this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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I recall that people blocked Waymo cars at one point by simply placing orange cones in front of them. Given Teslas only use cameras I wonder if you could just slap a sticker of an orange cone (or just a splash of orange paint) on the hood and confuse it enough that it wouldn’t move…
Edit: Or, if you really want to be a dick, get some black stickers (the stronger the glue the better) and surreptitiously put them over one or more cameras.
This still blows my mind. My fucking robot vacuum uses LiDAR, and multi-ton vehicles on public roads use cameras? Jesus Christ.
"Well you see lidar cameras are expensive. Yeah... that's the excuse. No more questions" - Tesla whenever they are asked to explain themselves
Actually the excuse Musk uses is that humans only use their eyes to drive, so that’s enough for cars as well.
Wrong on so many levels…
Right... except for hearing horns, sirens or brakes screeching. Feeling a bump in the road and using the tactile feedback to determine if you should swerve or stop.
Elon Musk has been chaffeured the vast majority of his life and it shows.
In my country when you do a driving test one of the things you have to do is pass a hazard perception test. Everyone hates it because it consists of watching a video and clicking on the hazards when you notice them.
The problem is it's almost impossible because the Field of view is probably only about 90°, you can't turn your head because you're locked to the forward-facing camera position, and you lack all the other information.
There are practise tests online, it's interesting to take them because it really does show you how dependent you are on things other than just direct vision.
Holy shit did he really say that?
Musk has been stubbornly clinging to the belief that a vision system similar to human stereoscopic vision is all that a self-driving vehicle needs and has ordered his engineers to produce such a vehicle.
The "humans drive cars with just optical input" has become a weirdly tightly held misconception for Elon Musk, it's a core part of his personality where autonomy is concerned:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-tesla-doesnt-023035552.html
Humans drive with optical input, haptic feedback, and millenia of evolution to handle the decision-making and social skills required to handle a vehicle safely. No LiDAR or radar waves, sure, but I wouldn't say no if either were on offer!
The dumbest part? He developed this belief in ~2019. Lidar costs have dropped immensely since then, and are fast-dropping still. Any technologist who doesn't fucking suck knows that component prices follow that depreciation curve. So he's basically an old man shouting at a cloud at this point, it would be cheaper to fix the mistake, but it could hurt his personal branding as a guru.