Engineer Reacts to Tesla Fails 

Y’all missed a golden opportunity for Sandro to be a guest expert 😂

Just as a note, there is not a truck driver shortage. There is a problem with low pay causing serious turnover. Companies that pay decent have much less turnover and much less trouble finding drivers. Pay has been stagnant for years now and with ELD requirements, drivers can't work extra to compensate for low pay. The solution is not self driving trucks but to do away with pay per mile (truckers do NOT have a minimum wage and are not required to be paid hourly by federal law, some states like California have different requirements). Autonomous trucks are being pursued in order to reduce driver pay even further rather than deal with pay that has not kept up with inflation.

"If i could just be in the backseat on my laptop and not have to worry about traffic on the 408 that'd be great" My brother in christ, that is the description of public transporation, not self driving cars

There is no truck driver shortage. As a driver in this industry, the shortage is a lie.

I mean… the Volvo DID stop. Just not by itself

The story behind the semi was. The day before when testing the semi they were coming up to a left turn, but turned the system off before they made that turn. The next day they started driving and didn't reset the system before they turned it on. So when they turned it on it still had commands from the day before and that is why it made a left hand turn. And yes, the investors pulled their momey and the company is now out of business.

A guy that works on AI Self-driving cars wearing a shirt that says "Hit &Run Crew" is certainly a choice... :D

That's why Tesla got sued in Germany for NOT being self-driving aka false advertising.

The thing that scares me about self driving cars isn’t the engineers, it’s the people in charge of the companies that do this that have no understanding of the technical challenges and only see it as a feature to sell vehicles. As soon as the price of lawsuits drops below the income the feature generates, they’ll be rolling them out, whether they’re ready or not.

This is absolutely crazy. Daniel looks and sounds just like a real human expert.

That self-driving BMW didn't malfunction. That's just how they are parked. It probably doesn't use blinkers, either.

I'm just so glad all of these companies get to test out their new tech on public roads with no way for any of us to opt out of their experiments or profit off of their eventual success. Seems super fair.

God, I hate the Tesla camera-only argument “if we only use eyes, the car should too.” It’s clearly a cop out so Tesla can cheap out and not supplement with lidar and make the fsd way better. Its obviously all about cost cutting

11:45 lets take platooning to the next level and link them trucks together, we can make a big long chain and then while we're at it let's make dedicated tracks for them to run on, oh wait that's a TRAIN

its almost like solid public transportation would solve all the issues self driving cars are trying to fix except way less dangerous and way less expensive

Engineer #1: What should we call it when a bunch of semi's follow each other? Engineer #2: Maybe circling? Cleaning lady: It's called a Convoy. Engineer #2: That sounds dumb. We'll call it platooning. That guy must have been living under a rock for 35 years. The term convoy has been used for over 70 years to describe that scenario. Hell, even the U.S. Army uses it in the same context. Platooning ???? 😮 Graduated top of his junior college remote learning class I guess. 😂

I like how donut provides a bar across the bottom during the commercial that progresses as the ad progresses. Really lets me mash through that crap to get to the video more accurately. I appreciate that!

8:50 This is a really good example of a big failing of self driving cars right now. They don't communicate. As more of them are driving around it's going to get more and more important for them to be able to tell each other what they want to do to avoid soft-gridlocks like this.

I like watching tech companies try to reinvent the idea of a train. "Man if I can just sit in the back seat and avoid traffic. Save the miles on my car for fun driving." Bro, it's call public transportation. Ride a well maintained bus or train and see how much easier it is.

Having lived outside the US and experienced just how amazing public transportation CAN be if you actually invest in it, I feel like autonomous driving is addressing the symptom of an illness that we're unwilling to acknowledge that we already know the cure to. In Switzerland and Japan, I didn't even own a car. No need to. I could literally walk or bike just about anywhere in the country. What's so sad about the history of transportation in the US is that we used to actually have great systems already in place before the advent of the auto industry takeover. Most major metropolitan areas built efficient street car/tram, train and eventually bus systems that could move WAY more people with less space. Car-dependent infrastructure is an unsustainable endless money pit that drains resources from communities through substantial and constant maintenance requirements. And time and again, those who study transportation infrastructure have learned that widening roads never actually results in solving the problem of congestion. At this point, it's frankly absurd that we don't have sustainable high speed rail systems connecting all major US cities with far more efficient and inexpensive train, tram and bus systems operating within them. And to address the resource draining "What about the suburbs!" folks, I will state that when I lived in Japan, I lived about 12 miles outside of a city of about 300K people. A train ride to the center of town was only about 5 minute bike ride away. Imagine if anytime you wanted to join friends for a night of drunken karaoke you didn't also have to worry about driving at all. Personally, I DO actually love cars, which is why I follow channels like Donut. But these days, owning one has become prohibitively expensive and almost nonsensical if you live in an urban setting. We can do BOTH though. If you want to take a nap on your way to work, support public transportation infrastructure projects. These autonomous driving systems are pretty neat, but they are also one of many things driving car prices through the roof. For me personally, I like having the full freedom of control over my car when driving. I'd MUCH rather have a low tech driver's car any day of the week over a high tech taxi built by an unaccountable private entity I can't trust. Public transportation CAN be amazing. But it only gets there if you're willing to support the investment.

I consider myself a tech-forward person, I love new tech and the things it can do. Self-Driving cars DO NOT need to happen, all they're going to do is get people killed. Distracted driving is a big enough problem with cellphones and info-tainment systems, how much worse is it gonna get worse when you have no incentive to pay attention?

I dunno if it's a matter of being "tech-forward" or not, my dude. I think it's more a matter of tech-bros getting so concerned with whether or not they _can_ do a thing that they never stop to wonder whether or not they _should_ do it, and that lack of foresight combined with malefactors in the space abusing the tech is what gets people to want to slow down on the tech development until we've had a chance to work out if it's a good idea or not before continuing down a particular path of technological development.

As a San Franciscan, the autonomous cars can go die in a hole. They've made EMTs' and firefighters' jobs so much harder for no reason. Public transit is the solution in cities--not expensive and dangerous "self-driving" cars.

At 2:41 whoever put the brilliance notes in sequence with ultrasonic, lidar, radar and cameras is attention to detail and editing master in my eyes. Big props.

Came here to see if sandro was here, his reaction would be priceless 😂

You guys really needed to ask him about IOT and self driving cars. The perfect example of this was that intersection where they were stuck. The human equivalent would be a hand signal from the driver to another. These cars need to all share the same network or at least be able to communicate to really maximize value.

The Volvo video is like 10 or more years old they where testing automatic brakes on a prototype but they have forgotten to turn on that system so technically nothing wrong with that

13:00 i don't think so - I drive a 2022 vehicle with basic lane keep assist and when I don't touch the wheel for a long time, it just turns off and drives wherever. The feature to stop the car was an extra, while the lane keep assist is standard (has to be in Europe).

As someone who has spent years driving semis, i would much rather trust another human than a computer at the controls of 80,000 pounds of rolling steel

10:31 Try using something called a "train". I heard those quicky people in Europe and Japan use the thing regularly with great success

This isn't a self-driving fail, but related to the Volvo auto brake failure. I love the old segment from early 2000s Top Gear where Mercedes is testing the radar safety system on their S-class. They confidently drove it into a bank of fog and immediately crashed it because the radar failed to detect the obstruction and brake in time. Its still very funny to watch.

One key downfall of self driving cars is their inability to communicate with other drivers and self drivers. Outside of basic things like turn signals, of course. But when you have a situation like a traffic jam, humans can verbally or signally yield to other drivers. Giving this ability to autonomous vehicles would be a huge undertaking.

I totally agree! We should all get to nap on the way to work. What if we invented a service where you could nap while traveling? You could even share it with coworkers headed in the same direction. Since automation isn't ready, we could call it the Blockchain Unautomated Shuttle or B.U.S for short.

There's a shortage of truck drivers because nobody wants to pay them living wages. So instead of paying drivers a living wage, the solution is to put them ALL out of work. Logical. Gotta love "Forward" technology.

The Expert - "The tough thing that engineers have to figure out is how do we negotiate really tricky situations safely" The situation - (T-intersection)

I"m actually really glad you guys got ads on these now. We've done it! We've made this channel popular enough to be sustainable!

Cop was going full iRobot lol "I don't trust this AI."

Now I want Sandro to explain how to make all of these "better".

The number of times my buddy has sent videos of automatic braking failures on semi trucks tests makes me think we’re a long ways away from driverless cars

I rented a ford last year with lane keeping. It did ok and pulled me back into the centre of the inside lane where I was but then immediately ignored all the road markings and crossed 3 lanes (did this at night, no other cars about and yes I was testing it and ready to take control) I prefer the old system of hands, eyes and awareness.

