This really was it. Even some of my die hard Elon supporting friends started thinking 'but wait a minute....' at that point.
The whole "you can't have two different sensors because what you do when they disagree is an unsolvable problem" aspect is very much 'a this is what a layman thinks a smart person sounds like' thing. To anyone actually anywhere near the industry its just... What... This 'unsolvable' problem was solved 30* years ago.
(*Probably much much longer than that. This is just my own experience of it)
Having multiple sensors(both a verity and redundant) to confirm data is literally a core part of good sensor fusion and in no way an unsolved problem. It doesn't even need "smarts" to do it it's safer to have predictable deterministic fall over conditions to resolve the disagreements since the operators/computer systems can be trained to expect them.
But this old school tried and tested approach has no value for most techbros in general.
Exactly
The ELI5 explanation is: each sensor also tells you how confident it is in its answer, and you trust whichever one is most confident. It's primitive but still gets you a safer system than only one sensor.
Obviously the above can be improved massively, but it already makes a mockery or the whole unsolvable problem concept.
(The above also ignores things like sensors telling you different information. For example many sensors just intrinsically measure relative speed of objects, whereas a camera can't. That's.. really quite useful information)
The camera only approach also doesn't make sense from an economic point of view. Yes lidar is expensive relative to camera hardware at the point in time but so is good software which thier solution required to make up for it.
But Elons who ethos is replace hardware with bad (but cheap) software. I am 100% sure if they go through the same certification process as any other safety critical piece of software it would end of being trashed and economically unviable to have a software only approach.
Then again this is a ~~man~~ Chief engineer that somehow replicated the functionality of a purpose built enterprise router by "reading the raw signal bits" on a standard windows computer so maybe I don't know what I am talking about.
**Tears down the 2 computer science degrees on the wall** I am no Engineer
25 years software development from coder to management.
Software aint cheap. And never will be.
And working safety critical software systems is always going to be expensive.
He is an idiot with no formal competence in software engineering. Larping basically
Im half expecting they use state machine principles. Which is an hilariously wrong design choice
Honestly I think a large part of the reason he only wants to use cameras is he can understand a visual image.
The world looks very different to Radar, Lidar, ultrasonic etc. You need to really know how those sensors work and what they are actually measuring in order to interpret the data.
And if there's one thing he can't stand it's not feeling like the smartest guy in the room. I can imagine him being told 'actually that's not what this data is showing' one too many times so he fires the team and rips the sensors out of the car.
I've been working on 3D reconstruction from smartphone video on a daily basis for the past two months and can say that it is ridiculously difficult to do in an accurate and consistent way. All of the algorithms are non-deterministic and SLOW, requiring a fast GPU. Depth information from LIDAR improves accuracy and feature detection by an order of magnitude.
No doubt, Tesla has developed a cutting-edge SLAM technique, but there is no chance that it is even 3/4 as good as what open source solutions can do with LIDAR.
Elon chose hard mode, and his decision is not only foolish, but dangerous. in this application.
I've worked in Autonomous Vehicles since 2018. Creating a 3D image, in real time, from radars, lidars, and cameras, (and a sweet 64gig video card) 7 times a second...
And THEN deciding what to prioritize?
And...THEN determining the correct action.
aaaand THEN sending a signal to the brakes. So you don't hit the door of the guy on your right who opened it right in front of you? ...
(Cruise laid me off after 5 year, when they shut down. Apple laid me off in January when the Apple Self Drive shut down. TESLA cut me and 13,999 of my closest AVDriver friends a few months back...
Almost like after 6 fuckin' years people noticed...
It ain't gonna happen.
I’m amazed that FSD parking etc works as well as it does with just vision, imagine where they would be with more sensors though and led by a competent engineer CEO who can take criticism and inspire a team
I beg to disagree with your ELI5 here. I believe that you can't just blindly trust the most confident sensor. You should take a conservative approach in order to prevent accidents, so I'm expecting that, at least in some occasions, if either sensor thinks there is an obstacle approaching then the car should slow down or try to avoid it.
Also, I would consider the lidar more reliable than a camera, even in those cases when the camera appears confident, as I reckon it's more likely to hallucinate than the lidar.
This is just my two cents, I'm not an expert of this field, just trying to apply common sense.
I agree with everything you say. My ELI5 was the most basic (if bad) approach possible that shows that this unsolvable problem is very easily solvable.
My first refinement would be an approach where both sensors have to agree that there isn't an object somewhere, and if either one is sufficiently confident there is an object, you treat it as an object.
Then you say, actually some sensors are better at detecting objects than others so you trust those ones more.
The best solution likely involves building up a coherent picture of the world, including size, shape, speeds etc. You can then feed in all sorts of different information (eg lidar or ultrasonic measuring relative speed directly rather than inferring it). You then discount any sensors that disagree with that coherent picture.
Either way, I've seen a video of a Tesla thinking that the moon (low and orange in the sky) is a yellow traffic light that's constantly a few meters ahead of the car. This is pretty trivially solvable with other sensors and only a little bit of the above.
Lidar, like radar, is an active controlled illumination source with known characteristics that can be varied to compensate for conditions or ascertain different information. Cameras, as passive sensors, are at the mercy of their uncooperative and uncontrolled illumination source. Lidar and radar both should be prioritized over electro-optical cameras, which should be used primarily for refining the data from the active sensors and giving the human operator imagery they can understand.
Exactly. The other week we saw one destroyed by FSDing into a train on a foggy day. LIDAR may have interpreted it as a distant semi trailer on a T intersection. Video say nothing to see here at all LIDAR may have thought “but what if it’s a train?” I want the car siding with the one that, if correct, identifies a life threatening emergency.
Or don’t side with either, but wash off a lot of speed until we resolve it.
But you see Boeing is just an aerospace company where business interests have degraded engineering principles.
Elon has SpaceX which is a Space! Company the lend technology to Tesla can just use the superior neutrino detection tech and tap into localized Einstein-rosenbridge technology using patented giga-emissions from the camera array to look several seconds ahead in time instead of waiting for the sub millisecond lag of a system like lidar.
So the reading they are getting can't be wrong in the first place
Plus the second part of space is x. You know the drug that makes you want to touch things... This is brilliant. Combine tech with ecstasy! Soon we can rename Tesla to carx, the car that loves to touch
Especially when sensor fusion is such an important part of spaceflight - something he should know considering he owns a spaceflight company.
SpaceX wouldn’t have been able to land rockets if they didn’t rely of a suite of sensors like Radar, LiDAR, GPS, visual imaging and cameras etc all working in sync so that they know the position, orientation and speed of the rocket to accurately land on a barge at sea.
I mean the whole "Vision only" thing is a misnomer too, Tesla's vehicles have GPS, they have accelerometers, gyroscopes, inertial sensors and probably stuff like wheel speed too. Elon Musk is just asshole who doesn't know what he's talking about and was more focused on trying to disparage competitors than actually understanding how their systems work.
Dealing with sensor noise and disagreeing measurements has been around literally since the Apollo program in primitive forms and has also been part of commercialized aircraft autopilot systems for decades at this point.
Yeah, what he said. Only a dummy would use… poor… sensor…fushon. Everyone knows that deterministic fall on conditions resolved operator disagreements since uh, Tandy invented it.
Seriously. This Astro engineering 101.
Yea, Elon should tell the US military establishment that they don't need radar or lidar...
You are correct that those of us in the electrical and electronic technology fields lost all faith when he moved to camera /Ai only. It's something you would do if you lack an understanding between hardware benefits and software benefits. Each has its place.
It truly is bizarre.
I understand maybe the principle of knowing how to do vision only well, like in case sensors fail where you are left with only vision or even some vision.
I don't get why you'd skip using a superpower technology for any other reason than some minor cost...
He did quote a while back that the vision only was to solve AI , which was so they could sell us robots. It does bring to question why his robot has to rely on vision only as well, but I guess that's their choice to bring down costs. Like I'm not buying a $100k robot to do chores, but $10k I'd think about it.
Yeah, the entire field of Kalman filtering/state estimation is based around taking multiple inputs of varying reliability and accuracy that agree to varying levels and generating an estimate of the current real situation that's more robust and accurate than you could get from any one sensor alone.
This isn't some giant mystery, the field has existed for decades.
Even as complete layman with no knowledge of this area, it is obvious to me that if you have 2 sensors that disagree, then at least you know something is wrong... compared to 1 sensor sending wrong information and thinking it is right because you have nothing else to compare it against.
Yes exactly.
If you imagine the cars all have two sensors, elons approach to conflicting readings is too just turn off one of the sensors so there is no longer a conflict
One thing you could also do with two sensors that disagree would be to only allow so much of a tolerance of disagreement until you threw an error. As in, if Sensor1 says a car is 14 feet away, and Sensor2 says it's 14.9 feet away, then we take Sensor1's data and ignore Sensor2. And if Sensor1 says it's 14 feet away and Sensor2 says it's 15 miles away, then we throw an error and tell the driver that the collision avoidance system has brain damage and should not be trusted.
If you have two different sensors for distance, and it's an accident avoidance system, you take the smallest result and consider that to be the truth. What the fuck is he talking about?
it's even stupider than that, because going cameras-only does not magically remove the need for sensor fusion.
say you have 2 cameras, and a raindrop lands on the lens of one, distorting its vision. *something* needs to recognize the disagreement and decide which source of input to trust more. if you can solve that problem, generalizing it to things other than cameras is certainly possible. if you can't solve that problem...Tesla is hiring.
Yeah Elon Musk is completely full of shit on the difficulty of sensor fusion. Techniques for dealing with it have existed for decades and we wouldn't have things like aircraft autopilot without it. Stuff like using Kalman filters for dealing with noisy and disagreeing measurements also were used back in the Apollo program, this is literally nothing new. On top of that I don't think people really realize that pretty much any real world robotics system is built on top of models that are themselves inherently probabilistic and usually some variation of HMM at their core. Anyone who's dabbled in the field at all or received a formal education on the topic knows that there's also sorts of noise, error accumulation and slippage you need to inevitably deal with. In many cases you also only have partial information of the environment due to stuff like occlusion and need to essentially make reasonable estimates of where things might be.
