If you look at the overlay, the algorithm seems extra paranoid about the following aspects: HIGH_BEAM, BLINDED, RAINING, TIRE_SPRAY, which all sound like camera weaknesses, not lidar/radar weaknesses. My guess is that this is camera-based still.

Also interesting is the vision fps of ~13. That's 75ms latency.

75ms sounds like a lot, but it isn't so bad - average human reaction time is about 200ms. Source:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456887/

Tesla doesn't use lidar. They have always used radar, but radar can't always tell the difference between a stationary metal sign near/over the road and a stalled car in the middle of the lane, so for stationary objects they need the cameras. This is why every adaptive cruise control system (not just Tesla's) has a warning that it may not detect stationary objects.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-s...

Tesla has a whitelist of problematic stationary objects. Pray you don't ever get into an accident with a Tesla vehicle at those places.

Though only(?) Tesla pretends that their adaptive cruise control is full blown self-driving.

I'm not sure about what they've said in the past, but their site is pretty clear about the current state of Autopilot / Full Self Driving: https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#autopilot and for a more in-depth description: https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot

Adaptive ("Traffic-aware") cruise control is actually an Autopilot feature, not FSD. Of course, Autopilot is a debatable name in itself, but Tesla does not market cruise control as FSD, at least not anymore. (I don't know if they ever did or not — honestly I didn't follow Tesla news until like 3 months ago.)

The closest thing to self-driving you get with the FSD package is "Navigate on Autopilot", which is something akin to "self-driving on highways only in good weather conditions". It can also drive around a parking lot on its own if you're supervising it, and it can supposedly park itself, though I've heard Autopark does not work well.

Source?

If you simply refer to it being called "autopilot", cmon that's not too serious. The word "autopilot" does not automatically mean that it is full self-driving. None of the Tesla drivers or potential Tesla buyers realistically think that it has level 5 self-driving yet.

UPD: The buy page literally says:

"The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."

>Source? If you simply refer to it being called "autopilot", cmon that's not too serious

The Model 3 Builder literally says: "Full Self-Driving Capability".

Autopilot is a separate feature from FSD. It also specifically lists out exactly what it can do. And includes a whole paragraph on limitations which starts with "The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."

Did you just read the one sentence and not any other text on that page?: "Coming later this year: Automatic driving on city streets.",

Oh and how about "The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.".

- Which I just copy-pasted from the exact page you are talking about. Who is being disingenious here?

I honestly don't think that there is any significant number of potential buyers who go onto a website to buy a car, and pull one sentence from that page out of context, ignore the rest of the text and then make their decision based on that.

You mean the text in smaller face "disclaimer text" buried under the fold, well under the price and the "Prices are likely to increase in the future" ("BUY NOW!"), and below things like:

> Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. Really.

(It may plow into a street to do so, but hey. And you should really have "full attention" on the car. Unless you're reading our marketing copy which says to feel free to "attend to a fussy child")

and so on. Ninety per cent of the length of that page is selling promises that aren't there yet, and the fine print at the bottom is taking most of it away, for some indeterminate period of time.

The problem with that collision is that neither the radar nor the camera saw the obstacle. To the camera it looked too much like the sky as you say. To the radar it appeared to be a stationary object and so probably an overhead sign or something instead of another vehicle. Once the car gets close enough that the radar's cone only includes dangerous obstacles then it starts putting the brakes but in that case it was too late.

In general, though, the art of combining information from multiple sensors is called sensor fusion and its a fairly well understood problem. Well, sometimes even good engineers make mistakes, see Schiaparelli and the saturated Kalman filter inputs, but we have a good idea of what those mistakes can be for different schema.

EDIT: Mistyped radar as lidar, fixed.

Tesla doesn't use LiDAR.

And I assure you that sensor fusion is not a well understood problem. One of the biggest challenges in autonomous driving is how to unify all of the different NN outputs.

They use both radar and cameras, but primarily cameras. Lines, road markings, stop lights, and street signs can only be detected with vision, but cars+pedestrians can (usually) be verified by both radar and cameras. In fact, they’ve mentioned that they use radar data to help train the camera neural nets to predict distances more accurately. However, radar alone isn’t sufficient for detecting obstacles — it sometimes misses vehicles with a lot of ground clearance, and sometimes registers false positives when driving underneath bridges and overpasses, resulting in phantom braking.

IIRC tesla still doesn't use LIDAR. Just wanted to point that out.

Correct. I believe they use vision along with front facing radar only