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Never Stop Driving #137: Throwing Cars at Foam Walls
“Oh noooo… you fell for Rober’s shtick,” exclaimed fellow automotive journalist Jordan Golson in an email response to last week’s newsletter. I had described a YouTube video by Mark Rober that showed a Tesla driving through a foam wall that was painted to look like a road.
The video highlighted the performance differences between two hands-free driver-assist systems. Teslas rely solely on cameras to scan the road ahead while other automakers add lidar, a light-based sensing device, to help its vehicles map obstacles. The Lexus with lidar stopped before hitting the wall. I figured the video would stir controversy, and it did. Criticisms ranged from relatively minor claims that Rober didn’t use the Tesla system properly to accusations that he was paid by Luminar, the company that makes the lidar sensor in the test Lexus. Maybe, others suggested, Rober owned Luminar stock which went up after the video or shorted Tesla, which fell.
What’s the right way to test these systems? Damned if I know. YouTuber Kyle Paul did a test with his own painted foam wall and like Rober found that a Tesla Model Y did not recognize the wall. He then drove a Cybertruck, which has the latest upgraded hardware and software, toward the wall, and it passed the test by automatically stopping before impact. Some quibbled that the Cybertruck was tested in different light conditions, which could have affected the result.
Golson’s point in subsequent exchanges was that Tesla is continually developing the so-called “Full Self Driving” system and it’s getting quite good. He owns a Tesla Model 3 and reports that the system frees him from the tedium of bumper-to-bumper traffic and highway slogs. He’s recorded several videos that show his Tesla in action, including a cross-country trip that required only a few minutes of manual driving.
Back to Rober—we all know that the internet feeds on you’re-an-idiot-no-you’re-an-idiot fodder. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, and you can listen to Rober’s responses to the allegations on this YouTube video. From my desk, the main issue is the language Tesla uses. There’s “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” which has been updated to read “Full Self-Driving (Supervised).” What’s the difference? Best I can tell, FSD is for when a route is plugged into the navigation system. Autopilot is for regular driving. But they’re really just driver-assist systems. I like the litmus test proposed by Alex Roy, who has set numerous records in transcontinental driving events: Can you sleep while behind the wheel? No? Then it’s not self-driving. The terms promise a capability that the tech can’t yet deliver.
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In other technology news, the Chinese automaker BYD announced a new battery that the company says can onboard 250-ish miles of electrical energy in five minutes. Since a typical EV requires an hour or more for a meaningful charge, manufacturers have increased EV range with ever larger, heavier, and expensive battery packs. If the BYD tech is legit, then perhaps it would lead to cars with smaller and less expensive batteries. That of course assumes that EV owners will have access to a new charger that can deliver the required kilowatts to achieve that speedy charge. Infrastructure is the main issue. Nevertheless, BYD stock rose after the announcement.
Finally, this week, if you needed a reminder that it’s good to be the king check out the latest video by my colleague Larry Chen. While in Dubai for an F1 race, he somehow talked his way into a tour of the vast car collection of one of the royal families of the United Arab Emirates. It’s as nuts as you envisioned. He even got to drive a prototype Porsche 911-based desert racer. Talk about how to win friends and influence people! Chen’s got a gift.
Have a great weekend!
Larry
P.S.: Your feedback and comments are welcome.
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I didn’t sign up to be a guinea pig for Tesla and its drivers to test their “self-driving” technology, and I am not thrilled that some of these drivers seem to think you CAN sleep at the wheel.
You can’t. There’s a camera in the cabin that watches the driver. Fall asleep — or even look down at the center screen — for more than a few seconds and the system warns you, then turns off, giving you a strike.
Get five strikes, and the system disables entirely for a week (or longer).
You can Bet Your Derrierre (BYD) is a real threat to American electric cars because they re selling (not promising like Musk) viable EVs for about $20000 and selling a lot in Central and South America.
And Ford’s president, Jim Farley, is raving about the Xiaomi EV car he has been driving (see Youtube https://youtu.be/p_VDT_o7hWY) which is half the cost of an equivalent Tesla and Farley likes it better.
The Chinese system of making foreign car manufacturers partner with a Chinese company and then
plundering any proprietary designs and plans seems to be working for them
Yeah I wrote about that few months ago. There’s all sorts of excess production capacity in that country as well.
