6 ms·

As a control engineer who knows something about sensor fusion - No LIDAR no ride. Musk can brute-force his unsafe robotaxis on the road but they won't be as saf

• dazc 1y ago
  The non-technical answer is that people do not care so long as it's safer and less unpleasant than the current alternative. My last taxi ride involved jumping red lights and speeding through residential streets at 60mph because, I assume, it was early morning and the driver had learned from experience that he could get away with driving like this. The previous experience to this was a lecture about a certain religious ideology and how I should spend the next two weeks reading up about it.
  • madaxe_again 1y ago
    Over the years, I’ve had four human driven taxis crash, and two taxi drivers rob me.
    • scrollop 1y ago
      Never heard of those two occurrences happening for a taxi customer, ever. Perhaps you live in a location that lends itself to such events...
      • brianwawok 1y ago
        Chicago taxis were pretty bad. Had taxis driven by the guy not in the card. Broken seat belts. Mega speeding. It was terrible.
        • igor47 1y ago
          I was in a Chicago taxi where the driver was basically passing out but (I think) chewing qat to keep awake
      • amscanne 1y ago
        Before there was an alternative used to take taxis in Toronto occasionally, and the common refrain was that the card machine was broken. And sometimes no change was available. These kinds of soft scams were common. So it’s not a hold-up, but definitely a form of robbery.
      • dazc 1y ago
        Well, you can't say that again.
      • madaxe_again 1y ago
        Crashes: New York, Istanbul, SW UK, Cairo. Robbed: Bishkek, Astrakhan. Former nicked my SLR at a gas stop, I should have been more attentive, but wasn’t expecting him to loot my luggage. Latter delivered me to his buddies who threatened violence unless I turfed over every penny I had. Joke was on them as they thought I was a loaded oil exec when I was actually just a broke backpacker. I’ve also had the old shake-down fare in Ljubljana, Bucharest, and Riga, off the top of my head - but I don’t count that as robbery, just assholes.
        • monetus 1y ago
          Can I ask what time periods? I have no personal experience of Kyrgyzstan or Russia, but my hunch would be that the noughts were riddled with taxi drivers like you say, while that has slightly improved over time? I mean, perestroika is known for having those problems, wasn't it? Correct me if I am wrong please anybody, thank you. Also, kudos on your travel.
          • madaxe_again 1y ago
            Crashes, various points over the last few decades. Three fender benders but the guy in Istanbul managed a proper one at speed, early hours of the morning and going too fast in the rain - thankfully nobody hurt but his car was trashed. Robberies, both 2012, on the same trip. And yes, corruption still rules the roost in a lot of old eastern bloc countries, from the government to the cops to the babushka driving the bus - it will take a long while for the mindset that the USSR inculcated to dissipate - that is, that the only way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, and steal. 2012 was my first time east of the Urals, and these days I know far better how to deal with it than back then, when I was still wet behind the ears.
        • llbbdd 1y ago
          If that happened to me in America I would count it as robbery.
  • gdbsjjdn 1y ago
    Remember that the robotaxi industry is currently doing everything they can to look good. They are being watched like hawks. Look at how everyone was horny for Uber rides, until Uber needed to actually make money so they jacked up fares, cut driver pay and let anyone with a piece of shit car join. Or how Google search has been enshittified. In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding. They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride. "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the .
    • gruez 1y ago
      >In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding Openly commit crimes when everything's being recorded and subject to discovery? What could possibly go wrong? >They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride. Sounds like a good excuse for whoever's trapped to break open the side windows because he "felt he was in danger because of claustrophobia" or whatever. More seriously though, I don't see anything wrong with mandatory ads as long as it's disclosed ahead of time. > "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the . By your own admission "Google search has been enshittified", yet when was the last time google "accidentally" sent you to the competitor's site on the search results page?
      • BizyDev 1y ago
        Uh, every Google search already shows me sponsored links to competitors’ sites at the top of the results. What would you say if in 5 years with Waymo, you want to go to Burger King but before taking you there, it suggests ‘hey, why don’t you go to this McDonald’s instead?’ At first you’d get a discount on your ride if you accept the suggestion, and then once everyone gets used to it, no more discounts and everyone ends up paying more than human taxis cost today.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
• adastra22 1y ago
  Removing LIDAR was the eye-opening moment for me re: Musk. The justification given at the time was technically bogus while it was so obviously in response to supply issues during COVID. If Tesla really wanted safe FSD they would prioritize sensor quality and multimodal input. They went for the bottom line instead.
