Summary of the above video for those that don't want to sit through it.
It's a test of Autonomous Emergency breaking between a car (teals) depending on camera's and one depending on Lidar.
Ultimately looking into Elon Musks famous 2019 quote:
“Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
If I recall rightly the logic was that if people can safely drive cars with visual inputs only, that a sufficiently computer should be able to do the same. I think the premise here is slightly flawed. I think we rightly hold autonomous systems to a higher standard than human systems when it comes to life safety, so simply matching human performance is not good enough.
Click to see spoiler(s)
- Tesla's Autonomous breaking was set to break very late (Assumed to minimize false positives). It braked so late in the most simple test (stationary child Mannequin in the middle of the lane), that there was enough of an impact the Mannequin was decapitated. As such Autopilot mode (which did pass the simple tests) was used for the remainder of the tests.
- The Lexus braked harder or earler. Seemed to always come to a stop about double the distance from the hazard.
- Lexus with LIDAR passed every test with flying color's. (even the water test which is a pain point of LIDAR performance)
- Tesla passed the stationary child, moving child & stationary child with super bright blinding lights behind tests (despite the drivers not being able to see the child at all).
- Tesla failed the following tests:
- Rain (comical amounts of water sprayed by multiple water trucks, somewhat visually obscuring a child)
- Fog (enough artificial fog that a stationary child was not visable at all to the naked eye)
- Painted wall - A wall painted to look like a continuation of the road.
The findings are fairly damming for Tesla. Without autopilot on the Tesla failed the most basic AEB test on offer. And it was noted that with autopilot on that it gets a lot of false positives.
It was not a surprise that the camera's were unable to detect the child in the rain (water jets) & heavy fog test, but it is concerning that the Autopilot system (on autopilot mode) would continue at high speed into water jets / fog that it could not see into.
Final (painted wall) test outcome, was not really a surprise, Clearly designed to trick the autopilot system. Still it was very obvious to a human viewer that they had a wall erected with a picture on it.
Ultimate conclusion was that the Lexus Lidar system far outperforms the Tesla's camera system.
Given Lidar system's have got small and cheap enough that the you tuber was able to smuggle one into a theme park roller coaster's, with hindsight it seems like a big mistake for Tesla to use just camera's in it's system's.
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