[ogjunkyard]

The removal of radar has got to be a hindrance to getting autonomous driving working well for Tesla. Cross-comparison between multiple forms of environment surveillance (Vision, Radar, LIDAR, etc.) has to be in place for autonomous driving to work reliably IMO. This much has been stated by multiple non-Tesla AI organizations and leaders.

I think Tesla may be using the price of FSD as a way to dissuade people from buying it, while enabling it to be a funding mechanism for continued work on autonomous driving.

As evident in this video, FSD is often acting like a nervous student driver by being unable to confidently make decisions on the path to take, running through red lights, driving unpredictably at slow speeds, and more. This is probably due to the fact that there is ONLY cameras being used to inform FSD, which can suffer from contrast issues.

I've seen videos in the past where Tesla camera input is in black/white/grayscale for processing. It seems like if you converted the video to B&W, the pylon and the road are similar darkness/color, so I'm not surprised this had issues. Tesla Autopilot was suffering from issues with contrast all the way back in 2016 when Autopilot failed to detect a semi crossing a highway in Florida which lead to the death of the Tesla driver. This was due to the white trailer against a bright sky.

Ultimately, as a consumer and former Tesla owner, I don't feel confident in Tesla's ability to get autonomous driving working well at a human-capable level, let alone the "10x safer" bar they've set for themselves.