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Comment by hanief | Hacker News Reader

I think they falsely believe human only needs one sense to navigate: sight. But we actually use our hearing, smell, and touch too. So, multiple type sensors is actually better than only one.

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Even if all the other senses were gone, the human eyes are hooked up to the human brain. Elon's references to cameras being eyes always glosses over the image processing part.

I imagine smell and touch are less valuable when driving a vehicle.

Touch is really important: it's how you can tell if your vehicle is sliding. You can feel the various forces of the vehicle's motion through touch.

Also more basic things like whether your feet are touching the pedals, that you're gripping the steering wheel at all, and how much force those things are taking.

Touch is extremely important when driving a vehicle. You won't know which controls you're using and how much force you're exerting upon your pedals otherwise.

Smell lets me know when it’s time to roll down the window.

also, depending on the area or the AQHI, when to Roll it back up

Unless that smell is oil. Or gasoline. Or burning rubber. Or petrichor. Or just plain old smoke.

Or the touch is the feeling of road surface changing, or the steering wheel getting harder to turn / having no effect at all, or the rush of air if a door flies open...

Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see, hopefully at low speed... but taste, yuck!

>Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see

I think you're underestimating the importance of touch, especially when it comes to steering and pedal control.

That's a limitation of us. We need touch and indicators to gauge how effective we are, but a machine can precisely throttle 23% or keep the steering wheel at 19 degrees without need to gauge how hard it is pushing the actuators. Touch is nice, but hardly crucial for driving.

Fully agree - also it’s a bit weird on Tesla’s part to think that there could be no possible way to make things better than a human in some regards. If humans had radar, it would probably make us more capable, not less.

Our eyes are also attached to an unfathomably efficient supercomputer. The most advanced one in the universe, in fact, by a gigantic margin compared to anything humans have made.

And hearing… like the sound of rain hitting the car.

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