Tesla to add radar in its cars next month amid self-driving suite concerns

https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-self-driving-suite-concerns/

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

53 53 4 years ago

MobileVet• 4 years ago

So Tesla is now going back and adding ‘HD Radar’ to the mix… after claiming it was a net negative and removing it barely a year earlier. No one saw that coming. <sarcasm>

For a company that partially exists because of the economies of scale and energy density gains in better battery tech, it always shocked me that Elon thought LiDAR was too expensive. In the time that Tesla has spent failing to achieve anything beyond level 2 autonomy, almost everyone else is about to release commercial vehicles at level 3… and they use LiDAR.

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

They’re going back because the supply chain has eased up and their internally developed hi res radar (“Phoenix”) is reaching production grade, so they no longer have to argue Vision is superior to keep shipping units post pandemic.

My prediction was wrong though, see below. I assumed NHTSA would’ve forced a recall mandating a move back to radar. They didn’t, and Vision was good enough to receive the highest rating in Euro NCAP’s protocol. You don’t need radar for Autopilot (we have Teslas both with and without radar), but if they say it’ll help with FSD, that would be a reasonable thesis to put forth (without arguing the merits of FSD).

Overall, the Model Y received an Adult Occupant Protection rating of 97%, a Child Occupant Production rating of 89%, a Vulnerable Road User Protection rating of 82%, and a near-perfect Safety Assist rating of 98%. The Model Y’s 98% score in the Euro NCAP’s safety assist category is especially impressive as these are related to features that utilize the company’s radar-less Tesla Vision system.
In fact, Model Y’s Safety Assist rating is the highest score among the vehicles that have been tested by the Euro NCAP to date. The Model Y’s stellar Adult Occupant Protection rating is also the highest thus far under the agency’s 2020-2022 rating criteria. Overall, the results of the Model Y’s safety tests prove one thing: vehicles equipped with Tesla Vision are just as safe — if not safer — than other vehicles out on the roads today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687408

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-vision-model-y-highest-euro-...

https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-se...

ra77• 4 years ago

They’re going back because the supply chain has eased up and their internally developed hi res radar (“Phoenix”) is reaching production grade, so they no longer have to argue Vision is superior to keep shipping units post pandemic.

In other words, they lied that vision-only is superior to having a radar, put out a blog post on how Tesla Vision is going to solve FSD and then sold a few hundred thousand cars without radar for over a year.

Delemono• 4 years ago

Their ai model is quite impressive.

Humans are also able to drive with vision only. Same sentiment as Hotz from comma.ai has.

I also think that radar will be a no brainer and make it better over all (night, fog) but I'm not sure if it has to be a must.

Perhaps in 20years when you have overall very good car AI the non radar version is always behind but we are far away from this market saturation. Probably more than 20 car iterations and more.

vlovich1232• 4 years ago

Humans are also able to drive with vision only. Same sentiment as Hotz from comma.ai has.

I’ve said this before and I’ll repeat it here. A CMOS sensor is nothing like the human eye both in terms of HW and the SW (ignoring the AI that interprets the signal - I’m talking just in terms of the sensor). Your eye is constantly subconsciously scanning an insanely wide FOV so that not only do you have an insanely high-res image at the center, you have a fairly high fidelity larger FOV that is quite wide. Additionally, the camera will automatically shift its focus insanely fast if there’s any motion in your periphery and start filling in the scene with extremely high fidelity data. It’s hard to really equate the two but some analyses I’ve found on Google estimate the human eye at having hundreds of megapixels worth of fidelity. The Tesla has ~8 1 megapixel cameras.

As for the intelligence behind the camera in terms of command and control, the human brain is significantly better.

At some point in the future, sure. A pure vision system could be equivalent (actually better) to a human driver. Today it’s probably better in some ways (doesn’t have the attention failure modes that the human brain can suffer) but fatally worse in others (distinguishing the white trailer on a semi right in front with a cloud or understanding there’s a dividor right in front of you). Obviously things are going to get better so I’d bet on a pure vision system in a decade or two will probably work. The problem is Musk’s false advertising and the lives it’s cost.

clouddrover• 4 years ago

Since 2016, Tesla has claimed that all its vehicles produced going forward have “all the needed hardware” to become self-driving with future software updates.

The specific claim in 2016 was that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

Maybe they'll give free radar upgrades to everyone. Maybe it will be lidar installations next.

Tesla was always going to keep improving its Autopilot/self-driving hardware so there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening,

Well, except for all the lies told to the people who bought into the Full Self-Driving puffery.

powerbroker• 4 years ago

I'm coining a new term: "gas-ware" New technology appearing in advanced electric vehicles. Much like 'gaslighting', a clever huckster keeps saying, its 'coming soon', and 'its has ___-capacity'. A common strategy for a 'gasware' creator, is he keeps moving the goal-posts. A necessary pre-requisite: high charisma and notoriety.

pedrovhb• 4 years ago

Thank you for mentioning gaslighting. I had that thought immediately but was wondering to myself whether it applied here (which means it was working!)

It's baffling that a company can do that and expect to still be trusted in the future, and with people's lives, no less. Alas, it'll likely blow over, if it even makes any kind of splash.

It'll be interesting to see the copious amounts of doublethink in the announcement.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

Sounds like there's some overlap with the well-established term 'vaporware'.

mrjin• 4 years ago

To me FSD is a lie. I don't see why he would not use another lie to cover it up.

To safely drive on the road, we'll need to understand the environment surrounding us precisely. Unfortunately for all auto-driving approaches, I cannot see anything to do with that. Sensors are actually least to worry about.

Given the popularity of the Tesla, I would expect dramatic increase of (fatal) accidents involving Tesla/FSD in the next a couple of years. Hopefully I'm wrong.

ck2• 4 years ago

How do self-driving cars do in the pouring rain or snow?

This "faith in technology" is borderline religion without proof, it's ignorance that it is as good as the code bugs and sensor fail (and people overriding safeguards out of laziness).

Pedestrians and cyclists are the "beta testers", I am sure the people in the hardened car frame will be mostly fine.

Yeah yeah, automation "will kill less than humans". Who goes to prison when software kills someone?

trap_goes_hot• 4 years ago

The current liability framework isn't designed to handle such a question.

A self-driving car surfaces the problem in a visceral manner, but this applies to many many sectors and to any software that runs critical services/tools/infrastructure - Hospitals, Medical devices, thermostats, etc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...

https://medium.com/predict/a-simple-computer-bug-that-killed...

etc

Also, this covers physical harm, but what about economic harm? If an OS security bug was exploited by a hacker and caused you to loose all your life savings and end up homeless, can you put a linux/windows/ s/w dev in jail?

D-Coder• 4 years ago

How do human-driven cars do in the pouring rain or snow?

aeternum• 4 years ago

Who goes to prison when humans kill someone with a vehicle? Usually no one.

It's extremely rare even for fatal hit and runs to result in prison/jail time: https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...

zaroth4• 4 years ago

I can answer that because I just drove home in the rain at night in my Tesla Model 3.

It was a light rain that has been falling for hours. The roads are sleek but very few deep puddles. No problem with traction, but the sheen of the water combined with poor lane markings means it’s often hard to see the lanes.

My experience has always been the vision AI can discern lines and road markings significantly better than I can. So I often choose to drive with autopilot on and keep close attention at night in the rain.

The car will be almost always perfectly in lane while I am freed up to pay more attention to the greater surroundings, traffic signs and lights, route planning, and watching for hazards and other traffic.

I find at night in the dark driving without autopilot, lane keeping requires significant focus, which can mean other driving tasks like route planning and identifying hazards can suffer.

As of right now, exceedingly few cars are being driven entirely automated. Humans using autopilot will have more time and focus to identify and avoid cyclists/pedestrians that are on or entering the road. Autopilot is a massively useful safety tool.

Unfortunately some humans abuse their driving privilege. Drunk driving and distracted driving are huge and growing killers. Human drivers that are supposed to be paying attention that instead hit a cyclist / pedestrian are at fault. If it’s done while driving distracted on autopilot that’s even more so the human’s fault.

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

I find that Model 3 FSD hugs the center line even on roads with a huge amount of lane space, to the point that some cars and trucks will honk at me because they think I’m about to cross over. It also gets confused constantly by badly marked roads and can’t drive for more than a mile or two on complex streets without making some critical error or behaving like a drunk driver. It’s interesting to drive if you watch it like a drivers ed teacher teaching a vision-impaired student’s first lesson. It is not yet an assistive technology (outside of highways) that anyone should be delegating any amount of their attention to, and I wouldn’t want to be walking on a road with people using it that way.

zaroth4• 4 years ago

Elon in June 2021;

The probability of safety will be higher with pure vision than vision+radar, not lower. Vision has become so good that radar actually reduces signal/noise.

A very high resolution radar would be better than pure vision, but such a radar does not exist. I mean vision with high res radar would be better than pure vision.

I will be interested to hear when if/they announce this if they quantify how it is used, what exactly it improves, and will it be retrofitted on FSD vehicles.

JustFinishedBSG• 4 years ago

what exactly it improves

The supply chain. They just needed to con people into believing getting less is good. The other automakers dealt with the supply shortage by delaying car deliveries... by a lot. Not an acceptable solution when you have an overpriced stock to pump even higher.

zaroth4• 4 years ago

It’s a fun narrative but it’s bullshit right? The old radar and the new radar they are putting in are not the same part. So “supply chain” is the wrong answer.

The new radar has been under development at Tesla. The old radar didn’t have the resolution to be useful. Elon was actually clear from the start that they needed to build a better radar that didn’t currently exist for it to be useful.

But if you hate Elon it’s easier to call it a con than to understand the technical details.

sschueller2• 4 years ago

Elon is currently attacking Wikipedia trying to rewrite history. In the end he will have never said that Teslas don't need radar for FSD.

shapefrog• 4 years ago

In the end he will have never announced the cybertruck, smashed its window or even failed to ship it.

Or announced a cyborg that (shocker) it turns out was really a real life human person in a gimp suit.

jarbus• 4 years ago

Where do you see claims of trying to attack wikipedia?

sschueller2• 4 years ago

" Most of Earth: “The MSM is biased.” Wikipedia: “Cite MSM source to confirm this claim.”

Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias.

@jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600200000763756544?t=BN...

throwthroyaboat2• 4 years ago

As the article points out, it remains to be seen if this is for self-driving use or in-cabin. Europe requires interior intrusion sensors in passenger vehicles, which afaik can be radar-based. There are also possibilities for fine-tuning of airbag deployment based on occupant size and shape which could be determined by a radar.

vlovich1232• 4 years ago

What do interior intrusion sensors in cars accomplish? I’ve not found anything about this online nor that Europe requires this.

throwthroyaboat2• 4 years ago

Sets off the alarm (an in a Tesla, gives you a phone notification) whenever a window is broken, or something enters the vehicle while it is locked. In an American car (at least last time I checked a few years ago), the alarm only goes off if you use an interior handle while the car is locked.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

LOL - you only have two eyes to map a 3D world - hence camera's are good enough.

seanhunter• 4 years ago

This is one of the most obviously false arguments in this domain and yet it is repeated often.

You don’t only have two eyes, you have a general intelligence which is far superior to anything that Tesla or anyone else has developed as a control system. The deficiency of the control system compared to a human brain means the sensors need to be significantly superior to anything that humans have in order to build an equivalent map of the world.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

I know - was just repeating the nonsense from Elon and his supporters club.

Our retina's does some major preprocessing and chunking it down for the visual cortex to handle in "realtime", which also feeds it into all of other parts to complete the whole picture of what we are seeing.

It took my daughter 2 weeks of tutoring and practice to master stick shift driving on the public roadways - FSD still working on it and sometimes it makes rather boneheaded decisions.

tsukikage• 4 years ago

Even just taking the argument on its surface, electronic cameras are not a match for human vision:

* our eyes have incredible dynamic range. We can perceive details in deep shadow and bright sunlight at the same time in the same scene. Cameras aren't good at that, and certainly not at a price point a company that forgoes lidar for pricing reasons would be happy with.

* our eyes combine wide angle low resolution perception with high resolution capture of a single point of interest, and switching between points of interest is super fast. No-one's even trying to replicate this electronically; the approach with digital cameras is to go for high resolution across the board, but this is nowhere near as high as what human eyes can manage in the centre of vision, and also because it results in a ton of data, SLAM applications tend to go for lower resolutions and more frequent images instead to help manage transfer and processing latency; however, this makes correctly parsing the scene a much harder problem than it would be either for the human or an electronic vision system of comparable fidelity.

* our eyes include a bunch of processing to help with feature detection and cross correlation (for depth perception) before the signal ever makes it to our brain, which helps us deal with the latency/bandwidth issues described above. This is certainly something we could attempt to replicate electronically, but, well, Tesla didn't want to pay for lidar either, so not seeing that happening tbh.

* our depth perception doesn't merely rely on cross correlating stereo vision to produce a depth field like electronic applications do. It synthesizes this with information such as the angle between our eyeballs and the shape the lens must take to bring the object of interest into focus, both of which vary depending on how far away the object of interest is. (This is part of why VR helmets make many people feel ill: they supply stereo images in perfect focus a small distance away from the eyes, and so these sources of information all disagree with each other; therefore, motion sickness.) Without some equivalent source of information - some form of electronic rangefinder, like lidar perhaps - the AI, unlike the human, is forced to rely only on cross correlating stereo images, which is problematic in a variety of tedious ways.

Tesla to add radar in its cars next month amid self-driving suite concerns

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