Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans
halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 23 hours agoAlright, so the radar is detecting a large object in front of the vehicle while travelling at highway speeds. The vision system can see the road is clear.
So with your assumption of listening to whatever says there’s an issue, it slams on the brakes to stop the car. But it’s actually an overpass, or overhead sign that the radar is reflecting back from while the road is clear. Now you have phantom braking.
Now extend that to a sensor or connection failure. The radar or a wiring harness is failing and sporadically reporting back close contacts that don’t exist. More phantom braking, and this time with no obvious cause.
merc@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Phantom braking is better than Wyle E. Coyoteing a wall.
Again, better than not braking because another sensor says there’s nothing ahead. I would hope that flaky sensors is something that would cause the vehicle to show a “needs service” light or something. But, even without that, if your car is doing phantom braking, I’d hope you’d take it in.
But, consider your scenario without radar and with only a camera sensor. The vision system “can see the road is clear”, and there’s no radar sensor to tell it otherwise. Turns out the vision system is buggy, or the lens is broken, or the camera got knocked out of alignment, or whatever. Now it’s claiming the road ahead is clear when in fact there’s a train currently in the train crossing directly ahead. Boom, now you hit the train. I’d much prefer phantom breaking and having multiple sensors each trying to detect dangers ahead.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
FYI, the fake wall was not reproducible on the latest hardware, that test was done on an older HW3 car, not the cars operating as robotaxi. The new hardware existed at the time, but he chose to use outdated software and hardware for the test.
merc@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Hardware that was still on the road, or something that had been recalled?
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
As a consumer product, you are responsible and supposed to be paying attention at all times and be ready to take over.
It is completely acceptable that it does not function perfectly in every scenario and something like a fake wall put on the road causes issues, that is why you need to pay attention.
There is nothing to recall about this situation.
If the car is failing on things it shouldn’t be, like both Tesla and Waymo failing to properly stop for school busses while in autonomous mode, that does require an update.
A Tesla not stopping for a school bus in supervised mode is acceptable though because the driver is responsible to stop.