[brianstorms]

Also, humans and other animals that rely on vision have eyelids and tear ducts and are able to blink and get stuff out of an eye.

Poor, poor Tesla cameras freak out as soon as the sunshine is too bright or there's snow or rain or ice or mud in the way. You'd think if they're going to rely on vision, every camera mounted on the car would have a way to "squint" in blinding-light conditions, or "wipe" the lens or something when smudges, rain, snow, ice, mud, or bug-splat blocks the view. But then, Tesla is insanely cheap, and all that would require parts, and that would impact margins, and that would impact stock price, and so, this is why we can't have nice things ....

[est31]

Yeah human eyes cover a huge dynamic range compared to traditional cameras that have all sorts of issues with either too little or too much light (blooming, lens flares). Are a Tesla's cameras of the same quality of the human eye? Can they see in the dark just as well?

[alpaca128]

Not only can Tesla's cameras not do that as well, they may also just shut down if it's too cold, even if they're not covered in snow.

Current self driving systems sometimes fail in perfect weather conditions on correctly marked, empty roads. There's a long road ahead if it's supposed to actually work in the real world.

[fastball]

Human vision sometimes fails in perfect weather conditions on correctly marked, empty roads.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans.

[grumple]

That's a failure of attention, not vision.

All the sources I'm able to find say there are no cameras in existence that are as good as human vision. Human vision is quite good and adaptive to real world conditions of all sorts.

[alpaca128]

Would you use the same excuse for calculators or medical devices?

The reason we invented machines in the first place is because they're significantly better and more reliable than humans.

[reaperman]

Would be nice if someone was prototyping things like that. Id imagine you could sell actual self driving cars for $200k or maybe a bit more. (Cost of a decent luxury car + 1-2 years of a dedicated full time chauffeur)

[oaw-bct-ar-bamf]

It’s called Mercedes Benz. S class.

They go the boring path. Work together with regulators. Prove to them that whatever they are doing is actually save to use. Don’t oversell to their customers.

They go the way of building and retaining trust - with customers and regulation bodies.

[snovv_crash]

And also build a product which is far more expensive than what Tesla does, when you compare features of their E-variants. It's all tradeoffs.

[MereInterest]

Doing something cheaper than competitors is a good thing when you’re achieving the same goal. Doing something cheaper than competitors when there’s a trade-off to the buyer fills out options in the market. Doing something cheaper than competitors when there’s an externality (e.g. a self-driving car that fails to recognize pedestrians) is morally condemnable.

[maven29]

https://news.ti.com/industrys-first-ultrasonic-lens-cleaning...

https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/analogwire/posts/ultrasonic-lens...

You could emulate the properties of blinking using piezoelectric transducers.

[Closi]

But humans eyes often look away from the road, close during a sneeze etc, and have a very narrow viewing angle compared to a car surrounded 365 degrees by cameras... so there are plusses and minuses.

Human vision isn't that perfect for driving when it's looking at a mobile phone.

[ikhatri]

Yeah it's shocking to me how many people overlook this. Even if we pretended that the Tesla sensor suite was capable of FSD, it's not FSD if you have to disengage when the lens gets mud on it. Sensor cleaning is an integral part of actually being able to have driverless operation. When I worked at Argo we spent a lot of time making sure that we were designing failsafe methods for detecting and dealing with obstructions (https://www.axios.com/2021/12/15/self-driving-cars-clean-dir...).