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Comment by Zombieball | Hacker News Reader

Reading through Tesla blogs and watching this video, my understanding is the self driving hardware is cameras and ultrasonic sensors.

Does the lack of lidar not scare anyone else?

Also, Out of curiosity, does anyone know how a Tesla behaves if you point ultrasonic transducers in the same frequency at it? Do they have special modulation to avoid tampering in this manner? I imagine you could confuse the car into thinking there are barriers it can't see.

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> Does the lack of lidar not scare anyone else?

I don't think lacking lidar should be inherently scary, humans don't have lidar sensors either and they do well enough. I do hope that cheap solid state lidars do come to market to improve low visibility driving nonetheless.

The human eye has an incredible dynamic range (>20 stops). It also have very high resolution at the point of interest. I seriously doubt that Tesla's cameras are anywhere close to the performance of the human eye. LIDAR can also make up for deficiencies in the software. The human CPU is also probably a little more advanced than the one driving this car so anything helps.

At this year's DEFCON there was a lecture [1] about the sensors on a Tesla and yes - you can confuse both the ultrasonic and the millimeter wave radar and hide an obstacle or put one that is not there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvasj4qQ7Lk

Finally got around to watching this. Super interesting. Exactly what I was thinking about.

Thanks!

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