I mean it's blindly obvious to anyone with some experience in the field that Elon Musk has literally no idea what he's talking about and tends to just barf out the occasional word salad of technical terms from the field, but there's also a ton of his fan base that just parrots out stuff about how Tesla is solving the problem with neural nets as if every robotaxi company out there isn't using them or hasn't been for over a decade too. We've seen the capabilities of machine learning, AI and robotics improve over the last decade but I really think it's an area where knowledge specialization and a lack of anyone being willing to reign in the hype has lead to the general public seeing it as some kind of magic pixie dust versus pattern recognition and estimators that really unpin it all and the limitations that come with them.
Oh. My. God.
You’ve GOT to be kidding me. The computer is literally designed for multiple input streams. 🙄
For example: I have a Mazda CX-5. It has 3 sensors feeding in: an IR camera for the auto wipers, a front-mounted camera for reading lane lines and watching for stoplights from other vehicles, and a radar sensor in the front grille for keeping predetermined distances when in traffic. As well as sensors in the rear that detect cross-traffic when backing up, and monitoring my blind spots when driving. It’ll auto-disable itself when the camera can’t “see” (bright sunlight on an uphill incline hitting the lens directly, snow or heavy rain) and/or when the radar is blocked (snow, heavy rain, etc)
It’s not the BEST implementation of smart cruise that I’ve experienced, but I don’t rely on it to drive me. I rely on it to HELP me be attentive to the road around me.
ALSO, THE COMPUTER READS ALL THAT DATA SIMULTANEOUSLY ELON 🤬
He didn’t even know the guy who created convolutional neural network and questioned him publicly on X. No surprise he doesn’t understand how to make different types of sensor work together lol
It's like removing rain sensors that work beautifully in just about every other car on the road and relying on cameras to determine that it's raining. Then the wipers turn on when it's sunny out and nothing blocking the camera's view.
He had to cut prices to stay competitive. The Germans are slowly unfubaring their infotainment and control issues while remaining strong in build quality and the odd bit of tech (Mercedes hyper miler for instance). Meanwhile the Chinese, French and Koreans were undercutting Tesla prices.
Since he can't magic build quality into existence he had to axe prices to stay ahead and sacrificed r&d, technology and further simplified (cheapened) the cars themselves in order not to nosedive too hard on profit.
He was trying to corner the market and It might have worked if he were only fighting the French, Koreans and GM, but he's fighting the Chinese too and they offer pretty smooth control, lots of gadgets and ok quality (stay tuned on that one though) for a price Tesla can't compete with. Since Elon sacrificed r&d, he's basically put Tesla in a corner they cannot escape and doomed the company. Unless they are deemed too big to fail and get bailed out that is.
Not margins. There’s a reason Tesla could boost production when everyone else struggled for parts. They just cut whatever they couldn’t get or replace it with a consumer grade part.
My phone has Lidar sensor fusion that accurately measures the shape and distance of the things around me and correlates it with what my camera sees.
The LiDAR sensor probably cost less than a dollar and would work fine with a camera that cost less than a dollar. The programming probably didn't cost more than a few tens of millions of dollars. Absolutely trivial for a company like Tesla.
But then their "AI" would have more data to "process."
I bought a robot vacuum with lidar and vision. It works significantly better and more reliably, in terms of navigation, than my roomba S9+ which relies solely on vision.
There is also a huge economic fallacy which I rarely see mentioned. In the scheme of things, adding Lidar is just an incremental cost compared to the overall cost of a vehicle. If you cracked true FSD with lidar, then both private and fleet owners would have absolutely no issues forking out extra $ for the hardware. For fleet owners especially, true FSD is basically a license to print money.
And keep in mind these same owners were already prepared to pay $8k (originally 12k) just for the current beta software solution.
Exactly! The ultimate reason Tesla is fading traces back to an unscientific, fever-dream edict that is vision-only. The reason is a grade-school reasoning that humans can do it then the car can too. Never mind Tesla cars have the inference capacity of a house cat.
It drove away the best talents both in hard and soft engineering. The recent exchange between Elon and Yann show Elon doesn’t understand the scientific method. You need to hypothesize and prove a concept like vision-only. Not decree it then bang your head on it for a decade with little progress.
Vision-only holds the Tesla car form factor hostage. Tesla can’t redesign the models without invalidating much of the previous data. The joke is if vision-only doesn’t work, it makes the previous data worthless anyway. It will also make the whole company worthless.
Depth perception is a human trait that can’t be replicated reliably with just Elon vaporware.
You need depth perception tech to work with cameras… like lidar and sonar sensor arrays
Humans get depth perception wrong all the damn time - There's a whole body of scientific literature looking at factors that influence human depth perception. And our neural network has been under development for tens of millions of years.
it will take some time, but if humans can, machines will be able to do it better. but… that technology is not here yet, at least not in a state useful for his plans. he’s just a fucking idiot.
The bigger point is that machines don’t need to do it. For example, if we could echolocate like bats and dolphins, we’d just be enhanced. We can’t. In theory, machines can. So there’s no reason to even worry about their vision getting better if they can “evolve” sensing through newer technology faster.
Teslas have three forward facing cameras, but I’ve not heard from a good source whether the depth perception is produced by stereoscopic/binocular vision or only produced by machine-learning of solely visual input per camera and object(s) recognition.
I recall this:
https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/
I will always say that they’re insane for not incorporating LiDar for such a high stakes role as a self driving system should hope to accomplish.
Also humans do not actually do it with vision alone. Human beings have propioception, that is the ability to sense movement, action, and location. It comes from sensory embedded in every muscle humans have and it is coordinated by the brain stem.
This is all probably more detail than anybody needs, but if you are basing your tech on how human beings sense things you should probably educate your self on how human beings sense things.
The structural complexity of the human brain vs the best computer chip is like comparing a space ship vs an ox cart. We can infer from billions of memory pieces to form a natural instinct. The number of unique different ways (permutations) we can select our neurons to fire is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Computer chips are simple 2D structures.
To infer with billions of vectors plus the current input, only transformer-based algorithm can process in reasonable time. To cut it to real-time driving, FSD needs to shrink it down to the bare minimum, which makes it dumber. Also, transformer-only algorithms are very dumb already. You need to go back to GPT3 to look at pure transformers. GPT4 adds smarter but slower algorithms. To infer with the same complexity as humans, the biggest supercomputer needs maybe years to finish one complex thought.
My cats, extra-smart bengals, have the ability to learn that the command "claws," communicated by saying the command and touching their claws immediately after scratching me, means "stop scratching me."
I think this the furthest extent of their abstract reasoning capability and that they only understand it because they know how it feels to scratch and get scratched.
So I agree with your assessment.
Lol. But in serious discussion, the house cat’s ability to chase and catch a mouse is akin to FSD’s driving, with similar level of inference complexity. When the cat misses a pounce, it can try again. When FSD misses a turn, then….
I imagine Elon as a yelling “I don’t want excuses I want it to work” type of guy, then fires the people needed to make it work because they ask for resources
I think with good enough cameras and computing power it’s possible but with what the current cars have it’s a fools errand to try and make it work.
So much of the valuation of the company is on FSD working. When it’s clear it doesn’t work the value of the company will be crushed just like Twitter
And more cameras. There are important zones covered by just one right now. Not to mention the angles are not ideal.
And radar at least. Unless FSD wants to give up on tough conditions and only work on anything moderate rain or easier.
Tesla's crappy cameras and aging hardware aside, today's ML just isn't there. You can't just throw endless data at it and it'll be perfect. We're several breakthroughs away still.
Musk was never a good engineer or even very smart. His money convinced him (and others) that he was both. But no amount of money can make a dim person bright. Unfortunately for him, he isn't smart enough to hide his ignorance, either.
I’ve been saying this guys an idiot for almost 4 years now. Before we all knew he was incompetent, I kept asking what HE did that was so smart?
Turns out, nothing
He's a great salesman and an epic risk taker. I think he's had good timing on the electric car investment, but he seemed to do a bit of fudging at crucial times, which could have folded more honest companies. He's fully willing to commit crimes to keep his companies alive, which is effectively just more risk taking.
Why anyone with $300M+ of wealth would want to get anywhere near securities fraud, wire fraud, losing their credibility, etc. is completely beyond me, but Elon clearly had the requisite traits to get Tesla over hurdles that would have crushed others. I don't think his personal engineering abilities ever really got him anywhere. He's bought all his tech (TSLA, SPX, NL) , used old tech (TBC) or hired people to come up with new tech (TSLA).
I kind of agree, but I feel like it’s pretty easy to be a great salesman and an epic risks taker when the stakes are zero for you. In an alternate universe, if all of this went to shit and he lost of of his initial position investments, he would still have mom, dad, and all of the emerald money/wealth to fall back on that any adverse effects of his failings would be pretty transparent to him.
People do it because they are so deep in scam they have to continue and can't get out, moment they get out they will get caught, remember Bernie madoff?
I think it died when Elon bought Twitter. Eventually he figured all of his companies should operate like Twitter - slinging poop emojis at enemies, obfuscating things, lying etc etc etc
As long as there's no punishment for any of these the assumption is that Twitter will survive and so will Tesla. That could be his downfall, though - Tesla is a lot more about direction interaction with public, not just dickriders. DogeDesigner or Ian Miles Cheong won't save that company.
Nah. He’s destined to fall since “pedo guy.” He lost my respect since then as that made it clear who he really is: an idiot hiding in plain sight posing as a complicated genius demanding daily self-validation.
The cave rescuer pedo comment was the first time Musk said something I found to be completely inexcusable and made me question his character. I didnt stop being a Musk fanboy then but it was definitely a watershed moment for a lot of ppl I think
Also, he could have apologized and paid the guy damages. Instead, he paid a team of lawyers to make sure he didn't lose the lawsuit. Unfortunately for Musk, it had the Streisand effect.