Messing with your laptop on the way to work? Public transit has you covered today!

As a second thing which I'm going to mention separately from my first comment, we do not have a shortage of truck drivers. What actually happened is truck drivers increased a absolute fuckton during covid and still remain here today however the amount of shipping has increased ten times faster because of covid. The amount of shipping and receiving buildings built by many different companies that have been erected over the last 5 years has been astonishing. The other reason why I say that there are more than enough truck drivers is because even though the company I work for is fairly good size though not one of the mega carriers like Swift or prime, we have actually had trouble finding loads for every one of our drivers including me. There have been weeks where I'm lucky if I get maybe three or four loads that are close by or if I'm super lucky I can get one long load from like Florida to Washington state which takes upwards of 5 days. The amount of loads I can get in a week has increased a little bit but not to the point that I would say that there is still enough to go around for every single driver. So as a truck driver I call bullshit that we do not have enough drivers and on top of that we actually have so many drivers there's not enough parking spots for all the drivers on the road today at truck stops.

We are leaving too much to chance. The ones who do not like auto-driving are not necessarily the ones who are less tech savvy but also, for me atleast, the ones who have been around tech long enough to know that NOTHING is malfunction proof. That semi would have had a serious chance of killing someone had anyone been there.

7:49 is the most adorable street takeover I've ever seen

what about massively improved and free public transit using AI to help plan out routes and timetables? that'd probably help more for traffic than turning your car into a taxi :P

The trucking one is a real issue for sure, not enough drivers and long journeys. So chaning trailers together is probably a good idea. That said, it would be more dangerous, so maybe they could get their own lane. For extra safety we could separate that lane from the road completely And if they're going to be in just this one lane we might as well optimise it for efficiency, some low friction all metal wheels and guide rails for them to run on. We could even electrify it with a series of transmission cables along the route Have a whole network of these things across the nation Hell, we could even transport people with them How has nobody thought of this before?!

I work in IT. The people I know who are most skeptical of self driving are software engineers - the people most familiar with how unreliable technology - esp software is.

Pretty ballsy for Bubaru to sponsor the video

Self-driving works in exactly the same way as a legally-blind senior on the road in their '70s Buick works. Every other driver takes avoiding action, makes space and compensates for the actions of the bad driver in their midst. So as long as it's only 1 vehicle out of many it "works" but as soon as you put a few of them together they all freeze up. This guy wants to "live the dream" of sitting in his back seat in traffic while working on his laptop. I already do that every day, I just skip commuting to the office and I work from home. Countries need to pass a labor law that states that if you do 90% of your work on a computer or on the phone that you must be given a work from home option by your employer.

It's crazy to me that Daniel can both be so competent of all the shortcomings that computer-logic has to humans, and also be excited to eventually nap in one. To me, the day these companies actually wave the policies that you 'need to be in control' will be so far into the future.

I had a tesla as a rental car for a week during a business trip. The self driving always wanted to aim for curbs and would change at the very last minute. I'd much rather have the compact car over a tesla at that point. Definetly should have gone for the challenger offer, but couldn't pass up the chance to have a tesla for a week. I liked my twin turbo flat 6 far more when I finally got home. Driving is an experience, not a chore. Not to mention the cheap materials, panel gaps, sub par audio system, lack of noise (personal preference), and just no pride driving one. It's like owning a civic and talking about V-Tec to everyone.

As a tech loving person living in Europe and also working for an insurance company that happily shares both victories and fails of this thing, my attitude is that this technology is in no way ready to be used. Like Daniel said: they're programmed to follow traffic rules. They are programmed to thrive either in test environments, or in the very car-heavy, pedestrian-unfriendly US traffic. They are not programmed on every stupid thing every child since the invention of the automobile has done near, on or inside a car. They are not programmed to take into account people who wanna show off in their new car. They are partially programmed to expect people with the same dreams as Daniel, who want to be on a train and just take a nap and not be stuck in traffic, to circumvent safety features, but that is a game of catch-up you will keep losing. If you're really lucky, they're programmed to consider jaywalking isn't globally illegal, and also old or disabled people exist and might not look like a healthy guy in his mid-twenties. That is not enough to let them loose in a supermarket parking lot, let alone public roads. Using the technology we currently have to get assistive technology from it, that's useful. (See: the guy who used his Tesla's adaptive cruise control and lane assist to overtake a BMW doing 200+ on a German higheway with its driver passed out at the wheel from a stroke, and then cause a controlled collision and slowdown to save lives) If it were truly able to be fully self-driving, Tesla would not program their cars to shut off the self-driving feature 1 second before every accident.

