Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy
What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They&#x27;ve shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that&#x27;s claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who&#x27;s serious, doesn&#x27;t have a LIDAR.<p>Now, it&#x27;s &quot;later&quot;, their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it&#x27;s not magic, and it&#x27;s not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he&#x27;s joined a death march.<p>If anything, Tesla should have learned by now that you don&#x27;t want to need to recognize objects to avoid them. The Mobileye system works that way, being very focused on identifying moving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. It&#x27;s led to at least four high speed crashes with stationary objects it didn&#x27;t identify as obstacles. This is pathetic. We had avoidance of big stationary objects working in the DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005.<p>With a good LIDAR, you get a point cloud. This tells you where there&#x27;s something. Maybe you can identify some of the &quot;somethings&quot;, but if there&#x27;s an unidentified object out there, you know it&#x27;s there.  The planner can plot a course that stays on the road surface and doesn&#x27;t hit anything. Object recognition is mostly for identifying other road users and trying to predict their behavior.<p>Compare Chris Urmson&#x27;s talk and videos at SXSW 2016 [1] with Tesla&#x27;s demo videos from last month.[2]
Notice how aware the Google&#x2F;Waymo vehicle is of what other road users are doing, and how it has a comprehensive overview of the situation.  See Urmson show how it handled encountering unusual situations such as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom.  Note Urmson&#x27;s detailed analysis of how a Google car scraped the side of a bus at 2MPH while maneuvering around sandbags placed in the parking lane.<p>Now watch Tesla&#x27;s sped-up video, slowed down to normal speed.  (1&#x2F;4 speed is about right for viewing.)
Tesla wouldn&#x27;t even detect small sandbags; they don&#x27;t even see traffic cones. Note how few roadside objects they mark. If it&#x27;s outside the lines, they just don&#x27;t care.  There&#x27;s not enough info to take evasive action in an emergency. Or even avoid a pothole.<p>Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving. It will use LIDAR, cameras, and radars. Continental will have a good low-cost LIDAR using the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts at an affordable price point.<p>Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;player.vimeo.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;192179727" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;player.vimeo.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;192179727</a>