I have no confidence that Tesla will fix this before the planned Robo-Taxi rollout in Austin in 2 weeks.
After all, they haven’t fixed it in the last 9 years that self-driving Teslas have been on the road.
Tesla self driving is already responsible for the deaths of multiple people.
They weren’t held accountable for those.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
If regular school shootings were no reason to actually do something, why would regular deadly accidents with self driving systems be one? I’m always amazed by what Americans are willing to tolerate.
That’s slightly different since most states will put full responsibility on the driver even for autonomous cars. If there’s no driver, though, it would go back to the manufacturer. That’s why Uber gave up on self driving after one of their test cars ran over someone.
So, the USA people are the beta testers, i guess.
only Texans… (with the robotaxis)
Texas state legislature has passed a law making it illegal for cities to pass laws more restrictive than the state laws and Austin which is known to be full of progressives. This makes it a perfect place for Tesla to beta-test it’s software. They’ll kill people likely to vote for Democrats.
Thoughts and prayers.
Might also explain why they’re the only ones that seem to have all this knowledge of a population crisis that no one else is aware of.
Thank God for the technocratic elite, and their foresight to know their plans for greatness will almost certainly wipe out the entire U.S. population. Hazard of being part of the unwashed masses, I guess.
Glad they are doing all this while they simultaneously argue that a loss of our personal liberty is a small price to pay for their protection. If they weren’t keeping us safe from… ::gestures vaguely:: China(?) then who would?
Put some respect to their name, off course they are alpha (males!) testers.
I guess there’s going to be a lot of heroes popping Robo-Taxi tires. To protect their community and all that.
I recall that people blocked Waymo cars at one point by simply placing orange cones in front of them. Given Teslas only use cameras I wonder if you could just slap a sticker of an orange cone (or just a splash of orange paint) on the hood and confuse it enough that it wouldn’t move…
Edit: Or, if you really want to be a dick, get some black stickers (the stronger the glue the better) and surreptitiously put them over one or more cameras.
Given Teslas only use cameras
This still blows my mind. My fucking robot vacuum uses LiDAR, and multi-ton vehicles on public roads use cameras? Jesus Christ.
“Well you see lidar cameras are expensive. Yeah… that’s the excuse. No more questions” - Tesla whenever they are asked to explain themselves
Actually the excuse Musk uses is that humans only use their eyes to drive, so that’s enough for cars as well.
Wrong on so many levels…
Correction: Robo-Taxis Hit the Child in 2 Weeks
Did they try it with a lighter colored child?
Texas releasing these things in public is horrifying. Tesla is last in this field, and refuses to add LIDAR, which is obviously what is needed.
My $60 robot vacuum has lidar…
Maybe you can get a business going mounting roombas on Tesla bumpers?
Call it clean energy
I award you the dubious honor of “Best Pun on the Thread”
Lidar is one of the things it needs, but even when they properly see what’s ahead they don’t interpret it correctly and don’t take the correct actions, it’s bigger than just lidar, which is honestly terrifying
The article doesn’t mention anything about where the cars will be driving in Austin, but I reluctantly took a Waymo from the airport in Phoenix to a hotel and it did really well. Even slowed down for a guy who was jaywalking.
It ended up taking longer than expected because apparently they’re either require or trained on different roads than you would normally take (e.g. no highways). It did such a good job, though, that I ended up taking a Waymo a second time while there.
All this to say that it may not be ready for all roads, but is ready for some. Definitely still scary though.
I believe Waymo has a better set of sensors (Lidar + Radar+ Cameras instead of just cameras), more processing power, and more research / time / resources spent on it compared to Tesla.
So it’s not that we aren’t ready for self driving taxis, but rather about which cars are ready to provide that service
I think Waymo is also trying to prioritize safety. I was in San Francisco recently and took one, just out of curiosity, from my hotel to a Giants game. It seemed to stop when pedestrian traffic got heavy instead of going all the way to the stadium. So, like three blocks from the stadium. No biggie. I might have told a human taxi driver I could walk from there.
I’m not sure if it’s a California regulation or Waymo trying to play it safe but I will never get in a self-driving car regulated by Texas and designed to the specifications of one of history’s biggest dumbasses.
Working with cities to regulate self-driving and plan out specific routes/infrastructure was always going to be the only path to widespread adoption but Elon was too busy grifting off bullshit claims like everyone’s Teslas moonlighting as self-driving taxis and paying for themselves.
