Meep meep.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Anyone with half a brain could tell you plain cameras is a non-starter. This is nearly a Juicero level blunder. Tesla is not a serious car company nor tech company. If markets were rational it would have been the end for Tesla.
Austin should just pull the permits until all the taxis have lidar installed and tested. Or write a bill that fines the manufacturer $100 billion for any self driving car that kills a person and puts the proceeds 50% to the family and 50% to infrastructure. One of the first rules of robotics was always about not harming humans.
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I love that one of the largest YouTubers is the one that did this. Surely, somebody near our federal government will throw a hissy fit if he hears about this but Mark’s audience is ginormous
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The rain test was far more concerning because it's much more realistic of a scenario. Both a normal person and the lidar would've seen the kid and stopped, but the cameras and image processing just isn't good enough to make out a person in the rain. That's bad. The test portrays it as a person in the middle of a straight road, but I don't see why the same thing wouldn't happen at a crosswalk or other place where pedestrians are often in the path of a vehicle. If an autonomous system cannot make out pedestrians in the rain reliably, that alone should be enough to prevent these vehicles from being legal.
Who owns the White House right now?
The question there would be does Austin have crosswalks that don't have red lights. Many places put a light at every cross walk, but not all. Most beaches don't have them at every crosswalk, they just have laws that if someone is in or entering the crosswalk you have to stop for the pedestrians. (They would all be at risk from what you are saying).
I don't know the answer to your question, but I'll add that I've seen major cities that have overhead yellow flashing light boxes that mean "you must stop if there is a pedestrian crossing the road"
That should at least slow them down, but yeah it could be a real threat there as well.
Not every pedestrian follows the rules of the lights though. And not every pedestrian makes it across the road in time before the light changes colors from red to green.
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A fitting metaphor for Musky and their involvement with the US government.
This is like the crash on a San Francisco bridge that happened because of a Tesla that went into a tunnel and it wasn’t sure what to do since it went from bright daylight to darkness. In this case the Tesla just suddenly merged lanes and then immediately stopped and caused a multi car pile up.
You'd think they have cameras with higher dynamic range and faster auto exposure in their cars by now. Nope, still penny pinching.
If only elon hadn't insisted on not using lidar or anything other than just visible light cameras
Yeah, pulling radar from the cars was the beginning of the end. Early teslas had radar, and that was what led to all of the “car sees something three vehicles ahead and brakes to avoid a pileup that hasn’t even started yet” type of collision avoidance videos. First, pulling radar was a cost cutting thing. Then Elon demanded that they pull out the lidar too, and that’s when their crash numbers skyrocketed.
Mark Rober is about to be listed as FBI public enemy #1 :(
EPA is going to investigate him for criminal fraud on Monday, I reckon.
Didn't they dismantle them on Thursday?
There's a very simple solution to autonomous driving vehicles plowing into walls, cars, or people:
Congress will pass a law that makes NOBODY liable -- as long as a human wasn't involved in the decision making process during the incident.
This will be backed by car makers, software providers, and insurance companies, who will lobby hard for it. After all, no SINGLE person or company made the decision to swerve into oncoming traffic. Surely they can't be held liable. 🤷🏻♂️
Once that happens, Level 4 driving will come standard and likely be the default mode on most cars. Best of luck everyone else!
Kids already have experience playing hopscotch, so we can just have them jump between the rooves of moving cars in order to cross the street! It will be so much more efficient, and they can pretend that they are action heroes. The ones who survive will make for great athletes too.
There's a reason GenX trained on hopper. Too bad the newer generations don't have something equivalent
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There is no way insurance companies would go for that. What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems. Im honeslty surprised they wouls cover them now.
If it's a feature of a car when you bought it and the insurance company insured the car then anything the car does by design must be covered. The only way an insurance company will get out of this is by making the insured sign a statement that if they use the feature it makes their policy void, the same way they can with rideshare apps if you don't disclose that you are driving for a rideshare. They also can refuse to insure unless the feature is disabled. I can see in the future insurance companies demanding features be disabled before insuring them. They could say that the giant screens blank or the displayed content be simplified while in motion too.
What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems.
If the risk is that insurance companies won't pay for accidents and put people on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, then people won't use autonomous systems.
This cannot go both ways. Either car makers are legally responsible for their AI systems, or insurance companies are legally responsible to pay for those damages. Somebody has to foot the bill, and if it's the general public, they will avoid the risk.
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Taking a guess here, but I think Mark Rober is not a big trump/musk fan? :D
He is studiously apolitical, the only political comment I could find from him was the very sensible advice that we need to tone down our hyperpartisanship :)
https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1641487680168153089?lang=en
For me, I criticize any vehicle that is objectively crappy... and some vehicles where I find them subjectively crappy... and I hope folks don't assume I'm doing that because of my political leanings.
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To be fair, the roadrunner it was following somehow successfully ran into the painting.
To any artists in Austin,TX: you have your work cut out for you. Godspeed.
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist