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This is true, but when safety is on the line it actually goes further than that. As an engineer you have an ethical duty to say no to making a product unsafe for end users or the general public.

It doesn’t matter if you get fired, if your boss goes to the media to bitch about you, if your boss threatens to sue you, you as an engineer hold a position of public trust to keep the people that use your product safe. If you don’t respect that and take it seriously, well we see where oceangate ended up.

Tale as old as time.

Engineers: "This is possible but we will need to equip every car with an expensive sensor suite"

Management: "So you're saying we can just remove the sensors and figure it out with your engineering magic, you guys are really good at that, you got my iPhone connected to ICloud so you must be reeeally good with technology."

Engineers: "..."

Management: "Also, anyone not up to this task is fired."

Management ALWAYS knows what's best! Obviously!

Hence why they constantly come running for us to fix it when shit goes as we say it will.

You can only get by on other people's laurels for so long

We also use way more than just our eyes to navigate. We have accelerometers (ear canals), pressure sensors (touch), Doppler sensors (ears) to augment how we get around. It was a fools errand to try and figure everything out just with cameras.

What’s worse is it will be hard to reverse this decision. Tesla is a data and AI company compiling vision and driving data from drivers around the world. If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize. You basically start from scratch at least for the new sensors, and you fail to deliver a promise to old customers.

How do we prove we're not robots? Fucking select the picture with traffic lights or buses, right? How was this allowed.

He’s such a fucking moron

This news is months old. Honestly agree with musk on this one. We are able to drive with 2(sometimes only 1)low resolution(sometimes out of focus, sometimes closed) cameras on a pivot inside the vehicle with further blindspots all around. Much of our rear situational awareness comes from 2/3 small warped mirrors strategically placed to enhance those 2 low resolution cameras on a pivot. Tesla has already reverted to add some radar back in... The lidar option sounds like dystopia waiting to happen (just imagine all streets filled with aftermarket invisible lasers from 3rd world counties, any one of them could blind you under unlucky circumstances). The best way forward is visual, and if you watch up to date test drives on YouTube you can see they are doing quite well with what they have.

He's starting to sound like Elizabeth Holmes.

Every expert in the field insists that my idea is impossible? They're backing their assertions with cold, hard facts?! I'll show em!

You mean one man with a sapphire spoon shoved up his ass from birth doesn't know more than an army of folks that have studied their entire lives, experienced worlds of issues around it, and are living and breathing this stuff everyday for this exact challenge? HUH! Well today I learned! /s

And when the lay offs come, who does it affect more? The billionaire douche bag? Or the people that warned him?

it doesnt end at ceos. i can think of one prominent, and fairly recent, incident where a different automaker knew of a defect before the product launched, and overruled fixing it because it was cheaper to leave it be. and that directly led to people dying. yet gm cars are still sold around the world and most people have forgotten about the ignition incidents. afaik the ceo was never involved in that decision.

They now even doubled down to actively remove sensors from older models, to avoid the inputs interfering with the new updates.

Yes, I bought FSD a long time ago and even though I'm owed a hardware 3 upgrade, I've yet to get it. If I stay on hardware 2.5, my radar will be stay active and they can't do something even dumber like disable my parking sensors. I've driven vision-only cars and it's really worse at least for the roads around here. The FSD alpha is still too nerve-wracking to use for me to even consider installing it.

Sorry about your $14k FSD purchase. Hopefully it gets better

It's having a heck of a career. Motherfucker has a better space program than any country and the Model Y is looking to beat the Toyota Corolla as the highest selling car in the world this year. It was the highest seller in the 1st quarter.

How much success does someone have to have before people can admit he's pretty good at making good engineering decisions?

The thing is working good enough most of the time is not enough. I haven’t driven a Tesla so I’m not speaking for their cars but I work in SLAM and while cameras are great for it, cameras on a fast car need to process fast and get good images. It’s a difficult requirement for camera only, so you will not be able to garante safety like other sensors would. In most scenarios, the situation is simple: e.g. a highway where you can track lines and cars and everything is predictable. The problem is the outliers when it’s suddenly not predictable: a lack of feature in crowded environments, a recognition pipeline that fails because the model detects something is not there or fail to detect something there… then you have no safeguards.

Camera only is not authorize in most logistic operation in factory, im not sure what changes for a car.

It’s ok to build a system that is good « most of the time » if you don’t advertise it as a fully autonomous system, so people stay focus.

This kind of serious trouble (from the article):

The Department of Justice is currently investigating Tesla for a series of accidents — some fatal — that occurred while their autonomous software was in use. In the DoJ’s eyes, Tesla’s marketing and communication departments sold their software as a fully autonomous system, which is far from the truth. As a result, some consumers used it as such, resulting in tragedy. The dates of many of these accidents transpired after Tesla went visual-only, meaning these cars were using the allegedly less capable software.

Consequently, Tesla faces severe ramifications if the DoJ finds them guilty.

And of course:

The report even found that Musk rushed the release of FSD (Full Self-Driving) before it was ready and that, according to former Tesla employees, even today, the software isn’t safe for public road use. In fact, a former test operator went on record saying that the company is “nowhere close” to having a finished product.

So even though it seems to work for you, the people who created it don't seem to think it's safe enough to use.