  • kamranjon 1y ago
    The part that I always found difficult to square was not that Elon Musk towed this “no need for LiDAR” line so hard, but that Andrej Karpathy, who I generally consider a very reliable voice in this space, was also in strong agreement that cameras were all that was needed. Does anyone know if he still believes cameras is all you need? Edit: Here is a link to Karpathy discussing the trade-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s
    • chronic0262 1y ago
      > but that Andrej Karpathy, who I generally consider a very reliable voice in this space, was also in strong agreement that cameras were all that was needed. You really expect a Tesla employee to speak out against Elon? Especially when $10M+ TC is on the line?
      • rumblefrog 1y ago
        But Andrej is no longer with Tesla?
    • sgt101 1y ago
      Andrej "train it on more data and the problem will go away" Karpathy
      • Grimblewald 1y ago
        Right? Im not arguing against the skills he obviously has, but if we're always just piece wise approximating the underlying manifold, then there will always be new problems. The amount of data required to reliably approxate reality, in the absence of an inductive bias, is infeasible to expect to collect. Not to mention how computationally inefficient it becomes as your model blows out in size/complexity.
• samrus 1y ago
  can binocular cameras replace lidar you think? they should result in just as reliable distance estimation
  • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    Ever heard of optical illusions? If a brain can be fooled by input from its two cameras like this, what hope does a dumb (or worse, artificially “intelligent”) computer have?
    • doctorhandshake 1y ago
      I think optical illusions are a poor choice to illustrate this point. They are manifestations of the corner cases, peculiarities, and side effects of our visual processing system and neither cameras nor Lidar are without their own analogous issues.
      • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
        If you’re saying cameras have analogous issues I fail to see how the analogy is a poor choice - looks to me like you understood exactly the point I was making.
  • djaychela 1y ago
    No, they don't. Look at what has happened when a tesla has mistaken a motorcycle with two small rear lights that is nearby for a car that is further away but with the same lighting configuration. Did not end well for the motorcyclists. He's just wrong about this.
    • maxlin 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • djaychela 1y ago
        With respect, I disagree. Musk is obsessed with the "the best part is no part ". Which only works if you don't actually need it. Combined with an obsession with cost cutting, and you get tunnel vision insisting on a course of action which does not know with 100% certainty about the world it is trying to navigate. And this has led directly to people dying. Being obsessed only works when you turn out to be right, and tesla's system does not work as well as lidar.
• tiahura 1y ago
  What version of Lidar does your head have?
  • seanhunter 1y ago
    Your head has a general intelligence, so it can do sensor fusion in a way a car can only dream of.
  • rainsford 1y ago
    There's no reason to think the best performing, or even adequately performing, technological solution to a problem would mirror how humans have solved it. Submarines don't swim like fish after all. But more specifically to this case, human eyes are attached to brains with (generally) vastly better image recognition and reasoning abilities than any camera based self-driving car. Because of this, humans are better able to recognize visual input even in degraded or unusual conditions compared with a computer.
  • DennisP 1y ago
    My head contains intelligence hardware that far outstrips anything in these cars. Plus my cameras are a lot better. Despite all this, a lot of modern cars are adding lidar to make things easier for me.
    • ACCount36 1y ago
      Your "cameras" have about 20 MP of active resolution between the two of them. With dead zones and pixels spread out unevenly. A modern smartphone has you beat. There's a small, sharp, high resolution color-enabled area in each eye - but the bulk of your vision field is monochrome, and mostly sensitive to motion. You don't notice that, because your image data is stacked and post-processed to shit to make it presentable. Your brain has been doing computational photography before it was cool - 90% of what you see at any moment in time is effectively AI-generated.
  • 4b11b4 1y ago
    It's not that we lack lidar, but we what we have in addition to "cameras". We possess a spatial intelligence (e.g. how your brain has an approximation of: It feels like I walked three blocks) that will never exist in this "photons-in" "controls-out" fantasy.
