8 ms·

The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could h

The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win. It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of the failure modes are different than human ones, because the jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"

estearum 8mo ago
I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.
- szundi 8mo ago
  Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk made a miscalc so far.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    Nah If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering (Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  There certainly is a pretty on going miscalculation regarding human intelligence, and consrquentially, empathy.
- mytailorisrich 8mo ago
  IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation and a complication, with a level of hubris. This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
- klabb3 8mo ago
  > Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows this.
  - venusenvy47 8mo ago
    And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple mirrors for full spatial awareness.
    - cobbzilla 8mo ago
      There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.
      - jeltz 8mo ago
        So your eye does not have an adjustable position and you cannot use mirrors?
        wat10000 8mo ago
        Both are easily compensated for by having many cameras.
      - venusenvy47 8mo ago
        I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the cars. The others are single, with no depth perception. How does it know how close objects are outside this forward cone? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fig1/AS:11431281294139365@1733057128683/Locations-of-cameras-on-a-Tesla-vehicle.jpg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...
- lazide 8mo ago
  Eh, I think ‘miscalculation’ might be giving too much credit about good intentions. He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point lidar required at the time - or even effective other sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price point that people would buy it at, even though it was not plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being promised. There is a word for that. But I’m sure there are many lawyers that will say it was ‘mere fluffery’ or the like. And I’m sure he’ll get away with it, because more than enough people are complicit in the mess. Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    I think Musk is really not as smart as he thinks he is and this specific thing was probably an earnest mistake. Lots of other fraudulent stuff going on though of course!
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams. Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier, and if you don’t do it right, your self driving system can be less reliable.
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    > Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at sensor fusion.
  - switchbak 8mo ago
    I think this is the key. In theory - more information stream when fused together (properly) should reduce error. If their stumbling block is the "properly" part, than the rest of those justifications come off as a pretty weak way to sidestep their own inabilities to deliver this properly. We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used in other domains, this seems like an especially life-critical domain that ought to have high rigor and standards applied.
  - DennisP 8mo ago
    Sensor fusion seems like it'd be a big problem when you're handcoding lots of C++, and way less of a problem when all the sensors are just feeding into one big neural network, as Tesla and probably others are doing now. The training process takes care of it from there. One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving, taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection of lidar points, where each point contributes to a probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's fine if different points seem to contradict each other, because you're looking for the most likely scenario that could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor types it's still the same sort of problem.
- kevlened 8mo ago
  > Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just thought we were close to self-driving in 2014. Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that. Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    Right, for the reasons that I just mentioned
- naravara 8mo ago
  Considering he also runs a company that puts computer chips inside brains to augment them you’d think he ought to have a more sound understanding as to the limits of both.
- wyldfire 8mo ago
  > how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
  - MengerSponge 8mo ago
    > If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly. This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them! https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-crashing-more-human-drivers https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...
    - ggreer 8mo ago
      According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.
      - kube-system 8mo ago
        Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers, looks like they primarily used data sourced from police reports, which most people only file if the incident is serious enough to turn into insurance. Tesla notes: > These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
      - cycomanic 8mo ago
        > According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. Why is it clearly false? It might be false, but clearly? I would definitely like to see evidence either way. > I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average. That sounds like you are trying to find reasons to get the conclusion you want.
- Gee101 8mo ago
  Musk has never been scared of vertically integrating something that's too expensive initially.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    What has he vertically integrated that's as technologically sophisticated as LIDAR?
bluGill 8mo ago
Until a lawyer points out other cars see that. My car already has various sensors and in manual driving sounds alarms if there is a danger I seem not to have noticed. (There are false alarms - but most of the type I did notice and probably should have left more safety margin even though I wouldn't hit it) also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.
small_model 8mo ago
Very recent issue with Waymo https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-puddle-in-los-angeles/ https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-.... This is 17 years after they bet the farm on LIDAR, with no signs its ever going to be cost effective or that it's better than multiple cameras, with millisecond reaction 360 degrees, that never gets tired, drunk, distracted, and also has other cheaper sensors and NN trained on Billions or real world data.
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  >A vehicle got stuck trying to figure out an obstacle so sensors with less information are better than sensors with more information.
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  That's an example of it failing safe. I'd rather it did that than drive me into a sinkhole because it thought it was a puddle.
  - small_model 8mo ago
    Ok so Waymo is useless in the rain then, kind of limiting. But at least that 0.000000000001% times it actually is a sinkhole you won't damage the bumper.
    - criley2 8mo ago
      I'd rather a Waymo be useless in the rain rather than a Tesla be actively dangerous and likely to kill me. Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65 Waymo fatalities: 0
      - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
        Autopilot isn’t full self driving (FSD), most cars these ship with smart cruise control (what autopilot basically is). Do you have fatality statistics for FSD? If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But Tesla is special since it doesn’t even use radar for its smart cruise control implementation, so that could make it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.
lazide 8mo ago
Pretty hard to do if your whole selling point is ‘better and safer than human’ however?
xnx 8mo ago
This is a new and flawed rationale that I haven't heard before. Tesla cameras are worse (lower resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range) than human eyes and don't have "ears" (microphones).
- peterfirefly 8mo ago
  The cars do have at least one microphone.
  - xnx 8mo ago
    Inside the car though, right? With multiple exterior microphones they could do spatialization like Waymo.
bko 8mo ago
Most accidents happen because people are human, aren't paying attention, are inebriated, not experienced enough drivers, or reckless. It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer can easily address all those issues
- jeltz 8mo ago
  Which means the mistakes vision-based models for today are unique to them.
georgeecollins 8mo ago
It is sound to think that cameras plus an accelerometer, plus data about about the car and environment (that you get from your ears) ought to be able to mimic and improve on human driving. However humans general purpose spatial awareness and ability to integrate all kinds of general information is probably really hard to replicate. A human would realize that an orange fluid spilling across the road might be slippery, guess the way a person might travel from the way their eyes are pointing... It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do things humans can't.
lesuorac 8mo ago
IIUC, the cameras in a Tesla have worse vision (resolution) at far distances than a human. So while in the abstract your argument sounds fine; it'll crumble in court when a lawyer points out a similar driver would've needed corrective lens.
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win “A federal judge” recently “rejected Tesla's request to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over the 2019 crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S” [1]. If a human supervising still incurs liability, human-like errors, particularly if Waymo and BYD aren’t making them, is a poor defense. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-verdict-against-tesla-over-fatal-autopilot-crash-2026-02-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-v...