These systems are not fool proof. Even today with auto pilots we have pilots as the systems are no perfect.
My present vehicles get false signals and brake on shadows and cars on the side of the road. The Tesla can miss things and I saw one hit a Jersey barrier that made a shift into the lane in construction.
Even a Tesla I was driving or should I say was behind the wheel was on their auto pilot an pegged road kill as it never detected it.
Leave the wheel to me and the programers for the HVAC.
When did those things happen, exactly?
Because Version 13 of FSD didn’t come out until December, and that was a wholesale top-to-bottom rewrite of the entire codebase. Anything from before that is immediately “well, we gotta try it again now. Maybe they fixed it.”
I don’t want/need to “decide” which self-driving system is good-better-best – I will never use ANY of them, period. Driving is a task that can be very dangerous to myself and others, and I’m going to take it seriously enough to give it my full attention. I don’t want some sort of electro-mechanical device to wipe my nose (or other parts), tie my shoes, kiss my wife, or hundreds of other things that I am capable – and responsible – to do myself. The only concern I think I’m valid in having is that someone else out there thinks their “system” is THE solution to “the tedium of bumper-to-bumper traffic and highway slogs”. Others are free to disagree with me, but I’m as set on this stance as it’s possible to be.
Unfortunately there are way too many who don’t take the responsibility of driving as serious as you do.
Oh, I know. But I don’t see that as an excuse to try and excuse them from the responsibility of driving altogether. Instead, I see that as an excuse to remove their privilege to drive. Yeah, yeah, I know, much easier said than done and maybe even impossible. But “nanny-state-a-robot-will-do-for-you-what-you-won’t-do-for-yourself” isn’t the nirvana I imagine for mankind…
I have defended some of the systems like adaptive cruise control in the sense that they’re *in addition to* an attentive driver, not as a replacement for. Sometimes the sensors can pick up things that I can’t. A radar based cruise system should be able to pick a car up in dense fog before I can, for instance.
But I agree with you that for most of us, driving to work (or wherever) is probably the most dangerous thing we do on a daily basis. Driving well IS a life-or-death situation and should be the full focus of anyone behind the wheel. Personally, I’m a proponent of more public transportation, as I think it would remove many of the inattentive/disinterested drivers from the road. Giving the people who don’t want to drive the choice to not have to drive should make the roadways better of us who look forward to driving.
Agree with you Larry that the language they use is misleading (at best). GM’s “supercruise” seems like a better nomenclature, as it identifies a system that is basically an enhanced cruise control.
I have never been a fan of Tesla, and this kind of thing is a big reason why. To be fair, I’m not a big fan of EVs in general, as I like a more analog driving experience, and even most modern ICE cars don’t appeal to me.
It’s what happens when you put Marketing in charge of naming things instead of the Legal Dept.!
Larry says “Since a typical EV requires an hour or more for a meaningful charge”… uh, come again? 350kW DC fast chargers are already mainstream in places like the USA, giving a meaningful charge in 10-20 minutes on vehicles that support it (which are also mainstream these days). P.S. Journalists should not parrot “miles per minute” from the press release, as it is a deceptive metric. Express charging only in kW, and miles/min can be calculated on a case-by-case basis as a function of the real-world efficiency of the combination of vehicle and driver habits.
I very much enjoyed the video. I did not think the test was biased, and I am a big fan of Elon.
I am not a fan of all this computerized B.S. however, and I am somewhat computer literate.
I think that system would be a good thing running in the back ground as a safety system for sure,
but if you are too inept or lazy to drive stay out of a car. Don’t say you are to busy either, hire a driver
if you are too busy to drive an pay attention.
All this high tech B.S. has made cars unaffordable for a poor person, and made it difficult for the do it yourselfer’s to repair the cars.
Keep up the good videos Hagerty.
I really enjoy most of them.
JJ
I’ve lost quite a bit of respect for Mark Rober. As an engineer, what problem was he trying to solve for? I don’t know of any use case where there’s a foam wall painted like a road to be in front of me. ZERO, NADA. No such use case. Also, if there were such a scenario, many of us would fail the test ourselves! After being a strong critic of Tesla’s FSD, with about 15k miles of FSD driving, it’s gold. Like what others have stated, my biggest issue is with Tesla calling it “full self driving”. If they called it “drive assist on steroids” DASSOS, it would be more appropriate. You need about 1k miles to truly familiarize yourself with it. After that, it makes commutes a lot less stressful. People who claim it adds more stress to their driving have not really spent the time to test it. My Supercruise, which only works on highways, doesn’t even come close to the Tesla.
