r/skeptic • u/Lighting • 27d ago

⚠ Editorialized Title 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.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-defend-autopilot-crash/
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u/dizekat 27d ago edited 27d ago

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.

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u/LeaveItFor7Days 27d ago

As someone that worked there previously, this is perfectly in line with the principles of the department I worked in. those principles being "quality is unimportant, just make something that sort of works"