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https://medium.com/predict/musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-and-now-they-are-in-serious-trouble-2e37269e387a>
"Over the years, we have witnessed Tesla’s incredible rise to power, and they
now stand as a juggernaut of the EV world. But one of Tesla’s most important
promises has yet to be fulfilled: true self-driving cars. In fact, according to
Musk, we should already have millions of Tesla robotaxis shuttling around the
globe. Yet, far from this utopian vision coming true, Tesla is actually
slipping behind in the autonomous vehicle race — and by quite a margin! So what
happened to cause this fall from grace? Well, thanks to a report from the
Washington Post, we now know the real reason, and we’ve come to understand
that it is all Musk’s fault.
To understand this whole debacle, we first need to understand how autonomous
vehicles work and why Tesla’s recent approach is counterproductive. I already
covered this topic in a previous article, so just consider this a quick recap.
Most autonomous or driver-assistance systems use a suite of different sensors
around the car to understand the world around them and then use artificial
intelligence to make driving decisions based on that data. These sensors
include cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and lidar. Why are there so many
different sensors? Well, because it ensures the data going into the AI is of
sufficient quality, given that the sensors often experience redundancy
(including broken sensors, obscured vision, or difficulty performing in
conditions such as rain or bright light). It also gives a far deeper
understanding of the world around the car, which enables better and easier
decision-making by the AI.
However, in 2021, Tesla bucked this trend. They abandoned all the sensors and
opted for a vision-only system. The reason why? At the time, it seemed that
Tesla thought that their AI could cope with this limited data input and that
their image processing software was able to generate spatial understanding at a
high enough level for their AI, meaning that losing the sensors would save a
significant amount of money and increase their profit margins.
As it turns out, this wasn’t the case."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
