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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • AEB braking was originally designed to not prevent a crash, but to slow the car when a unavoidable crash was detected.

    It’s since gotten better and can also prevent crashes now, but slowing the speed of the crash was the original important piece. It’s a lot easier to predict an unavoidable crash, than to detect a potential crash and stop in time.

    Insurance companies offer a discount for having any type of AEB as even just slowing will reduce damages and their cost out of pocket.

    Not all AEB systems are created equal though.

    Maybe disengaging AP if an unavoidable crash is detected triggers the AEB system? Like maybe for AEB to take over which should always be running, AP has to be off?




  • I think the older Tesla system (HW3) was around 300w, but I think the newer system is more now as they beefed up the compute, but I haven’t seen a number on that. The old system is pretty much maxed out though with no room to grow other then making things more efficient vs just more raw power usage.

    A lot of the older hardware back then wasn’t purpose built for driving and was more repurposed general graphical compute, so it was less efficient hence the 2Kw you were seeing. Tesla built ASICs for the driving computer to bring costs and power usage down.

    With the newer purpose built Nvidia stuff I’m sure that has brought the power draw down a lot though, likely relatively close (better or worse I don’t know) than Tesla’s watt per performance.

    edit: clarity






  • That’s not really true.

    He use lidar in SpaceX because he knows it’s the right tool for their specific job.

    His stance is it’s not that cameras are better, but that cameras have to be so good for a truly AV that putting effort into both means you’re not going to make your cameras good enough to do it and rely on lidar instead. That and cost.

    If the car can’t process and understand the world via cameras, it’s doomed to fail at a mass scale anyway.

    It might be a wrong stance, but it’s not that lidar is flawed.

    Tesla even uses lidar to ground truth their cameras

    Edit: just adding a late example - Waymo, Cruise, and probably everyone out there still use humans to tell the car what to do if it gets stuck. I even bet Tesla will if they ever launch a robotaxi as they need a way to somehow help the car if it gets stuck. When we see these failures with Waymo and Cruise, it’s less “is something there” and more “I don’t understand this situation”. The understanding comes from vision. Lidar just gives the something is there, but it isn’t solving their problem.