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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

AP is not capable of identifying speed limit signs. At least, modern AP cannot. To identify speed limits, Tesla AP pulls map information, which is often inaccurate outside cities.

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Do you own a Tesla?

AP1 vs AP2 vs AP2.5 in the Tesla refers to image processing hardware and software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_1

The AP1 includes forward looking radar by Bosch, ultrasonic detectors and a forward facing Mobileye EyeQ3 camera at the rear view mirror mount. That camera does many things including rain detection. It also detects speed limit signs.

https://www.mobileye.com/uk/fleets/technology/speed-limit-in...

Well I got mine this summer, I didn't get the full self driving package and my car certainly doesn't see speed limit signs its very obvious they come from map data. It actually makes using AP in town a bit useless because they changed a lot of at the limits but somehow the map data is not up to date.

Apparently identifying speed limit signs is AP1-only, because it relied on Mobileye's technology to do that and Tesla still haven't implemented their own replacement for that feature yet.

> Apparently identifying speed limit signs is AP1-only, because it relied on Mobileye's technology to do that and Tesla still haven't implemented their own replacement for that feature yet.

It's more of Tesla can't because because MobileEye owns the patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080137908A1/en

My Honda Civic has speed limit sign recognition. And it is possible to set cruise-control to limit the speed accordingly. Or are we talking about something more complicated?

Your Honda Civic has it because they licensed the tech from MobileEye in 2014.

Tesla AP1 cars also have it, but when Tesla dropped MobileEye in favor of their own system, they can't use it anymore.

That patent only seems to cover using the same camera for both sign recognition and forward collision detection by switching between two different sets of image capture parameters and then dividing the frames captured between the two different algorithms. It's not a general patent on sign recognition. Tesla have enough cameras on their current cars, and camera technology has improved by enough over the years, that I can't imagine that being necessary.

> That patent only seems to cover using the same camera for both sign recognition

That is THE meat and potatoes of the patent. Sign recognition. i.e. speed limit signs. I'm not a patent lawyer so I will not pretend to know enough of the scope.

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