13:00 in, I have to disagree... that car beeped to tell the driver it was going to disengage if he didn't touch the wheel, and then it called his bluff and just turned off the lane keeping system. It was allowing to the car to go wherever the wheels and outside forces (bumps, crown etc) were sending it. If the road had curved to the right the car would have continued strait, crossing into the left lane instead of going toward the shoulder and the wall.

Like most things with delivering goods: the answer is never putting more cars on the road. In an infrastructure built to be as flexible as possible, there is no free lunch, and the more you push roads flexibility aside, the more you just reinvent trains.

That guy definitely worked for tesla. His body language and eye movements when speaking on tesla an demeanor of his voice make me believe that's who made him sign an NDA.

I'm glad the people of the comments section understand how self-driving cars are just expensively/inefficiently trying to mimic what good public transit already does inexpensively/efficiently

I absolutely love writing $15K-35K collision estimates for all the new EV cars. Whether they fix or not, my shop’s banking on at LEAST $4K storage and power-down procedures. Thank you, Elon!

8:21 They are in a loop of "after you sir... oh no please, after you"

7:50 What happened here is that there was a street party and everyone was using the Wifi. It didn't leave enough local bandwidth for the cars to talk to each other and the whole system collapsed pretty fast. Pretty unsurprisingly, the company that ran those cars tried to blame the people at the party for using too much wifi. You know how a good self driving system in a city is designed to fail when it's near too many people? In a city? Just good design, right there. Edit: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pmGOjHi-7MM.html Skip to 30:28 for proof via tweet from the company that runs the cars.

9:40 The 'Week of Cone' was an idea dreamed up, funnily enough, after a week of cones.

There is no driver shortage. People dont want to pay what it takes to ship. And us drivers dont work for free

11:45 I work for Amazon. I drive a truck. We have a Truck Driver Assist feature. It has lidar, radar, and about 8 cameras on it. I do not like to enable the system. It is nice sometimes. But can be unreliable. Going on the freeway, i've had it just stop accelerating and start braking automatically for me, with no traffic in front of me. I was going through a very slight curve which didn't require me to slow down. Luckily I am able to take full control by pressing a button on the steering wheel or just putting my foot on the accelerator. I'd rather have full control if i'm driving a semi.

Simple idea: I'll let a computer drive for me when computers can go six years without a single error.

It's still amazing to see how far self-driving cars have come since the first one. It was a van capable of driving itself around a small ovular track using only pictures from the camera to correct itself, made back in like the '60s or so. It took about a minute to process the image and move the car about a foot or so, and over an hour to get around the track.

I have to think at least some of the reason for the high accident rate of Teslas is overreliance on and over-trust of the vehicle to drive properly. A car cannot see cause and effect the way a human can. That and the fact that in using those systems, the person is not in the moment, planning ahead, making a situation leading to an accident that much worse. It's a false sense of safety. I don't even have a car like that, but what I do have has cross-traffic alert and I would have been hit the other day if I hadn't been keeping track of the fact that a guy two spaces over got in his car just before i did and was leaving in my general direction. The alert didn't sound until it would have been too late. Never assume the car's got it.

Watching this guy uncomfortably tiptoe around answers is hilarious 😂

0:55 Tesla's approach is absolutely stupid, why shouldn't they take advantage of Radar, Lidar, sensors and other stuff? Besides, we can hear and feel things while we drive, we don't just use our eyes for everything.

I regularly drive through a roundabout that is being converted to a traffic light controlled intersection. It has been different most every time I’ve driven through it in the last six months. Currently they have dug up the roundabout and traffic islands and it’s just a bunch of traffic cones still working as a roundabout. I don’t think self driving cars will ever cope with something like that

I used to work on some of those waymo cars! Jaguar makes proprietary parts for the waymo i-paces and there was a huge problem with the A/C lines above the battery, they come through my shop all the time. They're really secretive about their project and remove some of the stuff before we get to work on it like the front camera and the computer in the trunk . They ask to cover windows and only one person to drive the i-pace. They also have a chrysler t&c car with the same treatment

For the first time I am scared of having my car, which I can't afford to replace, totaled by a self driving car. I of course won't get a dime, as my car is 20 years old. Brave new world.

