Tesla and Carelessness, name a better duo.

From removing radar from their cars [1] to having their $200k super car be criminally underbraked. [2]

Tesla has a low regard for human life, and exemplifies the worst of silicon valley's progress at any cost approach. Elon is undeniably intelligent, but his ethics are dangerously sidelined by his need to create products that might not be ready yet.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn9QWjxFPKM

Radar removal improved accuracy rather than harming it, they don't actually sell a car at the price point you listed. and inference from Tesla's award winning safety records suggests that Telsa does care about human life.

The factual content in your comment is decisively lacking.

Careless of you, I think.

"Radar removal improved accuracy rather than harming it..."

Reference, please.

When more sensors don't perform better than less sensors, either your hardware or your software is flawed. Removing a sensor from design because your system doesn't work speaks poorly of your product.

Even following that simplistic logic, if autopilot isn't safe, How could they dare not remove it?

> When more sensors don't perform better than less sensors, either your hardware or your software is flawed.

Consider that 99 cameras plus one radar does not make a system perform better if the task is identifying whether there is the color blue in an image. If we add ten thousand radars to this situation it doesn't produce an improvement, in fact, it gets worse, because there is more power being used by the sensors and a lot more complexity.

> Removing a sensor from design because your system doesn't work speaks poorly of your product.

This is a convoluted way of saying that making improvements to things is bad. That is nonsensical.

> Even following that simplistic logic, if autopilot isn't safe, How could they dare not remove it?

They did remove it.

Just to show you mathematically that they're right consider that if you have two sensors that are both measuring the same thing. One is Norm(mean=0, std=0.00001) and the other is Norm(mean=0, std=10). The true quantity is always zero in the real world. Given this scenario and these two senors you get the result of 0.11 and 11 as your return from the two sensors. Lets say we average the result of these two sensors. The average is farther from the true value than the first sensor was. The less reliable sensor is adding noise to our measurement. It isn't high utility.

A crafty person here will draw on ideas like kalman filters and sensor fusion to notice that as the number of measurements increase you can gain precision even in the presence of an unreliable sensor.

This is very true and it might be where the bad intuition that having multiple unreliable sensors is good is coming from. Multiple noisy readings can be averaged to get a more reliable reading if the distribution of reading errors is normally distributed. You can take ten Norm(0, 10) and average them and the result of that will be a normal distribution with a standard deviation which is lower than the standard deviation of the distribution that we sampled from. See basic statistics for the e

There are a few reasons why this doesn't apply in this case:

1. The measurements aren't going to be of the same thing. At time step t, the state of the world is potentially different from t+1. Since we have one radar sensor averaging the results of the two sensor readings doesn't give us the true position. Kalman filters solve this with a dynamics function so this problem isn't something that is impossible to solve.

2. So lets say we solve it. Even if we did measure the same thing we have another problem. We don't have time to take advantage of the central limit theorem. Yes, multiple noisy readings of the same thing average to the true reading, but since we have only a split second to decide whether to slam on the break to avoid an accident we don't have the capacity to await convergence of the noisy sensor and noisy dynamic function to the true measurement. But lets say we did even though we don't.

3. The radar sensor isn't actually a normal distribution in terms of its noise. It's actually more accurate in certain low visibility conditions because it goes through occlusion, but less accurate given certain environments like going under an underpass. Since the noise isn't normally distributed you don't have the guarantees from statistics which you were hoping to rely on.

From the keynote of CVPR. CVPR is the premier annual computer vision event comprising the main conference and several co-located workshops and short courses.

https://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrcCVPR

thanks for intro to that car review channel. really good stuff

I don't know much about this but wasn't Tesla getting safety award after safety award in testing and that translating into lower insurance rates?

My understanding is that they are safe in the event of a crash, not that they have the best crash avoidance.

That's patently a hilariously non-sequitur answer to the OP saying HE got rear ended by a Tesla. HE is the one with whiplash and a totaled car. Who CARES about how safe the stupid Tesla was that did it....

So, it is safer "in the event of a crash" for the people inside the car, but if crash rates are higher (statistics pending) it might be more dangerous for everybody both outside and inside of the car.

Exactly. Tesla is 100% trying to keep you safe on the inside while disregarding safety on the outside. Just look at the Cybertruck, pedestrian safety is clearly their last thought.

Doing well in crash tests means the car does well in those specific scenarios, but may not mean much about other safety issues.

