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I was initially skeptical about self-driving cars but I've been won over by Waymo's careful and thoughtful approach using visual cues, lidar, safety drivers and

I was initially skeptical about self-driving cars but I've been won over by Waymo's careful and thoughtful approach using visual cues, lidar, safety drivers and geo-fencing. That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead like Wile E. Coyote. Beep beep. Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot

KoolKat23 2y ago
To be fair, I'm sure there's a few humans that would crash into a giant painted road in the middle of a straight road in the middle of nowhere. Humans crash due to less.
- labrador 2y ago
  Well, I wouldn't and neither would a Waymo, but a Tesla did, which means it's no better than a bad human driver
  - saurik 2y ago
    I think I might, and I'm surprised by how confident you are that you wouldn't.
    - jjav 2y ago
      If you watch the video, it would be blatantly obvious to any human that it is just a big poster across the road, completely fake. No human would fall for that but tesla does.
  - zeroday28 2y ago
    > I wouldn't Of course, that's why traffic accidents are called 'accidents.' Drivers wouldn't crash their cars, but they do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ourmandave 2y ago
  To be more fair, some humans will drive into rivers if the gps map tells them to. =\
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  There's a fun thread available here: https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-post-your-local-news-stories-276441 https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-po... It's where a bunch of cycling nutters (I'm one of them) post local news stories where a driver has crashed into a building ("It wasn't wearing hi-viz!")
ggreer 2y ago
Mark Rober's video is misleading. First, he used autopilot, not FSD. Second, he sped up to 42mph and turned on autopilot a few seconds before impact[1], but he edited the Youtube video to make it look like he started autopilot a from a standstill far away from the barrier. Third, there is an alert message on his screen. It's too small to read in the video, but it could be the "autopilot will not brake" alert that happens when you put your foot on the gas. In the water test, Rober has the Tesla driving down the center of the road, straddling the double yellow line. Autopilot will not do this, and the internal shots of the car crop out the screen. He almost certainly manually drove the car through the water and into the dummy. One person tried to reproduce Rober's Wile E. Coyote test using FSD. FSD v12 failed to stop, but FSD v13 detected the barrier and stopped in time.[2] Lidar would probably improve safety, but Rober's video doesn't prove anything. He decided on an outcome before he made the video. 1. https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1901449395327094898 https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1901449395327094898 2. https://x.com/alsetcenter/status/1902816452773810409 https://x.com/alsetcenter/status/1902816452773810409
- labrador 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ggreer 2y ago
    The first tweet I linked to is Mark Rober's unedited video of the crash. The second tweet I linked to is a video of someone trying to reproduce the Wile E. Coyote test. Unless you think the videos are faked (one of which was posted by Mark Rober), I'm not sure what objection you're making.
    - labrador 2y ago
      My objection is Elon Musk and Tesla superfans will go to great lengths to spin events in Musk and Tesla's favor and X is their mouth piece. I looked at the replies under Mark Rober's video and it's the typical flood of Musk and Tesla super fans raging at him. Someone needs to explain why Mark Rober would post a misleading test. He seems like a solid guy. People I respect follow him, such as Palmer Luckey, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Andrej Karpathy. Let's get back to my main point, that Tesla's not having Lidar is stupid and I don't trust a self-driving car that can't adequately detect solid objects in it's environment
jksflkjl3jk3 2y ago
> That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead If you can visually detect the painted wall, what makes you think that cameras on a Tesla can't be developed to do the same? And are deliberately deceptive road features actually a common enough concern?
- aoeusnth1 2y ago
  How about fog and rain?
  - mavhc 2y ago
    Same as humans, drive slow enough that you can stop when you see something ahead. As demonstrated Lidar doesn't work in rain either. HW4 Tesla stopped before the painting of a road https://futurism.com/someone-else-tested-tesla-crash-wall-painted-road https://futurism.com/someone-else-tested-tesla-crash-wall-pa...
bob1029 2y ago
I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being expended on social media over LiDAR vs no LiDAR. Much of it feels like sock puppetry led by Tesla investors and their couterparties. I see this whole thing is a business viability narrative wherein Tesla would be even further under water if they were forced to admit that LiDAR may possess some degree of technical superiority and could provide a reliability and safety uplift. It must have taken millions of dollars in marketing budget to erase the customer experiences around the prior models of their cars that did have this technology and performed accordingly.
- labrador 2y ago
  "It's a feature, not a bug!" I suspect it would be a major undertaking to add LiDAR at this point because none of their software is written to use it
- x187463 2y ago
  I use FSD every day and it has driven easily 98% of the miles on my model 3. I would never let it drive unsupervised. I honestly have no idea how they think they're ready for robotaxis. FSD is an incredible driver assistance system. It's actually a joy to use, but it's simply not capable of reliable unsupervised performance. A big reason, it struggles exactly where you think it would based on a vision only system. It needs a more robust mechanism of building it's world model. A simple example. I was coming out of a business driveway, turning left onto a two lane road. It was dark out with no nearby street lights. There was a car approaching from the left. FSD could see that a car was coming. However, from the view of a camera, it was just a ball of light. There was no reasonable way the camera could discern the distance given the brightness of the headlights. I suspected this was the case and was prepared to intervene, but left FSD on to see how it would respond. Predictably, it attempted to pull out in front of the car and risked a collision. That kind of thing simply can not be allowed to happen with a truly autonomous vehicle and would never happen with lidar. Hell, just this morning on my way to work FSD was going run a flashing red light. It's probably 95% accurate with flashing reds, but that needs to be 100%. That being said, my understanding is the current model being trained has better temporal understanding such that flashing lights will be more comprehensible to the system. We'll see.
UltraSane 2y ago
It is truly astonishing how much Musk hypes up the robotaxi when no Tesla has ever driving a single mile autonomously while Tesla was liable for crashing.
- mavhc 2y ago
  Every new Tesla drives a single mile autonomously while Tesla is liable for crashing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1XXRwp3mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1XXRwp3mc
Ferret7446 2y ago
A wall painted to look like a road would likely cause human accidents and the painter would be very much criminally liable for them. That said, I do think using only visual cues is a stupid self-imposed restriction. We shouldn't be making self-driving cars like humans, because humans suck horse testicles at driving.
- timewizard 2y ago
  > because humans suck horse testicles at driving. Hardly. We drive hundreds of billions of miles every month and trillions every year. In the US alone. You're more likely to die from each of the flu, diabetes or a stroke than a car accident. If those don't get you, you are either going to get heart disease or cancer, or most likely, involve yourself in a fatal accident; which, will most likely be a fall of a roof or a ladder.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot? IMHO it kinda is. It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11
    - timewizard 2y ago
      > Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot? No. It's 1.25 per 10,000 per capita. Most people understand the risk ahead of time and yet still choose to drive. They clearly don't think it is. > It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11 And 50x 9/11 many people die of accidental self inflicted injury. This is an absurd metric.
      - Peanuts99 2y ago
        The US car fatalities per mile is double than the UK. It would at least be useful to ask why that might be. That's 40,000 people a year who have their lives cut short.
        Qwertious 2y ago
labrador 2y ago
My conclusion: If Tesla drivers are comfortable with vision-only FSD, that’s fine — it’s their responsibility to supervise and intervene. But when Tesla wants to deploy a fully autonomous robotaxi with no human oversight, it should be subject to higher safety requirements, including an independent redundant sensing system like LiDAR. Passengers shouldn’t be responsible for supervising their own taxi ride.

