In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
Tesla cars are stupid tech. As the cars that use lidar demonstrated, this is a solved problem. There don’t have to be self driving cars that run over kids. They just refuse to integrate the solution for no discernible reason, which I’m assuming is really just “Elon said so.”
Yeah, it’s infuriating! Elon said something along the lines of Humans drive all the time just using their eyes, so we can replicate that with just cameras. Leaving out the fact that one of the benefits of a self driving system should surely be that it’s in many ways BETTER than humans which are often terrible at driving in fog, torrential rain, low light/night time etc!? It was almost a point of pride that his cars would be every bit as shitty as a human driver to a fault!
I guess his robots are going to be just as weak and frail as humans and need sick days and simulate getting tired and dropping things too?? I can just imagine one of his robots entering a room and saying What did I come in here for again?? I think I need a nap!?
It’s even worse than that. Not only is it a solved problem, but Tesla had it solved (or closer to solved, anyway) and then intentionally regressed on the technology as a cost cutting measure. All the while making a limp-wristed attempt to spin the removal of key sensor hardware – first the radar and later the ultrasonic proximity sensors – as a “safety” initiative.
There isn’t a shovel anywhere in the world big enough for that pile of bullshit.
“human eyes are like cameras so cameras are sufficient” is definitely a thought that came out of Elon’s brain while deep in a k-hole.