The first several model years of the Model S were generally considered to be among the safest vehicles in the history of automobiles.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-tesla-model-s-achieves...

I continue to believe that minor differences car safety ratings are red herrings. (In a previous life I worked as a mech engg in car manufacturing)

It reminds me of benchmarks on MNIST datasets, to decide which model is better. It is like patting yourself on the back for funding better helmets, when your bike infrastructure is straight out of mad max. The real problem is somewhere else.

Crashes almost never occur like we see in these crash tests. The prime culprit is what you can call 'dangerous actions'. If a Tesla driver is far more likely to be distracted (FSD, Touch controls) or more likely to be out of control at speed (insane acceleration with terrible braking), then a Tesla is an unsafe car. This is irrespective of the marginally lower likelihood of death in ideally controlled circumstances. Taking standard customer behaviors into account is one of the basics of design. If you market your lvl2 system as FSD, then a few idiots will let the car drive while in the back seat. If your car can't brake effectively past 120 mph, then maybe it shouldn't accelerate to that number within the blink of an eye.

I am also ignoring the safety risk posed by these vehicles towards anyone else on the street. It has long been my complaint that the SUV & Pickup craze is actively making the roads unsafe. They have worse blind spots & can kill with the kind of efficiency that sedans can only dream of.

Tesla's safety ratings are misleading too. For one, Tesla's high safety has to do with being one of the first truly electric cars on the market. Electric cars can't roll, are heavy and thus the crash zones can absorb more energy due to having more mass. Electric cars are thus objectively safer in straight line collisons. [1] But, that's like saying that your military tank is incredibly safe, but crushing dozens of cars in front of you. Safety should be about how safe the streets are with your car on the road, vs not being on the road. Alas, this is a problem with the car industry at large. So, Tesla isn't really to blame for this one.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/with-more-electric-vehicles...

"But, that's like saying that your military tank is incredibly safe, but crushing dozens of cars in front of you. Safety should be about how safe the streets are with your car on the road, vs not being on the road. "

I recently witnessed an almost head-on collision between a H2 Hummer and a Chevy Malibu. The H2 Hummer lost control (i think due to speeding) and served into oncoming traffic. The H2 flipped on it side but was barely damaged; the Malibu was completely mangled.

An "autopilot" that requires a driver's attention is not an autopilot.

If people really understood that the car driving is less reliable than themselves, they might not turn it on at all. Imagine you teaching a 16 year old to drive while commuting, everyday. NTY

> An "autopilot" that requires a driver's attention is not an autopilot.

Weird; I thought that's exactly what an autopilot was.

And they probably still are, along with the rest of the models.

Assuming you're actually the one driving them that is, and not a broken ass camera.

Where I live Tesla has quite high insurance rates. Mostly because it’s very expensive to repair but also because Tesla drivers tend to speed and cause more accidents than other drivers.

Perhaps the drivers didn't mean to speed...

Tesla doesnt make a $200K car.......

They may not be in production yet, but they are asking $200k for the Roadster (and $250k for the founders), which might be the super car I presume parent is talking about. The plaid while not $200k still clocks in at $150k

>They may not be in production yet, but they are asking $200k for the Roadster (and $250k for the founders), which might be the super car I presume parent is talking about

Well, that's the problem. Claiming that the car that isn't even in production yet has "underbraking" issue is misleading at best.

Regardless, I don't think that person was talking about the upcoming Roadster, because they added a link as a citation in "having their $200k super car be criminally underbraked. [2]", and [2] is a link to a video review of Model S Plaid by a big car youtube channel. I have no idea why they linked that specific video, because it was a glowing review of the car. The reviewers were giddy and threw tons of praise at it in pretty much every aspect.

I meant the plaid. Sorry.

You are right, Tesla makes good cars. The rub is pretty much about carelessness on part of Tesla in safety design.

I specifically linked the video because they are even handed in their reviews and not one of those who put down cars just because they don't like the CEO.

Thanks for explaining your point, I really appreciate it.

Mostly because the original reply seemed like it was just trying to insert a video that doesn't fit the criticism drawn in the comment, but is baiting for people who will just read the comment without watching the video. But I get the point you were trying to make now.

While I disagree, I cannot in good conscience not upvote a point made well.

That's odd since Tesla seems proud of their AI expertise. Isn't something like "image is blurred" a fairly pedestrian (heh) exercise? Especially given that you would have related data, like what speed the car is going, if you're parked, etc.

