Tesla to add radar in its cars next month amid self-driving suite concerns
electrek.co
electrek.co
For a company that partially exists because of the economies of scale and energy density gains in better battery tech, it always shocked me that Elon thought LiDAR was too expensive. In the time that Tesla has spent failing to achieve anything beyond level 2 autonomy, almost everyone else is about to release commercial vehicles at level 3… and they use LiDAR.
My prediction was wrong though, see below. I assumed NHTSA would’ve forced a recall mandating a move back to radar. They didn’t, and Vision was good enough to receive the highest rating in Euro NCAP’s protocol. You don’t need radar for Autopilot (we have Teslas both with and without radar), but if they say it’ll help with FSD, that would be a reasonable thesis to put forth (without arguing the merits of FSD).
> Overall, the Model Y received an Adult Occupant Protection rating of 97%, a Child Occupant Production rating of 89%, a Vulnerable Road User Protection rating of 82%, and a near-perfect Safety Assist rating of 98%. The Model Y’s 98% score in the Euro NCAP’s safety assist category is especially impressive as these are related to features that utilize the company’s radar-less Tesla Vision system.
> In fact, Model Y’s Safety Assist rating is the highest score among the vehicles that have been tested by the Euro NCAP to date. The Model Y’s stellar Adult Occupant Protection rating is also the highest thus far under the agency’s 2020-2022 rating criteria. Overall, the results of the Model Y’s safety tests prove one thing: vehicles equipped with Tesla Vision are just as safe — if not safer — than other vehicles out on the roads today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687408
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vision-model-y-highest-euro-...
https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-se...
In other words, they lied that vision-only is superior to having a radar, put out a blog post on how Tesla Vision is going to solve FSD and then sold a few hundred thousand cars without radar for over a year.
I think one of Tesla's lead engineers on Lex Fridman’s podcast explained vision is enough and why radar isn’t needed… can’t recall all the details.
Just more BS coming out of Elon’s company… he created that culture.
I’d not trust anything coming of his mouth or sub-mouths… the information just isn’t reliable.
EDIT: Here is the link to the youtube video. The former snr. director giving his reasons why the other sensors are not required
So no lie. This fits perfectly with what he claimed.
How many people would have bought the car (or FSD) if they knew a better radar was coming a year down the line that not only helps FSD but also regular Autopilot?
The latest builds of FSD beta prove that to be true.
The question now becomes what can be done to make it better, and how much better is required.
similarly, humans can clearly drive vehicles "sufficiently" after consuming alcohol. Countries disagree on the amount, and the definition of "sufficient".
Unless the latest builds of FSD beta work without requiring a driver, it doesn’t prove anything to be true. To be a self driving car, it has to actually work without anyone in the driver’s seat. That’s literally the definition.
Obviously there is a person in this seat, but it would have done the same thing if there wasn't...
https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1599146605156130816
> He claimed just cameras were sufficient for self driving
And I showed a video where they are, clearly "sufficient".
Now you've moved the goal posts to:
> doing it thousands of times to be considered safe enough to remove the driver
Which is a completely different discussion.
It's coming.
dont hate the player, hate the game ra7
They sure made profits though.
I suggest adding something of value in the future rather than try to look smart because you only appear to be a biased fool.
Doesn't look to me at all as if you're interested in a discussion of sensors. My impression is that you have an axe to grind.
Hence that quote. It points to the observation that when people get defensive about another person's ego, it usually means they see themselves somehow in a competition with that other person. Jung would have called it projection. Girard would have called it mimetic rivalry.
None of that is an excuse for your dismissive attitude and name-calling, which really don't belong on HN.
Humans are also able to drive with vision only. Same sentiment as Hotz from comma.ai has.
I also think that radar will be a no brainer and make it better over all (night, fog) but I'm not sure if it has to be a must.
Perhaps in 20years when you have overall very good car AI the non radar version is always behind but we are far away from this market saturation. Probably more than 20 car iterations and more.
I’ve said this before and I’ll repeat it here. A CMOS sensor is nothing like the human eye both in terms of HW and the SW (ignoring the AI that interprets the signal - I’m talking just in terms of the sensor). Your eye is constantly subconsciously scanning an insanely wide FOV so that not only do you have an insanely high-res image at the center, you have a fairly high fidelity larger FOV that is quite wide. Additionally, the camera will automatically shift its focus insanely fast if there’s any motion in your periphery and start filling in the scene with extremely high fidelity data. It’s hard to really equate the two but some analyses I’ve found on Google estimate the human eye at having hundreds of megapixels worth of fidelity. The Tesla has ~8 1 megapixel cameras.
As for the intelligence behind the camera in terms of command and control, the human brain is significantly better.
At some point in the future, sure. A pure vision system could be equivalent (actually better) to a human driver. Today it’s probably better in some ways (doesn’t have the attention failure modes that the human brain can suffer) but fatally worse in others (distinguishing the white trailer on a semi right in front with a cloud or understanding there’s a dividor right in front of you). Obviously things are going to get better so I’d bet on a pure vision system in a decade or two will probably work. The problem is Musk’s false advertising and the lives it’s cost.
The probability of safety will be higher with pure vision than vision+radar, not lower. Vision has become so good that radar actually reduces signal/noise.
A very high resolution radar would be better than pure vision, but such a radar does not exist. I mean vision with high res radar would be better than pure vision.
I will be interested to hear when if/they announce this if they quantify how it is used, what exactly it improves, and will it be retrofitted on FSD vehicles.
The supply chain. They just needed to con people into believing getting less is good. The other automakers dealt with the supply shortage by delaying car deliveries... by a lot. Not an acceptable solution when you have an overpriced stock to pump even higher.