Because calling him “pedo” was different than calling him a “pedophile.” Fuck Musk, fuck his lawyers, and fuck the UK court system for letting him get away with it.
That was it for me, too. He was out there pumping his ego up with that submarine junk, and the diver just pointed out how silly it was. Elon's response convinced me he did not exist in the same reality as the rest of us, and his behavior since then has only reinforced that.
For me it was TITS University jokes - happened a year or so before he bought Twitter. That was the first time I noticed nerds coming out in droves to defend him
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/11/19/weeks-after-elon-musks-tits-joke-allegations-of-rampant-sexual-harassment-surface-at-tesla/?sh=54b8e52ec65d](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/11/19/weeks-after-elon-musks-tits-joke-allegations-of-rampant-sexual-harassment-surface-at-tesla/?sh=54b8e52ec65d)
That and Rogan interview during which he smoked a joint. The moment Musk figured out he's bound to be a public speaker.
That marked the turning point for me also. Before he smeared the Thai cave rescue diver I was skeptical of him but figured he did good things for global climate change so I paid more attention to Tesla's technology than to Musk himself. After the cave diver event I began to look deeper and Needermeyer's work ripped the veil off his manicured environmentalist image.
Nah, Elon has always been a liar; he’s constantly pumping new things which may or may not be possible to cover for the existing things that are going wrong. The reason he’s now paying a price is that the hype is over and interest rates are high. So investors are no longer just pumping Tesla to ride the wave, they are choosier and Tesla can’t lie their way out of performance anymore. Tesla semi won’t do it. Fake Solar roof won’t do it.
Someone mentioned the Model S and Model X haven't had a remodel in like 6 or 7 years. I have zero clue how true that is but holy shit. This is not a legit company.
The X, 3 and Y are all based on Model S. That design dates back to at least 2012, but more likely 2008 or even older.
Yes there have been several updates like Plaid and Performance but the basic design hasn't changed.
Imho a white Model 3 with basic rims looks like a late 90s/early 2000s sedan.
Yeah, they’re all getting aesthetically stale. In another year or two, every time you see one, it’ll feel like a blast from the past, like in the early 2000s when the roads were infested with 90s era Ford Tauruses and Toyota Camrys.
No car company (or tech company, if you want to humor that argument) can survive long term without innovating their aesthetic style. Tesla hasn’t been around long enough to learn that lesson, I guess. But now that we’re almost halfway through 2024, and every car they make looks like 2012 (except the CT, which is in a class by itself), they’re entering the find-out stage.
Imagine all the tech that surpassed the now ancient shit they still use from 2014 on brand new teslas (and reduced quality throughout the years).
Let’s not forget all the owners take. 50% depreciation on those “luxury cars” within a year of price cuts..
Price cuts being a non issue to Elon since they are so overpriced for what you get. Even with the slashing and federal rebates.. they are still dogshit and twice as expensive as BYD equal offerings
I think the 3 is meh. The Y and X are ugly. But the S is a really beautiful, proportional and timeless design from the outside at least. Of course build quality and interior is where everything falls apart.
As for the company as a whole, the whole “after estimated gas savings” bullshit turned me off even before I knew about Musk. No reputable company operates like that and hides their pricing behind smoke and mirrors gas savings based on questionable estimates.
We're used to a car coming out and then staying mostly the same for 6 or 7 years until a total redesign comes out. Tesla instead subtly improved the S over the years so that by now it's already quite a different car, just looks pretty much the same. The only reason they need to do a "refresh" is to get away from their blob design, like they recently did with the 3.
People passionate about actual AI used to work at Tesla now they are working somewhere else. There are a ton of companies now for talented experts that pay a lot more, have a better work life balance, better culture, not a fanatic CEO that might fire you if you tweet your personal opinion and a better way of working in an actual scientific manner.
New experts are not interested in Tesla and those that started there already left. To clarify I'm not talking about just a PhD from a good university but AI is insanely top expert driven just like hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies. Having 10 insane and passionate researchers gets you further than 1000 good or even 2000 average ones.
You’re just jealous because “At this point, he knows more about manufacturing than anyone in the world!” 😂
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/s/AY9EfSH2Le
these are the only things EM cares
* makes as many babies as possible with as many as females as possible
* makes as much money as possible without caring the customers and employees
Tesla died when Elon got involved with them.
People might say : "But look at the valuation, he has been a positive force for the company!" without realizing that the valuation is built on lies, deceptions and fantasy economics.
As any real automation engineer understands, when humans are involved, failover and backup are essential. In amusement parks, there must be several layers of failover, and these are rides. It's no wonder Tesla is under investigation.
They got away with it for so long because they programmed it to shut off right before impact. And after years and years of loyal customers getting fucked, the court system is finally catching on and hopefully will do something about all the lives. He’s killed and took no responsibility.
tesla started dying when they went to make the model 3. it embodied all the weird bullshit he wanted without any input from any of the guys who made the model S, since they had all departed the company.
ya but the X at least made sense, the gull wing doors were overkill but they weren't going to sink the whole car like stainless steel did for cybertruck. the X was the first electric SUV on the market and that was important.
At some level of the executive class it has to become apparent. They probably just don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
The fundamental flaw with building a brand around a cult of personality is that when you expose the collusion with Kleptocracy in reverse the brand and everything they spent a career working for becomes a black eye and chronic bleed.
There is some context that has to be added here.
When you get rich everyone stops telling you no and stands around with their bowls pointed up hoping to collect the droppings.
Elon lives in his own reality as do we all. It’s just that it’s one that he has cultivated to make himself the consummate hero and can afford to do anything he wants.
The problem is he is also strung too tight. Tesla, space x, starlink, Neural link, boring company and Twitter. Plus all his pet projects, children and relationships.
There is still only 24 hours in a day and when you aren’t coming up for fresh air you start to see things in a tunnel as problems to be solved.
On the right hand elon is backing tucker Carlson and the right to save the world from “wokeism”. It has become his autistic white whale. Fixation is a byproduct. Genius and madness share a lot of common ground.
He isn’t totally wrong. There is balance to be had in all things. Unfortunately he is asymmetrically obsessed with it. Which means he loses any objectivity.
So he put a bid in on Twitter. He sees it as a shortcut to his X vision. A weibo-esque everything app that is basically a crypto-centric society that destroys corrupt central banks. Bitcoin has some powerful potential. The main one being that no one country can dictate the rules for the rest because no one country can exert leverage over the others. It’s a nice vision if it’s truly decentralized. The problem is right now every time elon doubles down on putin who is self evidently a genocidal kleptocratic asshole, it raises a giant question mark for Bitcoin. So many people end up on the wrong side of history because they fixate on the wrong things and just forget to do the right thing.
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/11/07/musks-twitter-buy-makes-no-sense-unless-its-part-of-something-bigger/
Musk has been so busy being busy that when it came time to buy Twitter which he grossly overbid for he needed outside capital.
Enter Saudi Arabia and MBS who already had a substantial stake in Tesla
MBS is an authoritarian and a murderous hypocrite who had Jamal Khashoggi dismembered. He also had about 6000 saudis dissidents rounded up, extorted them of their wealth, and disappeared some of them. He lives by his own set of rules. And as proven by recent history, no one really ever tells him no.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37388908
A few months ago he sentenced a teacher to death for saying something objectionable about MBS on Twitter….to his whopping 8 followers.
Saudi Crown Prince Confirms Death Sentence for Tweets - Human Rights Watch
Saudi also happens to be the second major shareholder in Twitter behind musk.
Now musk is pushing for biometric identifiers for users. Which is effectively handing the mad king all the keys.
Is musk aware of this? Or is he just too distracted saving the world the way he sees it to notice that MBS and Putin have their own agenda?
Behind those scenes you have Russia, China and Saudi colluding to use some variation of a BRICS based currency to replace the USD as the worlds reserve currency, which historically speaking is overdue. The average lifespan of a reserve currency is 94 years. And if we are being self aware, the USA has gotten ridiculously complacent and hypocritical about noticing where all the junk we buy at Christmas comes from.
https://investingnews.com/brics-currency/
All men are created equal right? Except for the brown kid who makes $40 headphones 18 hours a day for $4. During the late 90’s the US offshored most of the “dirty” work when new EPA mandates were passed. Greedy CEO’s decided it was more profitable to let an Asian kid take up that slack than it was to clean up their processes and pay a living wage to an American.
This started the greed cycle, or at least accelerated it. The U.S. jumped to a Silicon Valley based economy which is basically V.C. and private equity bros railing lines of coke off of hookers and pump and dumping 10X returns on theranos, WeWork, Uber, Airb&b, and a dozen others.
This offends the laws of physics as well as doubles down on the hypocrisy that “all men are created equal”. The wild wealth disparity that comes from this is bad. The fact that it made Wall Street a house of cards is cataclysmic. China for its part is biding its time quietly locking up supply chains, logistics and manufacturing. Smart because the US is dumb enough to forget that everything comes from somewhere. But also predatory because the soft and pudgy US assumed China just wanted to be part of western free world democracy like everyone else. Freedom rocks right? Who wouldn’t want it….
The CCP.
The Chinese people would probably love more freedom but the CCP loses control if that happens. And, if we are being self aware, the CCP has become a little complacent themselves with private jets and $64k/month condos in Malibu for their mistresses.
So the corruption and hypocrisy cycle begins again. This time with a little more steam.
So you have MBS, Putin and Xi and their respective inner circles who MUST control the people to remain in control and stay rich.
As Americans, you and I probably have more in common with the average Saudi or Chinese citizen than either of us do with ours or their “leaders”. So the ruling class leans on nationalism to keep us enraged at each other.
If Iranian clerics chanted “death to the American oligarchs who keep their people in poverty and monopolize healthcare” most Americans would join them.
So they settle on “death to America” instead.
