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This decision was made at the height of the pandemic supply chain shortages, but then was never reversed when they could get sensors again. FSD will never work

This decision was made at the height of the pandemic supply chain shortages, but then was never reversed when they could get sensors again. FSD will never work with pure vision and it's folly that Tesla / Musk insists that it will.

mycodendral 1y ago
Can you cite some practical failure scenarios besides a wile e coyote billboard where camera inherently won't be able to accomplish what lidar/radar do?
- precommunicator 1y ago
  I was driving in convoy over closed (to non-convoy driving) mountain pass in Norway, in winter. Everything was white, you could barely see the road. Snow was so heavy that visibility stretched as far as the car before me, you couldn't see further than that. At some point a snow plug passed on the other side of the road and completely covered my windshield with snow, to the point that for a few second I had no visibility whatsoever. Good luck to cameras then.
  - metadat 1y ago
    In case it's helpful to know, Lidar also struggles to perform well in heavy snow due to the scattering and reflection of laser beams by snowflakes, which reduces the detectable range and can create false readings.
  - joshfee 1y ago
    But you are also only a camera without LIDAR or RADAR, and you apparently navigated that situation successfully...
- aorloff 1y ago
  There are advertisements on the sides of trucks. Better question is why you are willing to dismiss the wile e coyote failure demonstration.
  - aeternum 1y ago
    The wile e cayote failure was using tesla's cruise control rather than FSD. Binocular vision is sufficient. Lidar will likely be outlawed anyway as it burns your retina. Dare you to put your eye (or cellphone camera) next to a waymo sensor for 10 sec and see what happens.
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      FSD catapults families into highway dividers, I'm pretty sure LIDAR will be fine
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      Virtually all LIDARs are class 1 devices, safe for human eyes to look at. Do you have any reason to believe Waymo LIDARs aren't class 1?
      - aeternum 1y ago
        The rapid rotation and your blink reflex is apparently what makes it class 1 (supposedly). I don't see how a blink occurs if it isn't in visible spectrum. The science around the safety is very shaky, many tests look at only retina and not cornea damage. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safety-questions-raised-about-1550-nm-lidar https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet... Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
        AlotOfReading 1y ago
        The damage at those wavelengths is just overheating. Your eyes are mainly water with its absurdly high heat capacity compared to pretty much anything in an image sensor. I'd expect eyes to be much more resilient in short duration, high intensity exposures and significantly better at long duration, low intensity exposures. LIDARs have been shifting towards short duration exposures to get higher intensities (for range) in recent years, simply to stay under the class 1 limits.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. The question is whether you can put enough compute and data together into a car to be able to do it live. Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    > Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. Eh, I mean I think that that’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient. Eyes are _really good_.
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      Fair point! Is there some advantage eyes have that wouldn't be surmountable with simply more cameras (i.e. to capture different exposure ranges etc)? I actually haven't thought about this side of it super closely, but I think you're right.
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        It's a question of cost and technology. Cinema cameras don't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just because studios like spending money. Humans can see differences between even the best cameras on the market. It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways. It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
      - apothegm 1y ago
        Resolution; extreme dynamic range in a single exposure; sensitivity with short exposures in low light; focal range and speed of refocusing; white point adjustments (happening to a large degree in the retina as receptors become temporarily desensitized to a given wavelength with uninterrupted exposure). I’m sure there are more.
- walls 1y ago
  How about this? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv...
- moralestapia 1y ago
  Sure, anything that involves fog.
- kadoban 1y ago
  Shiny truck trailers have been a failure case. A reflection of the sky in a truck back looks a lot like the sky from the right angle.
- jameskilton 1y ago
  Shadows. Everyone I know who's tried FSD learns very quickly that it's a random chance that the car will see an oncoming shadow (big truck, bridge, tree, etc) as a wall and either slam on the brakes or swerve. If you have reliable depth information, ala LIDAR, you'll be able to know that there's nothing actually there.
- xnx 1y ago
  Fog
moralestapia 1y ago
Andrej Karpathy should be on that list. And there should be some criminal liability since people have died.
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
The craziest part is that many Teslas already have these sensor installed (physically), yet their input is coded-out/ignored!
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  The ultrasonic parking sensors in older Teslas only have a range of a few feet. That'd be useful for automated parking, but not for self driving above 5mph.
  - ProllyInfamous 1y ago
    >only have a range of a few feet At the very least they couldn't they detect imminent collisions with pedestrians? walls? ---- My non-Tesla has a radar for cruise control and imminant crash detection — while annoying at first, it is unfailable. As I've aged (¡perfect driving record!) my thought process has gone from more horsepower! to more safety!. Now when my car beeps at me I'm more-inclined to listen cautiously.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Not really. Stopping distance at 20mph is 20ft on dry pavement, and it goes up quadratically the faster you're going.
    - Kirby64 1y ago
      Ultrasonic isn’t particularly useful for fast reactions. If it’s navigating around a parking lot slowly, sure, but if you’re going any reasonable speed it’s basically useless.
      - ProllyInfamous 1y ago
        >if you’re going any reasonable speed it’s basically useless My active cruise control works even when set to 99mph (e.g. it will slow me down upon approaching another vehicle). I'm sure it'd work at higher speeds, but won't "set" above 99.
amluto 1y ago
I’m willing to believe that machine vision would eventually become good enough to match or exceed human visual perception given the same inputs. But humans in a car have a massive advantage over little cameras that no one seems to discuss much: we have two sensors (eyeballs) mounted on a servo (our head) that can move around and is looking through a truly monstrous aperture (the windshield), and that aperture is equipped with fancy cleaning devices (wipers and cleaning fluid spray), and the car’s operator is motivated to clean the windshield and maintain the windshield, wipers, and spray system to be able to see. A Tesla car has little tiny camera lenses that are every bit as exposed as the windshield but don’t have all the compensating machinery. Go stick a pair of nice cameras on a three-axis servo mount with a range of motion of a whole foot (or a camera array and no servo), stick that two feet behind the windshield, train it well (use that massive parallax!) and I’d believe the result would be competitive in performance but definitely not cost. Also the car would lose an entire seat. Or use radar and lidar and achieve super-human performance. Fir what it’s worth, the military was and is fully aware that lidar and similar tech can outperform human eyeballs in “battlefield conditions”, and I’m aware of old DARPA projects to do things like pulsed laser range-gated imaging to see through fog and such. (You still get attenuation and scattering, but you can mostly disambiguate the additive signal from fog from the stuff behind it.) Lidar can do something similar. Humans can move their head to acquire more data. Little cameras are at the mercy of the fog and can only use fancy image processing to try to compensate.

