Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?--FortNine

[Tam]

FortNine blames the two fatal motorcycle accidents in just 17 days apart in July in 2 different states CA and UT on the removal of radar.

Radar might have problems with stationary obstacles, but it has been quite good with moving obstacles traveling in the same direction.

When the radar is removed, vision needs all the visual clues it can get. At night the visual clues are reduced: "empty highways so we have few linear perspective cues,"

It may confuse the motorcycle's rear lights for a car's and take that as a distance cue: The farther the lights apart mean you are near to the car in front, and the closer they are apart means you are still far from the car in front (except it's not a car, it's a motorcycle in these 2 cases.) It might not classify the object in front as a motorcycle if it didn't see the rider above those 2 glowing red lights in the dark.

He also shows that Unadjusted for the highway advantage, there are fewer crashes with Autopilot:

However, when Adjusted for the highway advantage, there are times (Q2 2019, Q4 29019) that there are more crashes with Autopilot:

His solution is to add LIDAR.

 

[TresLA]

Predicting the future is hard. No one knows what we don’t yet know, so it’s not clear whether “vision only” (which, in Tesla’s case, still means integrating non-HD maps to some extent) will work or not. This video assumes a lot to make its arguments, and states some not quite true things (exactly what they accuse Tesla of). Important discussion and concerns, but things are not as clear cut as they try to make it.

Personally, I believe integrating an active sensor (not just passive visual light cameras) like LiDAR is a good approach, but Elon’s concerns of too high a cost, resolution, and environmental shortcomings have not yet been addressed.

 

[Zer0t]

Dan O'Dowd who builds secure operating systems for aerospace and defense has been campaigning that Tesla autopilot is legitimately the worst commercial software there is.

O'Dowd is founder and CEO of Green Hills Software

 

[buyleonard]

Dan O'Dowd who builds secure operating systems

His software is also used by companies working on self driving cars. And he has a history of trashing competitors software. Nothing from him can be believed.