[xvector]

I do not get why your comment is so controversial - you are absolutely right.

Conventional cameras alone are not trustworthy for self-driving, and this is part of the reason every respectable company venturing into self-driving is incorporation technologies like LIDAR.

I find it sketchy that Tesla markets "future full-self-driving" when they are unlikely to have the hardware to make that a safe experience.

[toomuchtodo]

I think it's important to recognize that Tesla is (partially) a technology deflation play (its also a financial engineering play, but that is out of scope for this thread).

Their ability to deliver is a function of the costs of their basic technology supplies (batteries for the Roadster were expensive, less so for the S, X, and energy storage, and now even less so for the 3). This is very similar to the cost decline curve of solar, wind, and storage in the utility energy space (project developers provide bids based on where prices will be in 3-5 years).

Tesla can do this because technology and batteries rapidly decreases in cost every year. Need new autopilot compute hardware? It should be cheaper by the time they need to perform the swap to realize the capability. Need LIDAR? They'll find a way to install it, and the costs should be fairly reasonable per vehicle instead of thousands, or tens of thousands, if they went all in when it was expensive.

This is not unlike a technology startup, where technical debt you're going to pay off in the future is an acceptable tradeoff, so you push off the decision and/or work until the last possible moment (but no further).

[threeseed]

ALL of the other OEMs are building autonomous cars using LIDAR so cost isn't a factor.

And relating it to technical debt makes no sense as you have to design with LIDAR in the beginning.

[toomuchtodo]

Can you provide a citation to an OEM that is putting LIDAR in vehicles being sold to customers today?

[threeseed]

GM/Honda are partnering with Cruise. Fiat are partnering with Waymo.

Everyone is partnering with someone or organising supply deals. And everyone other than Tesla uses LIDAR.

Also I never said these cars were being sold today.

[toomuchtodo]

> Also I never said these cars were being sold today.

Then you're moving the goal posts. Tesla is selling cars today to people that they are (EDIT) targeting support of full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so. Everything else is an experiment in a lab or on a track.

[dragonwriter]

> Tesla is selling cars today to people that will eventually support full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so.

Well, Tesla claims that. It's quite possible that neither will happen.

[threeseed]

Some of us think that Tesla's technology is an experiment.

An incredibly dangerous one.

[jaimex2]

Ever wondered why in millions of years nature didnt evolve a LIDAR equivalent and most species use passive vision?

I think Tesla is bang on the money going only with cameras. They are already better than the human eye.

[mikestew]

Ever wondered why in millions of years nature didnt evolve a LIDAR equivalent and most species use passive vision?

Because it compensated for poor sensor hardware with a processing unit and software that we have thus far been unable to even come close to replicating? Granted, solve that, and we’re just a few years away!

[candiodari]

The problem with that is that LIDAR is a sensor that is so unlike human perception humans completely misjudge what it's capable of. After an accident humans refuse to believe that the sensor really didn't see it coming, which of course is a big problem later in court. Sonars have the same problem. There's things those sensors can see that humans just can't but in the case of Lidar, only in specific planes (so, for example, it just doesn't see things that "point" at the sensor. It just doesn't see stairs or even an abyss, even at close range). Sonar has similar problems. It sees everything everything everything ... as long as there is a whole lot of consistent nothing surrounding it. When there is structure on the sea floor, sonar is useless near it. When there is a ship on the surface accelerating, the eddy currents create a region around, behind and below the ship where the sonar is blind. And near the surface, sonar is useless. The more wind, the deeper the problem goes. In a storm, it can be 10 meters and more. People with decades of experience for some reason seem to outright refuse to believe that.

People seriously misjudge the limitations of these sensors, and this leads to accidents.

Better to use cameras, which have almost exactly the same issues humans have (e.g. bad vision in low light, limited view, "blind" angles near corners, bad optical performance near the edges, ...), which will lead to "understandable" mistakes.

Nobody will understand if a LIDAR misses a beam sticking out of a truck in front of you (which would be expected behavior: such a thing is essentially invisible to LIDAR) and impales the person sitting in the passenger seat on it.

Or the Tesla fuckup. Failing to see the difference between front and back wheels of a large truck and 2 cars. Then decapitating the driver by driving in between the 2 sets of wheels at high speed. That's a typical LIDAR issue.

Sooner or later LIDAR will decide that just driving off an abyss is the best solution to a simple traffic situation (because LIDARs see abysses everywhere, so they use algorithms that assume abysses don't exist).

I've seen LIDAR controlled robots drive into tables "decapitating" (sort-of) themselves, because it only saw the feet of the table, looking at the data, and coming to the conclusion ... yep ... it was a perfectly understandable mistake. That robot also threw itself off the stairs. Again ... tough to fault it for that, as it saw the stairs as pretty much the same thing as a stick lying on the floor. Afterwards looking at the data, that was a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

We lost the robot to the stairs. I was looking at it making that decision. Why ? You see it move, and you're automatically assuming "surely it's not going to go for the hole in the staircase". And then it decides on a solution. Boom. And yes, I pressed the emergency stop button. Doesn't help much if the robot is already falling.

