The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

  • @breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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    10710 hours ago

    Eyes can’t see in low visibility.

    musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”

    FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes

    musk reaction -

    • @Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.

      Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That’s how he lives.

    • @helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      6 hours ago

      The whole “we drive with our eyes” thing is such bullshit. Humans are terrible drivers. Autonomous driving should be better than humans.

      That goes for OpenPilot too. They actually openly advertise that their software makes the same mistakes as humans, as if it’s some sort of advancement. Like if I could plug Lidar into my brain, I totally would.

    • @conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.

      • @jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        25 hours ago

        Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.

        • @magiccupcake@lemmy.world
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          145 hours ago

          Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.

          Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.

          • @conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            54 hours ago

            They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.

      • @III@lemmy.world
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        156 hours ago

        Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.

      • @normanwall@lemmy.world
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        158 hours ago

        Honestly though, I’m a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD

    • RandomStickman
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      179 hours ago

      You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.

    • aramis87
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      98 hours ago

      What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.

      • @SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world
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        77 hours ago

        I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.

        • @1984@lemmy.today
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          5 hours ago

          I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.

          I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.

          • idunnololz
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            35 hours ago

            I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.

            • @spacesatan@lazysoci.al
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              258 minutes ago

              ‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.

              • idunnololz
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                144 minutes ago

                It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.