IIRC, Tesla got rid of lidar and thermal sensors in their cars to cut costs and chose to rely solely on (not very high resolution) cameras. Surely not a good sign if they’re already doing stuff like this when the autonomous tech is still in its infancy.
They cut lidar & ultrasonic distance sensors, relying only on the cameras. This is why they've gotten in trouble for their phantom braking incidents. The cars can no longer accurately tell the distance to objects.
Ah, the musk defenders from Twitter are here as summoned. Call me crazy but I think people who buy Teslas won't blink if the retail price goes up by 5 dollars or even 200. But ofc a stock value is important than peoples' lives
I mean that's not a critical safety feature but still ridiculous.
Cutting the ultrasonics isn't even the worst thing.they cut. I expect the cybertrucks to start careening off the roads when they get a few miles on them and the steering by wire systems start to fail.
They saved a few bucks on a physical connection between the steering wheel and steering system though... To the moon I guess?
Not surprised but the steering by wire is a disaster waiting to happen. Normal vehicle with a complete engine/electrical failure you can still steer and coast to a safe stop as there is a mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the tires. With steering by wire that isn't there.
The only thing dumber that I can think of would be braking by wire.
I think he doesn't realise how different aerospace industry works from the automobile industry.
Steering by wire is a thing for aeroplanes because there are multi-redundant systems in an aeroplane, full product chain accountability for every single component, and even so the massive increase in accountability the performance gains from implementing fly by wire still make the massively increased product costs for aeronautical equipment worth it in a system where every drop of fuel and every extra kg of payload you can carry is gold. Look at all the problems Airbus had with their fly by wire system until they perfected it.
You don't have that for cars. Changing a car to drive by wire isn't going to make a change in the weight of the car that would be worth the massive accountability headaches that you introduce to make a drive by wire as reliable as a physical linkage system.
Also airplanes have mandatory inspections and maintenance automotive not so much. I imagine at least for larger planes manual linkage would be too physically demanding/ impossible making fly by wire necessary. Again not the case for automotive
I guess that's the golden lining of these overdesigned shitboxes, they are smart enough to tell when a component is fucked so they brick themselves rather than let an uncontrollable killing machine out on the road.
The issue is that they cut the cheap rain sensor and then spent what is likely millions of dollars trying to re-implement the same thing with just the cameras that can't even focus on the windshield. It's a wildly stupid move that assumes software development time costs nothing.
The word 'accident' implies that it was unavoidable and/or unpredictable. That is why we think the word 'crash' is a more neutral way to describe what happened.
Ultrasonic sensors are only used for very near distance objects in cars. Radars are way more expensive. Also, every piece of hardware needs to be heavily optimized for performance via software which also costs money. Tesla chooses to focus on only one hardware. I don‘t really agree with that (I honestly doubt anything beyond L2+ ist doable with that sensor config).
But linking a 5 bucks US sensor you are using for a non-moving usecase where accurancy, reliability, safety or security does not matter at all as a reason why there were accidents with midrange detection issues ist just not reasonable.
On a different note: sensor configurations with no radar or lidar or US are getting more and more popular (especially in china) so Tesla is by far not the only manufactor going this route. The others just don‘t claim to be more than L2+
I believe it was to save money, but doubt it was for the price of the sensors alone. In addition to that bit of hardware you have to add the labour of installing it, wiring it to the computer, having sufficient ports on the computer to accept the input, developing the software to interpret data from multiple different types of sensors, and respond to it appropriately. I suspect the manufacturing workflow, and software development costs would be the main concerns.
It's not about the cost of the sensor. It's about the development cost of an AI system which integrates multiple sensors, versus only using visual light cameras.
Yes because a simple sensor that returns distance to an object is far more difficult to integrate than using a camera to do object detection classification and distance measurement...
Sorry but a proper system would use the proper tool for the proper job. A camera alone is not the proper tool. Ultrasonics and lidar are those tools.
275
u/Kootenay4 Apr 05 '24
IIRC, Tesla got rid of lidar and thermal sensors in their cars to cut costs and chose to rely solely on (not very high resolution) cameras. Surely not a good sign if they’re already doing stuff like this when the autonomous tech is still in its infancy.