Optimus robots were remotely controlled by humans at the "We, Robot" event during Cybercab. They are not ready even for demo purposes.

It was clever trick because many attendees did not even think the possibility hose were teleoperated interactions because Musk did not bring it up. Some investment firms were clearly not amused by it.

> is showing a robot at the event failing miserably at picking up a small bag of chocolates

Luckily that's not one of the dirty or dangerous jobs it will soon take over :-)

At some point a reasonable person would realize that their past predictions have not panned out and would make their future predictions more conservative.

> with matrix-led's the high-low has been solved very well. It used to be bad and now it's almost perfect.

Yes, it works much better on my new Model Y (2024) than my old Model S (2014). But they didn't really solve the original problem, i.e. detecting oncoming traffic vs. street (or other lights) up ahead. The matrix led's darken these areas in any case, and neither street lights or oncoming cars complain of course. But it does not fill me with much confidence.

> Wipers, dunno, they used to be really bad but I have not noticed the issue in the past few months, maybe they have done something.

Then that software update has not come to Norway at least, here they still start wiping in dry conditions, and fail to detect actual rain; so they need to be manually started all the time.

> there are phantom breakings in the exact same spots this and other teslas have driven thousands of times.

Isn't this the problem with AI though? We've taken something we don't fully understand (neural networks) and applied them. We can give them a lot of training data to the point where they seem to be able to do stuff on their own. But when they fail, we really cannot do anything besides adding new nodes to our network and add more training data, and hope for the best. We cannot really say what went wrong, and fix it.

Honest question, considering I have never driven or been in a Tesla, when you say “it would follow the wrong road markings into a crash would I not intervene”, are you not concerned for your safety when driving it.

You do realise that matrix LEDs and auto wipers are bog standard auto tech that other manufacturers have been providing for years?

Audi first offered matrix LED headlights in 2013, so it's only taken Tesla a decade to catch up.

> I think "this guy" just has some weird obssession with Elon Musk.

It seem the whole planet has this obsession :-)

It's almost certainly because he dug the hole so deep in advertising. By saying "we need LIDAR", means that his promise "your car that you own right now will someday be self driving" was a lie. I can't imagine the lawsuits.

Both the Valeo SCALA and Luminar LIDAR sensors are in the $500 ballpark (at volume). Even a few times over, this seems like a petty cost to forgo on a $50k car.

Anyway, Tesla have supposedly recently bought a massive pile of Luminar sensors, so I expect them to be in one of these vehicles soon.

I think the robotaxi might be the only actual viable approach to developing fsd.

You control the hardware and software, you drive in real world conditions, you can deploy regionally and control the hours and conditions you operate in letting you gradually increase when you operate as you judge it safe.

And if the robotaxi makes a mistake, well it's still in testing phase/beta.

If Tesla comes out with FSD then it has to be damned near "perfect" in all conditions, which just is never going to happen out the gate?

Why not have at least radar? Plenty of cars have radar for adaptive cruise control and blind spot monitoring, it can't be that expensive. Two sensor kinds would still be an improvement.

I'm not sold - Cybertrucks are expensive and still sell. And if it would be really good FSD, it would sell too (even at 70/80k per car).

The worst thing about my Tesla are the phantom brakes and "emergency lane assist" function (which should be called "steer into opposing traffic for no reason". If I forget to turn those off before starting, my ride will be pure horror.

LIDAR probably would help to make Phantom Brakes happen less often, simply because there would be another info source for "is there REALLY an object that is dangerous to me?".

Those who say that FSD is "pretty good" are living in a fantasy world. There is hard data on miles between critical disengagements (which really should be called "if the driver doesn't respond within a fraction of a second, people will die"), and depending on region, model, weather etc it's between 13 and 115 miles right now.

Over here in Germany there are statistics that a human driver will have the equivalent every 155,000 miles.

"Pretty good" just doesn't cut it when it's about the risk of killing people.

My Model 3 right now detects about 60-70% of school children crossing the road (keep in mind roads in Germany are narrow, and humans including kids are using the roads, too). 30%-40% of those I would kill every morning on my way to the office.

And the thing is: 70% isn't enough for this, 80% isn't, 90% isn't, 99% isn't, and 99,999% isn't.

Side note: People constantly claim that Waymo is autonomous. It's as autonomous as a tram. They only work because it the cities they operate every single road they use have been mapped by hand and is constantly updated. Send a Waymo into my city over here, and will also kill a couple of kids per day. Years ahead of Tesla? Yes. Good enough? Hell no.

Adding an extra sensor onto something not designed for it may not do much. So if that specific question is important to answer, the answer is probably 'not a whole lot', especially since the AI has been training on images only, AFAIK.