Makes sense. There were sensors alll over that thing.
That’s part of the reason Teslas are not well-suited for this. One camera, each direction, with no other sensors to help make decisions, is a really bad way to ensure safety.
Humans normally have two “front facing cameras” (i.e. two eyes) so we have depth perception. We also process light differently than cameras do so infrared light (for one) doesn’t affect our decisions. We also have ears so the sound of a loud motorcycle engine tips us off if we just see a spec in the distance. We also use context clues to help our decisions, like if other drivers change lanes quickly we are extra observant of road obstacles.
Not that technology can never be as good as a human at driving, but we use a lot more than a single “moving picture” to decide what we should do.
To be fair, the Tesla vision system has 3 cameras facing forward. One in the center above the front bumper grille and two behind the rear view mirror. Those two provide some level of stereoscopic vision to help judge distances.
But yeah, the lack of other sensors is a huge issue. Anything from bug splatter to mud to snow etc. can easily obscure one or more cameras and render the whole vision system unreliable.
We also process light differently than cameras do
To expand on this a little further, human vision has also developed the ability to filter out unnecessary information in order to avoid overloading the brain. When tracking moving objects the eyes mostly send deltas of the movement to the brain. Computers, however, are the exact opposite. The cameras essentially send a series of still images, and it’s up to the computer to compare them to look for any movement.
Waymo is really interesting - you probably wouldn’t guess it, I’m a cautiously optimistic autonomy person! Waymo is already 12x safer than human drivers, that’s brilliant, I love that.
Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they’re mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.
The rub… that all points out the obvious danger of rolling out the wild-west FSD that Tesla drivers are currently employing everywhere else. If it’s safe enough to trust to drive your car for you, why does it need a ton of additional guard-rails to operate without a safety driver?
Yeah it’s scary to think about. There should be laws though that you’re still 100% at fault if you were not driving during an accident. I imagine another issue with FSD is government having a backdoor into your car to immobilize you or whatever they want. Part of me is in favor of that, but of course that a huuuge responsibility that can be abused.
The fun part is tesla FSD shuts off just before accidents, so you’re always the one at fault.
You would be the one at fault in most states anyway as long as you’re technically operating the car. They do that mostly for potential lawsuits from their customers.
So you’re saying it’s good at anticipating accidents haha
Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they’re mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.
Lol where are the Tesla fanboys insisting that geofencing isn’t useful for developing self driving tech?
Let’s not get carried away pretending America cares too much about children dying frfr.
Yeah once they’re out of the womb, fuck 'em. We only care about the unborn.
They don’t actually care about the unborn either. They just want women to suffer, that’s always been the only goal.
If we did the Carolina Lean is a bigger threat than Elon, but somehow that’s legal in most states.
Yeah the draconian punishment and outcry when someone dares to overtake a school bus is absolutely laughable.
Give that child chance to be shot the next day in school! Or starve to death, because they can’t afford school lunches.
If their “AI” wind shield wipers could identify…rain?..I’d be more hopeful about identifying a child.
Move fast and break things!
Move fast and break
thingsschoolchildren!Did you mean: Move fast and murder children?
A German party campaigned under the slogan “Digital first. Bedenken second” (Sic, i.e. mostly english). Bedenken means concerns.
They were punished pretty hard last election.
I still don’t get how anyone thought this notion was ever considered a good strategy for anything… it clearly shows these people have no skin in the game because there is no way they would break their own things
I’m developing a game engine, that is currently unpopular, instead of trying to make the old API work with the new rendering system, I just decided to completely redo a lot of stuff. It was mandatory for the GUI subsystem as previously it was a spaghetti code of mess, now it’s a pretty well usable thing. It was less mandatory with the sprite and tile rendering, but I needed to adjust stuff to OpenGL, as previously it used the CPU.
so, move slower and fix things! I like your style better
It hits the road in America. And considering the state of that country, this isn’t even near the list of problems atm.
Maybe y’all can’t shoot the cars when they go Christine on you.
The children were hamas obviously
They were behind white genocide in South Africa
“And if you don’t support killing them, you support terrorists, mmmkaaaaayyyy” — Bill Maher
Tesla be like: Yeet the child!
Can’t wait for the robo taxis to get vandalized.
Barring that, can’t wait until they fail miserably.
Worth saving this article for future class actions. Go go go!