• DennisP 1y ago
  Would Musk's argument about sensor fusion have made any sense back when they were doing lots of hand-coded C++? I've been thinking maybe vision-only was a reasonable decision, back when lidar was expensive and the software was hand-coded. Now it doesn't, because lidar is cheaper and the software is and end-to-end neural net, and additional sensors are just more inputs to the network which will learn to use them. But Tesla is locked in because of the promises they made to early FSD buyers.
  • general1726 1y ago
    > and the software is and end-to-end neural net, Well considering Musk record for adherence to reality, question is if you can really believe that or if Musk thinks that this is happening or it is not happening at all and Musk is just making it up.
    • DennisP 1y ago
      Given what's happening in the rest of the AI field, it seems pretty likely that it's correct. Plus various Tesla engineers have said the same thing, Tesla does have a very large AI training cluster, and FSD quality made a big jump when they claimed to deploy end-to-end.
  • Jyaif 1y ago
    You've got it exactly backwards. When the software was hand-coded, having Lidar and a high-res map was vital. But if you have a good enough AI, sensors that replicate the human senses are all what is needed. The real question is: when will we get good enough AI that can be applied to all cars?
    • DennisP 1y ago
      The question isn't whether it can be done eventually, but whether it would get safer faster with extra sensors. Back in the day, Elon's specific objection to lidar was that it was too hard to code the sensor fusion part. With end-to-end there's no coding to deal with. And it's not like they've replicated the visual cortex. It's the same neural net technology everybody else is using. It can deal with any sort of sensors just fine.
• tlogan 1y ago
  I have a question: - What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input? - Which specific modules or tasks still require LiDAR to function reliably?
  • findthewords 1y ago
    Camera vision and LIDAR perfectly complement each other. Camera vision is no good detecting unknown/outlier obstacles quickly and accurately. LIDAR is great at detecting unknown obstacles quickly and accurately. You can tune the camera obstacle detection to be hyper-sensitive, which results in phantom braking, causing Passengers to feel that the car is "unreliable" while it actually is safer. Humans are better at braking the appropriate amount when they see something strange, dynamically tuning their sensitivity in a new situation. You can lax the sensitivity, which will reduce false alarms, but will actually cause more crashes, deaths, and injuries. You don't want your customers to feel unsafe, so from a business perspective you will inevitably reduce the sensitivity.
  • RaftPeople 1y ago
    > What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input? Probably the main challenge is that it took nature about a billion years to get to human level visual perception and understanding of environment and nobody really knows how to duplicate it. Using tools like LIDAR can fill some gaps.
• apparent 1y ago
  I'm curious to know how you would act as a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian if you saw a Robotaxi nearby. Would you be more cautious, and if so in what way? Or are you mostly worried about LIDAR-less vehicles running into white walls, which it can't identify as solid walls?
  • queenkjuul 1y ago
    I already stay tf away from Teslas if i can help it, I'm taking my bike to a different street if there's a driverless one
• maxlin 1y ago
  [flagged]
• ACCount36 1y ago
  No amount of LIDAR wankery can solve self-driving. Take any self-driving car crash where the self-driving car was found at fault. Dump the blackbox, extract the raw sensor data. What will you see? You'll see that the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, many times over. And it didn't make the right call. That's not a "sensors" problem. The sensors are good enough. The main bottleneck for self-driving is, and always was, in AI. Which is why you get things like that Cruise car dragging a pedestrian despite being equipped with 360 cameras and a total of 5 overlapping LIDARs. It had the sensors. What it didn't have was object permanence.
  • VirusNewbie 1y ago
    How many car crashes does waymo have per mile compared to average drivers?
    • ACCount36 1y ago
      Statistically, SOTA self-driving cars are already superhuman. That holds for Waymo and Tesla both. They crash less, like for like, and the incidents they get into are less severe. But that's not because self-driving cars outperform a "top of the line" human driver. It's because they outperform the absolute worst bottom of the barrel human driver. A big part of a self-driving car's "safety edge" is that it isn't going to go 80 in a 40, doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, and isn't capable of DUI. Self-driving cars still struggle in some situations most human drivers wouldn't find challenging - AI issues - but they don't make the worst, the most unforced and avoidable "human factor" mistakes.
  • danny_codes 1y ago
    Well an under-carriage camera would have obviated this failure mode. So you could define it as a sensor issue