KoolKat23 2y ago

To be fair, I'm sure there's a few humans that would crash into a giant painted road in the middle of a straight road in the middle of nowhere. Humans crash due to less.

labrador 2y ago
Well, I wouldn't and neither would a Waymo, but a Tesla did, which means it's no better than a bad human driver
- saurik 2y ago
  I think I might, and I'm surprised by how confident you are that you wouldn't.
  - jjav 2y ago
    If you watch the video, it would be blatantly obvious to any human that it is just a big poster across the road, completely fake. No human would fall for that but tesla does.
- zeroday28 2y ago
  > I wouldn't Of course, that's why traffic accidents are called 'accidents.' Drivers wouldn't crash their cars, but they do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ourmandave 2y ago
To be more fair, some humans will drive into rivers if the gps map tells them to. =\
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
There's a fun thread available here: https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-post-your-local-news-stories-276441 https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-po... It's where a bunch of cycling nutters (I'm one of them) post local news stories where a driver has crashed into a building ("It wasn't wearing hi-viz!")

ggreer 2y ago

Mark Rober's video is misleading. First, he used autopilot, not FSD. Second, he sped up to 42mph and turned on autopilot a few seconds before impact[1], but he edited the Youtube video to make it look like he started autopilot a from a standstill far away from the barrier. Third, there is an alert message on his screen. It's too small to read in the video, but it could be the "autopilot will not brake" alert that happens when you put your foot on the gas. In the water test, Rober has the Tesla driving down the center of the road, straddling the double yellow line. Autopilot will not do this, and the internal shots of the car crop out the screen. He almost certainly manually drove the car through the water and into the dummy. One person tried to reproduce Rober's Wile E. Coyote test using FSD. FSD v12 failed to stop, but FSD v13 detected the barrier and stopped in time.[2] Lidar would probably improve safety, but Rober's video doesn't prove anything. He decided on an outcome before he made the video. 1. https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1901449395327094898 https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1901449395327094898 2. https://x.com/alsetcenter/status/1902816452773810409 https://x.com/alsetcenter/status/1902816452773810409

