The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

  • @breadsmasher
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    1452 months ago

    Eyes can’t see in low visibility.

    musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”

    FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes

    musk reaction -

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.

      • @Buddahriffic
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        32 months ago

        Not only that, when we have trouble seeing things, we can adjust our speed to compensate (though tbf, not all human drivers do, but I don’t think FSD should be modelled after the worst of human drivers). Does Tesla’s FSD go into a “drive slower” mode when it gets less certain about what it sees? Or does its algorithms always treat its best guess with high confidence?

      • Jerkface (any/all)
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        -212 months ago

        Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.

        • @magiccupcake
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          382 months ago

          Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.

          Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.

          • @[email protected]
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            212 months ago

            They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.

            • Jerkface (any/all)
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              -12 months ago

              I dunno what cameras you are using but a standard full frame sensor and an F/4 lens sees way better in low light than the human eye. If I take a raw image off my camera, there is so much more dynamic range than I can see or a monitor can even represent, you can double the brightness at least four times (ie 16x brighter) and parts of the image that looked pure black to the eye become perfectly usable images. There is so so so much more dynamic range than the human eye.

              • @[email protected]
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                62 months ago

                Do you know what the depth of field at f/4 looks like? It’s not anywhere in the neighborhood of suitable for a car, and it still takes a meaningful exposure length in low light conditions to get a picture at all, which is not suitable for driving at 30mph, let alone actually driving fast.

                That full frame sensor is also on a camera that’s several thousand dollars.

    • @expatriado
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      692 months ago

      if he was truthful: “the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits”

      • @III
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        292 months ago

        Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.

      Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That’s how he lives.

    • RandomStickman
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      252 months ago

      You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.

    • @flames5123
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      102 months ago

      The cars used to have RADAR. But they got rid of that and even disabled it on older models when updating because they “only need cameras.”

      Cameras and RADAR would have been good enough for most all conditions…

    • aramis87
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      82 months ago

      What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.

      • @SmoothLiquidation
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        82 months ago

        I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.

          I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.

          • idunnololz
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            42 months ago

            I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.

            • @[email protected]
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              42 months ago

              ‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.

              • idunnololz
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                32 months ago

                It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.