The new radar has been under development at Tesla. The old radar didn’t have the resolution to be useful. Elon was actually clear from the start that they needed to build a better radar that didn’t currently exist for it to be useful.
But if you hate Elon it’s easier to call it a con than to understand the technical details.
The specific claim in 2016 was that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Maybe they'll give free radar upgrades to everyone. Maybe it will be lidar installations next.
> Tesla was always going to keep improving its Autopilot/self-driving hardware so there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening,
Well, except for all the lies told to the people who bought into the Full Self-Driving puffery.
It's baffling that a company can do that and expect to still be trusted in the future, and with people's lives, no less. Alas, it'll likely blow over, if it even makes any kind of splash.
It'll be interesting to see the copious amounts of doublethink in the announcement.
To safely drive on the road, we'll need to understand the environment surrounding us precisely. Unfortunately for all auto-driving approaches, I cannot see anything to do with that. Sensors are actually least to worry about.
Given the popularity of the Tesla, I would expect dramatic increase of (fatal) accidents involving Tesla/FSD in the next a couple of years. Hopefully I'm wrong.
This "faith in technology" is borderline religion without proof, it's ignorance that it is as good as the code bugs and sensor fail (and people overriding safeguards out of laziness).
Pedestrians and cyclists are the "beta testers", I am sure the people in the hardened car frame will be mostly fine.
Yeah yeah, automation "will kill less than humans". Who goes to prison when software kills someone?
It was a light rain that has been falling for hours. The roads are sleek but very few deep puddles. No problem with traction, but the sheen of the water combined with poor lane markings means it’s often hard to see the lanes.
My experience has always been the vision AI can discern lines and road markings significantly better than I can. So I often choose to drive with autopilot on and keep close attention at night in the rain.
The car will be almost always perfectly in lane while I am freed up to pay more attention to the greater surroundings, traffic signs and lights, route planning, and watching for hazards and other traffic.
I find at night in the dark driving without autopilot, lane keeping requires significant focus, which can mean other driving tasks like route planning and identifying hazards can suffer.
As of right now, exceedingly few cars are being driven entirely automated. Humans using autopilot will have more time and focus to identify and avoid cyclists/pedestrians that are on or entering the road. Autopilot is a massively useful safety tool.
Unfortunately some humans abuse their driving privilege. Drunk driving and distracted driving are huge and growing killers. Human drivers that are supposed to be paying attention that instead hit a cyclist / pedestrian are at fault. If it’s done while driving distracted on autopilot that’s even more so the human’s fault.
The issue I have with AutoPilot is it doesn’t always shy away from poorly driven cars and large trucks in the next lane over. So while a human would be all the way over to the far side of the lane, AutoPilot stays perfectly centered or only slightly shys away from semi-trucks.
It's extremely rare even for fatal hit and runs to result in prison/jail time: https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
A self-driving car surfaces the problem in a visceral manner, but this applies to many many sectors and to any software that runs critical services/tools/infrastructure - Hospitals, Medical devices, thermostats, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...
https://medium.com/predict/a-simple-computer-bug-that-killed...
etc
Also, this covers physical harm, but what about economic harm? If an OS security bug was exploited by a hacker and caused you to loose all your life savings and end up homeless, can you put a linux/windows/ s/w dev in jail?
Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias.
@jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600200000763756544?t=BN...
Or announced a cyborg that (shocker) it turns out was really a real life human person in a gimp suit.
You don’t only have two eyes, you have a general intelligence which is far superior to anything that Tesla or anyone else has developed as a control system. The deficiency of the control system compared to a human brain means the sensors need to be significantly superior to anything that humans have in order to build an equivalent map of the world.
* our eyes have incredible dynamic range. We can perceive details in deep shadow and bright sunlight at the same time in the same scene. Cameras aren't good at that, and certainly not at a price point a company that forgoes lidar for pricing reasons would be happy with.
* our eyes combine wide angle low resolution perception with high resolution capture of a single point of interest, and switching between points of interest is super fast. No-one's even trying to replicate this electronically; the approach with digital cameras is to go for high resolution across the board, but this is nowhere near as high as what human eyes can manage in the centre of vision, and also because it results in a ton of data, SLAM applications tend to go for lower resolutions and more frequent images instead to help manage transfer and processing latency; however, this makes correctly parsing the scene a much harder problem than it would be either for the human or an electronic vision system of comparable fidelity.
* our eyes include a bunch of processing to help with feature detection and cross correlation (for depth perception) before the signal ever makes it to our brain, which helps us deal with the latency/bandwidth issues described above. This is certainly something we could attempt to replicate electronically, but, well, Tesla didn't want to pay for lidar either, so not seeing that happening tbh.
* our depth perception doesn't merely rely on cross correlating stereo vision to produce a depth field like electronic applications do. It synthesizes this with information such as the angle between our eyeballs and the shape the lens must take to bring the object of interest into focus, both of which vary depending on how far away the object of interest is. (This is part of why VR helmets make many people feel ill: they supply stereo images in perfect focus a small distance away from the eyes, and so these sources of information all disagree with each other; therefore, motion sickness.) Without some equivalent source of information - some form of electronic rangefinder, like lidar perhaps - the AI, unlike the human, is forced to rely only on cross correlating stereo images, which is problematic in a variety of tedious ways.
Our retina's does some major preprocessing and chunking it down for the visual cortex to handle in "realtime", which also feeds it into all of other parts to complete the whole picture of what we are seeing.
It took my daughter 2 weeks of tutoring and practice to master stick shift driving on the public roadways - FSD still working on it and sometimes it makes rather boneheaded decisions.