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.
Notice how they're mad at the video and not the car, manufacturer, or the CEO. It's a huge safety issue yet they'd rather defend a brand that obviously doesn't even care about their safety. Like, nobody is gonna give you a medal for being loyal to a brand.
As Electrek points out, Autopilot has a well-documented tendency to disengage right before a crash. Regulators have previously found that the advanced driver assistance software shuts off a fraction of a second before making impact.
This has been known.
They do it so they can evade liability for the crash.
I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well...
The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.
I hope some of you actually skimmed the article and got to the "disengaging" part.
As Electrek points out, Autopilot has a well-documented tendency to disengage right before a crash. Regulators have previously found that the advanced driver assistance software shuts off a fraction of a second before making impact.
It's a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.
I got a Tesla from my work before Elon went full Reich 3, and try this:
break on bridge shadows on the highway
start wipers on shadows, but not on rain
break on cars parked on the roadside if there's a bend in the road
disengage autopilot and break when driving towards the sun
change set speed at highway crossings because fuck the guy behind me, right?
engage emergency break if a bike waits to cross at the side of the road
To which I'll add:
moldy frunk (short for fucking trunk, I guess?), no ventilation whatsoever, water comes in, water stays in
pay attention noises for fuck-all reasons masking my podcasts and forcing me to rewind
the fucking cabin camera nanny - which I admittedly disabled with some chewing gum
the worst mp3 player known to man, the original Winamp was light years ahead - won't index, won't search, will reload USB and lose its place with almost every car start
bonkers UI with no integration with Android or Apple - I'm playing podcasts via low rate Bluetooth codecs, at least it doesn't matter much for voice
unusable airco in auto mode, insists on blowing cold air in your face
Say what you want about European cars, at least they got usability and integration right. As did most of the auto industry. Fuck Tesla, never again. Bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes.
Tesla cars are stupid tech. As the cars that use lidar demonstrated, this is a solved problem. There don’t have to be self driving cars that run over kids. They just refuse to integrate the solution for no discernible reason, which I’m assuming is really just “Elon said so.”
It's a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.
So, who's the YouTuber that's gonna test this out? Since Elmo has pushed his way into the government in order to quash any investigation into it.
What would definitely help with the discussion is if Mark Rober the scientist left a fucking crumb of scientific approach in his video. He didn’t really explain how he was testing it just slam car into things for views. This and a collaboration with a company that makes lidar made the video open to every possible criticism and it’s a shame.
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end. Why is this even a thing? Like talking about box office results, companies financials and stocks…. If you’re not an investor of theirs, just stop. It sounds like you’re working for free for them.
For the record, I do want the bar for self-driving safety to be high. I also want human drivers to be better... Because even not-entirely-safe self-driving cars may still be safer than humans at a certain point.
Yes it plays like an infomercial for lidar. So take that portion with some skepticism. I can think of some issues exclusive to lidar like 2+ lidar cars blinding each other which needs to be solved, e.g. some kind of light pattern encoding to mask out unwanted signals.
It absolutely 100% demonstrates the issue with camera-only technology in Tesla vehicles.
Teslas used to have cameras + radar but they cheaped out and removed the radar. I think it would have passed all the tests if they still had the front facing radar but they don't. The problem with cameras alone is obvious - they can't see what they can't see and probably don't have an innate sense to slow down if there is rain, fog, ice or whatever else that might cause a human to.
props to the LiDAR car for trying to drive through that heavy rain - does it just have enough resolution to see through the droplets to determine that there isn't a solid object within braking distance?
EDIT: actually maybe it didn't, and just stopped when it realised that it couldn't see through the water?
Man these cars don`t have a Radar ? Only eyes like most of the animals? Not even as a backup ? Not talking about Lasers, but Radar? Truck drivers, better not paint a scenery on the back of your truck.
It was super annoying how scared he acted when he knew it was styrofoam and it wasn't even going to leave a scratch on the car. I would have like it much better if the car crashed into and actual wall and burst into flames.