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‘LiDAR is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Newsflash for you, Elon. Most people are terrible drivers. We should be striving to do better as a society, not imitate something that already sucks.
He also claimed he wanted to make self driving safer than humans. You can't do that well if the car has the same visual limitations a human has.
When Autopilot started I would hear people joke about how it couldn't drive in bad weather where people could. They seem to miss the point that when the computer begins to lose information needed to navigate, it's going to stop driving. People lose information and they keep going. One of these is safer.
Of course if Elon had thrown everything at the car to make it have information even in terrible or odd conditions, there'd be more merit in claiming those cars are safer than humans. But between genius brain (however much there is) and narcissist, the latter won out in doing it his way because others were doing it the obvious way.
The safest roads would be fully automated and tapped into each other. We wouldn't even need lights at intersections. A hybrid mix of human/computer traffic is always going to be dangerous.
There's also the point that, while AI has gotten quite far, the human brain is still fairly superior at accurately interpolating and interpreting limited information. This may have changed in the past year or two, but my impression is that humans are still far better than machines at handling new or "corrupted" information, like driving in poor visibility, or suddenly having road markings disappear, etc.