Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere

Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road

Victor Tangermann

In a damning new video, YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober has perfectly demonstrated why Tesla relying entirely on visual data from a suite of cameras isn't such a good idea for driver-assistance tech.

The Elon Musk-led EV maker has given up entirely on LIDAR or radar sensors, which its many competitors have been using for object detection for years, with Musk once calling LIDAR "fricking stupid, expensive and unnecessary."

But by relying only on visual data, Tesla's Autopilot can easily be fooled by anything from heavy fog to a wall-scale painting of the road ahead, as Rober showed in his latest video.

=-=-=

Chinese Driverless Car Chief Breaks Silence After First Fatal Crash

Sophie Clark

The CEO of the company behind a driverless car model in China has spoken out after three people died in a crash involving their car.

Three girls lost their lives on March 29 after an SU7 electric car made by Xiaomi Automobile Corp crashed while operating on the Navigate on Autopilot (NOA) intelligent-assisted driving mode.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun posted to social media on Tuesday saying: "On behalf of Xiaomi, I extend my deepest condolences and sincere sympathies to the families."

=-=-=

Cash cow to money pit: Why GM decided to let Cruise go

Jackie Charniga

General Motors had high hopes for its self-driving subsidiary, Cruise, with company leaders boasting that it would one day be a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. But it never made a penny. Instead, GM poured billions into it until the automaker finally cut the cord and rolled it into its engineering division this past week.

Experts identify a number of reasons why Cruise went from the promise of being a cash cow to its reality: a money pit.

Industry insiders say poor leadership, extensive capital investment, regulatory hurdles and consumer safety concerns were all likely factors that prompted GM to end its Cruise experiment. A pedestrian accident that prompted a nationwide recall of all Cruise vehicles, the resignations of top Cruise executives and regulatory concerns about an initial lack of transparency by Cruise certainly didn't help the company's public image. But the real reason to cut a potentially profitable business model, experts say, is the discovery of a problem to which you have no solution — or at least, aren't willing to shell out the cash to figure it out.

[Laird]

Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road

I watched that video not long after it came out, and had been meaning to share it here, but it kept slipping my mind. Even aside from its implications, it's an interesting watch.

Cash cow to money pit: Why GM decided to let Cruise go

Paywalled, however, it can be read in full and for free via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/202502090131...246281007/