Of course it disengages self driving modes before an impact. Why would they want to be liable for absolutely anything?
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
1487 points (98.4% liked)
Not The Onion
15229 readers
2989 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It’s a farce that this protects them from any liability
It doesn't guarantee them protection from liability, but it makes it easier to muddy the waters.
They never have to claim that autopilot or self driving was on during a crash in any comment to the press, or the courts. They never have to admit that it was directly the result of the crash, only that it "could have" led to the crash.
It just makes PR easier, and allows them to delay the resolution of court cases.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I saw the video and I have two points:
- Yes it plays like an infomercial for lidar. So take that portion with some skepticism. I can think of some issues exclusive to lidar like 2+ lidar cars blinding each other which needs to be solved, e.g. some kind of light pattern encoding to mask out unwanted signals.
- It absolutely 100% demonstrates the issue with camera-only technology in Tesla vehicles.
Teslas used to have cameras + radar but they cheaped out and removed the radar. I think it would have passed all the tests if they still had the front facing radar but they don't. The problem with cameras alone is obvious - they can't see what they can't see and probably don't have an innate sense to slow down if there is rain, fog, ice or whatever else that might cause a human to.
Are there no standards for minimum required sensors on a car to get a "self-driving" badge?
Every other field, especially in the automotive industry, has such strict standards.. Radar should be a minimum
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end. Why is this even a thing? Like talking about box office results, companies financials and stocks…. If you’re not an investor of theirs, just stop. It sounds like you’re working for free for them.
I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end.
My blackest pill in my adult life was the realization that we've leveled off as a species. This is as good as it gets.
Our brains made monumental leaps in development over the last half-million years, with the strongest changes being made during the last ice-age, times when resources were scarce, and survival was extremely difficult and humanity was caught up in many wars and fights with other humans and animals and weather alike. Our brains were shaped to do a couple of things better than others: invent stories to explain feelings, and join communities. These adaptations worked amazingly, it allowed us to band together and pool resources, to defend each other and spot signs of danger. These adaptations allowed us to develop language and agriculture and formed our whole society, but lets not forget what they are at heart: brains invent stories to explain feelings, and we all want social identity and in-group. Deeply. This shit is hardwired into us.
Nearly every major societal problem we have today can be traced back to this response system from the average human brain to either invent a story to explain a discomfort, and those discomforts are often the simple desire to have a group identity.
Our world will get more complicated, but our brains aren't moving. We can only push brains so far. They're not designed to know how to form words and do calculus, we trained our brains to do those things, but our systems are far more complicated than language and calculus. Complex problems produce results like lack of necessities, which create negative feelings, which the brain invents stories to explain (or are provided stories by the ruling class.)
So this is it. Nobody is coming. Nothing is changing.
We MIGHT be able to rein in our worst responses over enough time, we MIGHT be able to form large enough groups with commonalities that we achieve tenuous peace. But we will never be a global species, we will never form a galactic empire, we will never rise above war and hate and starvation and greed. Not in our current forms at least. There's no magic combination of political strategies and social messages that will make everyone put down their clubs and knives.
This is it, a cursed, stupid primate on a fleck of dust spinning around a spark in a cloud of sparks, just looking at every problem like it's either a rival tribe or a sabertooth-cat hiding in the bushes. Maybe if we don't destroy ourselves someday our AI descendants will go out into the larger universe, but it certainly won't be us.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. This is a nice piece to help those to self reflect once in a well, it feels….. grounding. Curious what the positive sequel would be…
I think it comes from Depression era kids who found a brand that didn’t create cheap junk and so they spread the word. But of course, that has been co-opted by capitalist pirates who buy a brand famous for quality, gut expensive manufacturing with the cheap alternatives and then count on making a profit before word-of-mouth catches up to them.
Sears retailer. Gibson guitars. Off the top of my head. Thousands more examples over the years.
My guess as for why people do it today was because their grandparents or previous generations did that as a survival necessity but now we are seeing the behavior warped from its original purpose. Like opening and raising your right hand to show you had no weapon became a friendly wave hello nowadays. Maybe that’s not an analogous example but you should get the idea.
Brand loyalty is for suckers. But it's what brands prey on. They foster brand loyalty. And unfortunately there are a lot of suckers.
How are there still tesla fans?
Does anyone else get the heebies with Mark Rober? There's something a little off about his smile and overall presence.
Yeah, he's over-positive, it's unnerving.
Still, that video is good anti-musk press.
The hyper-positivity and enthusiasm is because his content is aimed at kids as much as it is adults. A lot of kid-oriented science content I remember, from tv shows/documentaries to guest speakers, to science-centre guides had that affect.
Did you know he used to work at NASA? He very rarely mentions it. /s
For me it's the Mormonism
Him being a Mormon makes him make a lot more sense. He very much has a classic Mormon vibe.
I hope some of you actually skimmed the article and got to the "disengaging" part.
As Electrek points out, Autopilot has a well-documented tendency to disengage right before a crash. Regulators have previously found that the advanced driver assistance software shuts off a fraction of a second before making impact.
It's a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.
It’s a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.
That is like writing musk made an awkward, confused gesture during a time a few people might call questionable timing and place.
Yeah but that's milliseconds. Ergo, the crash was already going to happen.
In any case, the problem with Tesla autopilot is that it doesn't have radar. It can't see objects and there have been many instances where a Tesla crashed into a large visible object.
That's what's confusing me. Rober's hypothesis is without lidar the Tesla couldn't detect the wall. But to claim that autopilot shut itself off before impact means that the Tesla detected the wall and decided impact was imminent, which disproves his point.
If you watch the in car footage, autopilot is on for all of three seconds and by the time its on impact was already going to happen. That said, teslas should have lidar and probably do something other than disengage before hitting the wall but I suspect their cameras were good enough to detect the wall through lack of parallax or something like that.
Or it still may have short distance sensors for parking and that if it sees something solid on those it disables autopilot?
load more comments
(1 replies)
That's so wrong holy shit
load more comments
(17 replies)
Man these cars don`t have a Radar ? Only eyes like most of the animals? Not even as a backup ? Not talking about Lasers, but Radar? Truck drivers, better not paint a scenery on the back of your truck.
Allegedly they used to, but Musk felt that vision should be enough because humans don't have radar either and they're just fine.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-radars-cameras/
Tesla use to have radar I believe, musk over ruled teslas using Lidar and insisted on vision only. Lidar powered autonomous vehicles like Waymo are already cruising the streets unsupervised beating tesla.
A genius! For decades, all carmakers have tried to fix human errors and compensate for our lack of abilities. Then there’s Elon, cutting out technologies because "humans don’t have them."
LIDAR generally works better at relatively short distances (like less than a km). Several other car companies are going with LIDAR and do alright. Musk thinks cameras with image recognition would be sufficient without anything else. It goes without saying that Musk is very wrong.
Yeah, he’s a total idiot. That decision has held them back from so much progress… and for what? Saving a negligible amount of money on a very expensive car. Nice.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Beep beep