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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

In fairness to Tesla that is probably why they are pushing for level 4/5 so hard. It's true that if level 2 drives perfectly for a month, yet a alone a year, the human backup system is going to degrade markedly. We're not there yet, but it's coming.

That's got to open up some liability questions. You can bet when people die it will be tested in court. You could make a case that Tesla's going to be liable for many level 2 accidents in the long run anyway, so might as well go all in ASAP.

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I have been under the impression that because TESLA dispensed with the idea of LIDAR that their solution would never be workable. I am still surprised at their ability to avoid liability for the incidents attributed to the "Autopilot"

I don't see how you'd draw that conclusion. It seems possible to have a workable, purely optical solution. Our workable solution today relies purely on optical (human drivers).

Cameras don't have the same dynamic range of the human eye. A more fair test would be giving someone remote control of a Tesla with only access to the video footage.

I think cameras will hit parity with the human eye, but the question is will it happen before or after Lidar becomes more affordable and compact.

Couldn't you just have multiple cameras of different sensitivity? Cameras are pretty cheap.

The best cameras nowadays have more dynamic range than human eyes. Although I'm sure Tesla is not using this in its cars.

The eye's dynamic range at any point in time is actually pretty bad. It's easy to beat the range of the retina with a camera sensor. The human eye can also adjust iris size and light sensitivity, and a camera can match it by adjusting iris size and exposure time. You're probably want a secondary camera for full night vision, but that's not very relevant for driving with headlights anyway.

Optical plus audio, haptic and inertial sensing. And smell, but maybe we can ignore that one.

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