Welp, he's wrong. He won't admit it. More people will have to die and/or Tesla will have to face bankruptcy before they fire him and start adding lidar (etc) back in.
Real sad because by then they probably won't have the cash to pay for the insane upfront investment that Google has been plowing into this for 16 years now.
The issue came when he promised every car would become a robotaxi. This means he either has to retrofit them all with lidar, or solve it with the current sensor set. It might be ego as well, but adding lidar will also expose them to class action suits.
The promise that contributed to the soaring valuation, now looks like a curse that stops him from changing anything. It feels a bit poetic.
A LIDAR can get near-exact distances between objects with error margins of something like 0.2%, even 100m away. It takes an absolute expert human to accurately judge distance between themselves and an object even 5 meters away. You can see this in the youtube movies of the "Tesla beep". It used to be the case that if the Tesla autopilot judged a collision between 2 objects inevitable, it had a characteristic beep.
The result was that this beep would go off ... the humans in the car know it means a crash is imminent, but can't tell what's going on, where the crash is going to happen, then 2 seconds "nothing" happens, and then cars crash, usually 20-30 meters in front of the Tesla car. Usually the car then safely stops. Humans report that this is somewhere between creepy and a horror-like situation.
But worse yet is when the reverse happens. Distance judgement is the strength of LIDARs. But they have weaknesses that humans don't have. Angular resolution, especially in 3D. Unlike human eyes, a LIDAR sees nothing in between it's pixels, and because the 3d world is so big even 2 meters away the distance between pixels is already in the multiple cm range. Think of a lidar as a ball with laser beams, infinitely thin, coming out of it. The pixels give you the distance until that laser hits something. Because of how waves work, that means any object that is IN ONE PLANE smaller than 5 centimers is totally invisible to lidar at 2 meters distance. At 10 meters it's already up to over 25 cm. You know what object is smaller than 25 cm in one plane? A human standing up, or walking. Never mind a child. If you look at the sensor data you see them appear and disappear, exactly the way you'd expect sensor noise to act.
You can disguise this limitation by purposefully putting your lidar at an angle, but that angle can't be very big.
The net effect of this limitation is that a LIDAR doesn't miss a small dog at 20 meters distance, but fails to see a child (or anything of roughly a pole shape, like a traffic sign) at 3 to 5 meters distance. The same for things composed of beams without a big reflective surface somewhere ... like a bike. A bike at 5 meters is totally invisible for a LIDAR. Oh and perhaps even worse, a LIDAR just doesn't see cliffs. It doesn't see staircases going down, or that the surface you're on ends somewhere in front of you. It's strange. A LIDAR that can perfectly track every bird, even at a kilometer distance, cannot see a child at 5 meters. Or, when it's about walking robots, LIDAR robots have a very peculiar behavior: they walk into ... an open door, rather than through it 10% of the time. Makes perfect sense if you look at the LIDAR data they see, but very weird when you see it happen.
Worse yet is how humans respond to this. We all know this, but: how does a human react when they're in a queue and the person in front of them (or car in front of their car) stops ... and they cannot tell why it stops? We all know what follows is an immediate and very aggressive reaction. Well, you cannot predict what a lidar sees, so robots with lidars constantly get into that situation. Or, if it's a lidar robot attempting to go through a door, you predict it'll avoid running into anything. Then the robot hits the wood ... and you hit the robot ... and the person behind you hits you.
Humans and lidars don't work well together.
And yet here we are where the testing grounds are our public roadways and we, the public, are the guinea pigs.
https://thevictoriancyclist.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/cycling...
This is probably core to their legal strategy. No matter how much data the cars collect they can always safely destroy most because this allows them to pretend the autonomous driving systems weren’t involved in the crash.
At this point it’s beyond me why people still trust the brand and the system. Musk really only disrupted the “fake it” part of “fake it till you make it”.
It's something to keep in mind but it's not an issue itself.
> The YouTuber Mark Rober, a former engineer at Nasa, replicated this behaviour in an experiment on 15 March 2025. He simulated a range of hazardous situations, in which the Model Y performed significantly worse than a competing vehicle. The Tesla repeatedly ran over a crash-test dummy without braking. The video went viral, amassing more than 14m views within a few days.
> The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.
In my previous comment I was wondering why would anyone still trust Tesla’s claims and not realistically assume the worst. It’s because plenty of people will only worry about it when it happens to them. It’s not an issue in itself until after your burned to a crisp in your car.
What would be good is if the guardian talked to domain experts about the sensor suite and why they are not suitable for "self drive" or even that the self driving isn't certified for level3 autonomy.
The other thing thats deeply annoying is that of course everything is recorded, because thats how they build the dataset. crucially it'll have the disengage command recorded, at what time and with a specific reason.
Why? because that is a really high quality signal that something is wrong, and can be fed into the dadtaset as a negative example.
Now, if they do disengage before crashes, there will be a paper trail and testing to make that work, and probably a whole bunch of simulation work as well.
But the gruan as ever, is only skin deep analysis.
TBH I see this more as a “firefighters aren’t being given the right tools” issue, as this is far from unique to Tesla, and the tools have existed since laminated side glass became a requirement - but don’t seem to yet be part of standard issue or training.
https://www.firehouse.com/rescue/vehicle-extrication/product...
tardibear•2h ago