In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
To be fair, if you were to construct a wall and paint it exactly like the road, people will run into it as well. That being said, tesla shouldn’t rely on cameras
Edit: having just watched the video, that was a very obvious fake wall. You can see the outlines of it pretty well. I’m also surprised it failed other tests when not on autopilot, seems pretty fucking dangerous.
this isn’t being fair. It’s being compared to the other- better- autopilot systems that use both LIDAR and radar in addition to daylight and infrared optical to sense the world around them.
Teslas only use daylight and infrared. LIDAR and radar systems both would not have been deceived.
So out of interest I looked it up.
The new BYD cars that are coming out also have self-driving probably to directly compete with Tesla.
However they do use lidar, and radar, and cameras, and infrared cameras, and ultrasonic sensors. All have to be working or the car won’t go into self-drive. So other companies consider even one of their sensors failing to be enough to disable self-driving capabilities yet Tesla are claiming that it’s perfectly safe to drive around with those features not even installed let alone functional.
So yeah that’s a real bad look.
Watch the video it’s extremely obvious to a human driver that there is something wrong with that view ahead. It’s even pointed out in the video that humans use additional visual clues when a situation is ambiguous.
The cars don’t have deduction and reasoning capabilities so they need additional sensors to give them more information to compensate due to their lack of brains. So it’s not really sensible to compare self-driving systems to humans. Humans have limited sensory input but it’s compensated for by reasoning abilities, Self-Driving cars do not have reasoning abilities but it’s compensated for by enhanced sensory input.
I’d take that bet. I imagine at least some drivers would notice something sus’ (due to depth perception, which should be striking as you get close, or lack of ANY movement or some kind of reflection) and either
or probably both, but anyway as other already said, it’s being compared to other autopilot systems, not human drivers.
Yeah, the Roadrunner could easily skip by such barriers, frustrating the Coyote to no end. Tesla is not a Roadrunner.
in the world of coyotes, be a roadrunner.
MEEP MEEP.
The video does bring up human ability too with the fog test (“Optically, with my own eyes, I can no longer see there’s a kid through this fog. The lidar has no issue.”) But, as they show, this wall is extremely obvious to the driver.
The tesla would lose its shit if it sees this
They already have trouble enough with trucks carrying traffic lights, or with speed limit stickers on them.
and fire trucks. and little kids. and, uh, lots of things really.
I have seen trucks with landscape scenes painted on the side and I’ve never crashed into one of those thinking that it was a portal to a random sunlit field.