Would a radar+camera system work better? Sure! But how much more would this add to the cost of the car?
Would people be willing to pay for this? My issue with Rober is that he makes it appear as if the Tesla’s FSD is crap and that’s not the case at all. It’s the best commercially available system out there today.
This comment highlights my thoughts too. It’s a ridiculous test to get clicks. And designing systems to meet ridiculous tests only drives unnecessary cost and failure points into the system.
Obviously the majority of commenters on this site want the driving experience and that’s great. But none have asked themselves what happens when they no longer should be driving. Let’s be real, no one is going to surrender their license even when they should. I had neighbors who only had one working set of senses between the two of them and the husband still had a license and drove. Public transportation? Sounds nice but at least where I live it just doesn’t exist as a practical replacement. Given the number of decades that public transit has had the opportunity to grow and hasn’t doesn’t give me much hope it’s going to be any better in the future. So what am I left with when that time comes to stop driving? No great options from my stand point. Self driving tech seems like the only possible solution.
Well said. Thanks for the comment.
“Would a radar+camera system work better? Sure!”
Ah, but FSD is not just a camera system. It is a camera system plus an incredibly advanced AI LMM (large multimodal model). The magic in FSD isn’t in the cameras. It’s in the system that interprets what is going to happen.
FSD can determine the intent of pedestrians from how they’re walking, to tell whether they’re going to step out into traffic or if they’ll wait on the curb. From that, it can determine if it needs to take evasive action from someone stepping out from behind a parked car or whether it can continue on.
Having radar and lidar wouldn’t make a bit of difference to that if you didn’t have the AI system behind it all analyzing what’s happening and, crucially, what’s GOING TO HAPPEN.
I’ll take cameras and a well-trained AI over cameras and radar and lidar combined with hand-written rules that can’t deal with anything it hasn’t seen before.
What I don’t want is to be run down by some vehicle driving itself, if you don’t want to do your own driving let another human do it,that can be risky enough, some technology is not necessary
Autopilot is basically equivalent to Super Cruise. It handles active lane centering plus speed. That’s it.
Full Self-Driving (Supervised) handles steering and throttle control, plus navigation, through all phases of driving. It handles stop signs, turns, red lights, yields, flashing yellows, merges and just about anything you’ll run into in every day driving.
I can literally go from my driveway to curbside at Logan Airport without touching the wheel or pedals once — not even shifting into Drive! The car does ALL OF IT. That’s the difference between Autopilot and FSD.
One drives for you. The other is fancy cruise control. They are very, very, VERY different in capability.
“The (Tesla) terms promise a capability that the tech can’t yet deliver.”
This. This is the crux of the matter, specifically Tesla’s use of the word “Full” in describing its “Full Self-Driving mode. “Full Autonomy” or Level 5 autonomy is a literal descriptor used by the SAE and those involved in the field to describe the highest level of vehicular autonomy. Tesla’s use of the word “Full” to describe its Level 3 (at best) system is fraudulent at best and highly unethical, regardless what any fanboy or fangirl might say.
I used to hear a lot about “False Advertising” and “Truth In Advertising” – supposedly there were laws against saying things like you are referring to. Especially when claims applied to health and safety. Apparently, those laws either don’t exist, or some companies are immune to them. Cigarette companies were told they couldn’t says 4 out of 5 Doctors recommended them and sugary cereals had to quit claiming they were healthy breakfast food. So how can an automaker say something is Full Self-Driving when in actuality it is not?
Respectfully, Alex Roy was writing about the need for standardization in “autonomous” vehicle testing and language nearly a decade ago. Where were you then?
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/20553/the-language-of-self-driving-cars-is-dangerous-heres-how-to-fix-it
https://www.thedrive.com/news/5817/we-made-a-nurburgring-for-autonomous-cars
Even though Roy is/was, in his words, “Pro Choice” in the “War on Driving”, he was also the only person who was openly critical of this technology as it was rolling out. Why is this only a permissible topic now when the hype surrounding autonomy has died down? Should we expect similar articles regarding EVs if/when they reach the “trough of disillusionment” the way AVs have?