7 ms·
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there ca
by youarentrightjr 8mo ago
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450
- xnx 8mo agoTruly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.
- hamdingers 8mo agoBecause they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it. Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.
- xnx 8mo agoAdd a tow hitch to Waymos and any car can be autonomous!
- baggachipz 8mo agoI bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.
- wat10000 8mo agoDo Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
- nrclark 8mo agoI get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
- catigula 8mo agoTo be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.
- nradov 8mo agoActually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
- catigula 8mo agoIncorrect. Humans are fairly good engineers, so cars are pretty safe nowadays. If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event. This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human.
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoI don't think averages work that way
- gf000 8mo agoHumans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired) But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoUnsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying. Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input. But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer. I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.
- p_l 8mo agoChinese are going with lidars as well. It's just that the cost of lidars are falling like crazy, with new automotive lidars using phased-array laser optics instead of what waymo started with (mechanically scanned lidars)
- rswail 8mo agoCameras are only "cheap" because of mobile phone camera development, radar/lidar is going through the same process with car and mobile robotics. So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car. The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers. That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
- xnx 8mo agoTesla doesn't even use good cameras. Compare to https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/ro-on-6th-gen-waymo-driver#:~:text=a%20lower%20cost.-,Vision%20System%20%C2%A0,-The%20Waymo%20Driver%E2%80%99s https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/ro-on-6th-gen-waymo-driver#:~...
- gf000 8mo agoThat assumes that hardware was/is/will be more expensive than.. simply scaling up data collection and training? Which seems like a very bad assumption, I'm not even sure it was ever true and is getting less and less true.
- stefan_ 8mo agoIf only there was a filter so we could fuse different sensor measurements into a better whole..
- torginus 8mo agoPersonally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ. So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
- lateforwork 8mo agoHis autopilot has killed several people, sometimes the owner of the car, sometimes other drivers sharing the road. It is hard to root for this guy.
- _diyar 8mo agoI fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
- llsf 8mo agoAnd to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps. There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability. I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
- tux1968 8mo agoThe other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability?
- BurningFrog 8mo agoI certainly don't trust anything he says 100%. This is - to me - entirely separate from the fact that his companies routinely revolutionize industries.
- girvo 8mo agoSensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
- youarentrightjr 8mo agoAgreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoI've been trying to fuse my stone knives and bearskins, but I fear I will never craft a tricorder.
- bluGill 8mo agoMore importantly you can detect a failed sensor.
- jacquesm 8mo agoSensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength. No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up. This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
- cameldrv 8mo agoEven if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
- jacquesm 8mo agoYes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement. Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoLast time I checked I relied entirely on vision to drive autonomously.
- dboreham 8mo agoYou have a much better GPU than it has.
- netsharc 8mo ago> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?". Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.
- weirdmantis69 8mo agoI've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.
- netsharc 8mo agoAnd what fraction Elon-Intelligence is needed to believe he actually invented/solved all that by himself? Or did I miss the sarcasm?
- gf000 8mo agoThe guy quite clearly couldn't put a html page up (see his tweets around Twitter's acquisition), and that's a field where he supposedly "worked". At all the other topics he couldn't even name the field. The only thing he is good at is scamming people dumb enough to fall for this.
- FireBeyond 8mo agoWell, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls... One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras: "Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem." No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't. What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME.