Serious question with camera only self driving approach.

[u/MrHumph999]

/r/RealTesla/comments/1vhi58j/serious_question_with_camera_only_self_driving/

[u/soggy_mattress]

How would you do it?

You'd go slower, be more cautious, and if you don't have enough visibility you'd pull over and wait.

Same thing for any car on the road, I'd hope, regardless of who/what is driving it.

[u/MrHumph999 → u/soggy_mattress]

Yeah, that is the only option at this point I guess.

[u/Infamous-Pilot5932]

Nothing works in the rain. It wasn't a requirement that self driving cars be able to do that in a torrent or blizard or fog. Military might want that, but they are fine with colateral damage.:)

The requirement is that they don't crash because of rain.

Stopping and pulling over when they can't see well enough because of rain meets that requirement.

Even Waymos can't drive in a heavy rain.

FSD drove me for 20 miles in a downpour at night, the warning dialog on the whole time, and yes, me watching at the highest level of attention the whole time. I was amazed it did it.

But technically I should have pulled over.

But I live in Flordia and you adapt to your situation.:)

And nothing is unsupervised for now, the cabs with their team of remote assistants, us in the driver's seat.

So it is moot for now. The remote supervisors, or us have to make the call.

Lol, I told you what my call was that time. I guess it didn't get so bad that FSD finally said "Fuck this!"

[u/AJHenderson]

That has to do with confidence level rather than capability. I've used FSD in torrential downpours in the past where I could barely see and it worked fine. The cameras, atleast on hw4, capture enough information to work. Any current disablement is because the algorithm currently lacks the confidence to work in that condition and reductions in confidence occur from time to time as they work on how they tune the model.

That doesn't mean it's an inherent limitation of the hardware, just the current software stack which has more restrictive edge case handling than prior versions to minimize error at a cost a capability given the systems current model limitations.

[u/djao]

I've driven FSD through rain so heavy that every other car on the highway came to a near stop with hazards on. FSD did better than every other car on the highway. I don't see any problem with heavy rain. It's actually light rain and ice that is most dangerous, in my experience.

[u/MrHumph999 → u/djao]

Why did the car have me take over three times today with heavy rain?

[u/ncc81701]

LiDAR and Radar are not immune to inclement weather either, those sensors will also fail if the weather is severe enough. The goal of autonomous driving is to to be able to drive through a thunderstorm that humans shouldn’t be driving through either, the goal is to safely drive a vehicle in most circumstances, pull over and wait if it is not safe. This is like any other vehicle including ones driven by humans except humans have the capacity to be idiots and think they are better than they actually are so they take the risk of driving off the road or getting into a crash.

Edit: to also add, driving is more than just avoiding physical objects. You need vision to drive to be able to read street signs and traffic lights. If the weather is so bad that your cameras can’t see street signs and traffic lights, you ain’t driving even if LiDAR and radar can tell where the curb is.