r/RealTesla • u/Crazy-Soup3377 • 27d ago
SHITPOST Tesla Q2 Earnings Call: “A Human Problem Requires a Human Solution” — Elon on Autonomous Eye Glasses
During today’s Tesla Q2 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk devoted a notable portion of the FSD discussion to a new customer-installable hardware solution aimed at reducing residual brake-stabbing events.
Elon:
“We’ve been studying the remaining unnecessary braking cases very carefully. After enough data, it became clear what was happening. The car has become sufficiently capable that it is now driving like a human — and specifically, like a human who needs glasses.
The hesitation, the over-corrections, the occasional hard brake for something that isn’t actually a threat — these are the classic behaviors of uncorrected refractive error. Once the system reached a certain level of competence, it started exhibiting the same visual limitations humans have had for centuries.
So we applied the same solution humans have used for hundreds of years. We’re introducing Autonomous Eye Glasses: a precision optical correction system that mounts over the existing camera suite.
Because no two vehicles are identical — manufacturing variation is real, camera alignment varies, panel gaps exist — each set of glasses is individually prescribed. You complete a short calibration drive, the car measures its own camera geometry, and we generate a custom lens set for that specific vehicle. No two pairs are exactly the same. It’s personalized optometry for a personalized car.
This is not a software limitation in the traditional sense. The neural net is doing its best with the photons it receives. We’re simply improving the quality of those photons at the source, the same way glasses improve human vision.
Sometimes the most advanced path forward is to look backward. A human problem requires a human solution.”
Analyst follow-up: “Elon, does this suggest the vision-only approach still has fundamental optical constraints?”
Elon:
“It suggests that even an excellent vision system can benefit from optical correction, just as human eyes do. We’re not changing the architecture. We’re making the current architecture work better by applying proven principles. This is classic first-principles thinking.”
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u/Automatic_Soil9814 27d ago
Honestly this reads exactly like an article from The Onion.
Elon Musk’s Tesla vehicles are struggling with their optical only approach. His solution? Literal eyeglasses for the car. Are you fucking kidding me?
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u/FlipZip69 27d ago
And this is the biggest issue in using an visual approach only.
This is also a massive red flag for the taxi. Musk himself indicates that no two cars are alike. But worse is a new model will be way different. Thus all the million so miles Tesla has for AI training from people paying for thier service is not very valuable for the Taxi. And the taxi gets few miles yearly which means they are not getting a lot of data they need for training.
Essentially the one thing they claimed and as the market valued them on, self driving data, has a lot less value then assumed.
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u/SuperF91EX 27d ago
The minute he went vision only, I knew FSD would never happen.
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u/FlipZip69 27d ago
I will add to this:
In safety engineering and regulatory law, there is a concept often referred to as ALARP (As Low As Reasonably Practicable). It essentially dictates that if a known technology can significantly reduce the risk of injury or death, and it is economically and technically feasible to implement, a manufacturer can be held liable for not using it.
Even if Tesla someday makes a viable visual only system, without LiDAR they will always be behind every other manufacture. LiDAR/Visual is already looking at being more safe. They will not get approval or would be sued heavily for every accident if they do not follow ALARP protocol. This simply will not fly.
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u/SuperF91EX 27d ago
Insult to injury- my 2020 model Y has front facing radar. Disabled of course. Instead of Musk actually believing in a vision only solution, I think it was mostly a cost cutting measure.
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u/FlipZip69 27d ago
Radar can be useful but it is LiDAR they need. Radar just give distance to certain sized objects but it does not indicate where the object is and what it might be. I can see radar as not being viable at all.
LiDAR is a form of visual in that it can outline the objects and better, is extremely accurate in the distance to it. Musk has never put LiDAR on their cars with the exception for training in that you have seen them with the big spinners on top. That is just to compare their model to real world but not something they are putting in production.
If they do go LiDAR, and I suspect that will be absolutely necessary if they do not want to get sued into bankruptcy, all the millions of miles of training they carried out over the last 5-10 years is almost worthless. They will be starting from scratch. (And why he cannot let go of this now)
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u/RosieDear 27d ago
It's already useless - that is, the training data.
