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Animatsyesterday at 9:04 PM5 repliesview on HN

"In the crashes that ODI has reviewed, the system did not detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred."

Does it not detect them at all, or fail to deal with detected sensor degradation adequately? Does "Full Self Driving (assisted)" slow down under conditions of poor visibility?

Does Tesla even look for the road surface? One big advantage of those up-top LIDAR units is that you have a good scan of the pavement ahead. If you're not sensing flat pavement ahead, don't go there. That's basic. Vision-only systems, going back to Mobileye, have been overly dependent on looking for known kinds of obstacles. Original Mobileye could only detect car rear ends.


Replies

dstrootyesterday at 9:21 PM

I own two Tesla’s. When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy rain, the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving. Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able to drive with X number of cameras. however, it suffers from the same problems humans do: if it can’t see it can’t drive and ironically that’s when it reverts back to human control.

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schifferntoday at 12:00 AM

  >Does Tesla even look for the road surface?
Yes. They use an occupancy network which segments the environment into drivable and non-drivable space. This has been shown in patents and company presentations.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US12164310B2/en

altairprimeyesterday at 9:20 PM

> Does "Full Self Driving (assisted)" slow down under conditions of poor visibility?

Under conditions of poor camera visibility?

Humans drivers can see under conditions that cameras cannot, and people will otherwise misinterpret “visibility” as referring unpredictably (and with personal biases) towards either human sight and/or camera processing and/or lidar processing.

Sohcahtoa82yesterday at 9:24 PM

I think vision-only can certainly work for 99.9% of driving.

But it's that 0.1% of situations where the results will be catastrophic. Sure, you can detect vehicles, traffic cones, bikes (both bicycles and motorcycles), people, mopeds, traffic lights, lane markings, everything you'd expect on a road.

But what about the mattress that fell out of someone's truck? If the car doesn't know what a mattress is and what it looks like, it can't really adequately determine its size based on the monocular vision that Tesla has. Sure, maybe it could use motion vectors between video frames to make a guess, but I'm not convinced that's going to work well, especially relative to LIDAR.

Steering back to the subject at hand...

> "In the crashes that ODI has reviewed, the system did not detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred."

I don't think I've ever had my Tesla disable Autopilot based on road conditions, though maybe it's because when conditions are bad, I've just taken manual control preemptively. I've let it go through construction areas where cones are guiding traffic outside the painted lines, and surprisingly, it's handled it fine, though I've only done this at low speeds (~20 mph).

Camera visibility is another story. In heavy rain at night, I've had it not allow me to enable AP, though I've never had it disable AP and tell me to take control. However, it HAS limited the cruise speed based on visibility.

All this to say...

...anybody buying Tesla's FSD is being swindled, as far as I'm concerned. "FSD (Supervised)" is a scam. If you have to supervise it, it's not self-driving. It's just a party trick that you have to watch to make sure nothing goes wrong.

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FireBeyondyesterday at 11:34 PM

I think both.

As for road surface, yeah, that is how it should be (as you describe). Higher end Audi model/trims do road surface scanning and will adjust ride height, vehicle camber, even (to the greatest extent possible) help you avoid potholes while maintaining lane positioning. This is - or should be - table stakes.