They do report if the camera can't get a good image. Glare from the sun is the most common reason. It is certainly possible that there is a window between when vision is degraded enough to be dangerous and when it alerts the driver, but a single occurrence isn't proof of a widescale problem. That is the type of thing that should be investigated in more depth, but it is hard to get anyone to care when it is only a theory that isn't even yet connected to a single accident.

This does sound like something that should be the subject of a recall investigation.

Genuine question, what temperature are cars expected to be stored at safely? I'm not talking about engine temperature, just literally the room temperate of the garage. I'm not wanting to excuse or accuse anyone here, but are cars supposed to be manufactured such that they can sit in 150F garages for days at a time without any maintenance?

Because cars sit out in the sun in hot countries all day (unavoidably), the automotive supply chain have developed quite rigorous standards for pretty much everything in a car.

Typically every electronic component must be rated from -40 to +105 C. I'd imagine there's similar requirements for all the interior parts of a car too. Cars have a lot of glass, so get very hot in direct sunlight and quickly reach ambient on cold nights.

The reason cars take so long to "catch up" to consumer electronics (eg it's only in the last year or two that large LCD displays have started appearing in cars, or that LED headlights have become commonplace) is that the car design cycle is very long - typically about 7 years. Tesla decided to do things differently, which meant they could iterate much quicker. It also meant they used components not qualified for automotive use. Mostly they got away with it, but there have been some issues (for example their large displays started failing in hot countries).

There are a lot of cars that get parked in the hot Arizona sun everyday, where temperatures outdoors can exceed 100 F and interior temperatures can exceed 150 F[1].

[1] https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/home-garden/james-corne...

I would expect SOME vehicles to do so just fine.

Really hot weather in the Continental USA can be pretty toasty, and if a garage was designed more like a crummy solar furnace, I would expect to see it hit those temperatures.

My car has survived at least 150F interior temperatures parked outside during a sunny Pacific Northwest heatwave. I'm estimating that temp because I had some plastic in the car that was rated to lose stiffness at 150F and it got a bit floppy after the car was parked outside in sunny 105F+ weather weeks on end and the plastic was in shade.

It can be hard on lead acid batteries and shorten their life, some lithium ion battery chemistries top out at 130F ambient operating temperature, and ABS plastic that dashboards can be made of is rated to about 176F. If its 150F ambient, the dash could be even hotter.

When the Tesla technician came out to replace the camera anti reflection shield, the plastic just crumbled in his hands.

Btw, they never actually replaced the camera, just the anti reflection shield, and cleaned the windshield and the camera lens.

> my car is parked outside ... the interior temperatures can easily rise over 150f

I live in Arizona as well and this is why you'll see everyone in parking lots parking under trees in the summer, with empty spaces in between.

Teslas have overheat protection (turns on the AC when interior temp > 105F) for a reason (one of them because it's cheaper to manufacture cars that don't need to withstand higher temperatures).

Your garage is not 150F, and certainly not for days at a time.

It’s not parked in a garage. Outside, facing southwest, in the Phoenix summer.

Tesla’s overheat protection only works for 12 hours at a time. If I were commuting, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened, but during Covid, the car was just sitting there for days without being driven. Tesla doesn’t offer a way to extend overheat protection past 12 hours, even when plugged in.

Indeed mine certainly is not, but apparently the parent commenter's routinely reaches 150F.

I assumed they were referring to the interior of the vehicle rather than the interior of a building.

I suppose teslas could come with warnings, "this vehicle is not intended for use in Arizona".

I wonder if the US government is afraid to kill their golden goose like what happened with Boeing.

EV is the future and China is moving fast.

EV != Tesla and Tesla != Autopilot Also maybe hydrogen is the future?

> Also maybe hydrogen is the future

It definitely isn't if we are going to move away from fossil fuels.

You can get H+ by cracking water. You “just” need a source of cheap energy.

Storage is tough — those protons are really tiny and it’s hard to keep them from escaping

> You can get H+ by cracking water. You “just” need a source of cheap energy.

Well aware. But we don't have a source of cheap energy. And guess what, whatever source of energy we have, it is very wasteful to produce hydrogen.

First, you need electrolysis. Around 80% efficient. However, in order to get any usable amount of energy per volume out of it, you need to either compress hydrogen (using more power) or liquefy it (way more power, boiloff problems).