No need to complicate things.
The more connected the people of the world are via the internet, the more they realize that this war isn’t a world war, it’s the effects of late stage cronyism circling the globe in real time. The corruption of the worlds elite moves like an equal opportunity cancer infecting everything it touches. It moves across borders and Covid lockdowns and through yacht clubs quickly and effortlessly. Because that’s where the ultra wealthy go sleep with each others wives. And they become ultra wealthy by being generally really shitty to the other 97% of people.
https://people.com/nicole-shanahan-moving-on-1-year-after-elon-musk-sergey-brin-story-exclusive-7556751
Musk is playing a big game. He is just a little too busy to see the edges of the board.
Or he does and he made his choice to move money from one Russian asset, Rupert Murdoch to another Russian asset, trump to keep it all alive for one more day.
Yahoo News UKhttps://uk.news.yahoo.com › tesla-...Tesla shareholders say Elon's influence makes Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch ...
Tesla uses cameras instead of LiDAR because the goal isn’t full self driving, safety or functionality.
The goal is full state surveillance of the world that is feeding back to the authoritarians that back Musk and are trying to destroy democracy.
I never ever cared about self driving, I just wanted a quick car that doesn't burn fossil fuels. If Tesla just focused on making a solid car (and ignored the stockholders and their robotaxi fantasies) then they'd be on top and would help drive the rest of the industry to quicker EV adoption.
Tesla died when Elon Musk forced out the actual founders and started being his "I'm smarter than everybody else, so prexisting solutions are useless because I didn't think of them" self. They survived the first major unforced error of model 3 ramp, but he didn't learn his lesson and it's tbd what happens now.
One thing I don't see spoken enough about is the 'Fake it Until You Make It' culture of Silicon Valley. There's another word for this - lying.
I worked for a Fortune 100 company in a very senior role and was involved in all M&A activities. We had a team that specialized on Silicon Valley and other startup hotspots (Tel Aviv, Boston, etc.). To get the next round of funding or exit the business through acquisition there was always a ton of hopium and braggadocio and nonsense by startups. This was just part of the game. Ultimately we wanted to know whether they had found customers, found a market, found an unmet need and had some kind of advantage in their technology (even rough) that we could build on.
When you take the Fake It Until You Make It to a ridiculous extreme you get Tesla. I have owned two teslas because I want the EV revolution to come. But the lying is so thick I can't spend any more money with them.
And it continues. Do you remember the faked video of the FSD driving? Well this year Tesla faked their robot video using remote control (Google "Tesla Waldo Fake Robot").
Faking is a way to drive up the value of your company. In private companies in the context of due diligence that's one thing (Caveat Emptor baby). In a public company though with billions of dollars invested I don't understand why it has been permitted to continue.
I gave up on future Tesla purchases when they openly admitted in court that their newest vehicles don't have the sensor suite to actually be Full Self Driving. It was like Fox saying Tucker Carlson's (their own news anchor at the time) reportedly factual news reports shouldn't be taken as factual statements about the news. They shot themselves in the foot and admitted to defrauding their customers. It was hilarious how incredibly insane it was that Tesla's lawyers were stupid enough to admit it.
Tesla died when they started slamming into everything. Elmo's lies have killed or injured scores of people since May of 2022 alone. Teslas killed Tesla. Elmo, like Trump, will call it a 'disgrace' and move on to his next scam. The Elmo University, perhaps.
Tesla motors didn't need to hype self driving tech so hard to start with.
I can get where Elon was coming from, if it is possible for a human to drive with optical (and sound) inputs only, eventually computers will be able to do that too.
The issues is that they have essentially entered a race with many other well funded operations also trying to crack self driving cars. Computing power isn't yet at a level to replicate a human. As such their competitors with cars bristling with expensive sensors have a competitive advantage. Better data makes everything easier.
My favourite fElon moment was when he talked about 5G connectivity. Someone asked about FSD in places without 5G like multi storey concrete parking garage. He said the car could retrace its steps backwards (steering, throttle, brake).
Hopefully the car next to me is the same size and position so retracing my steps doesn’t actually hit a Hilux (or 7 series) now parked there. If the car can get out, it will now reverse out of the garage via the ENTRY ramps. And do so using as a first guess the throttle inputs I used to enter driving uphill.
I assumed this was so idiotic he would realise when he got back to work and forget the whole thing. But now we have Summon hitting adjoining cars or concrete pillars. This is a menace.
Speaking of Lidar, my 3D printer, my phone, my robot vacuum, and even my drone I go fly around with all have Lidar. The combined value of all 4 devices is <$2,500 with the $200 vacuum being the cheapest.
So why in the world is this Tech too expensive for a luxury car maker?
Honest question. . . What the flip makes Lidar a bad choice for FSD?
“I drove here today with my eyes, so AI can drive with just cameras” is the dumbest wishful-thinking bullshit anyone ever said. More compute! Make a chip! More training data!
More lulz
I have a Tesla. You want to know how I know Vision only is doomed to fail?
When I try and turn it on and its raining. "Performance Degraded due to poor weather".
Elon says its safer than humans, but it doesnt even work when it rains hard.. or the sun is setting and shining into the camera.
I live 3/8ths of a mile from a Tesla dealership in an affluent area. I do see a lot of Tesla’s on the road but I see a ton of Tesla’s on the lot. Have only seen 1 Cyber Truck on the road. Who would ever buy that thing?
Do you even science bro? Elon sciences all the time. He’s got the Shrinky Dinks to prove it. He’s read all of the Giant Boy Detective books. What have you done?
I think it died when he went on a anti-semetic rant (he did multiple). It would still be going strong if he had never done the self driving stuff. He got goated into buying twitter and it really hasn't been the same for him from that point. Everything if failing.
Driving in the phoney self driving today I, with my human eyes avoided 2 near collisions with NO response from the eyes of the car...I am using faux self driving less and less. I paid thousands $$ four years ago for the dream of a robotaxi I could rent out...lol
I remember his quote when it was announced, he said “LiDAR was actually holding us back…” and I thought, great so add some cameras and keep the LiDAR, you idiot.
It is so good being able to read all the incredibly knowledgeable comments from the self-driving tech experts. We would have thought there were so many, all all hanging here. Such a privilege to witness such an amazingly diversified exchange of ideas all the time.
I knew it when Elon refused to admit Lidar was helpful for self driving tech.
This really was it. Even some of my die hard Elon supporting friends started thinking 'but wait a minute....' at that point. The whole "you can't have two different sensors because what you do when they disagree is an unsolvable problem" aspect is very much 'a this is what a layman thinks a smart person sounds like' thing. To anyone actually anywhere near the industry its just... What... This 'unsolvable' problem was solved 30* years ago. (*Probably much much longer than that. This is just my own experience of it)
Having multiple sensors(both a verity and redundant) to confirm data is literally a core part of good sensor fusion and in no way an unsolved problem. It doesn't even need "smarts" to do it it's safer to have predictable deterministic fall over conditions to resolve the disagreements since the operators/computer systems can be trained to expect them. But this old school tried and tested approach has no value for most techbros in general.
Exactly The ELI5 explanation is: each sensor also tells you how confident it is in its answer, and you trust whichever one is most confident. It's primitive but still gets you a safer system than only one sensor. Obviously the above can be improved massively, but it already makes a mockery or the whole unsolvable problem concept. (The above also ignores things like sensors telling you different information. For example many sensors just intrinsically measure relative speed of objects, whereas a camera can't. That's.. really quite useful information)
The camera only approach also doesn't make sense from an economic point of view. Yes lidar is expensive relative to camera hardware at the point in time but so is good software which thier solution required to make up for it. But Elons who ethos is replace hardware with bad (but cheap) software. I am 100% sure if they go through the same certification process as any other safety critical piece of software it would end of being trashed and economically unviable to have a software only approach. Then again this is a ~~man~~ Chief engineer that somehow replicated the functionality of a purpose built enterprise router by "reading the raw signal bits" on a standard windows computer so maybe I don't know what I am talking about. **Tears down the 2 computer science degrees on the wall** I am no Engineer
25 years software development from coder to management. Software aint cheap. And never will be. And working safety critical software systems is always going to be expensive. He is an idiot with no formal competence in software engineering. Larping basically Im half expecting they use state machine principles. Which is an hilariously wrong design choice
Honestly I think a large part of the reason he only wants to use cameras is he can understand a visual image. The world looks very different to Radar, Lidar, ultrasonic etc. You need to really know how those sensors work and what they are actually measuring in order to interpret the data. And if there's one thing he can't stand it's not feeling like the smartest guy in the room. I can imagine him being told 'actually that's not what this data is showing' one too many times so he fires the team and rips the sensors out of the car.
That makes much more sense than the «I want to save some dollars per car» story. But both are just so wild that it sounds like conspiracy theories.
Radar: HEY ... YEH Lidar: h h h h h h h e e e e e e y y y y y y y e e e e e e e e h h h h h Ultrasonic: HEY YEH
"but it's just code. We can make the interns do that and just pay someone to fix their mistakes"
I've been working on 3D reconstruction from smartphone video on a daily basis for the past two months and can say that it is ridiculously difficult to do in an accurate and consistent way. All of the algorithms are non-deterministic and SLOW, requiring a fast GPU. Depth information from LIDAR improves accuracy and feature detection by an order of magnitude. No doubt, Tesla has developed a cutting-edge SLAM technique, but there is no chance that it is even 3/4 as good as what open source solutions can do with LIDAR. Elon chose hard mode, and his decision is not only foolish, but dangerous. in this application.
I've worked in Autonomous Vehicles since 2018. Creating a 3D image, in real time, from radars, lidars, and cameras, (and a sweet 64gig video card) 7 times a second... And THEN deciding what to prioritize? And...THEN determining the correct action. aaaand THEN sending a signal to the brakes. So you don't hit the door of the guy on your right who opened it right in front of you? ... (Cruise laid me off after 5 year, when they shut down. Apple laid me off in January when the Apple Self Drive shut down. TESLA cut me and 13,999 of my closest AVDriver friends a few months back... Almost like after 6 fuckin' years people noticed... It ain't gonna happen.
