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by daghamm 646 days ago
Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD. This is something Tesla engineers learned the hard way.

Things may change in the future as we make advances in computing and AI, but right now it is not possible.

4 comments

So it's ok to sell a feature to customers if you only find out later it's not possible?
A more generous interpretation is that GP provides context and logical reasons behind the decision, not excuses for it.
It's Elon Musk after all.

His boldness and thinking he's exceptional is both the reason of his success and failures.

To be fair I believe we all have this basic bias. For example, when I have a streak of failures, I approach another task with caution, even though it may be simple and normally I'd do it easily. And when I have several successes, I get overconfident and commit to hard tasks (and sometimes even complete them, by a combination of experience, luck, and other factors). Musk had some great successes and believes it is his inherent feature. (Or, at least, this is how he appears.)

The good thing is that we, as humanity, benefit from his successes, but have also deal with his unfulfillable promises, not to mention occasional fits.

Not only sensors: in Europe I don’t see how driving in small towns could be possible without communicating with other drivers and pedestrians, and reading custom signs. Maybe add a robotic hand to the list of required hardware.
> Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD.

Come on now. Elon was the one being pigheadedly stubborn about camera vision over LIDAR. There's really no reason to think this was a case where the engineers were insisting on a viable approach that unfortunately proved infeasible over time.

They weren't going to be able to do it with the tech they put in the cars and damn near everyone knew it. We shouldn't think their engineers were uniquely blind to what everyone was saying when it's fairly clear that there was a top down push here.

Even with advances in AI, I don’t think the cameras are good enough. They are prone to getting blinded by the sun due to poor dynamic range, and some of them have no way to clean themselves, and aren’t redundant for certain directions.

No matter how good the AI is, the car is not going to be able to drive if the image is a big white blob of blown out sun or bird poop, and there is no redundant sensor.

A car without radar cannot be trusted to drive itself.

I can move my eyes, put on sunglasses, lower the sun visor. That rinkydink camera is stuck looking straight at the sun. It’s a no go.