Optical recognition is inferior and this is not surprising.
Yeah that's well known by now. However, safety through additional radar sensors costs money and they can't have that.
Nah, that one's on Elon just being a stubborn bitch and thinking he knows better than everybody else (as usual).

He's right in that if current AI models were genuinely intelligent in the way humans are then cameras would be enough to achieve at least human level driving skills. The problem of course is that AI models are not nearly at that level yet
Even if they were, would it not be better to give the car better senses?
Humans don't have LIDAR because we can't just hook something into a human's brain and have it work. If you can do that with a self-driving car, why cut it down to human senses?
Exactly, with this logic why have motors or wheels?
You don't have wheels so you shouldn't use cars
Cameras are inferior to human vision in many ways. Especially the ones used on Teslas.
Also the Human brain is still on par with some of the worlds best supercomputers, I doubt a Tesla has that much onboard processing power.
just one more AI model, please, that’ll do it, just one more, just you wait, have you seen how fast things are improving? Just one more. Common, just one more…

I NEED ONE MORE FACKIN’ AI MODEL!!
I don't think it's necessarily about cost. They were removing sensors both before costs rose and supply became more limited with things like the tariffs.
Too many sensors also causes issues, adding more is not an easy fix. Sensor Fusion is a notoriously difficult part of robotics. It can help with edge cases and verification, but it can also exacerbate issues. Sensors will report different things at some point. Which one gets priority? Is a sensor failing or reporting inaccurate data? How do you determine what is inaccurate if the data is still within normal tolerances?
More on topic though... My question is why is the robotaxi accident rate different from the regular FSD rate? Ostensibly they should be nearly identical.
I'm not too sure it's about cost, it seems to be about Elon not wanting to admit he was wrong, as he made a big point of lidar being useless
Wow, thank goodness nobody gutted the authority in charge of making sure that wouldn't happen...
The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said "Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers" and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.
So now you've got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because "fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we're creatively disruptive we do what we want".

They'll work perfectly as soon as AI space data center robots go to Mars. I'd say a Robovan will be able to tow a roadster from New York to Hong Kong by... probably July. July or November at the latest.
I really fucking hate how his fans can just listen to him lie like this over and over and it doesn't affect their opinion of him. I remember falling for it a couple times before I started asking "Is this like the last time you promised dates?"
By that time it was a moot point, however, because that "pedo guy" comment was just around the corner. Now anyone who likes him after that needs to go to therapy to figure out a few things.
I won't comment on people who support him after the other things.
Use lidar you ketamine saturated motherfucker
But then he would have to admit being wrong for removing radar...
It's important to draw the line between what Tesla is trying to do and what Waymo is actually doing. Tesla has a 4x higher rate, but Waymo has a lower rate.
Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:
https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Also, AFAIK this includes cases when the Waymo car isn't even slightly at fault. Like, there have been 2 deaths involving a Waymo car. In one case a motorcyclist hit the car from behind, flipped over it, then was hit by another car and killed. In the other case, ironically, the real car at fault was a Tesla being driven by a human who claims he experienced "sudden unintended acceleration". It was driving at 98 miles per hour in downtown SF and hit a bunch of stopped cars at a red light, then spun into oncoming traffic and killed a man and his dog who were in another car.
Whether or not self-driving cars are a good thing is up for debate. But, it must suck to work at Waymo and to be making safety a major focus, only to have Tesla ruin the market by making people associate self-driving cars with major safety issues.
Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state
Well, no. Lets talk fatality rate. According to linked data, human drivers
1.26 deaths per 100 million miles traveled
Vs Waymo 2 deaths per 127 million miles :)
Well, Waymo's really at 0 deaths per 127 million miles.
The 2 deaths are deaths that happened were near Waymo cars in a collision involving the Waymo car. Not only did the Waymo not cause the accidents, they weren't even involved in the fatal part of either event. In one case a motorcyclist was hit by another car, and in the other one a Tesla crashed into a second car after it had hit the Waymo (and a bunch of other cars).
The IIHS number takes the total number of deaths in a year, and divides it by the total distance driven in that year. It includes all vehicles, and all deaths. If you wanted the denominator to be "total distance driven by brand X in the year", you wouldn't keep the numerator as "all deaths" because that wouldn't make sense, and "all deaths that happened in a collision where brand X was involved as part of the collision" would be of limited usefulness. If you're after the safety of the passenger compartment you'd want "all deaths for occupants / drivers of a brand X vehicle" and if you were after the safety of the car to all road users you'd want something like "all deaths where the driver of a brand X vehicle was determined to be at fault".
The IIHS does have statistics for driver death rates by make and model, but they use "per million registered vehicle years", so you can't directly compare with Waymo:
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-model
Also, in Waymo it would never be the driver who died, it would be other vehicle occupants, so I don't know if that data is tracked for other vehicle models.
Isn't Waymo rate better because they are very particular where they operate? When they are asked to operate in sligthly less than perfect conditions it immediately goes downhill https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385936888_Identifying_Research_Gaps_through_Self-Driving_Car_Data_Analysis (page 7, Uncertainty)
Edit: googled it a bit, and apparently Waymo mostly drives in
Waymo vehicles primarily drive on urban streets with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less
Teslas do not.
Clearly, AI isn't just challenging human performance, it's exceeding it. Four times the crash rate is just the beginning. Just imagine the crash rate when super intelligence comes!
🚘💥🚗
I do (sarcastically) love knowing Leave the World Behind is a documentary.

Even for the first piss poor epigone of Neuromancer, the name "Robotaxi" would've been laughed at.
Mulon Esk made the dumbest name happen for the xth time.
a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped
Okay, idk why we would blame this one on the self driving car...
a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.
The difference is a lot of these are never reported when it's done by a human driver. I very highly doubt the rate is 4x higher than humans. I'm not saying the self driving cars are good. I am just saying human drivers are really bad.
a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped
Uuh...wouldn't that be the fault of the bus? I mean, the system is faulty as fuck so there's really no need to mix in shit like this, it reduces legitimacy of the otherwise very valid criticism.
That depends entirely where the Tesla stopped, and under what conditions.
How often are they just bursting into flames for no reason?
4x as often as a human I'd expect
I didn't realise spontaneous human combustion was still so prevalent!
EVs are far less likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles—20 times less according to Swedish data—despite high-profile media coverage of EV fire incidents.
https://ev-lectron.com/blogs/blog/ev-fires-vs-ice-fires-safety-comparison-and-analysis

Got this saved next time someone tells me that a robot can drive better than a human. They almost had me there, but data doesn’t lie.
A robot can theoretically drive better than a human because emotions and boredom don't have to be involved. But we aren't there yet and Teslas are trying to solve the hard mode of pure vision without range finding.
Also, I suspect that the ones we have are set up purely as NNs where everything is determined by the training, which likely means there's some random-ass behaviour for rare edge cases where it "thinks" slamming on the accelerator is as good an option as anything else but since it's a black box no one really understands, there's no way to tell until someone ends up in that position.
The tech still belongs in universities, not on public roads as a commercial product/service. Certainly not by the type of people who would at any point say, "fuck it, good enough, ship it like that", which seems to be most of the tech industry these days.
They're 4 times as capable ~of~ ~crashing~ as a human driver. How efficient!
This is a really funny thing to see a few scrolls down from an article about Tesla's first drivingwheelless vehicle and finally "solving autonomous driving"
Hopefully, the French judicial system will throw his worthless pedo neo-Nazi ass into prison.
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