Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

I'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept.

Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human inference engine that allowed human drivers to work, we would have to rely on highly-precise measurement instruments like LiDAR instead.

Musk's huge error was in thinking "Well humans have eyes and those are kind of like cameras, therefore all you need are cameras to drive"

But no! Eyes are not cameras, they are extensions of our brains. And we use more than our eyes to navigate roads, in fact there's a huge social aspect to driving. It's not just an engineering challenge but a social one. So from the get-go he's solving the wrong problem.

I knew this guy was full of it when he started talking about driverless cars being 5 years out in 2015. Just utter nonsense to anyone who was actually in that field, especially if he thought he could do it without LiDAR. He called his system "autopilot" which was deceptive, but I was completely off him when he released "full self driving - beta" onto public streets. Reckless insanity. What made me believe he is criminally insane is this particular timeline (these are headlines, you can search them if you want to read the stories):

  2016 - Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says
  2016 - Tesla working on Autopilot radar changes after crash
  2017 - NTSB Issues Final Report and Comments on Fatal Tesla Autopilot Crash
  2019 - Tesla didn’t fix an Autopilot problem for three years, and now another person is dead
  2021 - Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars Tesla announces transition to ‘Tesla Vision’ without radar, warns of limitations at first
  2022 - Former Head Of Tesla AI Explains Why They’ve Removed Sensors; Others Differ
  2022 - Tesla Dropping Radar Was a Mistake, Here is Why
  2023 - Tesla reportedly saw an uptick in crashes and mistakes after Elon Musk removed radar from its cars
  2023 - Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar Would Be Problematic: Report
  2023 - How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course
  2023 - The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash

Now I get to add TFA to the chronical.

The man and his cars are a menace to society. Tesla would be so much further along on driverless cars without Musk.

It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp.

That said, what if we make these self driving tools fully available to drivers. Drivers are pretty good at driving already with with relatively short training. Give them the superpowers of teslas like 360 view, predictive object path, and object detection and you have super drivers.

To quote Black Adder: Some of you may die, but some of us will live!

Sure but that's not all people.

If you assume a constant rate of attention, but then massively increase what people are aware of during that attention, that's a massive increase in safety.

Safety is affected by lots of factors. Increasing any of them increases safety -- you don't need to increase all of them to get improvements.

Radars are not as good as you think. They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on.

The "with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives" part is not true.

If you look at euroncap data, you'll see how most cars are not close to 100 in Safety Assist category (and Teslas with just vision are among the top). And these EuroNCAP are fairly easy and ideal. So it's clearly not a solved problem, as you portray.

https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ra...