In our town we had a Tesla shoot through red traffic lights near our local school barely missing a child crossing the road. The driver was looking at their lap (presumably their phone). I looked online and apparently autopilot doesn’t work with traffic lights, but FSD does?
There’s a few versions of this and several generations with different capability. The early Tesla Autopilot had no recognition of stop signs, it was literally just ‘cruise control that keeps you in your lane’. FSD for sure does recognize stop signs, traffic lights, etc and reacts correctly to them. I BELIEVE that the current iteration of Traffic Aware Cruise Control (what you get if you don’t pay extra for FSD or Enhanced Autopilot) will stop for traffic lights but I could be wrong on that. I know it detects pedestrians but its detection isn’t nearly as advanced as FSD.
I will give you that in theory, the time-of-flight data from a LiDAR pulse will give you a more reliable point cloud than anything you’d get from cameras. But I also know Tesla is doing things with cameras that border on black magic. They gave up on getting images out of the cameras and are now just using the raw photon count data from the sensor, and with the AI trained it can apparently detect edges with only a few photons of difference between pixels (below the noise floor). And I can say from experience that a few times I’ve been in blackout rainstorms where even with full wipers I can barely see anything, and the FSD visualization doesn’t skip a beat and it sees other cars before I do.
Would you still feel the same about Tesla if your car injured/killed someone or if someone you care about was injured/killed by a Tesla?
As a Level 2 system, the Tesla is not capable of injuring or killing someone. The driver is responsible for that.
But I’d ask- if a Tesla saw YOUR loved one in the road, and it would have reacted but it wasn’t in FSD mode and the human driver reacted too slowly, how would you feel about that? I say this not to be contrarian, but because we really are approaching the point where the car has better situational awareness than the human.
If we can put extra sensors in and it objectively makes it safer why don’t we? Self driving cars are a luxury.
For the reason above with the loved one. If you can use cameras and make a system that costs the manufacturer $3000/car, and it’s 50 times safer than a human, or use LiDAR and cost the manufacturer $10,000/car, and it’s 100 times safer than a human, which is safer?
The answer is the cameras, because it will be on more cars, thus deliver more overall safety.
I understand the thinking that ‘Elon cheaped out, Tesla FSD is a hack system on shitty hardware that uses clever programming to work around a cut-rate sensor suite’. But I’d also argue- if they can get similar performance out of a camera, and put it on more cars, doesn’t that do more to overall improve safety?
In the example above, if the car didn’t have the self driving package because the guy couldn’t afford it, wouldn’t you prefer that a decent but better than human self driving system was on the car?
There’s a few versions of this and several generations with different capability. The early Tesla Autopilot had no recognition of stop signs, it was literally just ‘cruise control that keeps you in your lane’. FSD for sure does recognize stop signs, traffic lights, etc and reacts correctly to them. I BELIEVE that the current iteration of Traffic Aware Cruise Control (what you get if you don’t pay extra for FSD or Enhanced Autopilot) will stop for traffic lights but I could be wrong on that. I know it detects pedestrians but its detection isn’t nearly as advanced as FSD.
I will give you that in theory, the time-of-flight data from a LiDAR pulse will give you a more reliable point cloud than anything you’d get from cameras. But I also know Tesla is doing things with cameras that border on black magic. They gave up on getting images out of the cameras and are now just using the raw photon count data from the sensor, and with the AI trained it can apparently detect edges with only a few photons of difference between pixels (below the noise floor). And I can say from experience that a few times I’ve been in blackout rainstorms where even with full wipers I can barely see anything, and the FSD visualization doesn’t skip a beat and it sees other cars before I do.
As a Level 2 system, the Tesla is not capable of injuring or killing someone. The driver is responsible for that.
But I’d ask- if a Tesla saw YOUR loved one in the road, and it would have reacted but it wasn’t in FSD mode and the human driver reacted too slowly, how would you feel about that? I say this not to be contrarian, but because we really are approaching the point where the car has better situational awareness than the human.
For the reason above with the loved one. If you can use cameras and make a system that costs the manufacturer $3000/car, and it’s 50 times safer than a human, or use LiDAR and cost the manufacturer $10,000/car, and it’s 100 times safer than a human, which is safer?
The answer is the cameras, because it will be on more cars, thus deliver more overall safety.
I understand the thinking that ‘Elon cheaped out, Tesla FSD is a hack system on shitty hardware that uses clever programming to work around a cut-rate sensor suite’. But I’d also argue- if they can get similar performance out of a camera, and put it on more cars, doesn’t that do more to overall improve safety?
In the example above, if the car didn’t have the self driving package because the guy couldn’t afford it, wouldn’t you prefer that a decent but better than human self driving system was on the car?