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Comment by namrog84 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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 :)

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