Tesla Model Y Passes NHTSA's New 'Advanced Driver Assistance System' Tests
nhtsa.gov
nhtsa.gov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI&t=1203s
https://electrek.co/2025/07/29/another-huge-chinese-self-dri...
XPENG (major chinese ADAS brand) recently decided to copy Tesla's vision-only+AI world gen data approach, after originally focusing only on LIDAR https://electrek.co/2026/04/29/xpeng-vla-2-test-drive-tesla-...
There's also been talk of companies pushing a hybrid LIDAR+vision approach using custom hardware since it's complex to merge the two datasets. So the answer might eventually be somewhere in between instead of companies choosing one or the other depending on costs.
- Tesla's vision only approach seems a lot more competent than the Lidar suites from smaller Chinese makers. Perhaps I misjudged how necessary Lidar was to achieve safe driving.
- Virtually all of the Chinese car infotainment were basically a 1:1 copy of Tesla's. I couldn't find any that genuinely tried something unique lol
Yes Waymo exists, but the amount of training data they have is a few orders of magnitude lower.
All of this said, once Karpathy left they have slowly looked at adding new sensors (recently radar), so who knows what the future for Tesla's sensor suite holds.
Speaking as a person who understands it extremely well and who has an advanced degree in computer vision, I'm sure that internet randos did, but I promise the people who actually know about the failure modes of the different modalities did not. I don't really expect you to take my word for it, but maybe this will spark an interest in investigating the failure scenarios of 3D reconstruction using cameras in computer vision. Just know that Google is an absolute top tier juggernaut in the CV/ML/AI research world, and they don't use lidar out of ignorance.
> less sensor collision
This isn't a real thing for anyone doing a good job. A sensor can be good for a scenario or it can be bad for a scenario. More sensors feeding input only gives you gradations of accuracy instead of binary accuracy. Having gradations of accuracy is an unambiguously good thing. When you only have one sensor, you have no way to know whether in the moment it is feeding you an optical illusion. That's what it means for something to be an optical illusion. But when you have multiple sensors of different modalities, then you have meaningful information about whether local disagreement between the different modalities means that one is better or worse than the other, because you can contextually characterize the failure scenarios of each.
> It's not magic, it performs poorly in inclination weather and can have issues with resolution over range and data processing (although lidar does do a lot of things well).
Inclement, not inclination. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but cameras also do poorly in inclement weather and have issues with resolution over range, and the solutions are identical for both (superresolution, temporal blending, alternate wavelengths, stereo correspondence, etc).
Tesla people always say (said?) things like "Well humans only drive with their eyes, so cars should be able to as well," but that's not a true statement about what humans have in relation to what Teslas have. Humans have many more different sensor modalities than what Tesla's cameras give. Teslas have single-view fixed-focus cameras that, for much of the FOV, can only reconstruct structure from shape assumptions (object detection and classification) and inter-frame changes (optical flow) coupled with sensation of the vehicle's motion. That's all they get. It's not bad at all, especially coupled with advanced machine learning, but you do have more than that coupled with even more advanced machine learning. When you as a human drive, in addition to what Teslas have (you do also have them), you also have binocular stereopsis cues, autofocus lens convergence cues, vehicle-independent motion parallax cues, and the ability to manipulate shade cover so you don't get blinded. Are all those extra cues necessary for every scenario? No, obviously not. Do they help though? Yes. Try driving with only one eye open and without moving your body or head at all. You can absolutely do it, but you won't be as good as you would with both eyes open and free movement.
Three things can be simultaneously true:
* Tesla's cameras are sufficient for some scenarios.
* Tesla's cameras are insufficient for other scenarios.
* A system with good data and bad algorithmic processing is still going to be bad. The Chinese vehicles almost always fail the tests because they see the obstacle but drive into it anyway.
Pedestrian automatic emergency braking
Lane keeping assistance
Blind spot warning, and
Blind spot intervention
"Don't most cars do something like that now? I'm curious what's different between Tesla and, say, a Honda Accord?
Cause if not, it would be hilarious to do that to a clapped out van...
Still would love to see it. The idea reminds me of farm truck https://okcfarmtruck.com/pages/about
1) old people can get into them more easily
2) women feel safe in them (they aren’t safer)
3) higher position == better overview
I don’t think those are compelling reasons for a family to own an SUV over a van, considering their disadvantages (size, high loading sill, efficiency, stability).
Yes everyone is wrong, particularly the childless.
I think telling people what they should do is a bad idea. On paper I should choose a wagon (I love reclined drive position). But I don’t think I ever will tho.
In European cities parking is just a PITA, and frankly using up all that space with a huge car is impolite.
Every... TWO HOURS?! I mean, come on. Put a camera on yourself or another human driver. There's an unexpected braking event at least that often, almost always in a more dangerous situation. The human failure tends to be failing to detect a real obstacle, vs. slowing for a phantom one.
This is just too much. If you don't like it don't use it. But to pretend that stomps-the-brakes-every-few-hours is a stop ship kind of safety bug is quite frankly ridiculous.
Wait...what are counting as an "unexpected braking event"? I can't think of anything I do with brakes that would not be counted as ordinary braking that happens anywhere near as often as every two hours.
I know, I know, you're a perfect driver and would never fail to notice an obstacle. But the rest of us aren't.
To wit, I, uh, don't believe a word you're saying. No one drives in traffic without an occasional oops. And the people who claim not to are, uh, almost certainly the worst of the bunch.
I said nothing about Tesla and I said nothing about my driving.
If you really want to know, I would not claim I'm a better than average driver. I don't think "very rarely has to unexpectedly brake hard" is something you need to be a particularly good driver to accomplish.
Maybe I simply don't drive often in circumstances where there are cars suddenly stopping ahead of me? I keep a pretty decent gap between me and the car ahead, unless I'm in stop and go traffic in which case I usually am using adaptive cruise control.
I've been planning to get an OBD2 scanner and an app that can report details on EV battery health, because a battery health report is the only thing that I'd get if used the dealer that is 15 miles away (and an hour bus ride away if I don't want to wait there) for scheduled maintenance that I don't get if I go to the independent service center a 10 minute walk away.
Perhaps I'll try to find one that can also log my brake activity to see if I'm somehow just not noticing a lot of brake stomping.
Especially in right hand drive markets (non US) it’s even worse than Toyota’s radar cruise.
I’ve nearly been killed by it about 5 times because it randomly steers into fences and things. It also randomly fails to change lanes (1 in 100), and then just randomly steers full lock and goes out of control.
Model 3 - Highland
I can’t recall anytime either Autopilot or FSD put me in danger though.
For right hand drive markets, it seems to be a stripped down version of FSD 10 or 11. It automatically changes lanes, takes corners and highway exits, but does not stop at traffic lights. It drives exactly in the middle of the lane, doesn’t shuffle over for trucks, and is easily confused.
It seems other HW3 might get a FSD-lite version. There's no official way to upgrade HW3-HW4.
Any other administration and I would be willing to grant the benefit of the doubt, but Musk's spent a lot of money to corrupt government agencies over the past year and a half so that he could get silly pronouncements that the most dangerous "advanced" driving system in the world is somehow also the safest. (More people have been killed by Tesla's ADAS systems than every other automaker's ADAS systems, in the world, combined.)