Actually, I think they do. During Autonomy Investor Day, Tesla explained how they can use all 8 cameras to create a 3D map of the surroundings that includes depth and speed perception.
That capability could also be used to map curbs and other stationary, low-lying objects that the front cameras cannot see when too close, because the car will have started farther away from the object, and it would have seen it. Curbs don't spring up out of the ground after all. Even if the car were parked in front of a curb and turned off, it could remember the previously mapped topography around it and use that to navigate around obstacles when powered back on. People cannot see the ground right in front of (or around most of) their cars anyhow. People driving cars hit curbs and other stationary, as well as moving, objects/debris all the time, and somehow we accept that and move on. The standard does not have to be perfection (at least not yet). Note, I am not suggesting that it will be OK if any given autonomous vehicle hits curbs, etc. all the time.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, so we will (soon?) see, as Tesla releases new FSD features, what things work well and what don't. Undoubtedly, there will be tricky edge cases that aren't handled well at first. Which those are and whether they are solvable with the current hardware remains to be seen. I do have a concern with one relatively common scenario: quickly making a right-angle turn to merge into oncoming orthogonally flowing traffic (i.e., making a right/left turn onto a busy, multi-lane thoroughfare where traffic is going, say, 45+ mph). This will make for some pucker-inducing scenarios where it may be very hard to tell if the car will do the right thing, and I don't know if people will be able to take over in any reasonable way if it doesn't. They will really need to get this right. I'm kind of hoping for something obvious on the display indicating what the car is going to do, like highlighting what space in the traffic flow the car will try to fit into (plot path line or show shadow car avatar in the new slot*), maybe some countdown (in seconds) of when it will start to go or a sound indicating "here we go" (
Wilhelm scream?), and possibly indicating how fast it might accelerate (by color intensity of the car's intended path line).
*I may be wrong, but if you slow down the latest
FSD demo video, it appears to show a shadow car in the new lane, whenever it's about to change lanes. Check at about 0:17 or 0:48, for example. On further review, it might just be a video compression artifact.
