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In one of the previous videos, the voice over was that of Elon Musk talking about FSD. There he made a comment that only forward looking radar was needed because that was the only direction with high speeds. As Chuck has found, this is not true; crossing high speed traffic means you also have high closing speeds in the lateral direction. This oversight may prove disastrous for the current Fsd hardware.
powertoold
Active Member
Definitely not an oversight, but we won't know if it was a good decision until another few months.
20 seconds in and the car fails a stop sign, starting to go right as a car was about to enter the intersection. This is a residential neighborhood with fairly slow traffic and it still failed. From beta 1 to now there’s been no real improvement on unprotected lefts, IMO, but it has been a while, so maybe I’ve forgotten how bad unprotected turns were on the initial beta.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Do you mean that Elon had considered high crossing traffic approach speeds but was lying about it in his talk?
powertoold
Active Member
No, why's everyone constantly saying Elon lies this and that. What you're saying is "oversight," which means Tesla *forgot* to consider this issue. Just because someone says one thing and you're thinking about another thing doesn't mean anyone lied.
What I'm saying is it's definitely NOT an oversight. They did think about it, but they decided that eventually the car's vision would be good enough to calculate the trajectory of oncoming cars for unprotected lefts.
Have a listen at 8:16 where Elon says radar is needed in the forward direction because of high speeds. He then says they don't need any other sensors. But speeds from the side because of other vehicles can be just as high as the forward speed of your vehicle.
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powertoold
Active Member
There are many many more objects that you have to worry about in front of the car compared to those that are involved in unprotected lefts. If Elon spent his time explaining the intricacies of design decisions, he'd get nothing done.
Yes, I know Elon works in mysterious ways, but you would think that if he were to choose one example, it would be the most important.
There could be a quite complicated array of vehicles all changing lanes, speeding up,etc, approaching from the left. I don't necessarily think it's an easier problem.
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powertoold
Active Member
Elon's comments on this topic make sense to me. For unprotected lefts, you only need to worry about cars and motorcycles. For driving forward, you need to worry about all sorts of objects.
Also speeds from the rear can be very important if you're trying to merge into highway traffic after being stopped on the shoulder, or at a controlled access on-ramp.
Or, if someone is approaching from behind at a huge speed, eg: the Autobahn where you had darn well better get out of the way, or I suppose a speeding vehicle.
As I understand it, the radar only detects objects that are moving w.r.t the background, so like cars, trucks and motorcycles.
At least in this case there is usually a shoulder to pull over onto. With cross traffic if the car pulls out, there isn't an escape route.
I love reading this thread, because I don’t even have to look at the name of the poster to know who’s posting what, especially one in particular. Crazy the patterns you can pick up.
I didn't follow the full story on whether Elon and/or Tesla really believe that only forward approaching traffic is the only important traffic with a need for radar to detect the speed differential. However if true it could illustrate another stunningly poor assumption to add to the list.
Dan Detweiler
Active Member
Are you joking?!
Tesla, Elon and the FSD team are competing in the incredibly difficult field of self driving cars. Not only competing, but arguably ahead of everyone else. Do you really think, with any degree of seriousness, that these people, some of the smartest on the planet, didn't think being able see the entire driving environment was important. Come on, your arguments are bordering on just plain silly.
Dan
Well perhaps they are considering everything, and that you are correct.
Tesla has these cameras: Wide Forward 60m, Main Forward 150m, Narrow Forward 250m, Forward Side 80m, and radar forward 160m with "radar play[ing] an essential role in detecting and responding to forward objects".
And Rearward Side (blind spots) 100m and Rear 50m "rear view camera is useful when performing complex parking maneuvers".
I certainly hope they are intending to fully detect all situations, despite their focus on the forward view bias.
In counterpoint, Waymo has vision detection to 500m, 360° lidar to 300m, 360° radar to "hundreds of meters". Their numbers. Waypoint - The official Waymo blog: Introducing the 5th-generation Waymo Driver: Informed by experience, designed for scale, engineered to tackle more environments
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Dan Detweiler
Active Member
May be true about Waymo, but then why do they have to rely so heavily on high definition mapping?
Dan
I honestly don't know if one system is better than the other. Maybe Consumer Reports can do another fully informed study.
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