2mo ago

Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes That Teslas With "Self-Driving" Computers May Never Be Able to Actually Self-Drive

futurism.com Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes That Teslas With "Self-Driving" Computers May Never Be Able to Actually Self-Drive

Tesla customers may need a hardware upgrade to allow their cars to fully drive themselves unsupervised, Elon Musk admitted.

"Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true."

Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming...

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177 comments

Still no LiDAR.
- "Trust me, you just need to buy more compute for your car. We'll figure out reliable driving by sight someday."
  
  I'm happily using all the sensors my car offers, even if I'm pretty ok with driving by eyesight. Better sensors that can easily see through fog/rain/snow/whatever? Hell yeah, give them to me.
  
  LiDAR in particular actually kinda sucks at those conditions (basically any form of precipitation). It's really only good in clear environments.
  
  LiDAR can be done with different wavelengths. It should be possible to make one that can see through rain and snow.
  
  If you shift the spectrum enough, you get Radar.
  
  Agreed. But you don't have to go that far to make rain and snow transparent. And radar might not be a bad idea to have on self driving cars, as long as it's not the only thing.
- Elon Musks make engineering orders of magnitude more difficult. Those poor Tesla neoslaves
  
  They were on the path of self driving cars till Musk pulled the plug on the LiDAR and opted for cameras (cost less). He is directly responsible for why autopilot isn’t so auto.
  
  And, since it's a car and not a plane, also not so pilot.
  
  It’s not a boat either, so no pilot x2.
  
  To be fair, the LiDAR was primarily used for parking. Still a stupid decision to remove it. There were plenty of values it provides...but those cars were never going to drive themselves even if they did have LiDAR.
- It’s got something way better: LieAr
- We'll fix that, the car will be driving fully autonomously 2018, promise!
- https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151497/tesla-lidar-luminar-elon-musk-sensor-autonomous
  Tesla bought over $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar this year
- I personally don't think it's a matter of more sensory input. Whilst Lidar wouldn't be a bad thing, autonomous cars are just a problem current technology can't solve.
  
  The vehicles with a higher automated driving rating than Tesla use a more diverse range of sensory inputs. While it may not make fully autonomous driving, it very clearly would have made Tesla closer to it based on the fact that cars that use things like lidar in addition to cameras surpassed Tesla's rating many years ago.
  
  I think there needs be car 2 car ( or even car 2 human f.e. in smartphones and wearables ) introduced before self driving cars is capable to exist. Of course until real AI is introduced. We're nowhere near the human capable ai
  
  Put glue on your accelerator.
  
  Blare free bird.
  
  It is. The machine learning algorithm has maxed out its parameters because Elon decided to get rid of redundancy. The machine learning algorithm had to invent new algorithms to do what redundancy would have easily done in far fewer lines of code. They are out of compute power BECAUSE they decided to cheap out and removed redundancy.
  
  Have you seen Waymo?
  
  We already have road legal level 4 self driving cars for sale in Germany (Mercedes EQS and S Class), level 5 isnt far away.
  If Tesla didn't go the vision-only route they would probably also have level 4 autonomy by now
  
  It is to some degree. Lots of other new cars have lane keeping assist and automatic braking, BLIS, adaptive cruise control etc, and so on with more capable sensors and can for the most part drive without input from the driver better than the Tesla models with ultrasonic sensors or simply cameras. In fact the ones that rely solely on cameras absolutely do reportedly perform worse in testing. Musk was insistent that they could cheap out on the types of sensors used in order to make more profit and it shows. I don't think it's that tech cannot handle self driving currently. I think that it's a numbers game where the firms attempting it want to do it as cheaply as possible while promising the moon and stars which they can't deliver on a cheap budget. Vehicles like Ford's (Blue Cruise) use all kinds of sensors including radar and GPS to allow for handsfree (not self driving) and it does work. The proofs of concept are out there in the world, but the costs to go from something like that to full self driving just doesn't make it feasible for the average car manufacturer.
  
  Lots of other new cars have lane keeping assist and automatic braking, BLIS, adaptive cruise control etc, and so on with more capable sensors and can for the most part drive without input from the driver better than the Tesla
  Self driving is a huge step on from these things though. Hyper cruise control is easy in comparison and that's what those features give.
  Self driving means capable in all situations and all conditions. Not just highways.

177 comments