Weird, linkedin says Drew Baglino worked/works on powertrains and energy storage systems, I didn't see any mentioning of him working on Autopilot.Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson:
“He would drive from his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles to the SpaceX headquarters near the airport, where they would discuss the problems his Autopilot system encountered. “Every meeting started with Elon saying, ‘Why can’t the car drive itself from my home to work?’ ” says Drew Baglino, one of Tesla’s senior vice presidents.
This sometimes led the Tesla team to do some Keystone Kops scrambling. There was a curve on Interstate 405 that always caused Musk trouble because the lane markings were faded. The Autopilot would swerve out of the lane and almost hit oncoming cars. Musk would come into the office furious. “Do something to program this right,” he kept demanding. This went on for months as the team tried to improve the Autopilot software.
In desperation, Sam Teller and others came up with a simpler solution: ask the transportation department to repaint the lanes of that section of the highway. When they got no response, they came up with a more audacious plan. They decided to rent a line-painting machine of their own, go out at 3 a.m., shut the highway down for an hour, and redo the lanes. They had gone “as far as tracking down a line-painting machine when someone finally got through to a person at the transportation department who was a Musk fan. He agreed to have the lines repainted if he and a few others at the department could get a tour of SpaceX. Teller gave them a tour, they posed for a picture, and the highway lines got repainted. After that, Musk’s Autopilot handled the curve well.
Baglino was among the Tesla engineers who wanted to continue to use radar to supplement camera vision. “There was just such a gulf between Elon’s goal and the possible,” says Baglino. “He just wasn’t aware enough of “the challenges.”
At one point Baglino’s team did an analysis of the distance perception an autopilot system would need for situations such as at a stop sign. How far left and right did the car need to see in order to know when it could safely cross?
“We’re trying to have those conversations with Elon to establish what the sensors would need to do,” Baglino says. “And they were really difficult conversations, because he kept coming back to the fact that people have just two eyes and they can drive the car. But those eyes are attached to a neck, and the neck can move, and people can position those eyes all over the place.”
This is from early days of FSD when they used Mobileye, but the culture and approach are the problem. You can’t scale unreasonable problem solving with this type of corner cutting mentality. And why anything Elon says has an unreliable narrator problem, which is why I’ve been saying the clues for real FSD isn’t in something from his tweets, but signs like (1) tesla telling regulators they’re starting to count autonomous miles, (2) the crowdsourced FSD tracker going parabolic on interventions per mile.
Also Sam Teller - the guy who did the corner cutting - is not an engineer, he was Elon's aide.