estearum 8mo ago

I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.

szundi 8mo ago
Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk made a miscalc so far.
- estearum 8mo ago
  Nah If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering (Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
cyanydeez 8mo ago
There certainly is a pretty on going miscalculation regarding human intelligence, and consrquentially, empathy.
mytailorisrich 8mo ago
IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation and a complication, with a level of hubris. This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
klabb3 8mo ago
> Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows this.
- venusenvy47 8mo ago
  And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple mirrors for full spatial awareness.
  - cobbzilla 8mo ago
    There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.
    - jeltz 8mo ago
      So your eye does not have an adjustable position and you cannot use mirrors?
      - wat10000 8mo ago
        Both are easily compensated for by having many cameras.
    - venusenvy47 8mo ago
      I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the cars. The others are single, with no depth perception. How does it know how close objects are outside this forward cone? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fig1/AS:11431281294139365@1733057128683/Locations-of-cameras-on-a-Tesla-vehicle.jpg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...
lazide 8mo ago
Eh, I think ‘miscalculation’ might be giving too much credit about good intentions. He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point lidar required at the time - or even effective other sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price point that people would buy it at, even though it was not plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being promised. There is a word for that. But I’m sure there are many lawyers that will say it was ‘mere fluffery’ or the like. And I’m sure he’ll get away with it, because more than enough people are complicit in the mess. Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
- estearum 8mo ago
  I think Musk is really not as smart as he thinks he is and this specific thing was probably an earnest mistake. Lots of other fraudulent stuff going on though of course!
seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams. Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier, and if you don’t do it right, your self driving system can be less reliable.
- overfeed 8mo ago
  > Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at sensor fusion.
- switchbak 8mo ago
  I think this is the key. In theory - more information stream when fused together (properly) should reduce error. If their stumbling block is the "properly" part, than the rest of those justifications come off as a pretty weak way to sidestep their own inabilities to deliver this properly. We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used in other domains, this seems like an especially life-critical domain that ought to have high rigor and standards applied.
- DennisP 8mo ago
  Sensor fusion seems like it'd be a big problem when you're handcoding lots of C++, and way less of a problem when all the sensors are just feeding into one big neural network, as Tesla and probably others are doing now. The training process takes care of it from there. One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving, taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection of lidar points, where each point contributes to a probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's fine if different points seem to contradict each other, because you're looking for the most likely scenario that could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor types it's still the same sort of problem.
kevlened 8mo ago
> Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just thought we were close to self-driving in 2014. Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that. Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.
- estearum 8mo ago
  Right, for the reasons that I just mentioned
naravara 8mo ago
Considering he also runs a company that puts computer chips inside brains to augment them you’d think he ought to have a more sound understanding as to the limits of both.
wyldfire 8mo ago
> how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
- MengerSponge 8mo ago
  > If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly. This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them! https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-crashing-more-human-drivers https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...
  - ggreer 8mo ago
    According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.
    - kube-system 8mo ago
      Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers, looks like they primarily used data sourced from police reports, which most people only file if the incident is serious enough to turn into insurance. Tesla notes: > These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
    - cycomanic 8mo ago
      > According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. Why is it clearly false? It might be false, but clearly? I would definitely like to see evidence either way. > I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average. That sounds like you are trying to find reasons to get the conclusion you want.
Gee101 8mo ago
Musk has never been scared of vertically integrating something that's too expensive initially.
- estearum 8mo ago
  What has he vertically integrated that's as technologically sophisticated as LIDAR?

