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Comment by quonn | Hacker News Reader

It‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.

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This is simply not true. Let's look at the best autonomous driving features available today, i.e. level 3:

Mercedes Drive Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front.

BMW Personal Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front

Honda SENSING Elite: Uses 5! lidars

They all use lidar, and some of the placement locations are downright hideous (Mercedes EQS). I think further development will require even more/better sensors, and manufacturers tend to agree on this point.

What are the benchmarks that say Mercedes, BMW, and Honda have the best level 3 features.

Don't forget Blue Cruise from Ford.

Blue Cruise is level 2+, not 3, and does not rely on lidar.

I ignore the Chinese because it is difficult to get reliable English information. Apart from those, these are the only level 3 systems available, and level 3 is the most advanced system that private individuals can currently get their hands on. Have I missed any?

It's not a benchmark, but there is a youtube channel (Out of Spec) which tests these systems, and I think they also say Mercedes are the best in their "Hogback challenge".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3NcHSH49Q&list=PLVa4b_Vn4g...

Worth checking out, many cars are very bad.

Sponsored by Magna, probably the contractor selling them the system...

Chinese OEMs (BYD, Xaomi, Nio) use lidar in almost all of their mid to premium segments. Also, Polestar 3.

How well do they work? Camera only systems can be easily blinded by sun, fog, dirt, and snow

Maybe they changed their mind on it in the last 10 years. I had as the source a high-ranking BMW manager as well as an Audi one who each gave a public lecture at a university with such a statement.

After a bit of research, I found out that they apparently did. Obviously every manufacturer would like to be able to use only proven technologies such as cameras and radar because they are cheap. One of the early Mercedes prototypes seemingly didn't have lidar <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlgGTi4Gs50&t=79>.

Since then, the consensus has been that without lidar, the systems would not meet safety standards. For example, the cars need to be able to detect fairly flat objects, such as pallets that have fallen onto the road, which are very difficult to see optically, especially in difficult lighting conditions. For this reason, and because the technology has come down in price, virtually everyone except Tesla, which is developing advanced driving systems, is using lidar.

This development is nearly a decade old. It is for this reason, combined with the overwhelming amount of Musk-related nonsense, that I objected so strongly.

All of these are far less capable than FSD. They might have more advanced regulatory approval because they have strong limitations of when it can be used, but if you drive the same route and compare, its not even close.

I doubt it. Yes, FSD is more flexible and can also drive reasonably well on city streets, but there is a reason why it is not certified for level 3 on motorways. It would most likely fail certification. With a level 3 system, I can take my eyes off the road and watch a movie. Doing that with FSD, even in the best conditions, is suicidal. Level 3 vehicles must have an extremely low failure rate. Any crash would quickly be picked up by the media.

FSD is a versatile level 2 system, but at best a prototype for level 3. If we are talking about prototypes, it has to be compared to prototypes from other manufacturers like this <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uSph0asNsk> fully autonomous system from ... 11 years ago. The reason FSD is available to the average consumer is mostly a matter of philosophy, not technology.

> With a level 3 system, I can take my eyes off the road and watch a movie. Doing that with FSD, even in the best conditions, is suicidal.

That is hyperbole at best. I've test driven a Tesla with FSD and it worked flawlessly, such that I would have been perfectly safe taking my eyes off the road. Of course one test drive is not sufficient data to say one should trust the system all the time, but you are making the claim that it is never trustworthy which isn't true.

Oh, it's 100% trustworthy until it suddenly isn't.

I have driven a number of level 2 cars on the motorway and almost all of them can do extended zero-intervention driving, but that does not make them safe. The failure rate compared to humans is still sky high.

Multiple independent FSD tests have shown that you need to take over several times an hour to avoid dangerous or illegal situations <https://electrek.co/2024/09/26/tesla-full-self-driving-third...>. The number will be lower on a motorway and you will sometimes have time to correct even if you are not looking, but the number of failures is still significant. If you take your eyes off the road, it is only a matter of time before you end up in a ditch.

I stand by my statement. The system is _never_ trustworthy enough to take your eyes off the road.

> have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap

If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.

If you want conventional car utilization where the car sits in a parking spot most of the time then the extra cost from the lidars is much more of an issue than if you're operating a fleet that is acting as taxis most of the day.

Theoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.

If we want the sell driving computer to be only possibly as good as a human. I can't see in the dark, can't see through fog, and have trouble with rain. Why is human visibility the bar to meet here?

Oh and the sun. I get blinded when the sun is in my eyes at sunrise and sunset.

And how many car accidents did you cause in your life? Probably still no a lot even with your flawed vision.

Because we allow humans to drive, therefore if something can perform as well as a human it should be allowed. The bar is a floor, not a ceiling.

In theory. In practice neither the cameras nor processors available in cars function anywhere near human level.

It's not even entirely true in theory. We use a lot of our senses when driving. Force feedback on the wheel. Sounds from the environment. Inertial senses. And our vision isn't fixed, its constantly moving.

And yeah, as you mention, cameras don't really have the same level of range our eyes have and computers don't operate in the same way.

In practice humans aren't particularly safe drivers.

Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? Or is it due to distraction and/or poor judgment? I don't actually know the answer to this, but I assume distraction/judgment is a bigger factor.

I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.

> Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely?

In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.

Still, millions of humans drive every night and only a miniscule percentage cause any accidents. So maybe we are not so bad at this.

According to NHTSA, about half of all fatal crashes occur at night, even though only 25% of driving happens at nighttime. So yes, we are pretty bad at this.

I totally agree, I think most accidents are caused by human nature (especially slow reaction time in specific conditions like being tired or drunk) and ignoring laws of physics (driving too fast). And some are just a pure bad luck (something/someone getting on the road right in front of the car).

Imagine that same reasoning applied to the car itself. Ugh, wheels?? Humans get around just fine bipedally, so cars should have legs too.

Explains the Tesla robot actually

Theory isn't really all that applicable to this though - in theory nothing is stopping anyone from writing all code in assembly, but obviously that doesn't happen.

I think more practically cars have adding driver assistance feature for a while now - more cameras, blind spot monitoring, ultrasound for parking, lane drift indicators.

It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that adding more sensors is helpful (but even the old adage of more data is better than less would probably say that).

To be honest, it's possible that having too much data can only cause problems in quick decision-making. Any redundant data will only slow down processing pipelines.

Sure, but why strive for that? We can have better than human perception by adding lidar and radar.

> Theoretically it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit

That "some kind of image processing unit" in humans has an awful lot of compute power and software.

If you remove $100k of sensors but have to add $200k of compute to run more advanced computer vision software, then it's a bad tradeoff to use only cameras, even if in theory that software is possible.

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