[Ntrails]

> Better to use cameras, which have almost exactly the same issues humans have

Surely, he cries, the argument is to use both and simply apply use some kind of likelihoods/confiendence in the output to combine them?

[franciscrick1]

You say this ironically, and yet every indicator points toward this happening in the next 5-10 years!

[mdorazio]

Ever wondered why with millions of years of evolution, human drivers with depth perception-enabled HDR cameras in their heads still get into accidents all the time? If that's your bar for "good enough" then we're in big trouble with autonomous vehicles.

[manicdee]

You need to look at why humans have accidents then.

Hint: it’s not due to the sensor package being used.

[TeMPOraL]

> Hint: it’s not due to the sensor package being used.

But it is. The package is pretty limited, and the firmware running it is full of hacks that compensate. Hiding the blind spot, saccade masking, not paying attention to stationary things...

[FrankieThroway]

The vast majority of accidents are due to distracted driving. The millions of humans successfully operating a car more or less prove that the problem isn't our sensors. Alternative sensors may help, but marginally.

[candiodari]

It at partially is. For example, humans' blind angles get blamed for quite a few accidents. Pointing attention in the wrong direction for another decent batch.

[threeseed]

Eagles can see 4-8x further than humans can and many varieties of birds can see in additional spectrums to ours. And of course SONAR exists in whales, dolphins etc which is a corollary.

[manicdee]

And yet here we are with limited spectrum stereo vision, at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

[candiodari]

He neglects to mention that those sensors eagles use have their own limitations. They have zero peripheral vision. It's like having strong binoculars glued to your eyes.

This has consequences. It takes them forever to find anything, even if they can do it from great distances. They are blind for several seconds when they change position (such as when they just caught prey), or just generally at short range.

And you can try this with cats: this makes it very easy to sneak up on them. No peripheral vision, directional hearing ... if they're focused in front of them, you can almost just walk up to them from the back, they won't notice.

These things are tradeoffs. Humans are prey species, pack hunters. If a human is paying attention you can't really hope to sneak up on them. One human is easy to take down. But 10 humans will defend each other effectively.

[davidgould]

There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary ladder." There is well fit to an environment and not well fit. To say "top of the ladder" implies that evolution encodes the concept of "progress". It does not. This notion of "top of the ladder" has been used to promote all sorts of pseudo-scientific racism and used to justify all sorts of bad conduct up to and including genocide.

I'm not accusing you of any of this, just pointing out that a seemingly innocuous, almost cliched term like "evolutionary ladder" can carry a lot of unwelcome baggage.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Eagles can see 4-8x further than humans can and many varieties of birds can see in additional spectrums to ours.

So can digital cameras.

> And of course SONAR exists in whales, dolphins etc which is a corollary.

The reason for (active) SONAR is the lack of ambient sound. An alternative for a car would be headlights. Or passive infrared cameras.

[mtgx]

So does Tesla have cameras that see 4-8x better than a human then? Or do they use potato cameras that are useless at night like Uber did?

[candiodari]

Tesla's have 12 camera's I believe. So ... yes, it does.

[supergirl]

humans also didn't evolve wheels and the ability to run at 200 km / h.

[AnthonyMouse]

No, but cheetahs did at the speeds vehicles would be operating in autonomous mode, and various birds fly even faster.

[mtgx]

Even at night? And in snow?

[nickik]

So basically you simple predefined what technology makes people 'respectable' and and what not. Seems to me that you are just assuming knowledge that actually nobody has.

[salawat]

They aren't assuming. If you aren't radiating and measuring the return, you're at a massive disadvantage in terms of your sensor package. It's s bit like trusting a computer to drive at 70 mph on a pitch black stretch of highway it has never seem before. Enjoy overdriving your headlights and hitting a deer or something else.

Tesla is cutting corners by eschewing a well-known technology that will increase the fidelity of their autonomous driving system. That is irresponsible.

[nickik]

Its only irresponsible if they actually sell anything that doesn't work. So far what the offer is fine for what it is. People who don't want to wait can get their money back at any time.

[salawat]

If you define working as "encouraging drivers to drive in a more disengaged state, while at the same time adding additional sources of hazard or malfunction for both the disengaged driver, and other motorists to be alert for", then I got nothing that'll seemingly convince you, as it appears we'd be arguing right past each other.

Do. No. Harm. It isn't just for Doctors. You can't sit on the positivist side of the fence and say, "Bah, it'll never happen."

It always does. When the cost is lives, you don't mess around or skimp. Closer to Perfection over pretty good is 100% justifiable in safety critical applications. In many cases, critical systems are redundantly reinforced.

Look up risk compensation to understand why a half-baked solution is almost guaranteed to be worse. If you are still relying on the human to compensate for failures in a system in an environment where response time to live is measured in seconds, you might as well just have them being alert and engaged at all times with as few things to have to compensate for malfunctioning as possible.

Another somewhat tangential demonstration of this is observable in nuclear reactor design, and utilising delayed fission product neutrons to attain criticality. This slows down the timescale over which things can go horribly wrong to the scale of minutes instead of seconds that would make avoiding prompt criticality highly problematic.