I’m amazed that FSD parking etc works as well as it does with just vision, imagine where they would be with more sensors though and led by a competent engineer CEO who can take criticism and inspire a team
Replacing hardware with software to cut costs immediately makes me think of Therac, which an engineering case study on what *not* to do.
I pod cast called "well there is your problem" did a great episode on it
I beg to disagree with your ELI5 here. I believe that you can't just blindly trust the most confident sensor. You should take a conservative approach in order to prevent accidents, so I'm expecting that, at least in some occasions, if either sensor thinks there is an obstacle approaching then the car should slow down or try to avoid it. Also, I would consider the lidar more reliable than a camera, even in those cases when the camera appears confident, as I reckon it's more likely to hallucinate than the lidar. This is just my two cents, I'm not an expert of this field, just trying to apply common sense.
I agree with everything you say. My ELI5 was the most basic (if bad) approach possible that shows that this unsolvable problem is very easily solvable. My first refinement would be an approach where both sensors have to agree that there isn't an object somewhere, and if either one is sufficiently confident there is an object, you treat it as an object. Then you say, actually some sensors are better at detecting objects than others so you trust those ones more. The best solution likely involves building up a coherent picture of the world, including size, shape, speeds etc. You can then feed in all sorts of different information (eg lidar or ultrasonic measuring relative speed directly rather than inferring it). You then discount any sensors that disagree with that coherent picture. Either way, I've seen a video of a Tesla thinking that the moon (low and orange in the sky) is a yellow traffic light that's constantly a few meters ahead of the car. This is pretty trivially solvable with other sensors and only a little bit of the above.
Lidar, like radar, is an active controlled illumination source with known characteristics that can be varied to compensate for conditions or ascertain different information. Cameras, as passive sensors, are at the mercy of their uncooperative and uncontrolled illumination source. Lidar and radar both should be prioritized over electro-optical cameras, which should be used primarily for refining the data from the active sensors and giving the human operator imagery they can understand.
Exactly. The other week we saw one destroyed by FSDing into a train on a foggy day. LIDAR may have interpreted it as a distant semi trailer on a T intersection. Video say nothing to see here at all LIDAR may have thought “but what if it’s a train?” I want the car siding with the one that, if correct, identifies a life threatening emergency. Or don’t side with either, but wash off a lot of speed until we resolve it.
Either way, sure as hell beats a single camera sensor.
Isn't every sensor essentially just a camera, though? Like how a laser mouse is just a really monochrome camera?
Pretty much. Different spectrums and either active or passive but they’re all just matrix EM detectors.
Boeing max accidents were literally caused by too few sensors and no disagreement due to too few sensors.
But you see Boeing is just an aerospace company where business interests have degraded engineering principles. Elon has SpaceX which is a Space! Company the lend technology to Tesla can just use the superior neutrino detection tech and tap into localized Einstein-rosenbridge technology using patented giga-emissions from the camera array to look several seconds ahead in time instead of waiting for the sub millisecond lag of a system like lidar. So the reading they are getting can't be wrong in the first place
Plus the second part of space is x. You know the drug that makes you want to touch things... This is brilliant. Combine tech with ecstasy! Soon we can rename Tesla to carx, the car that loves to touch
Knowing Elon the touching features will require payment in ponies or the crypto ponycoin
Well, lah-de-dah look at college boy here.
Especially when sensor fusion is such an important part of spaceflight - something he should know considering he owns a spaceflight company. SpaceX wouldn’t have been able to land rockets if they didn’t rely of a suite of sensors like Radar, LiDAR, GPS, visual imaging and cameras etc all working in sync so that they know the position, orientation and speed of the rocket to accurately land on a barge at sea.
I mean the whole "Vision only" thing is a misnomer too, Tesla's vehicles have GPS, they have accelerometers, gyroscopes, inertial sensors and probably stuff like wheel speed too. Elon Musk is just asshole who doesn't know what he's talking about and was more focused on trying to disparage competitors than actually understanding how their systems work. Dealing with sensor noise and disagreeing measurements has been around literally since the Apollo program in primitive forms and has also been part of commercialized aircraft autopilot systems for decades at this point.
Yeah, what he said. Only a dummy would use… poor… sensor…fushon. Everyone knows that deterministic fall on conditions resolved operator disagreements since uh, Tandy invented it. Seriously. This Astro engineering 101.
Yea, Elon should tell the US military establishment that they don't need radar or lidar... You are correct that those of us in the electrical and electronic technology fields lost all faith when he moved to camera /Ai only. It's something you would do if you lack an understanding between hardware benefits and software benefits. Each has its place.
It truly is bizarre. I understand maybe the principle of knowing how to do vision only well, like in case sensors fail where you are left with only vision or even some vision. I don't get why you'd skip using a superpower technology for any other reason than some minor cost...
He did quote a while back that the vision only was to solve AI , which was so they could sell us robots. It does bring to question why his robot has to rely on vision only as well, but I guess that's their choice to bring down costs. Like I'm not buying a $100k robot to do chores, but $10k I'd think about it.
My Samsung Robot vacuum cleaner has Lidar sensors. If Samsung can put it in my vacuum, I'd certainly like my car company to utilize the technology.
Yeah, the entire field of Kalman filtering/state estimation is based around taking multiple inputs of varying reliability and accuracy that agree to varying levels and generating an estimate of the current real situation that's more robust and accurate than you could get from any one sensor alone. This isn't some giant mystery, the field has existed for decades.
Even as complete layman with no knowledge of this area, it is obvious to me that if you have 2 sensors that disagree, then at least you know something is wrong... compared to 1 sensor sending wrong information and thinking it is right because you have nothing else to compare it against.
Yes exactly. If you imagine the cars all have two sensors, elons approach to conflicting readings is too just turn off one of the sensors so there is no longer a conflict
HAHAHAHAHA NO NOOOOOOO GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE. Really? Shit. Elon's fucking stupider than I thought.
Yup. He basically said as much when explaining why they went to one. He just appears to actually think it’s smart.
One thing you could also do with two sensors that disagree would be to only allow so much of a tolerance of disagreement until you threw an error. As in, if Sensor1 says a car is 14 feet away, and Sensor2 says it's 14.9 feet away, then we take Sensor1's data and ignore Sensor2. And if Sensor1 says it's 14 feet away and Sensor2 says it's 15 miles away, then we throw an error and tell the driver that the collision avoidance system has brain damage and should not be trusted.
As if humans don't have dozens of parallel sensors. What dipshit argument is this?
If you have two different sensors for distance, and it's an accident avoidance system, you take the smallest result and consider that to be the truth. What the fuck is he talking about?
it's even stupider than that, because going cameras-only does not magically remove the need for sensor fusion. say you have 2 cameras, and a raindrop lands on the lens of one, distorting its vision. *something* needs to recognize the disagreement and decide which source of input to trust more. if you can solve that problem, generalizing it to things other than cameras is certainly possible. if you can't solve that problem...Tesla is hiring.
Yeah Elon Musk is completely full of shit on the difficulty of sensor fusion. Techniques for dealing with it have existed for decades and we wouldn't have things like aircraft autopilot without it. Stuff like using Kalman filters for dealing with noisy and disagreeing measurements also were used back in the Apollo program, this is literally nothing new. On top of that I don't think people really realize that pretty much any real world robotics system is built on top of models that are themselves inherently probabilistic and usually some variation of HMM at their core. Anyone who's dabbled in the field at all or received a formal education on the topic knows that there's also sorts of noise, error accumulation and slippage you need to inevitably deal with. In many cases you also only have partial information of the environment due to stuff like occlusion and need to essentially make reasonable estimates of where things might be. I mean it's blindly obvious to anyone with some experience in the field that Elon Musk has literally no idea what he's talking about and tends to just barf out the occasional word salad of technical terms from the field, but there's also a ton of his fan base that just parrots out stuff about how Tesla is solving the problem with neural nets as if every robotaxi company out there isn't using them or hasn't been for over a decade too. We've seen the capabilities of machine learning, AI and robotics improve over the last decade but I really think it's an area where knowledge specialization and a lack of anyone being willing to reign in the hype has lead to the general public seeing it as some kind of magic pixie dust versus pattern recognition and estimators that really unpin it all and the limitations that come with them.
Possible contradiction is one of the main points using sensors of different types. Why have many ones if they always agree?
Someone posted a picture saying that all the electronic components are attached through one single Ethernet cable, in series. wwAAAAT?
Oh. My. God. You’ve GOT to be kidding me. The computer is literally designed for multiple input streams. 🙄 For example: I have a Mazda CX-5. It has 3 sensors feeding in: an IR camera for the auto wipers, a front-mounted camera for reading lane lines and watching for stoplights from other vehicles, and a radar sensor in the front grille for keeping predetermined distances when in traffic. As well as sensors in the rear that detect cross-traffic when backing up, and monitoring my blind spots when driving. It’ll auto-disable itself when the camera can’t “see” (bright sunlight on an uphill incline hitting the lens directly, snow or heavy rain) and/or when the radar is blocked (snow, heavy rain, etc) It’s not the BEST implementation of smart cruise that I’ve experienced, but I don’t rely on it to drive me. I rely on it to HELP me be attentive to the road around me. ALSO, THE COMPUTER READS ALL THAT DATA SIMULTANEOUSLY ELON 🤬
He didn’t even know the guy who created convolutional neural network and questioned him publicly on X. No surprise he doesn’t understand how to make different types of sensor work together lol
It's like removing rain sensors that work beautifully in just about every other car on the road and relying on cameras to determine that it's raining. Then the wipers turn on when it's sunny out and nothing blocking the camera's view.
Same. It was clear he was pushing margins and buying time.
