Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Because Tesla effectively doesn't have AEB while AutoPilot is enabled.

In a Tesla AEB should be an entirely self-contained ("dumber") system. Its only job should be to look for any ground-level object ahead and brake. It should do this using simpler but more reliable ("dumber") techniques like forward bumper-level radar or camera parallax, not NN/deep learning/object recognition/AI.

To use an analogy, AEB should be like two-factor authentication. If your "second" factor is the same as your first, then it isn't two-factor. In this case AutoPilot is the "first" and "second" factor i.e. it is AEB and in control of the vehicle.

So Tesla's vehicles absolutely have AEB, when AutoPilot is disabled, because it is offering a "second opinion" relative to the driver. So IIHS's ratings are correct in that instance. But as soon as AutoPilot is enabled it is no longer a "second" opinion and therefore may as well not exist.

Unfortunately Tesla aren't alone in making this mistake. We're seeing other vehicle manufacturers stepping into the vehicle automation space double-dipping their auto-drive systems into AEB. It is a bad practice regardless of who, AEB should be its own system with its own simpler/dumber logic that protects people from auto-drive mistakes, not compounds them.

I like the 2-factor analogy for the driver-assist technologies, which are ordinarily framed as more primitive automation, rather than the low-cost safety boons that they are.

The Level 3 automation systems that Tesla and Uber built rely on two factors too, but they invert them, expecting disengaged humans to snap to alertness at super-human speed, which is just not how our brains work. So of course the second factor only exists as a legal cover to reduce their liability, which is all these players care about as far as safety is concerned.

Does Tesla even have a radar?

I dont think so. I thought their whole gimmick or goal was to drive entirely by cameras and nothing else. Because humans only have eyes.

Though just speculation and no source.

Due to the current chip shortage they've moved to a vision-only system, as they had difficulty getting radar units in the quantity required. Until recently however, all Teslas had radar since ~2014. The high profile crashes are mostly/all radar-enabled vehicles.

The thing about automotive radar, and this isn't just Tesla, is that stationary objects are normally excluded. Otherwise the system brakes for things like overhead signs that have high radar reflectivity. Stopped cars, concrete barriers, etc are all basically invisible to most automotive radar.

Tesla also isn't the only manufacturer taking the vision approach. Subaru, for example, was doing vision-only emergency braking in 2016.

> The thing about automotive radar, and this isn't just Tesla, is that stationary objects are normally excluded. Otherwise the system brakes for things like overhead signs that have high radar reflectivity. Stopped cars, concrete barriers, etc are all basically invisible to most automotive radar.

I believe most automotive radars in the last few years are FMCW exactly to accommodate adaptive cruise control.

When we bought our used Suzuki, one of the differences to another car we looked at was that ours had stereo vision AEB and the other had radar - one of the selling points by the dealer was that the camera version could detect stopped objects, which I always figured was half the point of AEB.

I'm quite sure I've heard something pretty close to those words from Musk himself in some video.

Humans only have eyes... and the most powerful supercomputer in the world between their ears.

The goal is to cut costs and keep shipping during the chip shortage. Ignore the excuses.

Humans also have ears. And a sense of touch. And a sense of motion. And that supercomputer between the ears has decades of experience doing sensor fusion amongst all the various inputs down to the level of milliseconds of variation, and decades of experience of rising in cars and knowing what they feel is safe versus what is not, and presumably at least months of experience of control behind the wheel.

Tesla doesn’t have a lot of any of those things.

To my knowledge, they don't even have binocular vision. For several angles there is only one camera. Even where there are multiple cameras, they are clustered together and so of limited use for binocular vision. It seems there are multiple cameras to improve range and FoV rather than depth perception.

So it's like a small animal with one eye closed.

> Because humans only have eyes.

This is the most ridiculous line of reasoning I've heard in a long time. Wow.

Humans only have eyes? So Teslas can smell the milk and throw it out if its gone bad? Or listen to a faraway sound and know that its getting closer at an alarming or not-alarming rate? Or feel the road getting harsher and understand that the GPS is incorrect?

> So Teslas can smell the milk and throw it out if its gone bad?

Cars do not need that skill.

> Or listen to a faraway sound and know that its getting closer at an alarming or not-alarming rate?

I'm sure the car has multiple microphones, it just needs the brains to process the input.

> Or feel the road getting harsher and understand that the GPS is incorrect?

Again, I am sure the car has multiple G sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes. It just needs the smarts to process the input.

> Cars do not need that skill.

As a driver, I can certainly sense my car smelling funny if something goes wrong :)

Yes, at least some do, and they recently disabled it in a recent software update

Any info as to why? Simply because it is redundant or is there a technical problem with it?

IIRC there's concern of crosstalk as it becomes more common. So relying on it in a radar-noisy environment would be risky.

Or they just don't want to maintain two different versions of their software for cars with and without it.

They removed it on new models early this year.

Many manufacturers are removing radar in their latest model spins fwiw.

Suddenly my 2016 car just got much more valuable to me.

Except you are at the whim and mercy of Tesla to keep providing updated support using lidar. They will probably just not use the lidar any more and merely use the cameras(which you also have) like they are on the 2021 Model 3/Y

Notably, Tesla cars have never used Lidar, which is a lot more precise than radar, but it costs more.

Lidar costs have come down. Now it is around $1,000 soon it will be under $500

https://www.barrons.com/articles/lidar-is-the-future-of-auto...

Tesla uses common technology available. Mass-produced consumer cars haven't yet adopted lidar, because the technology has been too expensive and bulky, until very recent development. The next-gen premium cars will likely offer lidar as an option in near future.

One little known fact is that lidar has been in cars for a long time. Volvo for example has had lidar in some cars going back almost 10 years IRRC (I saw a presentation by a Volvo engineer talking about this, can't find any link right now because it's all swamped by the Volvo luminar collaboration). It was very different type of lidar though mainly used for keeping distance to the car ahead (and maybe AEB?). The thing about "modern" Lidar is that there are still so many open questions (weather, how to keep the apertures clean...) , apart from the fact that they still are way too expensive.

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