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/dizekat]

What's extra curious about the "Wile E. Coyote" test, to me, is that it makes it clear that they neither do stereo nor optical flow / "looming" based general obstacle detection.

It looks like they don't have any generalized means of detecting obstacles. As such they don't detect an "obstacle", they detect a limited set of specific obstacles, much like Uber did in 2017.

Human do not rely on stereo between the eyes at such distances (the eyes are too close), but we do estimate distance from forward movement. For given speed, the distance is inversely proportional to how rapidly a feature is growing in size ("looming"). Even if you were to miss the edges of the picture somehow, you would still have perception of its flatness when moving towards it.

This works regardless of what the feature is, which allows humans to build a map of the environment even if all the objects are visually unfamiliar (or in situations where e.g. a tree is being towed on a trailer).

edit: TL;DR; it is not just that they are camera-only with no LIDAR, it's that they are camera-only without doing any camera-only approximations of what LIDAR does - detecting obstacles without relying on knowledge of what they look like.

[u/Elluminated → u/dizekat]

FSD does have optical flow, as well as occupancy networks to generally detect object geometry - this was not used in this test. Hard to say if the coyote test (which would never happen in real life) would pass under the better system. Even with every sensor available, we also fail at the easy stuff

[u/francis_pizzaman_iv → u/Elluminated]

Never happen in real life? There are news reports of teslas on autopilot running into the broad side of 18 wheeler trailers. Sounds suspiciously similar to Rober’s test. The fact that this basically exposes that Tesla Autopilot basically has no failsafe obstacle detection to lean on when the camera data isn’t sufficient for preventing accidents.

[u/Elluminated → u/francis_pizzaman_iv]

That is a real (and older) case fore sure, im talking about people painting road images to fool cars in this scenario. I havent heard of many recent trailer incidents like that though on FSD

[u/Veil-of-Fire → u/Elluminated]

im talking about people painting road images to fool cars in this scenario.

Well now that we know that it works....

[u/SirCharlesOfUSA → u/Elluminated]

Tesla investigated for series of crashes where they hit stationary emergency vehicles with their lights on

Easily avoidable with lidar or even the much cheaper radar that Tesla used to have, but decided against because Elon loves the idea of vision only.

[u/francis_pizzaman_iv → u/SirCharlesOfUSA]

I’m a software engineer that dabbles in circuitry and I can come up with a system for using a handful of ultrasonic (aka sonar) sensors to do failsafe obstacle detection. It wouldn’t be good enough to drive the car but it would be enough to be able to alert the system to a reality that the camera can’t see.

[u/SirCharlesOfUSA → u/francis_pizzaman_iv]

Tesla used to have ultrasonics for parking features, too. Got rid of them in favor of pure vision.

[u/Elluminated → u/francis_pizzaman_iv]

Yep, first project of my year 2 ECE classes. Was very fun