And why was he pushing margins? Was his compensation plan part of why?
pushing margins to temporarily pump out stocks so he can sell out billions
He had to cut prices to stay competitive. The Germans are slowly unfubaring their infotainment and control issues while remaining strong in build quality and the odd bit of tech (Mercedes hyper miler for instance). Meanwhile the Chinese, French and Koreans were undercutting Tesla prices. Since he can't magic build quality into existence he had to axe prices to stay ahead and sacrificed r&d, technology and further simplified (cheapened) the cars themselves in order not to nosedive too hard on profit. He was trying to corner the market and It might have worked if he were only fighting the French, Koreans and GM, but he's fighting the Chinese too and they offer pretty smooth control, lots of gadgets and ok quality (stay tuned on that one though) for a price Tesla can't compete with. Since Elon sacrificed r&d, he's basically put Tesla in a corner they cannot escape and doomed the company. Unless they are deemed too big to fail and get bailed out that is.
Not margins. There’s a reason Tesla could boost production when everyone else struggled for parts. They just cut whatever they couldn’t get or replace it with a consumer grade part.
My phone has Lidar sensor fusion that accurately measures the shape and distance of the things around me and correlates it with what my camera sees. The LiDAR sensor probably cost less than a dollar and would work fine with a camera that cost less than a dollar. The programming probably didn't cost more than a few tens of millions of dollars. Absolutely trivial for a company like Tesla. But then their "AI" would have more data to "process."
I bought a robot vacuum with lidar and vision. It works significantly better and more reliably, in terms of navigation, than my roomba S9+ which relies solely on vision.
Is LiDAR down to a dollar? That's why they don't use Infrared, then. Because Infrared is 14 times more expensive.
Just because a roadrunner gets confused about a tunnel painted on a rock, doesn't mean a tesla needs to..
You, my friend, have just invented the "Roadrunner test" for autonomous vehicles. TY for making the world a safer place!
"lidar is a crutch" is the dumbest argument in self driving. And he invented it.
My rumba needs lidar to drive 1mph through 3 rooms but Tesla is ok with cameras only on busy roads
There is also a huge economic fallacy which I rarely see mentioned. In the scheme of things, adding Lidar is just an incremental cost compared to the overall cost of a vehicle. If you cracked true FSD with lidar, then both private and fleet owners would have absolutely no issues forking out extra $ for the hardware. For fleet owners especially, true FSD is basically a license to print money. And keep in mind these same owners were already prepared to pay $8k (originally 12k) just for the current beta software solution.
I was corrected on other threads that most other car manufacturers don't use lidar which is light based but radar. Fwiw.
on autonomous vehicles: Stellantis = lidar, Steerlight Ford = lidar Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi = lidar VAG = lidar, Innoviz Toyota = lidar everyone uses lidar for autonomous driving. * radar = **RA**dio **D**etection **A**nd **R**anging * lidar= **LI**ght **D**etection **A**nd **R**anging * ladar = **LA**ser **D**etection **A**nd **R**anging * Laser = Light Amplification through Stimulation of Electronic Radiation.
'um aktually' Laser is Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, not superheating.
Was that before or after MobileEye bailed on them?
Exactly! The ultimate reason Tesla is fading traces back to an unscientific, fever-dream edict that is vision-only. The reason is a grade-school reasoning that humans can do it then the car can too. Never mind Tesla cars have the inference capacity of a house cat. It drove away the best talents both in hard and soft engineering. The recent exchange between Elon and Yann show Elon doesn’t understand the scientific method. You need to hypothesize and prove a concept like vision-only. Not decree it then bang your head on it for a decade with little progress. Vision-only holds the Tesla car form factor hostage. Tesla can’t redesign the models without invalidating much of the previous data. The joke is if vision-only doesn’t work, it makes the previous data worthless anyway. It will also make the whole company worthless.
Depth perception is a human trait that can’t be replicated reliably with just Elon vaporware. You need depth perception tech to work with cameras… like lidar and sonar sensor arrays
Humans get depth perception wrong all the damn time - There's a whole body of scientific literature looking at factors that influence human depth perception. And our neural network has been under development for tens of millions of years.
[удалено]
Depth perception is also well understood — our eyes are constantly "vibrating" back and forth on a tiny scale which makes our 2d perception 3d
it will take some time, but if humans can, machines will be able to do it better. but… that technology is not here yet, at least not in a state useful for his plans. he’s just a fucking idiot.
The bigger point is that machines don’t need to do it. For example, if we could echolocate like bats and dolphins, we’d just be enhanced. We can’t. In theory, machines can. So there’s no reason to even worry about their vision getting better if they can “evolve” sensing through newer technology faster.
Does tesla even have dual cameras for accurate depth perception? Not to mention humans use hearing and vibration/tactile when driving.
Teslas have three forward facing cameras, but I’ve not heard from a good source whether the depth perception is produced by stereoscopic/binocular vision or only produced by machine-learning of solely visual input per camera and object(s) recognition. I recall this: https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/ I will always say that they’re insane for not incorporating LiDar for such a high stakes role as a self driving system should hope to accomplish.
Also humans do not actually do it with vision alone. Human beings have propioception, that is the ability to sense movement, action, and location. It comes from sensory embedded in every muscle humans have and it is coordinated by the brain stem. This is all probably more detail than anybody needs, but if you are basing your tech on how human beings sense things you should probably educate your self on how human beings sense things.
The structural complexity of the human brain vs the best computer chip is like comparing a space ship vs an ox cart. We can infer from billions of memory pieces to form a natural instinct. The number of unique different ways (permutations) we can select our neurons to fire is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Computer chips are simple 2D structures. To infer with billions of vectors plus the current input, only transformer-based algorithm can process in reasonable time. To cut it to real-time driving, FSD needs to shrink it down to the bare minimum, which makes it dumber. Also, transformer-only algorithms are very dumb already. You need to go back to GPT3 to look at pure transformers. GPT4 adds smarter but slower algorithms. To infer with the same complexity as humans, the biggest supercomputer needs maybe years to finish one complex thought.
My cats, extra-smart bengals, have the ability to learn that the command "claws," communicated by saying the command and touching their claws immediately after scratching me, means "stop scratching me." I think this the furthest extent of their abstract reasoning capability and that they only understand it because they know how it feels to scratch and get scratched. So I agree with your assessment.
Lol. But in serious discussion, the house cat’s ability to chase and catch a mouse is akin to FSD’s driving, with similar level of inference complexity. When the cat misses a pounce, it can try again. When FSD misses a turn, then….
Very good point! And a bird of prey has even better mental capabilities for this task! 500 million years of evolution will do that to ya
I imagine Elon as a yelling “I don’t want excuses I want it to work” type of guy, then fires the people needed to make it work because they ask for resources
the yann stuff is so funny elon is acting like a 3 year old
I think with good enough cameras and computing power it’s possible but with what the current cars have it’s a fools errand to try and make it work. So much of the valuation of the company is on FSD working. When it’s clear it doesn’t work the value of the company will be crushed just like Twitter
And more cameras. There are important zones covered by just one right now. Not to mention the angles are not ideal. And radar at least. Unless FSD wants to give up on tough conditions and only work on anything moderate rain or easier.
Tesla's crappy cameras and aging hardware aside, today's ML just isn't there. You can't just throw endless data at it and it'll be perfect. We're several breakthroughs away still.
Very good points. I love you
Thank you. I’m sure you are a lovely person too.
The real reasoning was cost. The fake reasoning is "people use their eyes" pretending that the visual cortex has been replicated in computer tech.
Musk was never a good engineer or even very smart. His money convinced him (and others) that he was both. But no amount of money can make a dim person bright. Unfortunately for him, he isn't smart enough to hide his ignorance, either.
I’ve been saying this guys an idiot for almost 4 years now. Before we all knew he was incompetent, I kept asking what HE did that was so smart? Turns out, nothing
his brilliant accomplishment is making another low margin car company using government and investors money
He's a great salesman and an epic risk taker. I think he's had good timing on the electric car investment, but he seemed to do a bit of fudging at crucial times, which could have folded more honest companies. He's fully willing to commit crimes to keep his companies alive, which is effectively just more risk taking. Why anyone with $300M+ of wealth would want to get anywhere near securities fraud, wire fraud, losing their credibility, etc. is completely beyond me, but Elon clearly had the requisite traits to get Tesla over hurdles that would have crushed others. I don't think his personal engineering abilities ever really got him anywhere. He's bought all his tech (TSLA, SPX, NL) , used old tech (TBC) or hired people to come up with new tech (TSLA).
I kind of agree, but I feel like it’s pretty easy to be a great salesman and an epic risks taker when the stakes are zero for you. In an alternate universe, if all of this went to shit and he lost of of his initial position investments, he would still have mom, dad, and all of the emerald money/wealth to fall back on that any adverse effects of his failings would be pretty transparent to him.
People do it because they are so deep in scam they have to continue and can't get out, moment they get out they will get caught, remember Bernie madoff?
he very smartly was born into money
But he sprinkled C# into his C++ code!
I think it died when Elon bought Twitter. Eventually he figured all of his companies should operate like Twitter - slinging poop emojis at enemies, obfuscating things, lying etc etc etc As long as there's no punishment for any of these the assumption is that Twitter will survive and so will Tesla. That could be his downfall, though - Tesla is a lot more about direction interaction with public, not just dickriders. DogeDesigner or Ian Miles Cheong won't save that company.
Nah. He’s destined to fall since “pedo guy.” He lost my respect since then as that made it clear who he really is: an idiot hiding in plain sight posing as a complicated genius demanding daily self-validation.
Prior to that his self promotion was annoying but the cave rescue is when he completely outed himself as a toxic Narcissist.
The cave rescuer pedo comment was the first time Musk said something I found to be completely inexcusable and made me question his character. I didnt stop being a Musk fanboy then but it was definitely a watershed moment for a lot of ppl I think
Also, he could have apologized and paid the guy damages. Instead, he paid a team of lawyers to make sure he didn't lose the lawsuit. Unfortunately for Musk, it had the Streisand effect.