labrador 2y ago
[flagged]
- ggreer 2y ago
  The first tweet I linked to is Mark Rober's unedited video of the crash. The second tweet I linked to is a video of someone trying to reproduce the Wile E. Coyote test. Unless you think the videos are faked (one of which was posted by Mark Rober), I'm not sure what objection you're making.
  - labrador 2y ago
    My objection is Elon Musk and Tesla superfans will go to great lengths to spin events in Musk and Tesla's favor and X is their mouth piece. I looked at the replies under Mark Rober's video and it's the typical flood of Musk and Tesla super fans raging at him. Someone needs to explain why Mark Rober would post a misleading test. He seems like a solid guy. People I respect follow him, such as Palmer Luckey, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Andrej Karpathy. Let's get back to my main point, that Tesla's not having Lidar is stupid and I don't trust a self-driving car that can't adequately detect solid objects in it's environment

jksflkjl3jk3 2y ago

> That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead If you can visually detect the painted wall, what makes you think that cameras on a Tesla can't be developed to do the same? And are deliberately deceptive road features actually a common enough concern?

aoeusnth1 2y ago
How about fog and rain?
- mavhc 2y ago
  Same as humans, drive slow enough that you can stop when you see something ahead. As demonstrated Lidar doesn't work in rain either. HW4 Tesla stopped before the painting of a road https://futurism.com/someone-else-tested-tesla-crash-wall-painted-road https://futurism.com/someone-else-tested-tesla-crash-wall-pa...

bob1029 2y ago

I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being expended on social media over LiDAR vs no LiDAR. Much of it feels like sock puppetry led by Tesla investors and their couterparties. I see this whole thing is a business viability narrative wherein Tesla would be even further under water if they were forced to admit that LiDAR may possess some degree of technical superiority and could provide a reliability and safety uplift. It must have taken millions of dollars in marketing budget to erase the customer experiences around the prior models of their cars that did have this technology and performed accordingly.

labrador 2y ago
"It's a feature, not a bug!" I suspect it would be a major undertaking to add LiDAR at this point because none of their software is written to use it
x187463 2y ago
I use FSD every day and it has driven easily 98% of the miles on my model 3. I would never let it drive unsupervised. I honestly have no idea how they think they're ready for robotaxis. FSD is an incredible driver assistance system. It's actually a joy to use, but it's simply not capable of reliable unsupervised performance. A big reason, it struggles exactly where you think it would based on a vision only system. It needs a more robust mechanism of building it's world model. A simple example. I was coming out of a business driveway, turning left onto a two lane road. It was dark out with no nearby street lights. There was a car approaching from the left. FSD could see that a car was coming. However, from the view of a camera, it was just a ball of light. There was no reasonable way the camera could discern the distance given the brightness of the headlights. I suspected this was the case and was prepared to intervene, but left FSD on to see how it would respond. Predictably, it attempted to pull out in front of the car and risked a collision. That kind of thing simply can not be allowed to happen with a truly autonomous vehicle and would never happen with lidar. Hell, just this morning on my way to work FSD was going run a flashing red light. It's probably 95% accurate with flashing reds, but that needs to be 100%. That being said, my understanding is the current model being trained has better temporal understanding such that flashing lights will be more comprehensible to the system. We'll see.

UltraSane 2y ago

It is truly astonishing how much Musk hypes up the robotaxi when no Tesla has ever driving a single mile autonomously while Tesla was liable for crashing.

mavhc 2y ago
Every new Tesla drives a single mile autonomously while Tesla is liable for crashing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1XXRwp3mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1XXRwp3mc

Ferret7446 2y ago

A wall painted to look like a road would likely cause human accidents and the painter would be very much criminally liable for them. That said, I do think using only visual cues is a stupid self-imposed restriction. We shouldn't be making self-driving cars like humans, because humans suck horse testicles at driving.

timewizard 2y ago
> because humans suck horse testicles at driving. Hardly. We drive hundreds of billions of miles every month and trillions every year. In the US alone. You're more likely to die from each of the flu, diabetes or a stroke than a car accident. If those don't get you, you are either going to get heart disease or cancer, or most likely, involve yourself in a fatal accident; which, will most likely be a fall of a roof or a ladder.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot? IMHO it kinda is. It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11
  - timewizard 2y ago
    > Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot? No. It's 1.25 per 10,000 per capita. Most people understand the risk ahead of time and yet still choose to drive. They clearly don't think it is. > It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11 And 50x 9/11 many people die of accidental self inflicted injury. This is an absurd metric.
    - Peanuts99 2y ago
      The US car fatalities per mile is double than the UK. It would at least be useful to ask why that might be. That's 40,000 people a year who have their lives cut short.
      - Qwertious 2y ago

labrador 2y ago

My conclusion: If Tesla drivers are comfortable with vision-only FSD, that’s fine — it’s their responsibility to supervise and intervene. But when Tesla wants to deploy a fully autonomous robotaxi with no human oversight, it should be subject to higher safety requirements, including an independent redundant sensing system like LiDAR. Passengers shouldn’t be responsible for supervising their own taxi ride.