Now you need to transport it, physically. This uses more power, usually with some big trucks driving around, just as we have today with gasoline and diesel.

This will get stored into some gas station equivalent. All the while losing mass, as those protons are hard to store, indeed.

Now you can drive your vehicle and refill. Some inefficiencies here too but we can ignore them unless you need to travel long distances to refuel.

This hydrogen will generally be used in a fuel cell. The output of the fuel cell is... electrical energy (+water)

You could skip all that, use the electricity from the power grid to directly charge batteries. No hydrogen production plants needed, no container challenges, no diffusing through containers and embrittlement to worry about. No trucks full of hydrogen going around. Electricity is found almost everywhere, even in places where there's little gas infrastructure.

Mind you, hydrogen has another disadvantage, other than thermodynamics: it ensures control is kept with the existing energy companies. We would still need to rely on their infrastructure to refill our cars (much like gas stations). They would like to keep it that way. Ultimately it doesn't really matter what's the fuel we are using, as long as we keep driving to gas stations.

If hydrogen fuel cells lasted longer than batteries (in lifespans, not-per charge) or required fewer rare metals to create, I can see a giant win. EVs are pretty wasteful if you consider the entire car lifespan and not just what the end consumer fills up with, to the point that I feel the ecologically superior action is just to drive an old ICE.

> required fewer rare metals to create

Fuel cells require expensive and exotic catalysts, like platinum. So they don't even win there.

Hydrogen might have aviation uses but I'm just as skeptical we'll get over the safety issues.

> EVs are pretty wasteful if you consider the entire car lifespan

Only until the required recycling infrastructure is in place. We can recycle around 96% of the material used in batteries. There's much less equipment needed for an EV, compared to ICE. There's also a push to use less of rare earth minerals like cobalt. Any advances in battery tech (like solid state batteries) can be easily incorporated, as electric motors don't care where the electricity comes from.

EVs don't have spark plugs(consumable), oil pumps and filters, alternators(the drive motors work as alternators for regen braking), air filters, crankshafts, valves, pistons, exhaust(and catalytic converters with rare metals), starter motor... the list goes on. Even the brake pads last longer. It's at a minimum a battery bank, an electric motor, and some electronics to manage power. An order of magnitude less moving parts (that have to be manufactured, wear out, and have to be replaced).

> the ecologically superior action is just to drive an old ICE.

An old but relatively recent, fuel-injected ICE with the latest emissions standards? Probably much than getting a new one built, yes.

A really old one with a busted engine (or one before we had catalytic converters in the exhaust)? Then I do not know. Might be better to scrap and get a somewhat less old vehicle.

Honestly, the ecological win here would be to convert the existing fleet into EVs, rather than creating entirely new cars. There are some hobbyists doing that successfully. It's not even difficult - the difficult part is adapting the parts to fit the specific vehicle. The economics may be difficult to justify, however.

At some point, when we have a sizable EV fleet, getting recycled batteries into them would be the way to go. They will probably last longer than our current ICE vehicles.

You speak as if lead-acid batteries, the most recycle-friendly battery, had anything in common with EV batteries, besides being batteries.

If a lead acid battery is bread in a bag, a Lithium battery is a tacobell combo: much more energy, much more waste material.

Reduce comes before Reduce and Recycle

I agree, H+ is a dumb approach.

And H2 isn't much better.

Hydrogen as fuel is unrelated to fossil fuels. Look it up. Edit: 95% of hydrogen is currently produced from hydrocarbons. BUT Electrolysis

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water Hydrogen as a fuel has been tested in buses. Works a proof of concept.

This was about hyundai marketing hydrogen as a fuel:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/07/04/...

In the end, it will depend on the energy conversion efficiency that can achieved in the future.

Can't renewables produce hydrogen?

They can. But overwhelmingly, they do not. It's much cheaper to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and that's not likely to change any time soon.

All major car companies manufacture EVs. Off the top of my head, I've seen BMW, Prius (Toyota), Honda electric cars outside recently.

Hydrogen production should be coupled to renewable energy production in the way they will pair bitcoin mining to any energy plant

Meanwhile, TSLA is up 52% over the past 30 days, and 200% over the last year.

Does that magically make it safe? I don’t get the connection.

My charitable read of the GP comment is that they are pointing out how ludicrous the stock increase is, but that's my reading. Side note, how much attention does your username usually garner you?

None typically. I don’t think anyone has made the connection, publicly anyways, since I’ve started using it.