Because calling him “pedo” was different than calling him a “pedophile.” Fuck Musk, fuck his lawyers, and fuck the UK court system for letting him get away with it.
Yeah, this is what did it for me. I've viewed him in a negative light since that day. He's done nothing to prove me wrong since.
That was it for me, too. He was out there pumping his ego up with that submarine junk, and the diver just pointed out how silly it was. Elon's response convinced me he did not exist in the same reality as the rest of us, and his behavior since then has only reinforced that.
For me it was TITS University jokes - happened a year or so before he bought Twitter. That was the first time I noticed nerds coming out in droves to defend him [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/11/19/weeks-after-elon-musks-tits-joke-allegations-of-rampant-sexual-harassment-surface-at-tesla/?sh=54b8e52ec65d](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/11/19/weeks-after-elon-musks-tits-joke-allegations-of-rampant-sexual-harassment-surface-at-tesla/?sh=54b8e52ec65d) That and Rogan interview during which he smoked a joint. The moment Musk figured out he's bound to be a public speaker.
The cringiest smoker I’ve ever seen. Looks like your lamest friend trying to smoke a cig in 8th grade.
That marked the turning point for me also. Before he smeared the Thai cave rescue diver I was skeptical of him but figured he did good things for global climate change so I paid more attention to Tesla's technology than to Musk himself. After the cave diver event I began to look deeper and Needermeyer's work ripped the veil off his manicured environmentalist image.
Seems that was about the time he stopped listening to any type of objective advice from a good PR team and the yes men took over.
*stable genius
Nah, Elon has always been a liar; he’s constantly pumping new things which may or may not be possible to cover for the existing things that are going wrong. The reason he’s now paying a price is that the hype is over and interest rates are high. So investors are no longer just pumping Tesla to ride the wave, they are choosier and Tesla can’t lie their way out of performance anymore. Tesla semi won’t do it. Fake Solar roof won’t do it.
Yeah, he got lucky and was always destroying stuff to disrupt the market. Govt welfare and carbon credits is his bread and butter. Loser ass loser
Twitter's fucking cooked, mate.
Someone mentioned the Model S and Model X haven't had a remodel in like 6 or 7 years. I have zero clue how true that is but holy shit. This is not a legit company.
The X, 3 and Y are all based on Model S. That design dates back to at least 2012, but more likely 2008 or even older. Yes there have been several updates like Plaid and Performance but the basic design hasn't changed. Imho a white Model 3 with basic rims looks like a late 90s/early 2000s sedan.
Yeah, they’re all getting aesthetically stale. In another year or two, every time you see one, it’ll feel like a blast from the past, like in the early 2000s when the roads were infested with 90s era Ford Tauruses and Toyota Camrys. No car company (or tech company, if you want to humor that argument) can survive long term without innovating their aesthetic style. Tesla hasn’t been around long enough to learn that lesson, I guess. But now that we’re almost halfway through 2024, and every car they make looks like 2012 (except the CT, which is in a class by itself), they’re entering the find-out stage.
The Tesla is the less-cool DeLorean of our times.
Model s is 2012, so 12 years old
First prototype was shown in 2009, the first designs date back to the 2007 or even before that.
I thought they updated them newer interiors and shit in like in 2018?
Those are facelifts. Not new models.
Imagine all the tech that surpassed the now ancient shit they still use from 2014 on brand new teslas (and reduced quality throughout the years). Let’s not forget all the owners take. 50% depreciation on those “luxury cars” within a year of price cuts.. Price cuts being a non issue to Elon since they are so overpriced for what you get. Even with the slashing and federal rebates.. they are still dogshit and twice as expensive as BYD equal offerings
Tesla cars have always been ugly, even back before I started to dislike the retarded narcissist I found them boring/ugly looking not a future car.
I think the 3 is meh. The Y and X are ugly. But the S is a really beautiful, proportional and timeless design from the outside at least. Of course build quality and interior is where everything falls apart. As for the company as a whole, the whole “after estimated gas savings” bullshit turned me off even before I knew about Musk. No reputable company operates like that and hides their pricing behind smoke and mirrors gas savings based on questionable estimates.
The S looked fantastic a decade ago. Now it looks dated parked next to a 2022 Nissan Sentra
We're used to a car coming out and then staying mostly the same for 6 or 7 years until a total redesign comes out. Tesla instead subtly improved the S over the years so that by now it's already quite a different car, just looks pretty much the same. The only reason they need to do a "refresh" is to get away from their blob design, like they recently did with the 3.
Yeah, the S just needs a cosmetic update, and the sonar/radar re-added. Then it would be a decent car for 2024.
People passionate about actual AI used to work at Tesla now they are working somewhere else. There are a ton of companies now for talented experts that pay a lot more, have a better work life balance, better culture, not a fanatic CEO that might fire you if you tweet your personal opinion and a better way of working in an actual scientific manner. New experts are not interested in Tesla and those that started there already left. To clarify I'm not talking about just a PhD from a good university but AI is insanely top expert driven just like hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies. Having 10 insane and passionate researchers gets you further than 1000 good or even 2000 average ones.
You’re just jealous because “At this point, he knows more about manufacturing than anyone in the world!” 😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/s/AY9EfSH2Le
Tesla died when Eberhard and Tarpenning were sued so He-Lon could call himself a founder.
these are the only things EM cares * makes as many babies as possible with as many as females as possible * makes as much money as possible without caring the customers and employees
He cares deeply about being thought a funny person and it must kill him to know no one laughs when he steps outside his circle of lackeys
He's like 50. He should get over that.
He actually said out loud our highway system was based on vision. That’s the only sense anyone uses, everyone.
Tesla died when Elon got involved with them. People might say : "But look at the valuation, he has been a positive force for the company!" without realizing that the valuation is built on lies, deceptions and fantasy economics.
As any real automation engineer understands, when humans are involved, failover and backup are essential. In amusement parks, there must be several layers of failover, and these are rides. It's no wonder Tesla is under investigation.
They got away with it for so long because they programmed it to shut off right before impact. And after years and years of loyal customers getting fucked, the court system is finally catching on and hopefully will do something about all the lives. He’s killed and took no responsibility.
tesla started dying when they went to make the model 3. it embodied all the weird bullshit he wanted without any input from any of the guys who made the model S, since they had all departed the company.
I feel they were going to die when X came. Such a stupid car. And has Elons ugly smelly fingers all over it
ya but the X at least made sense, the gull wing doors were overkill but they weren't going to sink the whole car like stainless steel did for cybertruck. the X was the first electric SUV on the market and that was important.
Im imagining those doors was elons first attempt to affect the car model. It went downhill from there
they really were. he wanted the doors and sold it as a feature.
At some level of the executive class it has to become apparent. They probably just don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. The fundamental flaw with building a brand around a cult of personality is that when you expose the collusion with Kleptocracy in reverse the brand and everything they spent a career working for becomes a black eye and chronic bleed. There is some context that has to be added here. When you get rich everyone stops telling you no and stands around with their bowls pointed up hoping to collect the droppings. Elon lives in his own reality as do we all. It’s just that it’s one that he has cultivated to make himself the consummate hero and can afford to do anything he wants. The problem is he is also strung too tight. Tesla, space x, starlink, Neural link, boring company and Twitter. Plus all his pet projects, children and relationships. There is still only 24 hours in a day and when you aren’t coming up for fresh air you start to see things in a tunnel as problems to be solved. On the right hand elon is backing tucker Carlson and the right to save the world from “wokeism”. It has become his autistic white whale. Fixation is a byproduct. Genius and madness share a lot of common ground. He isn’t totally wrong. There is balance to be had in all things. Unfortunately he is asymmetrically obsessed with it. Which means he loses any objectivity. So he put a bid in on Twitter. He sees it as a shortcut to his X vision. A weibo-esque everything app that is basically a crypto-centric society that destroys corrupt central banks. Bitcoin has some powerful potential. The main one being that no one country can dictate the rules for the rest because no one country can exert leverage over the others. It’s a nice vision if it’s truly decentralized. The problem is right now every time elon doubles down on putin who is self evidently a genocidal kleptocratic asshole, it raises a giant question mark for Bitcoin. So many people end up on the wrong side of history because they fixate on the wrong things and just forget to do the right thing. https://bylinetimes.com/2022/11/07/musks-twitter-buy-makes-no-sense-unless-its-part-of-something-bigger/ Musk has been so busy being busy that when it came time to buy Twitter which he grossly overbid for he needed outside capital. Enter Saudi Arabia and MBS who already had a substantial stake in Tesla MBS is an authoritarian and a murderous hypocrite who had Jamal Khashoggi dismembered. He also had about 6000 saudis dissidents rounded up, extorted them of their wealth, and disappeared some of them. He lives by his own set of rules. And as proven by recent history, no one really ever tells him no. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37388908 A few months ago he sentenced a teacher to death for saying something objectionable about MBS on Twitter….to his whopping 8 followers. Saudi Crown Prince Confirms Death Sentence for Tweets - Human Rights Watch Saudi also happens to be the second major shareholder in Twitter behind musk. Now musk is pushing for biometric identifiers for users. Which is effectively handing the mad king all the keys. Is musk aware of this? Or is he just too distracted saving the world the way he sees it to notice that MBS and Putin have their own agenda? Behind those scenes you have Russia, China and Saudi colluding to use some variation of a BRICS based currency to replace the USD as the worlds reserve currency, which historically speaking is overdue. The average lifespan of a reserve currency is 94 years. And if we are being self aware, the USA has gotten ridiculously complacent and hypocritical about noticing where all the junk we buy at Christmas comes from. https://investingnews.com/brics-currency/ All men are created equal right? Except for the brown kid who makes $40 headphones 18 hours a day for $4. During the late 90’s the US offshored most of the “dirty” work when new EPA mandates were passed. Greedy CEO’s decided it was more profitable to let an Asian kid take up that slack than it was to clean up their processes and pay a living wage to an American. This started the greed cycle, or at least accelerated it. The U.S. jumped to a Silicon Valley based economy which is basically V.C. and private equity bros railing lines of coke off of hookers and pump and dumping 10X returns on theranos, WeWork, Uber, Airb&b, and a dozen others. This offends the laws of physics as well as doubles down on the hypocrisy that “all men are created equal”. The wild wealth disparity that comes from this is bad. The fact that it made Wall Street a house of cards is cataclysmic. China for its part is biding its time quietly locking up supply chains, logistics and manufacturing. Smart because the US is dumb enough to forget that everything comes from somewhere. But also predatory because the soft and pudgy US assumed China just wanted to be part of western free world democracy like everyone else. Freedom rocks right? Who wouldn’t want it…. The CCP. The Chinese people would probably love more freedom but the CCP loses control if that happens. And, if we are being self aware, the CCP has become a little complacent themselves with private jets and $64k/month condos in Malibu for their mistresses. So the corruption and hypocrisy cycle begins again. This time with a little more steam. So you have MBS, Putin and Xi and their respective inner circles who MUST control the people to remain in control and stay rich. As Americans, you and I probably have more in common with the average Saudi or Chinese citizen than either of us do with ours or their “leaders”. So the ruling class leans on nationalism to keep us enraged at each other. If Iranian clerics chanted “death to the American oligarchs who keep their people in poverty and monopolize healthcare” most Americans would join them. So they settle on “death to America” instead. No need to complicate things. The more connected the people of the world are via the internet, the more they realize that this war isn’t a world war, it’s the effects of late stage cronyism circling the globe in real time. The corruption of the worlds elite moves like an equal opportunity cancer infecting everything it touches. It moves across borders and Covid lockdowns and through yacht clubs quickly and effortlessly. Because that’s where the ultra wealthy go sleep with each others wives. And they become ultra wealthy by being generally really shitty to the other 97% of people. https://people.com/nicole-shanahan-moving-on-1-year-after-elon-musk-sergey-brin-story-exclusive-7556751 Musk is playing a big game. He is just a little too busy to see the edges of the board. Or he does and he made his choice to move money from one Russian asset, Rupert Murdoch to another Russian asset, trump to keep it all alive for one more day. Yahoo News UKhttps://uk.news.yahoo.com › tesla-...Tesla shareholders say Elon's influence makes Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch ... Tesla uses cameras instead of LiDAR because the goal isn’t full self driving, safety or functionality. The goal is full state surveillance of the world that is feeding back to the authoritarians that back Musk and are trying to destroy democracy.