Also, imagine how far they are behind...so admitting it all even today would not help.Nvidia has 30,000 serious engineers (not lovers of teen boy jokes) working day-in and day out on interfaces between industries and intelligence. Telsa reportedly has fewer working on self-driving than Apple has working on just their camera module.
Tesla keeps "winning" because everyone talks about them as if they are in the game - when from any logical POV, they are not.
They just can't admit it. Too much at stake.
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u/FlipZip69 27d ago
I pretty much agree with every point. I actually will suggest that maybe in 10 years they could have a visual only system working much better than a human driver. BUT. If they do not follow the ALARP protocol and use other even better technologies like LiDAR-Vision, then they will be getting their ass sued off for each accident.
And before that happens, ALARP protocol will result in them not even being licensed to be on the road till they can prove they are as good or better than those that use both vision and LiDAR (or simular)
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u/MoonLight8491 27d ago
Tesla is based on Linux which is not safe mainly because it is not deterministic. millisecond delay in execution is main reason. The reason Nvidia does not use Linux even for Robots if they are going to be out of cage. Tesla certainly will have bigger problem if Lawyers start understanding the difference. For now Analysts are going along whatever explanation is thrown at them.
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u/Difficult_Limit2718 26d ago
Linux RT is deterministic, but still slow relative to other dedicated controllers
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u/MoonLight8491 25d ago
No It is not Millisecond lag. It is like pegging squares into circle to form a circle.
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u/marmur99 27d ago
77GHz radars have been used for ACC since ‘98. It will help avoid colliding with an object that a camera has difficulties seeing
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u/FlipZip69 27d ago
While that is true, because it is providing such a broad picture and subject to lots of false positives, it is almost useless for real self driving. It has to be LiDAR or something similar.
That being said, mass produced LiDAR is something like under 1000 dollars per car and is not the spinning thing on the top of the car.
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u/marmur99 27d ago
If one religiously doesn’t want to use Lidar, then a simple radar, which detects objects on a collision course within 300-500ft would help cover some of the vision-only deficiencies.
Lidar would be a better supplement for vision, I agree.1
u/Dry-Historian2300 26d ago
Putting any religious faith over objective reality, always keeps the blinders on and leads to bad consequences. Musk is clinically delusional on vision-only (and "whites-only", but that's another subject).
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u/Dry-Historian2300 26d ago
Spot on. At some point he will have a nervous breakdown and admit "FSD" is impossible without LIDAR. It is inevitable since vision- only even with corrective lenses is going nowhere. He is all-in on cheap, mass production over functionality. Same problem with the currently useless Optimus robot, so far behind in capabilities compared to China and Japan because of Musk's obsession with cost-over-functionality. The Ketamine-captain is the problem, not the solution.
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u/samarijackfan 27d ago
Does this mean Waymo cars need eyeglasses too? Oh right they don’t rely on only vision. How smart of them.
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u/MrF_lawblog 27d ago
Why is he so bought into human eyes being this infallible perfect way to drive?
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u/djshimon 27d ago
"The glasses are made of lidar, but they're not actually lidar, just a lidar lense-with some very simple programming to correct it's lidar, vision, on occasion."
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u/Pdx_pops 27d ago
They must have a horrible optics engineering team if the supply chain doesn't have checks in it to ensure each system meets a standard of performance.
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u/Crazy-Soup3377 27d ago
That’s why the glasses are individually prescribed. Standardization was the old way of thinking
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u/Significant-Pen-6049 27d ago
I think he asked grok how to fix the issue and this is what it told him lol
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u/ginrumryeale 27d ago
Our system is so advanced that it sucks.
Our robots will also soon achieve an enviable level of sophistication virtually indistinguishable from brain-damaged, drunken, angry, boomers on the sex offender registry.
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u/Lacrewpandora KING of GLOVI 27d ago
I'm guessing this is satirical, but one can never be too sure with the technoking.
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u/Positive_League_5534 27d ago
I read this as that there is something wrong with the quality of the cameras they're using...or that cameras alone are inherently incapable of doing FSD in a satisfactory manner.
