Push for Autopilot 3.0 hardware now or wait for 4.0?

[smatthew]

Other than an inability to see low/close to the vehicle.

Which is probably not a huge issue in highway driving, but a fairly big one in the long run for things like enhanced summon and park-seek modes...

(there's also some argument the range of the side cameras might be insufficient for cross-traffic at speed- at ~75 mph there's less than 2 seconds from when an object is at max range of those cameras until it's in the same physical space you are- but I dunno how "hard" that range cutoff really is)

Have you seen the video @GreenTheOnly posted from a HW2.5 he bought of a Tesla getting t-boned? The front cameras show absolutely nothing, but the side cameras clearly show the car approaching for a decent amount of time. Actually watching the video was tough - you could see the other car barreling down the road for quite a while and you just knew it would end badly.
That car wasn't on autopilot, but I believe eventually autopilot will start using those camera for collision detection.

Edit: Here's a link. green on Twitter

 

[Knightshade]

Have you seen the video @GreenTheOnly posted from a HW2.5 he bought of a Tesla getting t-boned? The front cameras show absolutely nothing, but the side cameras clearly show the car approaching for a decent amount of time. Actually watching the video was tough - you could see the other car barreling down the road for quite a while and you just knew it would end badly.
That car wasn't on autopilot, but I believe eventually autopilot will start using those camera for collision detection.

Edit: Here's a link. green on Twitter

I did see it- though it's unclear the speed of the oncoming vehicle, and even then it was really only visible for about 3 seconds (which implies it was going nearer 50-55 than 75)

Where it gets interesting is let's say it's a 75 mph car- so time from "seeing" to "hitting" is under 2 seconds- how long does it take the car to see it, and also figure out if it's planning to stop or not (for things like a 4 way stop).

Obviously humans screw this up too- they did in the accident shown in the video- so the existing cameras are PROBABLY good enough to equal or beat humans at this, with the exception of the inability to lean forward for semi-obstructed views- the B-pillar cams are stuck where they are.

 

[TomB985]

Have you seen the video @GreenTheOnly posted from a HW2.5 he bought of a Tesla getting t-boned? The front cameras show absolutely nothing, but the side cameras clearly show the car approaching for a decent amount of time. Actually watching the video was tough - you could see the other car barreling down the road for quite a while and you just knew it would end badly.
That car wasn't on autopilot, but I believe eventually autopilot will start using those camera for collision detection.

Edit: Here's a link. green on Twitter

I saw that, and looked again after your post. My first thought was how visible the car was with the white paint contrasted with the green trees behind it. A darker color would've been harder to see, I wonder how often the system would accurately see different colored cars in the same situation. I believe these only use 1.2 megapixel cameras, which may hinder accurately predicting the speed of oncoming traffic.

I don't worry about it, though. People far smarter than me designed the system, so look forward to see features improved in the coming months.