bluGill 8mo ago

Until a lawyer points out other cars see that. My car already has various sensors and in manual driving sounds alarms if there is a danger I seem not to have noticed. (There are false alarms - but most of the type I did notice and probably should have left more safety margin even though I wouldn't hit it) also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.

small_model 8mo ago

Very recent issue with Waymo https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-puddle-in-los-angeles/ https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-.... This is 17 years after they bet the farm on LIDAR, with no signs its ever going to be cost effective or that it's better than multiple cameras, with millisecond reaction 360 degrees, that never gets tired, drunk, distracted, and also has other cheaper sensors and NN trained on Billions or real world data.

idiotsecant 8mo ago
>A vehicle got stuck trying to figure out an obstacle so sensors with less information are better than sensors with more information.
RobotToaster 8mo ago
That's an example of it failing safe. I'd rather it did that than drive me into a sinkhole because it thought it was a puddle.
- small_model 8mo ago
  Ok so Waymo is useless in the rain then, kind of limiting. But at least that 0.000000000001% times it actually is a sinkhole you won't damage the bumper.
  - criley2 8mo ago
    I'd rather a Waymo be useless in the rain rather than a Tesla be actively dangerous and likely to kill me. Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65 Waymo fatalities: 0
    - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
      Autopilot isn’t full self driving (FSD), most cars these ship with smart cruise control (what autopilot basically is). Do you have fatality statistics for FSD? If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But Tesla is special since it doesn’t even use radar for its smart cruise control implementation, so that could make it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.

lazide 8mo ago

Pretty hard to do if your whole selling point is ‘better and safer than human’ however?

xnx 8mo ago

This is a new and flawed rationale that I haven't heard before. Tesla cameras are worse (lower resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range) than human eyes and don't have "ears" (microphones).

peterfirefly 8mo ago
The cars do have at least one microphone.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Inside the car though, right? With multiple exterior microphones they could do spatialization like Waymo.

bko 8mo ago

Most accidents happen because people are human, aren't paying attention, are inebriated, not experienced enough drivers, or reckless. It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer can easily address all those issues

jeltz 8mo ago
Which means the mistakes vision-based models for today are unique to them.

georgeecollins 8mo ago

It is sound to think that cameras plus an accelerometer, plus data about about the car and environment (that you get from your ears) ought to be able to mimic and improve on human driving. However humans general purpose spatial awareness and ability to integrate all kinds of general information is probably really hard to replicate. A human would realize that an orange fluid spilling across the road might be slippery, guess the way a person might travel from the way their eyes are pointing... It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do things humans can't.

lesuorac 8mo ago

IIUC, the cameras in a Tesla have worse vision (resolution) at far distances than a human. So while in the abstract your argument sounds fine; it'll crumble in court when a lawyer points out a similar driver would've needed corrective lens.

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago

> If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win “A federal judge” recently “rejected Tesla's request to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over the 2019 crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S” [1]. If a human supervising still incurs liability, human-like errors, particularly if Waymo and BYD aren’t making them, is a poor defense. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-verdict-against-tesla-over-fatal-autopilot-crash-2026-02-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-v...