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Comment by mordymoop | Hacker News Reader

I don’t live near a lot of Wild E. Coyote fake road walls. I get the sense it’s more of a Midwest thing.

But that wall may come to you. There's a few large truck trailers I've seen completely covered on a side with a picture which could be interpreted as a road / sidewalk / smaller car / whatever.

Also, any wall at a T-intersection with a mural that looks vaguely landscape-y.

I dunno, I generally try to avoid driving off the road into a landscape.

That said, I very well might drive into a high-res billboard of the exact scenery behind the billboard, if I wasn’t expecting it on a long straight country road. The in-car view in that video looks pretty damn convincing, sure you’d know something was off but I wouldn’t bet on 100% of drivers spotting the deception.

Maybe next video he can show that Autopilot won’t detect a land mine, or an excavation just after the crest of a hill.

The point of driver assistance systems is to be better at this stuff than humans, and most actually are because they don't leave it up to just cameras and "we'll figure out how to make it work as good as radar/lidar eventually, I promise".

> and most actually are

From the testing I've seen, there are no Automatic Emergency Braking systems on the market that are anywhere close to being as good as a human that's paying attention.

The one used for comparison in the actual video certainly is in some situations. Lidar can see things that eyes cannot. They aren't perfect by any means and not necessarily better than humans in all situations, but they are clearly a net benefit

> they are clearly a net benefit

Do you have any data to prove it?

Yes

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7037779/ https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-3a3816bd26418... https://www.kbb.com/car-news/studies-automatic-emergency-bra...

These don't break it down by lidar vs camera systems, but AEB systems significantly reduce crashes

The important catch here is "paying attention". I guess the way Tesla is marketing their "Full Self Driving" technology leads to people paying less attention. If you market your technology as "Emergency Breaking System" people will be less likely to pay less attention.

Also, an emergency breaking system doesn't have to be better than humans in general. It is sufficient to beat humans in certain facets like reaction time (kid jumping onto the road) or tough lighting. LiDAR has it's own weaknesses I guess. But if the driver and LiDAR can hit the breaks we get best of both worlds.

>There's a few large truck trailers I've seen completely covered on a side with a picture which could be interpreted as a road / sidewalk / smaller car / whatever.

Truck trailers are typically 3-4 ft off the ground, and have obvious borders.

Are you prepared to try that the "obvious border" is enough? Would you fully trust that there will be no issue?

I'm prepared to trust that the obvious border, the fact the trailer is 3-4 feet off the ground (thereby creating obvious visual separation), and the fact that I've never seen a deceptively painted trailer, that this isn't worth worrying about. I'd be far more worried about it not being able to recognize off-ramps, or "activists" vandalizing it as a political statement.

They're obvious to you and me - are they obvious to a camera only Tesla "autopilot"?

In the 2019 fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, the Tesla failed to identify a white tractor trailer crossing the highway: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...

And to be clear, this is the second time a Tesla failed to see a tractor trailer crossing the road and it killed someone by way of decapitation, the first being in 2016:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-dri...

Notably, Tesla's response to the 2016 accident was to remove RADAR sensors in the Model 3. Had they instead taken this incident seriously and added sensors such as LiDAR, that could detected these obstacles (something that any engineer would have done), the 2019 accident and this "cartoon road" failure would have been avoided. For this reason I believe the 2019 accident should be considered gross professional negligence on the part of Tesla and Elon Musk.

>Midwest thing.

Southwest I think.

It failed also on kid mannequin. Do you have many kids around?

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