mycodendral 1y ago

Can you cite some practical failure scenarios besides a wile e coyote billboard where camera inherently won't be able to accomplish what lidar/radar do?

precommunicator 1y ago
I was driving in convoy over closed (to non-convoy driving) mountain pass in Norway, in winter. Everything was white, you could barely see the road. Snow was so heavy that visibility stretched as far as the car before me, you couldn't see further than that. At some point a snow plug passed on the other side of the road and completely covered my windshield with snow, to the point that for a few second I had no visibility whatsoever. Good luck to cameras then.
- metadat 1y ago
  In case it's helpful to know, Lidar also struggles to perform well in heavy snow due to the scattering and reflection of laser beams by snowflakes, which reduces the detectable range and can create false readings.
- joshfee 1y ago
  But you are also only a camera without LIDAR or RADAR, and you apparently navigated that situation successfully...
aorloff 1y ago
There are advertisements on the sides of trucks. Better question is why you are willing to dismiss the wile e coyote failure demonstration.
- aeternum 1y ago
  The wile e cayote failure was using tesla's cruise control rather than FSD. Binocular vision is sufficient. Lidar will likely be outlawed anyway as it burns your retina. Dare you to put your eye (or cellphone camera) next to a waymo sensor for 10 sec and see what happens.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    FSD catapults families into highway dividers, I'm pretty sure LIDAR will be fine
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    Virtually all LIDARs are class 1 devices, safe for human eyes to look at. Do you have any reason to believe Waymo LIDARs aren't class 1?
    - aeternum 1y ago
      The rapid rotation and your blink reflex is apparently what makes it class 1 (supposedly). I don't see how a blink occurs if it isn't in visible spectrum. The science around the safety is very shaky, many tests look at only retina and not cornea damage. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safety-questions-raised-about-1550-nm-lidar https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet... Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        The damage at those wavelengths is just overheating. Your eyes are mainly water with its absurdly high heat capacity compared to pretty much anything in an image sensor. I'd expect eyes to be much more resilient in short duration, high intensity exposures and significantly better at long duration, low intensity exposures. LIDARs have been shifting towards short duration exposures to get higher intensities (for range) in recent years, simply to stay under the class 1 limits.
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. The question is whether you can put enough compute and data together into a car to be able to do it live. Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. Eh, I mean I think that that’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient. Eyes are _really good_.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Fair point! Is there some advantage eyes have that wouldn't be surmountable with simply more cameras (i.e. to capture different exposure ranges etc)? I actually haven't thought about this side of it super closely, but I think you're right.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      It's a question of cost and technology. Cinema cameras don't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just because studios like spending money. Humans can see differences between even the best cameras on the market. It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways. It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
    - apothegm 1y ago
      Resolution; extreme dynamic range in a single exposure; sensitivity with short exposures in low light; focal range and speed of refocusing; white point adjustments (happening to a large degree in the retina as receptors become temporarily desensitized to a given wavelength with uninterrupted exposure). I’m sure there are more.
walls 1y ago
How about this? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv...
moralestapia 1y ago
Sure, anything that involves fog.
kadoban 1y ago
Shiny truck trailers have been a failure case. A reflection of the sky in a truck back looks a lot like the sky from the right angle.
jameskilton 1y ago
Shadows. Everyone I know who's tried FSD learns very quickly that it's a random chance that the car will see an oncoming shadow (big truck, bridge, tree, etc) as a wall and either slam on the brakes or swerve. If you have reliable depth information, ala LIDAR, you'll be able to know that there's nothing actually there.
xnx 1y ago
Fog

