this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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The big headline is understandably that it crashes into a fake painted wall like a cartoon, but that's not something that most drivers are likely to encounter on the road. The other two comparisons where lidar succeeded and cameras failed were the fog and rain tests, where the Tesla ran over a mannequin that was concealed from standard optical cameras by extreme weather conditions. Human eyes are obviously susceptible to the same conditions, but if the option is there, why not do better than human eyes?
Human eyes are way better at this than any camera based self driving system. No self driving system is anywhere close to driving in Swedish winter with bad weather and no sun, yet us Swedes do it routinely by the millions every day.
Yep, winter will be the death of 100% self driving cars, we can "filter out" snowflakes easily, computers can't.
My Volvo (and I mean, if one brand makes cars made for winter, it's them) ends up turning adaptive cruise control off in snowstorms because the sensors get completely blocked by snow. Elon never had to drive in conditions where the whole front of your car ends up looking like a snowbank and it shows. Hell you might need to stop by the side of the road to clear your lights in order to continue driving! Try to make a South African living in Texas understand that!
Not only that. As a general rule road markings are hidden beneath the snow, and often signs will be covered as well. You have to make an educated guess what they say. E.g. speed limit is based on contextual clues like road width, distance to treeline etc).
Really any technology that relies on signs and markings being visible will fail. There is little indication of where the road is. Often a fork in the road is not apparent because the plow has pushed up a snow bank that you must push through (but be careful not to get stuck in it if it's too dense).
Combine this with heavy snow in the wind, road salt that picks up dirt that sticks to sensors, fog, and other cars that overtake you while spraying snow across your windshield. It's honestly crazy that humans manage so well in these conditions.
That's interesting. I've never had any problems with adaptive cruise in the winter. I'm pretty sure that my V90CC has a heated radar module.
Mine is a P3 so maybe the newer generation fixed that!
Of course it does snow in Texas. Famously even.
Elon's problem is he's just a self-absorbed dick, most people wouldn't have trouble imagining adverse weather conditions, even if they haven't personally experienced them.
Average snowfall of 0.1 inches a year in the state, the northern part of the state gets less than 2 inches on average, the place that gets the most snow is Amarillo at 17 inches a year on average.
Last month we got 31 inches over three days over here, I've lived in a city where 200 inches a year is normal.
Texas doesn't know actual winter driving.
Tesla users with low empathy: who cares?
Seriously though, why ditch lidar?
To save Elmo a few bucks.
https://www.cdotrends.com/story/4083/lidar-u-turn-elon-musks-fools-errand-becomes-teslas-secret-weapon
Long story short is Musk is a greedy billionaire that likes to think he’s an engineer and he clearly isn’t.
Excuse me. He's also a top ranked PoE player that doesn't know how open his inventory.
Human eyes are much better at picking up shapes from complex visual clutter than computers. Not to mention that human eyes have infinitely better dynamic range than cameras (every time you go into or out of a tunnel the camera is essentially blind for a couple of seconds until it readjusts), both mean that while you absolutely do need the cameras, you can't just rely on them and say "oh well humans only use their eyes", because the cameras and the computers are nowhere near human level capable.
I love the justification for only using cameras is "humans do it". Like, are we not supposed to use any technology that humans can't replicate? Maybe we shouldn't fly planes because humans can't fly. It's such a dumb reason.
Even worse, you could actually easily see the mannequin behind the rain curtain.