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.

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[–] 446 points 2 years ago (32 children)

Notice how they're mad at the video and not the car, manufacturer, or the CEO. It's a huge safety issue yet they'd rather defend a brand that obviously doesn't even care about their safety. Like, nobody is gonna give you a medal for being loyal to a brand.

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  • [–] 168 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    These people haven't found any individual self identity.

    An attack on the brand is an attack on them. Reminds me of the people who made Stars Wars their meaning and crumbled when a certain trilogy didn't hold up.

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  • [–] 50 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    The styrofoam wall had a pre-cut hole to weaken it, and some people are using it as a gotcha proving the video was faked. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, but it's styrofoam. You could literally run through it. And I'm sure they did that more as a safety measure so that it was guaranteed to collapse so nobody would be injured.

    But at the same time it still drove through a fucking wall. The integrity doesn't mean shit because it drove through a literal fucking wall.

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    [–] 289 points 2 years ago (35 children)

    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.

    This has been known.

    They do it so they can evade liability for the crash.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Not sure how that helps in evading liability.

    Every Tesla driver would need super human reaction speeds to respond in 17 frames, 680ms(I didn't check the recording framerate, but 25fps is the slowest reasonable), less than a second.

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  • [–] 69 points 2 years ago

    It’s not likely to work, but them swapping to human control after it determined a crash is going to happen isn’t accidental.

    Anything they can do to mire the proceedings they will do. It’s like how corporations file stupid junk motions to force plaintiffs to give up.

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    [–] 195 points 2 years ago (28 children)

    I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well...

    The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.

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  • [–] 165 points 2 years ago

    If I could pass one law, requiring multiple redundant scanning tech on anything autonomous large enough to hurt me might be it.

    I occasionally go to our warehouses which have robotic arms, autonomous fork lifts, etc. All of those have far more saftey features than a self driving Tesla, and they aren't in public.

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  • [–] 135 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    The tl;dr here is that Elon said that humans have eyes and they work, and eyes are like cameras, so use cameras instead of expensive LIDAR. Dick fully inside car door for the slam.

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  • [–] 74 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They used to have it but Elmo removed it years ago as a cost cutting move.

    Now they’re the only self driving car that drives into immovable objects.

    You might remember a few years ago a guy got decapitated when his Model S drove straight into the side of a semi trailer.

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  • [–] 52 points 2 years ago

    To be clear, Elon Musk removed radar from Tesla vehicles and not Lidar, but a) he had it removed even from vehicles that had the hardware for radar and b) radar would have been enough to pass all the tests in the video anyway.

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    [–] 163 points 2 years ago (59 children)

    My 500$ robot vacuum has LiDAR, meanwhile these 50k pieces of shit don't 😂

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    [–] 143 points 2 years ago (23 children)

    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.

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    [–] 130 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    "Dipshit Nazis mad at facts bursting their bubble is unreality" is another way of reading this headline.

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    [–] 117 points 2 years ago (40 children)

    Why would a car that expensive not have a LiDAR sensor?

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  • [–] 43 points 2 years ago

    Cost cutting. Lidar is cheaper now but was relative expensive and increased tech debt and maintenance. Also he legit thought that "human see good - then car see good too". Tesla is being led by a literal idiot.

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    [–] 101 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    Painted wall? That's high tech shit.

    I got a Tesla from my work before Elon went full Reich 3, and try this:

    • break on bridge shadows on the highway
    • start wipers on shadows, but not on rain
    • break on cars parked on the roadside if there's a bend in the road
    • disengage autopilot and break when driving towards the sun
    • change set speed at highway crossings because fuck the guy behind me, right?
    • engage emergency break if a bike waits to cross at the side of the road

    To which I'll add:

    • moldy frunk (short for fucking trunk, I guess?), no ventilation whatsoever, water comes in, water stays in
    • pay attention noises for fuck-all reasons masking my podcasts and forcing me to rewind
    • the fucking cabin camera nanny - which I admittedly disabled with some chewing gum
    • the worst mp3 player known to man, the original Winamp was light years ahead - won't index, won't search, will reload USB and lose its place with almost every car start
    • bonkers UI with no integration with Android or Apple - I'm playing podcasts via low rate Bluetooth codecs, at least it doesn't matter much for voice
    • unusable airco in auto mode, insists on blowing cold air in your face

    Say what you want about European cars, at least they got usability and integration right. As did most of the auto industry. Fuck Tesla, never again. Bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes.

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    [–] 92 points 2 years ago
    [–] 62 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    If you get any strong emotions on material shit when someone makes a video...you have 0 of my respect. Period.

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    [–] 60 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (30 children)

    I bet the reason why he does not want the LiDAR in the car really cause it looks ugly aestheticly.

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  • [–] 92 points 2 years ago* (14 children)

    It costs too much. It's also why you have to worry about panels falling off the swastitruck if you park next to them. They also apparently lack any sort of rollover frame.

    He doesn't want to pay for anything, including NHTSB crash tests.

    It's literally what Drumpf would have created if he owned a car company. Cut all costs, disregard all regulations, and make the public the alpha testers.

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    [–] 55 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Meep meep!

    What do you expect when the company is run by a loony toon?

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    [–] 52 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Tesla cars are stupid tech. As the cars that use lidar demonstrated, this is a solved problem. There don’t have to be self driving cars that run over kids. They just refuse to integrate the solution for no discernible reason, which I’m assuming is really just “Elon said so.”

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  • [–] 51 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's even worse than that. Not only is it a solved problem, but Tesla had it solved (or closer to solved, anyway) and then intentionally regressed on the technology as a cost cutting measure. All the while making a limp-wristed attempt to spin the removal of key sensor hardware -- first the radar and later the ultrasonic proximity sensors -- as a "safety" initiative.

    There isn't a shovel anywhere in the world big enough for that pile of bullshit.

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    [–] 46 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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.

    So, who's the YouTuber that's gonna test this out? Since Elmo has pushed his way into the government in order to quash any investigation into it.

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    [–] 42 points 2 years ago (3 children)
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    [–] 41 points 2 years ago (22 children)

    And the president is driving one of these?

    Maybe we should be purchasing lots of paint and cement blockades...

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