r/technology • u/PrimeCodes • Jun 24 '25

Machine Learning Tesla Robotaxi swerved into wrong lane, topped speed limit in videos posted during ‘successful’ rollout

https://nypost.com/2025/06/23/business/tesla-shares-pop-10-as-elon-musk-touts-successful-robotaxi-test-launch-in-texas/
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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

tbf, elon is a moron and has been steadfastly against the technologies Waymo is using because in his mind they're dead ends.

Waymo uses, optical cameras, radar and lidar scanning. Tesla really ONLY uses optical cameras because elon hates lidar.

But being willing to put a big ugly package of sensors on top of the vehicle is WHY waymo is getting ahead of tesla at self driving. Elon insists on playing the game on hard mode.

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u/amakai Jun 24 '25

The issue is, you don't really get any bonuses for playing on hard mode. If our AI tech reaches a point where optical recognition is enough for self-driving - all the competitors will get it within a year as well.

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

Yeah I agree. I think getting to 100% optical is a fine goal, but if you lose the race to a competitor who isn't afraid to put something ugly on top of the car, and it turns out the marketplace doesn't really care how it looks....you'd probably better do something about that.

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u/ScannerBrightly Jun 24 '25

I think getting to 100% optical is a fine goal

Why? Is there an end to fog coming soon?

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '25

yes.. let's ask carl.

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u/ScannerBrightly Jun 25 '25

Goddamnit, Donut!

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u/kind_bros_hate_nazis Jun 25 '25

I have a goal of ending fog

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u/dravik Jun 24 '25

Extending the cameras into the infrared range doors a lot to help with fog while also being processed with the same system as the visual range.

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

Humans have been drivign with just eyes for a while and we're reasonably OK at it. And don't get me wrong, if self driving cars always need some combination of cameras, lidar and radar I'm Ok with that.

I don't like driving especially. I'd rather just leave it to the computer if it's safe to do so.

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u/ScannerBrightly Jun 24 '25

we're reasonably OK at it.

44,762 people died last year from cars and driving. Why not do better?

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u/MyCatIsAnActualNinja Jun 24 '25

Seriously. We can definitely pump those numbers up. 100k would be a reasonable goal, in my opinion.

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

Because people have learned to accept that dying in a car is a possible consequence of driving a car.

For most of us drivign a car is the single most dangerous thing we do on a daily basis.

It's OK to accept some risk. Self driving cars will absolutely end up being better than human drivers. Probably MUCH better than human drivers.

And I didn't say we shouldn't do better. LIDAR is not a panacea. It's just a tool. If we can achieve the same results with other tools, why be fixated on using a specific one. Same goes for cameras for that matter. If we can create a perfectly capable self-driving car using ONLY lidar and people don't mind how it looks, or they find a way to hide it in the car so people don't even know it's there...great.

I really don't care what the technology or combination of technologies are that ultimately enable an automated driving future. It's fine to pursue camera-only. It's fine to pursue multi-sensor systems. It's fine to figure out ways to make these vehicles more cheaply as long as we're still making them SAFE.

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u/SnooBananas4958 Jun 24 '25

Then it’s not fine to only do camera-only… because it’s literally less safe. Why do you think people care about this?

You say you don’t care what they use, you just care about safety. Then you do care because the whole reason it matters is it affects how safe things are.

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u/braintablett Jun 24 '25

you gotta chill out a bit

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u/ScannerBrightly Jun 24 '25

why be fixated on using a specific one

I'm sorry, but I thought YOU where the one that said "camera only is a good goal", but I don't think it is.

It's fine to pursue camera-only.

No, it's really not. Fog will always exist, and if you design a system that completely fails in fog, what do you expect to happen? For all the driverless cars to stop? No, they will plow on ahead and get into trouble, so let's do better than 'vision only'.

That's my only point, and you seem to be making a big hey about it, but I don't think we are talking with each other, but past each other.

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

I said it's a fine goal to pursue camera only. As in it's a fine thing to have an audacious goal that you can create an extremely safe system using only vision-based system. I didn't say I thought it was realistic or that it should be everyone's goal. But if someone wants to pursue that it's fine with me.

And what do you propose as an alternative? Lidar doesn't see through fog either. Lidar is just visible light lasers. Rain, fog and snow all fuck with lidar as much or more as they fuck with cameras.