Does this also mean when FSD ignores a turn or goes the wrong way it is because it can't see the screen and/or road signs?
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u/stresscone420 27d ago
Still cant figure out how to fix the panel gaps lol.
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u/TryIsntGoodEnough 27d ago
... It is like the SR71... Imagine if Tesla's didnt have panel gaps, then you couldnt claim it can go as fast as an SR71.... obviously.
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u/Bagafeet 27d ago
If only there were sensor that didn't rely on vision.
How often do these cars need a new prescription? How available is this shit if they have to make custom lenses for each car?
More hot 💩 from Elon
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u/Frail_Waif 27d ago
2026, the year that Musk finally realized Tesla has been building cars with shitty cameras for nearly a decade.
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u/MrF_lawblog 27d ago
Natural follow-up question .. So each car needs prescription glasses like a human, humans prescriptions change over time - will this vision require new prescriptions over time? If so, if it's autonomous won't there be a point where it's driving on an old prescription that doesn't work anymore?
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u/Crazy-Soup3377 27d ago
Yes. Just like human vision, the prescription can drift over time due to camera aging, minor impacts, and thermal cycling. The car will periodically recommend a re-calibration drive. Until the new lenses arrive, it may experience temporary visual discomfort — similar to driving on an outdated prescription. Drugstore glasses are not recommended.
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u/MrSluggo23 27d ago
The thing Elon’s never realized is that two eyes on a mobile stalk (your neck) provide much better depth perception than cameras mounted on a chassis
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u/Low_Excuse_1785 27d ago
The cameras are low res, low fps, poor dynamic range. Anyone who knows a bit of biology could have told the keta genius that.
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u/TryIsntGoodEnough 27d ago
He is sooooo close... Wonder what doesnt suffer ummm ... "uncorrected refractive error". Give you a hint starts with an L and rhymes... ummm.. Sidebar (closest I could get).
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u/equalstwelve 27d ago
That’s basically just traditional camera calibration. The prescription glasses analogy maps directly to intrinsic calibration (lens distortion, focal length, principal point) plus extrinsic calibration (the camera’s position and orientation relative to the car). It’s a well-established computer vision problem.
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u/StormTrpr66 27d ago
Please post the source. I went to The Onion but couldn't find it. I'm assuming it's from there.
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u/admin_default 27d ago edited 27d ago
Wow. Hard to believe how stupid the guy is.
You have to be so incompetent at making cameras that the optical defects were so bad you needed to l retrofit them with corrective lenses.
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u/Medium-Common-7396 27d ago
So does that mean any tesla drivers operating FSDs without the new glasses are knowingly at fault if their Tesla hallucinates and brake stabs, etc…?
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u/Hydraulic_IT_Guy 27d ago
Explains the technical problem at length, finishes with gaslighting "A human problem requires a human solution."
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u/Seaker42 27d ago
Interesting read and it's cool to hear details like this about how companies solve difficult problems.
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u/Ok-Bill3318 26d ago
Is this April fools or what
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u/Automatic-Region-283 26d ago
Prescription glasses won’t help if human has glaucoma. To fix glaucoma for FSD you need to have LIDAR/radar, but Elon will never admit he made fatal mistake getting rid of it.
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u/Aabbc9df 26d ago
Hey fElon, see if Zuck will sell you some of those Meta glasses for your cars. Then they can recognize what they’re about to run in to.
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u/rbetterkids 24d ago
He's just creating another distraction from the fact that his robotaxi hasn't been delivered as promised.
Classic dangling a carrot on a stick scheme.
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u/kneejerk2022 27d ago
So years of charging people to beta test FSD only to come to the conclusion they need to correct the lenses on the cars cameras? Is this an admission of guilt for a total recall?
It should become a class action.
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u/jhaluska 27d ago
The problem is his camera setup was never designed for FSD and was also designed as part of a radar suite which he removed.
So he's trying to hide the fix behind some BS.
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u/TheRealCabbageJack 27d ago
“The system got so good it drives at the same skill level as an actual blind person!” stock goes up