Tesla Autopilot drove into Wile E. Coyote-style fake road wall in the middle of the road in a camera versus lidar test.
This is hilarious. It wasn’t even a front on photo of the road but a perspective corrected on, for the side on, wile e coyote perspective shot. Head on, the photo would look like it took a sudden, immediate corner, not even a curve. Tesla’s software just said ‘this is perfectly normal’.
While most companies developing self-driving technologies have been using a mix of sensors (cameras, radar, lidar, and ultrasonic), Tesla insists on only using cameras.
The automaker removed radars from its vehicle lineup and even deactivated radars already installed in existing vehicles.
I did not know about this. I thought they were also using a mix of sensors, since they originally were. But they stopped putting them in new ones and even disabled them on vehicles that already had them?!
This is some next level stupidity.
Yeah this is the reason Tesla is massively overvalued. Self drive tech won’t be coming from Tesla because Musk interfered and told his engineers to remove lidar.
Musk is nothing but an investor but he believes his own nonsense about being a genius. He made some good bets but he also made some bad ones (Twitter being one) and Tesla is not going to justify irs crazy shareprice. Even having fallen 50% from peak it is way overvalued.
All true, but I think Twitter was a “good” bet. He controls a surprisingly large amount of the media landscape now and it got his bff rapist in chief elected.
A while ago people called Musk out on only using cameras when better options existed(for reasons exactly like this one), and he had a little tanty about it like the normal adult man he is. I have no doubt turning off existing radar features is a spiteful move because he got his feelings hurt.
Doubt thats the reason. More like no need to maintain two versions of their software.
No sane person would ever have 2 separate versions of their software for different sensors. It would be 1 software with integration of the different sensors.
It’s not “Cameras OR Lidar”, it’s Cameras AND Lidar.
Thats my point. If the new model only have cameras, then it only makes most financial sense to develop only for cameras.
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That depends on how much you think good will toward your customers affects the financial sense.
Consider the CEO is a nazi, i dont think putting customer saftey is their top priority.
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Anywhere Tesla can cut corners and save money, they do. The real reason they don’t use it is lidar is expensive but lying about self driving is free.
Now imagine what the boy genius is doing for the us govt.
Why have more data when you can crash through walls with less data?
It’s fine… If you’re a road runner and not a coyote. Meep meep!
The comments say that the tests weren’t exactly right. Something about not using FSD after stating their were going to.
I think it shouldn’t matter, the other vehicle using FSD and didn’t murder a bunch of fake children.
Supposedly there’s a difference between ‘Full Self Driving’ and ‘Autopilot’ (the later is what Mark used in the video). I’m not convinced there’s any meaningful difference for a test like this though.
Changing the software behind them isn’t going to magically give cameras the power to see through visual hindrances like rain/fog, or detect range to a nearby object that appears far away (like a painted wall).
Mark states he used it because it was more conservative but commenters are saying it wasn’t on for the wall test.
Hmm…
Taking a close look just now; there’s two conflicting shots.
At 15:34 the blue lines and rainbow effect ‘turn on’ on the center screen. Then the shot from inside the car shows no rainbow/blue lines during impact at 15:42.
I then started looking around a bit and found:
He posted the ‘raw footage’, which shows Autopilot disengage before impact, but not brake. Unfortunately when you compare the two, it’s clear these are two seprate takes: the youtube version had Autopilot engage at 39mph, while the ‘raw footage’ shows it engage at 42mph.
Combined with the obvious advertising/conflict of interest; this one’s gonna have Mark in some hot water… Tesla may even have a solid defamation case here :/
https://teslanorth.com/2025/03/16/busted-mark-robers-misleading-tesla-test-sparks-outrage/
So the question then remains, can the autopilot disengage if it senses an imminent collision so that the manufacturers aren’t held liable?
It certainly could, and wouldn’t really surprise me tbh. Whether it does or not would need to be tested further as unfortunately I think Mark has pretty well destroyed his credibility with this.
It seems pretty clear there was at least two takes of hitting the wall, both times Autopilot was disengaged shortly before impact, and Mark wasn’t honest about it.
There is a huge difference between Autopilot (basically hasn’t been updated in like four years) and FSD. Autopilot is basically just glorified lane keeping while FSD attempts to drive end to end (stop signs, traffic lights, etc.).
Not sure how it would change this test though. FSD is much more vision based than Autopilot.
The problem is that at scale you can’t have every car on the road using lidar at the same time.
They’ll mess with each other’s systems.
Same with radar.
So while this seems like a solved answer, it’s not necessarily as simple as it sounds
This is objectively false. Early lidar systems did have crosstalk interference and mitigations have been designed and working for years.
It’s like saying you can’t have WiFi cause if all your neighbors do it won’t work. As these systems hit the real world mitigations get designed to handle these types of issues.
Again, also not true. Lidar and Radar systems use a special spread spectrum frequency modulation and they do not interfere with each other.
I’m not sure that’s true. Has anyone punished a study on this? Lidar has far less “on” time than one would think.
IMO what is required is stereoscopic image capture and processing - This allows instant distance measurement to every pixel of the image
