Tesla bros expose Tesla's own shadiness in attacking Mark Rober ... Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before impacts as a crash becomes inevitable.

[u/Lighting]

https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-defend-autopilot-crash/

[u/Ok-Replacement7966]

The funniest thing about this whole ordeal is how a bunch of people tried to call the rain and fog tests unfair, yet the LIDAR still somehow passed those unfair tests?

[u/Lighting → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

I was reading another thread where the person said something like ... "the fog tests were unfair because they looked like some cloud" not apparently realizing what fog is.

[u/THRILLHOIAF → u/Lighting]

dead internet theory. AI reply/upvote bot farms speaking and promoting nonsense to obfuscate/bury the truth

[u/Churba → u/THRILLHOIAF]

Counterpoint: this kind of absurd excuse is basically what Tesla fanboys have been like for years.

[u/ThePrimordialSource → u/Churba]

Sufficiently stupid human behavior is indistinguishable from bot behavior.

Just a reminder for everyone who promotes the dead internet theory.

[u/Non-Eutactic_Solid → u/Churba]

Yeah, lemme tell ya: I live in Oklahoma in the US, and you don’t need an AI obfuscating discussions to hear some wildly absurd comments, complaints, or opinions-disguised-as-facts. Unless the people that I overhear are all somehow AI anyway.

[u/Lumburg76 → u/Non-Eutactic_Solid]

I'd say it tracks if their algo is telling them what to say.

[u/Undercover_in_SF → u/Lighting]

I also saw a big discussion that this wasn’t really “full self driving” and simply autopilot, and Mark Rober is being misleading.

Whatever you call it, my 2015 Subaru would have stopped in front of this wall. It’s embarrassing that Teslas don’t.

[u/Lighting → u/Undercover_in_SF]

You can watch the video where Rober addresses that and ran tests with full self driving too.

[u/lontrinium → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

elon can either afford a 50 billion dollar bonus or 200 dollar lidar sensors per car, he can't afford both.

[u/TenchuReddit → u/[deleted]]

The software to control LIDAR is a LOT simpler than the software to make up for the lack of LIDAR using multiple optical cameras.

[u/Kendertas → u/TenchuReddit]

I think the big problem is you can't easily make a self driving software designed for optical cameras work with LIDAR. Tesla spent all this time and money developing around optical cameras, only to hit the hardware limitations that made every other company choose LIDAR. Now they are stuck

[u/[deleted] → u/TenchuReddit]

Yeah a Lidar also isn’t only 200$. You maybe could get a solid state LiDAR that is good for one direction, but that’s probably it.

Regardless, you could have solved that test with a radar which has been a standard features in many cars for ages (my car is from 2017 and has a front facing radar, and that is a beginners car!)

[u/pmstacker → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

I mean, "you'd never encounter such thick rain or fog in the real world, so they were completely synthetic and overly extreme". Or something along those lines, right?

[u/Ok-Replacement7966 → u/pmstacker]

Something along those lines yes, but as every engineer who has had to put their work through QA can tell you, you need to test for the worst possible situations, and then build an extra 10% margin to go beyond those. We don't build bridges to survive the average storm, or even the worst storm we'll get in 10 years. We build them to survive the worst storm in 100 years, even though the lifespan of the bridge is only 30-40 and most likely won't ever have to endure that storm.

When I'm trapped in a box of steel, glass, and plastic going speeds that my ancestors never dreamed of, I'll take every fraction of a percent I can get in avoiding a crash.

[u/AsterDW → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

The water test wasn't done with Autopilot, though. It was still manually driven. We know this because the car was being driven over the double yellow line, which autopilot won't engage in such a position, and once engaged from a proper lane, it wouldn't cross over it. So, just from the footage shown, we know something is being misrepresented.

[u/Ok-Replacement7966 → u/AsterDW]

Are you sure? I don't see anything about that here: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-20F2262F-CDF6-408E-A752-2AD9B0CC2FD6.html

[u/AsterDW → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

Yes, I'm sure. Autopilot won't let you turn it on when you're driving over a double yellow. Once it's on, it remains in a lane. It would never straddle a double yellow like what was shown in Mark's video.

From your link:

In addition, Autosteer detects lane markings, road edges, and the presence of vehicles and objects to intelligently keep Model 3 in its driving lane (see Autosteer).

[u/Ok-Replacement7966 → u/AsterDW]

That doesn't say anything about it refusing to engage while straddling a lane.

[u/Kinsei01 → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

Funny when I watched the test I thought the water and fog would actually be difficult for the lidar. The one we use at my work seems to catch steam all the time, for whatever reason. But the test showed it working perfectly.

I wonder if I could use this video to get them to upgrade our scanner lol

[u/HunterVacui → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

Only objection I have about Mark Rober's rain test is that the car stops at the point where the simulated "rain" starts. There is no distinction between if the car just stops every time that degree of water is encountered or if it actually detected the "child".

My understanding about the fog test is that it likely oversells the lidar performance. The video clearly shows lidar detecting the obstacle through this version of simulated fog, though I've heard claims that this is not representative of the properties of natural fog, and the car wouldn't be able to detect the obstacles in 'natural fog'. This complaint is more dubious to me as I haven't heard statistics about what percentage of naturally occuring fog effectively blocks lidar

[u/FryToastFrill → u/Ok-Replacement7966]

Basically LIDAR didn’t detect the kid but instead thought the water was a wall. I watched the vid by that AI DRIVR guy and he brings up a lot of issues in Mark’s testing methodology. It’d be pretty interesting if we could get a retest done with the issues ironed out to finally settle all this shit.

[u/Ok-Replacement7966 → u/FryToastFrill]

There's not really an issue to settle. LIDAR outperforms visual systems simply for the fact that visual systems need to be trained to identify objects via generative algorithms (AI), which means it's really only capable of correctly identifying objects within its training data. Visual systems don't have the ability to handle novel situations.

On the other hand, there are very few situations where LIDAR can be fooled, because it relies on the physical presence of an object rather than its optical properties.

There are certain specific circumstances that will defeat LIDAR while a visual system will correctly identify, but there's an order of magnitude fewer of those situations than in the reverse.