Will Tesla autopilot crash into wall painted to look like road?

[struggle4progress]

... YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober has perfectly demonstrated why Tesla relying entirely on visual data from a suite of cameras isn't such a good idea for driver-assistance tech.

The Elon Musk-led EV maker has given up entirely on LIDAR or radar sensors, which its many competitors have been using for object detection for years, with Musk once calling LIDAR "fricking stupid, expensive and unnecessary."

But by relying only on visual data, Tesla's Autopilot can easily be fooled by anything from heavy fog to a wall-scale painting of the road ahead, as Rober showed in his latest video ...

Worse yet, Tesla is planning to roll out an "unsupervised" version of its infamous "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance software later this year, according to Musk, which could give already complacent drivers an even bigger false sense of security ...

https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot

[House of Roberts]

1. It will if it was programmed by

Wile E. Coyote, supergenius software engineer.

[Norrrm]

2. I just zinged right through it. Was there a Wile E Coyote tunnel painted on the wall?

[H2O Man]

11. Well done.

[Renew Deal]

3. I guess people shouldn't paint roads on walls at the end of a street.

[Quixote1818]

5. The Tesla failed several other tests including fog and heavy rain

While the other tech breaked for dummies in those conditions.

[Renew Deal]

7. They also shouldn't go out in fog and rain

[LudwigPastorius]

13. It's not just painted walls.

Tesla's reliance solely on cameras makes them tend to not "see" things...like the light-colored sides of semi trucks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231008063244/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/tesla-autopilot-crash-analysis/

https://www.tesladeaths.com

[Xavier Breath]

4. How does it react to a tunnel painted on a wall?

The manual should read "Please consult all Warner Brothers cartoons for potential hazardous situations."

[Disaffected]

6. Seems like pointless criticism.

How many times would a situation like that (a wall painted to look like a road) arise in real life? Only in silly YouTubes I guess.

[artemisia1]

10. No, but the tests with the child in the road that Tesla failed and the other car passed are real world (fog, glare, etc.

[Meowmee]

8. I'm glad he did this

But I already knew it is not a good idea ever, and I would never rely on that in a car.

[oasis]

9. To sum it up in one word: "FAIL".

[madville]

12. This stuff is why cars are unaffordable

It’s to the point now where these cars will be built to be capable of everything and owners will unlock features through subscription. All the major manufacturers are doing it now or at least going that way. You’ll be paying for capabilities in the base price but have to pay an annual subscription to use them.

[keep_left]

14. Yep. The surviving brother from the "Car Talk" show...

...Ray Magliozzi, went on the warpath about this recently. He has a syndicated column that is carried by the local paper. Magliozzi told a story about going car shopping (IIRC, a Toyota dealer), and discovering that many features are now "subscription-based". In other words, the car is always connected to a wi-fi signal, and features can be turned off and on remotely rather than being purchased. Magliozzi was enraged, and warned his readers that if buyers go along with this, more and more automakers will create these kinds of "paywalls" for features that we used to pay for as options. They want to keep us paying forever.