to be functional in the first place.
All sensors throw a shitload of false positives (or negatives) when used in the real world, that’s why the filtering and unification between sensors is so important, but also really hard to solve, while still getting a consistent and reliable solution.
“seeing an obstacle” is a high level abstraction. Sensor fusion is a lower level problem. It’s fundamentally kinda tricky to get coherent information out of multiple sensors looking partially at the same thing in different ways. Not impossible, but the basic model is less “just check each camera” and more sheafs
To be fair, humans have proven all you need are visual receptors to navigate properly.
To be fair, current computers / AI / whatever marketing name you call them aren’t as good as human brains.
No, but they can be improved to the point where all that’s necessary are cameras and the means to control the vehicle.
I take it you are an expert in the field to be saying this?
The experts agree.
No, they don’t and that’s the entire point in all of this. Tesla autopilot sucks and it will suck and kill people. But fanboys like you would rather “look to the future” instead of realistically looking at it.
Visual receptors… And 3-dimensional vision with all the required processing and decision making behind that based on the visual stimuli, lol.
And how many vehicle accidents and deaths are there today? Proven that humans suck at driving maybe
No we don’t, we use sight, sound and touch/feeling to drive at a minimum
Touch? Sure, barely. But you can drive without being able to hear.
Bot to be a hard-on about it, but if the cameras hace any problem autopilot ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver.
I aint no elon dicj rider, but I got FSD andd the radar would see manhole covers and freak the fuck out. It was annoying as hell and pissed my wife off. The optical depth estimation is now far more useful than the radar sensor.
Lidar has severe problems too. I’ve used it many times professionally for mapping spaces. Reflective surfaces fuck it up. It delivers bad data frequently.
Cameras will eventually be great! Really they already are, but they’ll get orders of magnitude better. Yeah 4 years ago the ai failed to recognize a rectagle as a truck, but it aint done learning yet.
That driver really should have been paying attention. Thee car fucking tells you to all the time.
If a camera has a problem the whole system aborts.
In the future this will mean the car will pull over, but it’'s, as it makes totally fucking clear, in beta. So for now it aborts and passes control to the human that is payong attention.
So I drive a tesla as well. Quite often I get the message that the camera is blocked by something (like sun, fog, heavy rain).
You can’t have a reliable self driving system if that is the case.
Furthermore, isn’t it technically possible to train the lidar and radar with Ai as well?
Of course it is, functionally both the camera and lidar solutions work in vector-space. The big difference is that a camera feed holds a lot more information beyond simple vector-space to feed the AI straining with than a lidar feed ever will.
Gracefully? LMAO
You can come back when it gives at least 3 minutes warning time in advance, so that I can wake up, get my hands out of the woman, climb into the driver seat, find my glasses somewhere, look around where we are, and then I tell that effing autopilot that it’s okay and it is allowed to disengage now!
Yes, that’s exactly how autopilots in airplanes work too… 🙄
I think camera FSD will get there, but I also think there are additional sensors needed (perhaps not lidar necessarily) to increase safety and like the point of the article states… a shitload more testing before it’s allowed on public roads. But let’s be reasonable about how the autopilot can disengage.
Tesla’s won’t. Musk fired all his engineers. Mercedes has a better driving record these days.
All of them?
Well…there’s those two Indian interns that can’t quit because they need their Visa. But they just get Musk coffee and turn away all the summons for child support.
Ah shit did he really? That fucking turd
That was interesting for some people, before we had autonomy levels defined for cars. Nobody wants to know that anymore.
This is exactly the problem. If I’m driving, I need to be alert to the driving tasks and what’s happening on the road.
If I’m not driving because I’m using autopilot, … I still need to be alert to the driving tasks and what’s happening on the road. It’s all of the work with none of the fun of driving.
Fuck that. What I want is a robot chauffer, not a robot version of everyone’s granddad who really shouldn’t be driving anymore.
Just in time to slam you into an emergency vehicle at 80…but hey…autopilot wasn’t on during the impact, not Musk’s fault.
Nah, with hands on the wheel, looking at the road, the driver, who agrees they will pay attention, will have disengaged the system long before it gets to that point.
The system’s super easy to disengage.
It’s also getting better every year.
5 years ago my car could barely change lanes on the highway. Now it navigates lefts at 5 way lighted intersections in big city traffic with idiots blocking the intersection and suicidal cyclists running red lights as well as it was changing lanes on highway… And highway lane changes are extremely reliable. Cant remember my last lane change disengagement. Same car; just better software.
I bet 5 years from now it’ll be statistically safer than humans… Maybe not same car. Hope it’s my car too, but it’s unclear if that processor is sufficient…
Anyway, it’ll keep improving from there.
good thing regular cameras aren’t affected by reflective surfaces
oh wait
What brand of car has better autopilot with other sensors?
Uhhhh…
…any level 4 car actually, according to the federal governments and all the agencies who regulate this stuff.
NAVYA, Volvo/Audi, Mercedes, magna, baidu, Waymo.
Tesla isn’t even trying to go past level 3 at this point.
Why the fuck did I get down voted for looking for an ev Tesla alternative… This place makes no sense. Are you all Tesla fan boys or what?
It sounded like sarcasm rather than an honest question. Like “Find me a better autopilot” rather than “What manufacturer would you recommend for autopilot?”
It… sounded?? How does my question not appear genuine? I literally just asked a question. I want to buy an EV with excellent software in the next few years. That’s it. No sarcasm. Would prefer not a Tesla.
I took it as condescending, just poorly written.
So condescending to ask for a better technology option with multiple sensors. /s
Text sucks man, expect people to miss interpret anything, esp when you’re talking Tesla
All of them. The other automakers didn’t fire their engineers during a hissy fit.