The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
Eyes can’t see in low visibility.
musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”
FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes
musk reaction -
It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.
Not only that, when we have trouble seeing things, we can adjust our speed to compensate (though tbf, not all human drivers do, but I don’t think FSD should be modelled after the worst of human drivers). Does Tesla’s FSD go into a “drive slower” mode when it gets less certain about what it sees? Or does its algorithms always treat its best guess with high confidence?
Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.
Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.
Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.
They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.
I dunno what cameras you are using but a standard full frame sensor and an F/4 lens sees way better in low light than the human eye. If I take a raw image off my camera, there is so much more dynamic range than I can see or a monitor can even represent, you can double the brightness at least four times (ie 16x brighter) and parts of the image that looked pure black to the eye become perfectly usable images. There is so so so much more dynamic range than the human eye.
Do you know what the depth of field at f/4 looks like? It’s not anywhere in the neighborhood of suitable for a car, and it still takes a meaningful exposure length in low light conditions to get a picture at all, which is not suitable for driving at 30mph, let alone actually driving fast.
That full frame sensor is also on a camera that’s several thousand dollars.
if he was truthful: “the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits”
Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.
Honestly though, I’m a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD
You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.
He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.
The whole “we drive with our eyes” thing is such bullshit. Humans are terrible drivers. Autonomous driving should be better than humans.
That goes for OpenPilot too. They actually openly advertise that their software makes the same mistakes as humans, as if it’s some sort of advancement. Like if I could plug Lidar into my brain, I totally would.
How Can Cameras Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?
Pluck it out!
The cars used to have RADAR. But they got rid of that and even disabled it on older models when updating because they “only need cameras.”
Cameras and RADAR would have been good enough for most all conditions…
What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.
I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.
You can hear them, but manufacturers had to add external speakers to electric cars to make them louder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds
I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.
I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.
I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.
‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.
It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.