“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
That’s why they use LIDAR and not just visual cameras. They don’t need to know the difference between different objects; they just need to know an object is there, in the way, or even moving in a way that could potentially put it in the path of the vehicle.
They’re making it more complicated by working on both autonomous driving, and also image recognition for use by AI.
I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that’s literally what those technologies are for.
But even then, that’s not enough. LIDAR/radar can’t help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.
It isn’t a matter of which is better - you use both, and more.
my point is that “if there’s an obstruction, stop” means these cars are going to be stopping and requiring human intervention all the time. That’s semi autonomous at best.
I don’t know if you’ve encountered intransigent geese in your driving adventures, but the only way to deal with them is to slowly drive through the flock until they move out of your way.
fully autonomous cars are never going to happen without major changes to our roads. we’d be better off investing in more busses and trains.