Chenquieh

I think the point is that Tesla investors and customers don’t care about safety, either for the passengers or as an externality.

I think he's referring to the naive idea that stock prices in general are somehow influenced by what a company is doing and are not pure speculation.

That's horrifying. Every phone I've owned in the last 5 years or so notifies me when my camera is smudgy... it's not exactly cutting edge tech. Does this mean Tesla isn't doing this?

Tesla does do this. But there are likely some cases that are blurred enough to be a problem but not quite enough to trigger the detection.

FWIW, I've seen a Youtube video of a non-Tesla with radar cruise have a similar issue. The radar was caked with snow and it was trying to run over the car in front of it. Does it not have detection for that scenario? Of course it does, but this one somehow managed to not trigger the radar blocked warning.

These systems are not expected to be perfect at the moment.

There are five forward facing cameras in a Model 3. So you're not being told the full picture here.

https://imgur.com/a/KDkjbuF https://imgur.com/a/vEbpzPo

See for yourself.

All the forward facing cameras reside behind the rear view mirror. While the technician had removed the rear view mirror, I took a short video of the windshield blurring. Notice that through the haze it’s almost impossible to read the house numbers, about 9” tall, approximately 15’ away.

And no, the car wasn’t shipped like this. I have plenty of footage from a year earlier, where the front facing cameras are crystal clear. Something happened in the last year.

As someone keenly interested in such topics, would you permit using these pictures, and if so, how would you want to be credited? (the background is https://TorchDrift.org/ , and the image reminded me of the right hand side of our poster here https://assets.pytorch.org/pted2021/posters/I3.png)

There are three cameras in the front center of the windscreen and two more forward facing cameras on the sides of the car. Again, for a total of five forward facing cameras.

I see your picture of the on-screen rendering of an image from just one of these five cameras.

And your second picture (video) which appears to show things that have been disassembled or partly uncovered… hard to draw any conclusions from that especially about the side forward facing cameras which are situated not where your picture shows, but just behind the front doors. Also can’t draw many conclusions about the windscreen cameras, not having been there myself to see what was done in the disassembly. And it’s a picture of the interior of the car, back side of the camera assembly? Not sure what it is supposed to be adding here.

I’m going to use the terminology from this image: https://i.shgcdn.com/739286e6-3f49-463f-ae61-cbc6c99d5270/-/...

And then I’m going to reference some part numbers from the Tesla parts manual you can find online.

The forward looking side cameras are embedded in the b-pillars, and are unable to image directly in front of the car. I checked my car, and cannot see the lens of these cameras when a few degrees from straight forward. The image above shows a field of view which approximately matches what I could assess.

The only cameras which can see directly in front are the main forward camera, the narrow forward camera, and the wide forward camera. All three cameras are behind the rear view mirror, in the 1143746-00-C module.

When viewing the in-car recording, it’s not clear as to which of the three is being displayed. It’s possible the other two weren’t impaired, but I find that unlikely.

These three cameras are enclosed in a small area behind the rear view mirror, bounded by the windshield in front, and the triple cam glare shield around them. 1086333-00-E <-- Triple Cam glare shield.

The entire inside of the windshield enclosed by the glare shield was coated in a haze. When I touched the surface, it was sticky. The Tesla technician (servicing Phoenix) indicated that he had never seen this failure. I sincerely believe he hadn’t.

The video I had posted previously was showing the windshield, after the rear view mirror was removed, along with the camera module by the Tesla technician. As I panned left to right, you can see that the house numbers are obscured through the haze. If I recall correctly, the haze was roughly uniform inside that glare shield. As all three forward facing cameras are looking through that same haze, I expect all three were significantly impacted. I did not have an optical acuity test sheet to validate my subjective assessment that it was hazy, and have to go by the inability to see ~9” tall house numbers from 15’ away. I haven’t done the minute of angle calculation, but I expect that level of acuity would be sufficient for an individual to be considered legally blind.

What’s even more frustrating is that when the technician was disassembling the rear view mirror assembly, he discovered that there were 2 missing screws. When he went to remove that triple cam glare shield, it fractured into many pieces, almost turning into dust.

How did it get that hot in there? We keep a reflective windshield screen in the windshield. The rear view mirror and cameras would have been sandwiched in the small space between the screen and the windshield. Coupled with the highly optically absorbent glare shield, and exactly aligned solar exposure, and high external temperatures… there must be some strange combination that caused this failure.