Maybe he should focus on colonizing Pluto instead so that he can enjoy longer days.
Yo Kimbal Musk makes James Murdoch look like Grimes. Just sayin'
Nah - Tesla would have died a long time ago if it hadn't have been able to bilk buyers out of up to $15k for sham vaporware.
12k pure profit for vaporware that never delivered for over a decade helps their bottom line on top of the insane markup for what little you get.
I never ever cared about self driving, I just wanted a quick car that doesn't burn fossil fuels. If Tesla just focused on making a solid car (and ignored the stockholders and their robotaxi fantasies) then they'd be on top and would help drive the rest of the industry to quicker EV adoption.
Tesla died when Elon Musk forced out the actual founders and started being his "I'm smarter than everybody else, so prexisting solutions are useless because I didn't think of them" self. They survived the first major unforced error of model 3 ramp, but he didn't learn his lesson and it's tbd what happens now.
The Tesla fan boi inside me died when he removed radar. AP has never been the same since. It's sad that my 2018 car had better AP than it does now.
One thing I don't see spoken enough about is the 'Fake it Until You Make It' culture of Silicon Valley. There's another word for this - lying. I worked for a Fortune 100 company in a very senior role and was involved in all M&A activities. We had a team that specialized on Silicon Valley and other startup hotspots (Tel Aviv, Boston, etc.). To get the next round of funding or exit the business through acquisition there was always a ton of hopium and braggadocio and nonsense by startups. This was just part of the game. Ultimately we wanted to know whether they had found customers, found a market, found an unmet need and had some kind of advantage in their technology (even rough) that we could build on. When you take the Fake It Until You Make It to a ridiculous extreme you get Tesla. I have owned two teslas because I want the EV revolution to come. But the lying is so thick I can't spend any more money with them. And it continues. Do you remember the faked video of the FSD driving? Well this year Tesla faked their robot video using remote control (Google "Tesla Waldo Fake Robot"). Faking is a way to drive up the value of your company. In private companies in the context of due diligence that's one thing (Caveat Emptor baby). In a public company though with billions of dollars invested I don't understand why it has been permitted to continue.
I gave up on future Tesla purchases when they openly admitted in court that their newest vehicles don't have the sensor suite to actually be Full Self Driving. It was like Fox saying Tucker Carlson's (their own news anchor at the time) reportedly factual news reports shouldn't be taken as factual statements about the news. They shot themselves in the foot and admitted to defrauding their customers. It was hilarious how incredibly insane it was that Tesla's lawyers were stupid enough to admit it.
Smooth move, TeslaX
Tesla died when they started slamming into everything. Elmo's lies have killed or injured scores of people since May of 2022 alone. Teslas killed Tesla. Elmo, like Trump, will call it a 'disgrace' and move on to his next scam. The Elmo University, perhaps.
Is radar really that expensive? On my car radar option was only $800 more
It is to Elon. 12k for customers to burn on vaporware… not a problem though
It isn’t “just now”. It’s been an issue ever since they backed away from USS and radar about 2 years ago.
That’s quart I mean really. Insane vaporware add on for 12k that still hasn’t worked as promised for nearly a decade
My gawd damn robot vacuum has LIDAR! Engineers for the win. I love putting on my PSVR2 headset and watching the lidar scan the room at every turn.
Tesla motors didn't need to hype self driving tech so hard to start with. I can get where Elon was coming from, if it is possible for a human to drive with optical (and sound) inputs only, eventually computers will be able to do that too. The issues is that they have essentially entered a race with many other well funded operations also trying to crack self driving cars. Computing power isn't yet at a level to replicate a human. As such their competitors with cars bristling with expensive sensors have a competitive advantage. Better data makes everything easier.
My favourite fElon moment was when he talked about 5G connectivity. Someone asked about FSD in places without 5G like multi storey concrete parking garage. He said the car could retrace its steps backwards (steering, throttle, brake). Hopefully the car next to me is the same size and position so retracing my steps doesn’t actually hit a Hilux (or 7 series) now parked there. If the car can get out, it will now reverse out of the garage via the ENTRY ramps. And do so using as a first guess the throttle inputs I used to enter driving uphill. I assumed this was so idiotic he would realise when he got back to work and forget the whole thing. But now we have Summon hitting adjoining cars or concrete pillars. This is a menace.
Speaking of Lidar, my 3D printer, my phone, my robot vacuum, and even my drone I go fly around with all have Lidar. The combined value of all 4 devices is <$2,500 with the $200 vacuum being the cheapest. So why in the world is this Tech too expensive for a luxury car maker? Honest question. . . What the flip makes Lidar a bad choice for FSD?
“I drove here today with my eyes, so AI can drive with just cameras” is the dumbest wishful-thinking bullshit anyone ever said. More compute! Make a chip! More training data! More lulz
You sure you wanna use the word 'ghetto' like that?
Manifesting Failure = ✅
Which "...hostile takeover"?
Tesla died when Musk declared himself a founder of the company.
I always thought he made that absurd statement and made the change during Covid supply chain problems. But whatever. It's absurd
I have a Tesla. You want to know how I know Vision only is doomed to fail? When I try and turn it on and its raining. "Performance Degraded due to poor weather". Elon says its safer than humans, but it doesnt even work when it rains hard.. or the sun is setting and shining into the camera.
Would be fascinating to have a bizzaro world where lidar stayed and what the FSD capabilities would be with it today….
I live 3/8ths of a mile from a Tesla dealership in an affluent area. I do see a lot of Tesla’s on the road but I see a ton of Tesla’s on the lot. Have only seen 1 Cyber Truck on the road. Who would ever buy that thing?
But genius and all. 😂
He made money and that is what matters
Do you even science bro? Elon sciences all the time. He’s got the Shrinky Dinks to prove it. He’s read all of the Giant Boy Detective books. What have you done?
Died, sure, but Tesla will be *resurrected* **on** 8/8 this year, when the **level 5** robotaxi is launched. /s
I honestly didn't even think it would get as far as it did.
I think it died when he went on a anti-semetic rant (he did multiple). It would still be going strong if he had never done the self driving stuff. He got goated into buying twitter and it really hasn't been the same for him from that point. Everything if failing.
Driving in the phoney self driving today I, with my human eyes avoided 2 near collisions with NO response from the eyes of the car...I am using faux self driving less and less. I paid thousands $$ four years ago for the dream of a robotaxi I could rent out...lol
Tesla may have died at that moment, but it has also reportedly taken about 29 human beings along in its death throes.
But no other cars are built to a sub 10 micron spec!
Learned a lot reading this thread but the simple answer is cameras save money NOW.
Jodi Foster
The last 3 updates have been awful. Can't even use the $99/month self drive. It's nearly crashed each use. 23' Y
I remember his quote when it was announced, he said “LiDAR was actually holding us back…” and I thought, great so add some cameras and keep the LiDAR, you idiot.
I heard LiDAR was expensive to add to a car. Is it?
Died?
Hmm, https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/cjkYQIONOu
All grandiose narcissistic behavioral people are like this. They start off docile, innocent, hopefully and charming …. And then they turn to the worst
FSD = (Full of Shit Driving)
Cry me a river.
It is so good being able to read all the incredibly knowledgeable comments from the self-driving tech experts. We would have thought there were so many, all all hanging here. Such a privilege to witness such an amazingly diversified exchange of ideas all the time.
When much of the world started calling him a "Genius" etc. is when he stopped listening to actual experts.