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.
yeah, you’d think they’d at least use radar. That’s cheap AF. It’s like someone there said I have this hill to die on, I bet we can do it all with cameras.
Yeahhh pretty sure I know who
Not sure it’s a him thing, though it definitely could be. An inexpensive Chinese radar element could have eliminated all these problems and they could still use cameras as the main system. It would have cost them dollars to add it to the parts list and it’s just a minor input to the collision avoidance stuff.
I would expect him to do a cost-savings thing and pull parts, but they’re not really all that cost adverse. ( until you get to QC )
Maybe it was a DOGE kid he hired to come up with ideas or something. Doing with cameras only is more like a technical challenge, nobody looks at that and goes, WOW they can just do that with cameras, they go wow, that’s a horrible idea full of dust, dirt and mud issues.
That said, he has made worse plans :)
How are people still giving this man a fucking pass on everything?
August 2019:
Elon Musk: “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed.” Experts: Maybe not
Jan 2025:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk Dismisses LiDAR Again: ‘Humans Drive Without Shooting Lasers Out Of Their Eyes’
It was Elon, he was very vocal about how Lidar was an expensive crutch and how machine learning would get so much better than human vision back around 2016ish.
And I can see the expense on lidar being a problem in 2016 but what about radar? You can get a 30 m radar/sonar element for dollars. Then they wouldn’t be crashing into walls and children and what have you.
Your perspective is very generous to Elon. “It’s a cheap part, why would they omit it? Probably it was some dumb kid working there”.
Usually cost-cutting measures that make significant compromises are top-down pushes, profit is their concern. Might not have been the CEO himself but, in my perspective, it would have been from the top levels.
What’s the opposite of occam’s razor? The most convoluted, unbelievable answer full of assumptions is the correct one? Because it seems like rumba is operating from there.
No I’m not trying to be generous, If it were just a dumb decision it would totally have been his. This is like a recent graduate engineer vendetta kind of decision. I don’t think he’s actually smart enough to try to make this bad decision.
Back in like 2016, a huge part of the grift was that Tesla was a tech company and their system would get smarter forever as it got more data.
Using an expensive sensor that can just detect objects instead of relying on computer vision and machine learning is kinda like an admission of failure.
that’s fair