YouTuber Mark Rober has kicked the hornet's nest with his latest video. But are Tesla fanboys right mistakes were made?

In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.

The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.

  • blady_blah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    He didn’t think they were better. He thought Tesla could get away without the more expensive lidar. Basically “humans can drive with just vision, that should be enough for an autonomous vehicle also.” Basically he did it because lidar is more expensive.

    • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Even if humans can drive with just vision:

      1. Human vision has superb dynamic range, auto focus and other features that cameras thousands of dollars could only dream of (for most).
      2. I don’t want self driving cars to drive like humans. Humans make too many mistakes and are prone to bad decisions (see the need for safety systems in the first place).
      3. Train and bus transport is better for most people. Driving is a luxury, we’ve forced people that should not be driving to do so in order to keep a job and barely survive.
      • blady_blah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Human vision is great, human attention is not and neither is their reaction time. Computers are 100x better at both of those. If you throw lidar into the mix, then a car’s vision is now much better than a humans.

        IMHO self driving cars have to be statistically 10x better than humans to be widely implemented. If it passes that threshold them I’m fine with them.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I didn’t think it was about the cost. I think he just likes to be contrarian because he thinks it makes him seem smart. He then needs to stick by his stupid decisions.

      • blady_blah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        20 hours ago

        I’m assuming it’s a cost because it makes sense to me. His goal was to build full-self-driving (FSD) into ever car and sell the service as a subscription.

        If you add another $500 in components then that’s a lot of cost (probably a lot cheaper today but this was 10 years ago). Cameras are cheap and can be spread around the car with additional non-FSD benefits where as lidar has much fewer uses when the cost is not covered. I think he used his “first-principles” argument as a justification to the engineers as another way for him to say “I don’t want to pay for lidar, make it work with the cheap cameras.”

        Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?

          What makes you think people make rational decisions? Especially sociopaths like Musk?