this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Even with LIDAR there are just too many edge cases for me to ever trust a self driving car that uses current-day computing technology. Just a few situations I’ve been in that I think a FSD system would have trouble with:
I pulled up at a red light where a construction crew was working on the side of the road. They had a police detail with them. As I was was watching the red light the cop walked up to my passenger side and yelled “Go!” at me. Since I was looking at the light I didn’t see him trying to wave me through the intersection. How would a car know to drive through a red light if a cop was there telling you to?
I’ve seen cars drive the wrong way down a one way street because the far end was blocked due to construction and backtracking was the only way out. (Residents were told to drive out the wrong way) Would a self driving car just drive down to the construction site and wait for hours for them to finish?
I’ve seen more than one GPS want to route cars improperly. In some cases it thinks a practically impassible dirt track is a paved road. In other cases I’ve seen chains and concrete barriers block intersections that cities/towns have determined traffic shouldn’t be going through.
Temporary detour or road closure signs?
We are having record amounts of rain where I live and we’ve seen roads covered by significant flooding that makes them unsafe to drive on. Often there aren’t any warning signs or barricades for a day or so after the rain stops. Would an FSD car recognize a flooded out road and turn around, or drive into the water at full speed?
In my opinion, FSD isn’t attempting to solve any of those problems. Those will require human intervention for the foreseeable future.
Musk’s vision is (was?) to eventually turn Tesla’s into driverless robo-taxis. At one point he even said he could see regular Tesla owners letting their cars drive around like automated Ubers, making money for them, instead of sitting idle in garages.
Musk is an idiot
Or there are better other ways to tell a FSD car that the road is closed. We could use QR code or something like that which includes info about blockade, where you can drive around it, and how long it will stay blocked. A FSD should be connected enough to call home and give info to the servers, those then update the other FSD cars, et voila tadaa.
Sure. A QR code. That couldn't possibly get obscured.
Why should it get obscured? Just plug that giant QR code there. You can create QR codes, where you only need to see very little of the square to get all the info in the QR code. I don’t feel like obscuring would be any problem.
Wow, you solved one of the really easy self driving problems (sign recognizion) with a more complicated solution.
Sign recognition and traffic light recognition are available in a lot of cars. Detecting that the dark lump on the road is just a shadow and not slamming the brakes automatically is the hard part.
Or that the white sky is in fact not a white sky but the sideways view of a semi trailer.
(The latter issue is why relying on multiple sensors camera+radar+ultrasound in the case of my car's emergency brake system and drive assistant is always a lot better - each sensor on its own has its failure modes)
Umm, we had it about blocked streets not normal sign detection But if those would be standardized to designs good "readable" for cam/pc (like QR codes), the car would never recognize e.g. a "S" for a "5". Due to high contrast, one could assure that it still works by night. But honestly I would prefer, if manually cars are completely banned from roads and only FSD cars are allowed. The streets would then be made for FSD cars (instead for human("monkeys" drivers) and about all problems are solved.
In huge parts of the world these are standardized and readable as well - where Vienna Convention signs are being used. (Those with have more pictograms).
Detours are also labelled by standard signs in a pre-determined font with a specific reflectivity. Easy for a car to recognize.
And even without text recognition is one of the really easy parts of self driving. I've done development on document recognition for random bank statements, builinng plans and legal documents - all the paperwork for financing a house - before. Those documents come in in various fonts, layouts differently formatted etc.
Mud for one. Trees and bushes for another. Strong wind for a third. All of those things already obscure signs or make them very hard for humans to read, let alone a computer.
Well FSD is supposed to be Level 5 according to the marketing and description when it went on sale. Of course, we know Tesla's lawyers told California that they have nothing more than Level 2, have not timeline to begin building anything beyond Level 2, and that the entire house of cards hinges on courts and regulators continuing to turn a blind eye.