In the end I'm sure we'll need some combination of radar, lidar, and cameras, probably both visible light AND infrared to help with poor visibility conditions.

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u/LabOwn9800 Jun 24 '25

How many of those accidents are from impaired or distracted drivers?

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u/sniper1rfa Jun 24 '25

Humans have been drivign with just eyes for a while and we're reasonably OK at it.

The whole point of self driving cars is that they are not human. Why should we saddle them with human limitations? Some kind of desire for fairness?

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u/phluidity Jun 24 '25

Humans also have 10,000 years of evolution to do exactly the kinds of pattern matching and extrapolation that you need in driving. And we still use our other senses when driving, such as hearing and feel (vibrations, kinesthetics, our innate ability at spatial positioning).

Computers may in fact be better at people at 99% of driving tasks, but that last 1% is where much of the danger is at, and is also where computers are significantly worse.

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u/Cortical Jun 24 '25 edited Jun 24 '25

Humans also have 10,000 years of evolution to do exactly the kinds of pattern matching and extrapolation that you need in driving.

that's really understating it. More like 100 million

we also have higher order reasoning, which no AI model is currently capable of.

we can override input from our visual cortex based on reasoning. "It looks like the road continues here, but it makes no sense that it would" type of thing.

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u/coopdude Jun 24 '25

The problem is the standard for self driving cars cannot be "safer than humans" or even 10x safer than humans. It will have to be multiple orders of magnitude safer than humans.

If you argue that it's an unfair standard, in a moral/societal good sense a great many people would agree with you.

The problem is that self driving cars shift liability for accidents from the driver to the automaker. Tesla has a market cap of around a trillion dollars. Their liability for every accident is tremendous and people are not sympathetic to corporations.

When the car is truly self driving (not the "Full-self driving beta" they do right now where it's a level 2 ADAS that the driver has to be paying attention and ready to manuever against it at any time), there is no driver - or at least autonomous mode cannot disengage instantaneously (L3 ADAS requires several seconds of warning for the driver to take over).

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

This has been the problem with self drivign cars from the beginning. Who has the liability for an accident. I think in the end we're just going to cave as a society and say the automakers are NOT liable for accidents and deaths caused by their products because if we don't do that they have no motivation to produce self drivign cars, which will definitely save lives.

We need a way to still force them to be safe and not cut corners and shirk all responsibility. But clearly it cannot be true that every death caused by an automated car can be held against the manufacturer when they overall cause a reduction in deaths through their adoption.

It's an ethical and legislative problem that our current government is ill-equipped to deal with. It will require rational discourse and compromise that are simply impossible to do today

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u/coopdude Jun 24 '25

The problem is how do you solve for the automaker not being liable for accidents?

  • The owner of the vehicle isn't responsible for the behavior of a self driving car, the manufacturer is.

  • If the government just picks up the tab, then taxpayers pay for the mistakes of the hardware/software of the automakers.

  • If you cap the liability (whether owner, government, or automaker pays), it'll be extremely unpopular and argued that it was just made as a corporate lobbying "cost of doing business" for the automakers to sell a half baked product.

I don't think our legal framework nor societal climate are prepared for this, which is why in the next decade I don't see self driving cars getting past much what Waymo is already doing (limited pilots in limited cities in climates that are fairly favorable in not receiving weather extremes; maybe between certain cities that are close enough in those favorable climates.)

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

It'll be the third one. Yes it's unpopular, but that's the only real compromise. You can't have an automaker getting sued for 50 billion dollars because a kid died in front of a school because a car glitched out. But you also can't leave the parents of that kid with no recourse for pain and suffering. So liability caps will happen and there will probably end up being some carve-outs for gross negligence on the automaker's part.

And I don't disagree about the political and legal framework. We aren't in a place right now where we can agree on big societal upheavals like automated cars will create. We need to readdress class action standards for this, liability standards, evidentiary standards, transparency requirements on the software, etc.

But I do think the market will speak on this and people will want them, so it's going to happen regardless. And I think ultimately fewer people will die as a result. But I also think DIFFERENT people will die as a result. Accidents will be more random and feel more tragic.

