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Why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

(www.theguardian.com)
131 points nickcotter | 2 comments | 05 Jul 25 06:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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indolering ◴[05 Jul 25 07:31 UTC] No.44470781[source]▶
Elon has tricked himself into thinking the automated statistics machine is capable of human level cognition. He thinks cars will only need eyeballs like humans have and that things like directly measuring what's physically in front of you and comparing it to a 3D point cloud scan is useless.

Welp, he's wrong. He won't admit it. More people will have to die and/or Tesla will have to face bankruptcy before they fire him and start adding lidar (etc) back in.

Real sad because by then they probably won't have the cash to pay for the insane upfront investment that Google has been plowing into this for 16 years now.

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almatabata ◴[05 Jul 25 08:02 UTC] No.44470935[source]▶
Back when they started, lidar cost a lot of money. They could not have equipped all cars with it.

The issue came when he promised every car would become a robotaxi. This means he either has to retrofit them all with lidar, or solve it with the current sensor set. It might be ego as well, but adding lidar will also expose them to class action suits.

The promise that contributed to the soaring valuation, now looks like a curse that stops him from changing anything. It feels a bit poetic.

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1. tzs ◴[05 Jul 25 13:19 UTC] No.44472617[source]▶
> Back when they started, lidar cost a lot of money. They could not have equipped all cars with it.

But radar and ultrasound did not cost a lot and he got rid of those too, suggesting it was more than cost that made him go vision only.

Heck, they even use vision for rain sensing instead of the cheap and more effective sensor everyone else uses (which is just some infrared LEDs and photodiodes that measures the change in internal reflection at the outer side of the windshield when the critical angle changes when the windshield gets wet).

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2. almatabata ◴[05 Jul 25 18:52 UTC] No.44474708[source]▶
> But radar and ultrasound did not cost a lot and he got rid of those too, suggesting it was more than cost that made him go vision only.

They did get rid of the radar at a moment when there was a shortage of parts. They had the choice, ship now without the part, or wait and ship less cars.

Maybe that was always the plan, and the shortage only accelerated the decision.