My biggest gripe is that Tesla may not be forced to recall, and when this happens again, I’m going to have to pay for the repair out of pocket. I’ve already purchased a replacement glare shield off eBay in case I have to replace it in the future. The glare shield appears to have some optical absorbent flocking, likely attached with glue. It’s this glue that I expect couldn’t withstand the heat.

The technician cleaned the windshield, the camera lenses, and reassembled (the new glare shield had to be ordered and was replaced on a subsequent service call). The problem hasn’t recurred in the following 4 months, even though the parking orientation, windshield screen use, etc hasn’t changed. Luckily Phoenix does cool down.

Btw, I think the three forward camera design behind the windshield is quite innovative. The cameras are looking out through an area that is swept by the windshield wipers, helping to maintain visibility. The cameras are separated by sufficient distance that a single bug shouldn’t obscure all three. The only common environmental failure mode appears to be this weird issue on the inside of the windshield. Hard to fault the engineers designing this. I’d be extremely proud of this design, if I designed it. I happen to have hit a corner case.

My wish is that Tesla enable some sort of software to detect this failure, and offer free repair for this failure for the life of the vehicle - regardless of how often this recurs.

In typically Tesla fashion, this could be a simple over the air software update, but will likely be followed by months of arguing with the service department when the fault is detected and the repair actually needs to happen.

Without this software detection, I’m afraid that this failure will go undetected by many other Tesla owners, incorrectly putting their trust into auto pilot using cameras with this failure mode.

Awesome comment, thank you!

> was shocked to find that my camera was completely blurry

They maybe don't need to figure out how it got blurry.

But their testing regime is sad if it continues to work when it can't see!

It sounds like the fix here is a built-in-test for the camera capable of detecting this sort of obscuration / degraded acuity.

There are several cameras for redundancy. The car also doesn't need crystal clear vision to drive. What may seem like a blurry image to human eye with simple filtering can become much more visible. It also doesn't need to see details, but rather needs to detect if there are any objects in the way or where the lane markings are.

https://imgur.com/a/KDkjbuF https://imgur.com/a/vEbpzPo

I've also filed a NHTSA report, some 12 months old now, that has been greeted with ... crickets. Something very basic, that any car maker should be able to do, is write a manual that teaches people how to use the (poorly written) software.

The manual explains that you can do a 3-step invocation of a voice command: 1) push 'voice' button; 2) utter command; 3) push 'voice' button to complete. It hasn't worked that way since 2019. See, e.g. Software version: 2021.32 [1], p. 161

Good luck teaching people how to use 'Full Self Driving' with these kinds of error checks.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_s_owners_man...

Tesla is making a virtue out of cutting costs, using cheaper parts, and running a public beta.

I guess one real test will be what the resale value of Teslas ends up being. Because they have been growing so fast, most Teslas are very new. What will they be like at 10? 15? Will they stay in shape, or will they drag the company valuation down? Also right now they have the cool car premium, but that’s bound to be shared once other catch up.

Ford T was a similar bet I guess, attention to detail must have been lower with mass production, and it clearly paid off. Hard to know this time.

There are five forward facing cameras on a Model 3. Was it all five of them that were blurry? How could you tell? Or just the one selected as the frontmost one on the dash cam video?

Just the one that’s visible on the dashcam video, but the enclosure where all (I’m not aware of any other place) the forward facing cameras reside, the window was covered in a haze. Do you know of any way to view the other camera feeds? Are there any other forward facing cameras which aren’t behind the rear view mirror?

https://imgur.com/a/KDkjbuF https://imgur.com/a/vEbpzPo

My $300 OPPO phone alerts me when there's dust in front of the lens... Maybe maybe Tesla could benefit from some similar technology.

FWIW Oppo sells more phones per month than Teslas lifetime total

It's also a problem that the camera could have degraded vision that's inadequate for self driving yet report no problem at all and continue driving as if everything's fine.

I'm pretty sure your situation isn't the only way the vision can be obstructed, maybe liquids, or even bird poop can also degrade vision.

This is what I would expect as well. Some kind of visual self-test, and if/when it fails, the driver gets an obvious warning and autopilot does not engage - you get some kind of clearly visible warning so that you can contact Tesla to investigate / repair the obstruction.

This does happen, but maybe not in all cases. I've had it happen where lane change is no longer supported (and you get a notification) because the sun is blinding one of the pillar cameras.