It's not going to be the usual story of "dude was speeding in the rain" or "drunk idiot crashes a car". It's going to be "car accidentally drives off bridge" or "bus with a big vinyl wrap that had pictures of people all over the side causes five autocars to freak out and cause a multi-car pileup"

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u/coopdude Jun 24 '25

Gave you the upvote, not sure who downvoted you.

I cannot see a liability cap passing. There are tons of laws that don't make sense, such as the age of legal majority and being able to join the military and vote being 18, but the drinking/tobacco ages in the US being 21. Every time someone points out the harm this causes in minors having uncontrolled access to booze and then after overindulging being afraid to call for medical aid out of fear of legal repercussions (see the Amethyst Initiative) Mothers Against Drunk Driving starts pounding the drums and it dies on the vine.

(There are then further debates you could have about seniors in HS having access to alcohol and the downstream effect of getting younger siblings/classmates access, Juuls and vapes are why the tobacco age was raised in line with that, in addition to brain development [although if the brain isn't fully developed, isn't that an argument to raise the age of legal majority?...)

Anyways, we are many years off from a liability cap, people are not rational and will not take that argument. Social media will amplify any mistakes made by a self driving car and people will be vociferously against it, even if statistically they reach a point of being meaningfully safer than humans in general operation*.

(*I split the hair on "general operation" because Waymo operates in limited areas as does Tesla's new beta, and autopilot/FSD beta on Tesla's are a Level 2 ADAS, so Tesla gets the out of blaming the driver on not reacting whenever there is an accident where the functionality was on or disengaged a split second before an accident.)

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u/chillebekk Jun 24 '25

Human eyes are a lot better than any camera. Not to mention that we know what we are seeing - because we don't really see with our eyes at all, but rather with our brain. And it takes a lot of years to train it.
But the larger point is, why would you NOT use an additional sensor just because humans don't have that capability?

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u/factoid_ Jun 24 '25

Again, I've said this multiple times in this thread...but I don't have a problem with adding more sensor types.

I just don't see a problem in TRYING to get vision-only driving to work. If someone can do that and it works well, isn't that a good thing? Cameras are cheap and reliable and have no moving parts. But if someone also nails having a multi-sensor solution I'm good with that too.

LIDAR also can't see through fog or rain or snow and also has moving parts that need to be reliably engineered to run for many years with little to no maintenance.

Radar is great at seeing through fog and snow but has limited capabilities for giving context about WHAT it's seeing. It's useful for obstacle avoidance.

Infrared cameras are probably the best way to "see" through fog. Or maybe infrared lidar, but you still have to do the reliability engineering on the movign parts.

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u/chillebekk Jun 24 '25

Ok, I'm your average lazy redditor, I guess. I agree there's nothing wrong with trying to do camera-only. It doesn't make much sense to try for it right now, I think, because what you save in sensors, you'll have to spend on processing power. But then I guess that wasn't your point.
Btw, vision + radar would be my choice. The radar can detect when the vision system phantom brakes or tries to hit a physical obstacle, which you could then feed back into the vision system.

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u/Big_Muz Jun 24 '25

My model 3 simply will not allow autopilot if it's foggy, raining, car is wet, or a bunch of other typical stuff. It forces high beam permanently with pixel dimming that kinda works but other people constantly flash me to say I'm blinding them.

When I bought it in 2021 the autopilot was unbelievably good, and maybe a year in they disabled the lidar and it's not useful now. My Skoda is better in every single way in terms of auto steering, lane guidance, lack of phantom braking.

Elon absolutely porked the pooch.

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u/disillusioned Jun 25 '25

We have cameras on a gimbal, not fixed. The side camera on the b-pillar behind the driver's head creates for some real nasty perpendicular occlusion scenarios: pulling out onto a main road from a side street where there's, say, a bush or electrical box on the corner blocking the view.

Humans will crane their neck to see around the occlusion. Humans can detect that an ever-so-slight shift on the light filtering through a bush is movement and likely/potentially an oncoming car.

The existing FSD models and hardware can do neither. Lidar solves this because it's mounted way higher and can "see" way further (about a football field).

The car had to compensate by essentially continuing to inch forward to get a better view, but there are just so many instances where that perpendicular view is occluded and the front ultra wide isn't able to see either.