In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.

The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well…

    The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.

    • Joeffect@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It didn’t fool lidar… The car equipped with lidar stopped before hitting the wall because it saw the obstacle not what was on the obstacle

      • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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        2 days ago

        You didn’t see the quote in the above comment that specifically states Teslas don’t have lidar but other brands using it weren’t fooled?

    • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The tl;dr here is that Elon said that humans have eyes and they work, and eyes are like cameras, so use cameras instead of expensive LIDAR. Dick fully inside car door for the slam.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        In theory he’s not wrong, except for that part where neither the optics nor (especially) the software come anywhere close to matching the performance of human eyes and brains and won’t for the foreseeable future.

        • davidgro@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          And human eyes/brains aren’t good enough anyway. The whole hype about self-driving cars was that they were supposed to be better than humans.

      • BetaBlake@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        This is the same energy as blizzard saying “you’ve got phones don’t you?”

        Teslas are cheap crap, for a premium price, this has always been the case

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        23 hours ago

        The worst part is that LiDAR isn’t even expensive anymore. Hell, my phone has LiDAR. He originally said that to justify the fact that they were dealing with a component shortage and he needed to keep shipping vehicles. So he simply shipped them without the LiDAR systems that he couldn’t get ahold of, and claimed it was because he didn’t need LiDAR.

        But now LiDAR is much more advanced and cheaper. But since he refused to admit it was because of a component shortage, adding LiDAR now would require Musk to publicly admit he was wrong. And we all know that will never happen.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        The entire premise of the joke is that we could mistake a sufficiently detailed image of a road for an actual road. That humans are susceptible to such a failure does not mean it is reasonable for a robot to share the same flaw.

    • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      They used to have it but Elmo removed it years ago as a cost cutting move.

      Now they’re the only self driving car that drives into immovable objects.

      You might remember a few years ago a guy got decapitated when his Model S drove straight into the side of a semi trailer.

      • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        To be clear, Elon Musk removed radar from Tesla vehicles and not Lidar, but a) he had it removed even from vehicles that had the hardware for radar and b) radar would have been enough to pass all the tests in the video anyway.

    • Weirdfish@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      If I could pass one law, requiring multiple redundant scanning tech on anything autonomous large enough to hurt me might be it.

      I occasionally go to our warehouses which have robotic arms, autonomous fork lifts, etc. All of those have far more saftey features than a self driving Tesla, and they aren’t in public.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      tesla doesnt use lIDAR anymore, not since '18, it relies on cameras solely.

      • hovercat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        They removed radar in 2021 for cost-cutting reasons and have never had LiDAR, which Elon called “a fool’s errand”.

        Source: I worked on their ADAS systems.

    • can@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      I see you didn’t catch just how dumb teslas are. If it wouldn’t result in actual human harm I would have liked to paint one of these.