The problem isn't that the sensors need to be added now, the problem is that without the sensors the cars are half blind and are more likely to make bad decisions and refusing to add them at all shows bad judgement.

Rain, snow, mist, fog, darkness -- these are things cameras are very bad at seeing through. Is that thing in front of us solid? Without extensive training on that particular type of object, the AI with the camera has to guess. I'm sure these aren't the best examples -- I am not an expert in LiDAR. But I do have experience with computer vision with camera systems, and they are woefully insufficient for life and death decision making systems when they haven't been trained on the exact specific scenarios they will encounter.

My guess is that it's not the lack of sensors that causes the problem with autonomous driving, rather it is the processing of the data. What should the car do if there is a flood covering a dip in the road?

> If you have a car that works with ultrasonic and lidar and cameras

Well... that conditional clause was never satisfied in the first place ;)

Perhaps the worst hardware that can solve FSD is hundreds of sensors of all types plus a fleet of attached drones for other angles. The worst thing that could work is different from the worst thing.

Apple have been pretty successful with basically the opposite approach.

I have an idea, replace the existing cameras with early 2000s era webcams. Since worse technology solves problems, it would work better.

If Musk had gone all-in on every sensor possible and put them all over the cars like strings of Christmas lights, I assume you would be defending that decision with just as much fervor.

> you have a really good microprocessor that works,

and applying this analogy to the current situation: do we?

normally you have to sell a product that works first, take the profits and then invest that into improving the components to make more profits. I think Elon has cracked the code: sell the product you don't have to people who would love to have it, and you don't even need to produce a version 1 that works - just move on to solving the problems that you want to. the market will pay you either way.

I mean, Volvo is already delivering the EX90 with a LIDAR integrated from factory for similar money to the Model X - and I can't imagine Volvo is losing money on them, so it can be done. Tesla just chose not to.

And yes, I know the EX90 is currently an absolute mess in terms of software and their LIDAR isn't even enabled for driving assists yet, but the hardware is there so it can be built on scale.

Humans don't just have two eyes though (and our eyes are pretty damn good as far as organic light sensors go), we have 3 mirrors giving all-around sight, a whole body full of nerves providing feedback, and excellent 3D reckoning to keep track of other vehicles.

Our eyes (+ brain visual processing) are way better than the vast majority of cameras you can buy, judged on things we care about in driving. Typically only high-end film cameras approach the dynamic range of our eyes, for example. The only major thing that even cheap cameras easily beat us at is zoom, but that is mostly irrelevant for this use case.

> one answer is due to the fact that humans also do this with just 2 pretty bad cameras and a lot of offloading to the cortex.

No, humans do significant sensor fusion.

There's binaural audio: useful to detect and have a rough position of emergency services and/or high speeds cars(it's true that its a relatively unencumbered channel, but that makes it all the more valuables for emergencies)

And there's a working if imperfect IMU (performance can be altered if the power supply is set to an alternate mode) to sense all kinds of acceleration: for fine course correction on acceleration and bearing, for getting the road condition and adjust the driving profile accordingly, etc..

Humans also have only legs instead of wheels. The whole point of having cars (or any machine) is that they're not limited to my biology build.

With this logic you should also insist on legs instead of wheels.

The human eyes are also mounted on a neck that can turn it around in all directions. Kinda useful for parking

Humans have millions of years of evolution in vision processing, and yet we still regularly have 100+ deaths a day in the US, plus many more injuries and fender benders.

I don't doubt that it's possible with machine vision alone, but it makes the challenge substantially harder.

Another way of saying this is that we do this with a system comprised of human eyes and a human brain. We’re very good at making machine eyes, but the brain part is proving extremely difficult for us to reproduce with machines.

I mean, human eyes are in some very important ways better. Not least, they're self cleaning and can adjust their angle for a better view.

Yes - but humans possess other senses, and crucially, our eyes have a much greater dynamic range than even the best cameras (and they are not fitting the absolute best cameras, because that would be even more expensive than LiDAR).

It also does away with one of the crucial aspects of "better than human safety" - driving in conditions where a camera is uselss - think moderate to dense fog, heavy rain etc. etc.

In case you really have two eyes pointing in a single direction, you should see an oculist urgently. Mine are doing a perfect 3D picture. Also, unlike the eyes of my Tesla which becomes blind when it rains, or if there is any light reflection, I can still see things.

Also, should your eye cameras be in fixed position, you even more urgently should see a doctor. Mine can be turned 180° on the X-axis, and 120° on the Y-axis.

And finally: My eye cameras have working high-speed auto-focus, HDR, are protected against rain or snow, can operate at very low ISO, and have retina resolution.

