Hacker News Reader

Comment by thoughtstheseus | Hacker News Reader

This is a risk adverse culture then. Tesla is spending gobs of money specifically on building safer if not the safest cars out there.

View on HN

> building safer if not the safest cars out there

Unless the car loses power and catches fire. Then you can't open the fucking doors [0].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/23/man-died-...

Using 1 off cases based on unsubstantiated information in a lawsuit is not a persuasive argument for overall safety.

It's certainly a better argument than the GPs claim of "the safest cars out there" with 0 evidence given to substantiate that. I think it fair to refute such an unsubstantiated claim with a reported instance where safety was not maintained as can reasonably be expected.

Tesla cars have the highest safety ratings in the world and they have the the best active safety features and complete fleet compliance with their whole fleet for new standard of active safety features (literally the only company that does have that).

This is literally just the basic fact of the situation. If you want to disagree with literally every state safety agency in the world, then you are the one who needs to come up with real evidence.

How do you square that with them removing sensors from their cars and going all-in on doing self-driving exclusively using vision? If they were so passionate about spending money to make the safest cars, they'd be doing sensor fusion.

> If they were so passionate about spending money to make the safest cars, they'd be doing sensor fusion.

That's your opinion. They have shown data where the information from radar was of a lower quality than what their vision stack was providing (e.g. lack of vertical resolution). Watch their AI day webcast for examples. Their current vision-only stack has been validated with LIDAR ground-truth data.

Is anyone arguing for replacing vision with lidar and radar instead of combining it?

If the radar data conflicts with what vision is saying, which one do they trust? They have shown that their vision stack has surpassed what they can do with radar. So "fusing" that data in only makes it worse when it gives conflicting information.

Sensors are obviously important, but it doesn't really matter if two sensors conflict, the important thing is which one is consistent with their running model.

So far their biggest problem is that they allow flicker. That's why sometimes the software picks the wrong lines. (Of course this is a very hard problem. Our brain conveniently smooths over sensory changes for us, because that's how our everyday reality is. Things don't flicker in and out of existence, nor does a car suddenly appear as a different thing, then switches back.)

And if it turns out the sensor(s) failed, it has to be able to handle that too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com