The New York Times now has a good story to look at Tesla's development plan for a semi-autonomous driving assistance system, which the company confusingly (perhaps deceptively) refers to as autopilot and fully autonomous driving. This article is full of interesting insights from sources within the company, but there is one detail that I found now really incredible: When shooting the Autopilot demo video, someone said that the car was "automatically driving" and the car hit an obstacle by itself. , Had to be repaired. That part is not included in the posted video, I believe you will be shocked when you hear it.

This detail really impressed me because this is a video that Tesla has been posting on their website since 2016, and it was released at the same time as Telsa announcing that their car has all the hardware required for fully autonomous driving, even though it turns out This is not true even Tesla itself, they had to upgrade the FSD computer in the car to get a newer version of the FSD software.

This video is also worth noting because it begins with this important text:

So, the point of this video is obviously to say, hey, look, the car is driving by itself! We just need to put a guy on the seat, because Johnny Law created us!

This is why this part of the New York Times story is so incredible:

As Tesla approached the launch of Autopilot 2.0, most of the Autopilot team gave up their normal duties and began to produce a video aimed at demonstrating the autonomy of the system. But the final video did not provide a complete picture of how the car operated during the shooting.

According to two former members of the Autopilot team, the route of the car has been drawn in advance by the software that creates the 3D digital map, which is a feature that drivers using the commercial version of Autopilot cannot use. Three people involved in the video shooting said that during the process of shooting the video, a car hit a roadside obstacle at a Tesla property while using Autopilot and had to be repaired.

This video was later used to promote Autopilot's features and is still on Tesla's website.

The pain of survival is not equipped with one, but two 5.0Ah batteries, and even a soft bag for storage.

Okay, so not only is the route pre-planned and pre-drawn, but the car hits an obstacle on the side of the road under the control of Autopilot? Both of these things seem to be very big deals that should be mentioned in the video, and if not so irresponsible, it would be funny if the car actually hit something.

Well, I think both are okay.

Maybe they were planning to include another text card like this, but due to time, they had to cut it out:

If all of this is absolutely confirmed, is this different from other technical fake videos, such as the infamous Nikola EV truck. When it was discovered that it had just rolled down a mountain, it was found to be driven more by gravity rather than electricity. Promotional video?

It's really different at all. If anything, the situation may be worse, because this video was used to deceptively suggest the functions of the system that is deployed in the hands of real people and used on public roads.

Of course, I am not the only one who makes this connection:

Despite the age, Tesla and its supporters have relied heavily on this video for many years as evidence that Tesla is basically fully autonomous. There are only a few details that need to be resolved. How difficult is this?

The story mentioned Elon’s attitude towards truly autonomous roads, and quoted Musk’s statement to Fortune magazine:

By the end of 2015, Musk publicly stated that Tesla will drive autonomously in about two years. "I think we have all the parts, it's just to improve these parts, put them in place, and make sure they work in a large number of environments-and then we are done."

Think about that sentence, and marvel at it for a moment. He was basically saying that they have a car with sensors and cameras, and a computer and some software. All they have to do is, you know, put them together and make sure they work everywhere! simple!

This is basically the same as having a Porsche 356 in my driveway, because I have a Beetle, its carbohydrates have been removed, and a bunch of metal-I just need to put them together to make sure they work!

In these two examples, the phrase "make sure they work" is as burdensome as Atlas holding the earth and his girlfriend's wallet.

This article also records Elon Musk's focus on manufacturing camera-only vision systems for autonomous driving, avoiding the common radar systems used by Tesla and many other companies in the field of autonomous driving. Advanced lidar system.

The industry generally believes that the more sensors and types, the better, so the advantages and disadvantages of each method can cover and make up for each other.

Elon likes to remind people that his camera system should work normally, because after all, there are only two small cameras in the head of a cold, soft human driving a car! Tesla has eight, just like far surpassing spiders.

In this regard, Schuyler Cullen, an expert in robotics and artificial vision, responded very well in an interview. The New York Times report also quoted this point:

"The camera is not the eye! The pixel is not the retinal ganglion! The FSD computer is completely different from the visual cortex!"

And, of course, he is absolutely correct. It is easy to compare a computer to a brain and a camera to an eye, but the truth is that these two systems work in completely different ways. Through evolution and natural selection, mammalian eyes have been developed for millions of years, and we do not fully understand how the brain processes all vision.

The eyes and the camera are similar on the surface, children's book level, but nothing more. Our biological brain does not operate like a computer, and the process of sending images from the eyes to the occipital lobe of the brain through the optic nerve and camera data through the system bus to the AMD Ryzen CPU in Tesla has nothing to do with the FSD computer. This is not how it works.