:)

Human eyes have much higher resolution than Tesla's cameras, better dynamic range, no issues with rain or dirt on the lens, can take measures to avoid most glare from the sun, and are connected to a brain that is vastly better at driving than AI.

It makes no sense to say "humans can do it with only X, so machines should have to as well". Do cars run? Do planes flap?

I do agree that planning should be the hardest part of self-driving, but go and look at any Tesla FSD video on YouTube and it's clear they haven't solved the perception part yet either. Cars wobbling all over the place, morphing into vans, etc.

They’re doing well in spite of Musk, not because of him. Shotwell is running that company not him.

> So far he seems to be terribly wrong on self-driving.

Don't forget the colonisation of Mars. He's even more wrong on that one.

musk's track record of bets is 4 out of 6[0] - a pretty good one.

[0]: the successful bets: paypal, tesla, spacex, starlink. Failures: twitter, self-driving. To be determined: ai.

> So far he seems to be terribly wrong on self-driving.

Like all breakthroughs, he will be terribly wrong right up to the point he isn’t (see the fail compilation video of failed Falcon9 landings)

You only fail when you give up.

I wonder how the mood is at SpaceX. I mean, those engineers see how he unsafe the production workers at Telsa have to work, they see how shit he's treating everyone at Twitter and basically sinking it, how long before someone the mood turns sour and we see an outflow to the competition?

He pushed for it and is instrumental in the design. Musk is not just a ceo.

For any comment making fun of elon’s face, I’ll find you twenty criticizing more substantive traits.

Yeah, it seemed pretty balanced and well thought out:

"Ploy for credibility, retreating even deeper into fantasy, pretense of reality, pure fantasy, contained within a world of fantasy, retreating into misinformation-fuelled fantasy world, runaway ego, less palatable, self-soothing fantasy bubble, fake statistics, blown deadlines, litany of bullshit, chronic inability, unprecedented publish delusion or deception, having drawn a poor hand, financial-cognitive nightmare, it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously believing that a night of delusional Disney Adult cringe, too childish to call a fraud, Musk’s increasingly-degenerate gambling run is slouching toward one last big coinflip"

Shall we coin it as the “Trusk Fallacy” perhaps?

>> If anyone is going to make self driving work, the odds are stacked in Tesla's favor. > > How disconnected from reality are you to make this statement?

I suppose we all live in our own bubbles. I've not been to SF in many years. I've never seen a Waymo on the street. However, I've sat in a Tesla myself and watched it navigate the roads in my hometown. As have many others across the US. And so I feel rather connected with reality in that small, tangible way.

I should have been more precise with my words. By 'make self-driving work', I meant deploy that technology cheaply and widely. But retroactively I understand my clarification appears like I'm moving the goal posts. I alluded to that though: 'They have more data and distribution than any of their competitors.'

>> I feel similarly excited for Tesla when they demonstrate robots with incredible dexterity. > > Did you never hear about Boston dynamics?

I have, and I am also excited for them. I believe you missed my point about being happy for people trying to do difficult things.

I love my Model Y, and the supercharger network. The charger network in the US is so much better than any of the competitors in terms of reliability, why would I support the others? The other car manufacturers constantly roll back their hollow promises to electrification, while Tesla has been all-in since day 1. Why would I support Tesla's competitors? VW lied and lied about the emissions their cars put out, why would I ever buy a VW car? On and on... I'm happy with my choice of a Model Y, and I'm not compelled at this point to choose a competitor for our second or next car.

It was a difficult conversation when I had to explain to my children that my love and support for them was zero-sum.

I.e., I think you missed my point about being happy for people attempting to do something difficult and celebrating their successes. I can root for them as much as I please and it doesn't hurt a soul.

I'm afraid you're arguing against something I didn't say.

They certainly do. Those Mercedes don’t have all the cameras and sensors and are not recording it all and sending it back to HQ.

For the newer cars that do there was an awesome post on HN from someone who consulted with them and they had a single server at HQ with a single thread to capture all this data. They had no idea why it wasn’t working.

This, and that when you get involved in politics, a big percentage of people is going to scrutinize you more thoroughly. Before, it was fun to believe everything he said, but now it is less so.

I agree with the tesla stuff but last I checked waymo had self driving only for pre-mapped roads and a lot of human assistance in the background. There was a lot of fuss about it when veritasium released a sponsored video about them.

> a movie set with fake streets to drive on? While Waymo is delivering real self driving taxi rides

"Tesla FSD Supervised Tops 1.6 Billion Total Miles Driven": https://teslanorth.com/2024/08/07/tesla-fsd-supervised-1-6-b...

Seems obvious that movie sets are like red carpets, no?

Making paraplegics play chess with their mind and making EVs mainstream after they were considered dead.