moralestapia 1y ago

Andrej Karpathy should be on that list. And there should be some criminal liability since people have died.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago

The craziest part is that many Teslas already have these sensor installed (physically), yet their input is coded-out/ignored!

bryanlarsen 1y ago
The ultrasonic parking sensors in older Teslas only have a range of a few feet. That'd be useful for automated parking, but not for self driving above 5mph.
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  >only have a range of a few feet At the very least they couldn't they detect imminent collisions with pedestrians? walls? ---- My non-Tesla has a radar for cruise control and imminant crash detection — while annoying at first, it is unfailable. As I've aged (¡perfect driving record!) my thought process has gone from more horsepower! to more safety!. Now when my car beeps at me I'm more-inclined to listen cautiously.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Not really. Stopping distance at 20mph is 20ft on dry pavement, and it goes up quadratically the faster you're going.
  - Kirby64 1y ago
    Ultrasonic isn’t particularly useful for fast reactions. If it’s navigating around a parking lot slowly, sure, but if you’re going any reasonable speed it’s basically useless.
    - ProllyInfamous 1y ago
      >if you’re going any reasonable speed it’s basically useless My active cruise control works even when set to 99mph (e.g. it will slow me down upon approaching another vehicle). I'm sure it'd work at higher speeds, but won't "set" above 99.

amluto 1y ago

I’m willing to believe that machine vision would eventually become good enough to match or exceed human visual perception given the same inputs. But humans in a car have a massive advantage over little cameras that no one seems to discuss much: we have two sensors (eyeballs) mounted on a servo (our head) that can move around and is looking through a truly monstrous aperture (the windshield), and that aperture is equipped with fancy cleaning devices (wipers and cleaning fluid spray), and the car’s operator is motivated to clean the windshield and maintain the windshield, wipers, and spray system to be able to see. A Tesla car has little tiny camera lenses that are every bit as exposed as the windshield but don’t have all the compensating machinery. Go stick a pair of nice cameras on a three-axis servo mount with a range of motion of a whole foot (or a camera array and no servo), stick that two feet behind the windshield, train it well (use that massive parallax!) and I’d believe the result would be competitive in performance but definitely not cost. Also the car would lose an entire seat. Or use radar and lidar and achieve super-human performance. Fir what it’s worth, the military was and is fully aware that lidar and similar tech can outperform human eyeballs in “battlefield conditions”, and I’m aware of old DARPA projects to do things like pulsed laser range-gated imaging to see through fog and such. (You still get attenuation and scattering, but you can mostly disambiguate the additive signal from fog from the stuff behind it.) Lidar can do something similar. Humans can move their head to acquire more data. Little cameras are at the mercy of the fog and can only use fancy image processing to try to compensate.