The Sienna was not using an exit strategy idk what this guy is talking about. He didn't keep his hands on the wheel so the lane keeping just turned off and the car went straight. This is extremely common from almost all manufacturers.

Awesome being sponsored by both Subaru and Tesla!

14:45 bmw really knows their drivers, that truly is the bmw style parking

I love how nervous he immediately got once they showed an example of how much the AI sucks

Volvos own boss got ran over by his own tech , I was in stitches 😂

Self driving cars are like automatic paper towel dispensers, a solution to some thing that wasn’t an issue.

If only there was a system where people could pay to have another person pick them up in a regular vehicle and drive them where they need to go. Maybe it could be really cheap and be a big vehicle that many people could ride at the same time, that makes routine stops along a predetermined route. You could even have a service where people use their own vehicles to pick people up as a side hustle. Maybe call it "Doober". Just a thought.

The biggest weakness of self driving in my opinion is balancing between being safe and reckless. In a busy intersection with no traffic lights (this might be mind blowing to you guys but in some places, traffic lights aren't a common thing) drivers would usually try to poke the nose of their vehicles forward, if the incoming vehicle stops, you go in and make the turn. Sometimes you have to go in with a tight squeeze (only a few centimeters from hitting another vehicles) There are a lot of times that you basically have to test the water if the driver on the other lane will let you into their lane. This is where self driving vehicles fall short. They try to not run into other car that they won't accept a few inches of clearance. Those self driving vehicles stuck on that intersection is rather hilarious. Specially the two vehicles having a standoff on the middle. One could have easily made the turn and the other car could have easily followed it. This is why self driving cars don't have a place in places like Asia. The traffic congestion here is so severe that self driving cars would just get stuck unable to do anything.

The cop really yelled no at the car 🤣

I work in IT and it made me an anti-techology-person in private. I want a car, not a driving smartphone. And if there's only this autonumous driving, I might as well take the train

Does Tesla really believe we should only use cameras? That’s insane - that’s like saying our work computers shouldn’t be able to compute complex code or even simple math - we can only do it by hand or by memory up to a certain extend, so computers should only use simple logic gates.

Hello I am a truck driver of five years in counting we the truck drivers do not support self driving technology in anyway shape or form. The problem is the companies are not paying the drivers enough. There is no driver shortage at all. There is a money shortage.

The roads are going to be infinitely more deadly with these on the road.

The Sienna wasn’t trying to create an exit route to the side. When it loses tracking of the lane it just doesn’t intervene anymore, and in this case the road was curving at the same time. So straight ahead with no lane keep activated is the wall.

The camera only idea is stupid: a lot of crashes occur because humans can’t see (fog, and confusing visuals, for example).

the biggest problem with self driving cars is exemplified so well in that video from austin. The public was sold on the idea of self driving cars being able to communicate with eachother. So why cant a bunch of cars( from the same company even) be able to alleviate or prevent that issue. Sure lke he said, maybe they are all trying to get to an event to pick people up, but still the cars should be able to tell eachother "we're all going to the same place, this is just a traffic jam" and not create that intersection issue.

The crosstrek makes me think of new yorkers on vacation. Ive come across so many New Yorkers visiting my state and a lot of them had Crosstreks or something similar

best subaru ad i've seen.. from a failed stop to showing off auto stop on the crosstrek

For autonomous trucks: couldn't you just link a bunch together for aerodynamic efficiency? And since there's so much efficiency loss in pneumatic tires you could make the wheels out of steel and then make them drive on steel roads?

Great video, great guest! Donut strikes again! Summon does not work in bad weather though, that guy got lucky!

Why is sandro not in this episode, you could still have the AI lovers and sandro just be there making jokes and calling them nerds

As a truck driver, I think self driving trucks are very far away. Maybe certain roads will allow them with a single 53', but I could never see a self driving truck driving a set of triples without flipping the back box all the time, let alone in all the weather conditions that I drive in. Not like anyone can get out of the truck and chain up to get over a hill in the winter.

Truck one might be due to sensors being too low for the height of the bottom of the truck. Instead of long-distance AI trucks, we need higher speed freight trains that drop off cargo at local Hubs.

I work in car rental. The thing with LKA systems is that they "assist", not "take over". They are not at all the same thing as a "self-driving car", and should not be trusted as such. LKA gets confused pretty easily and the display will let you know this: grayed out lane lines means the car doesn't know where the lane is, and is currently disabled. Lanes, as identified, will show up white. Green icon means "A-OK", red icon means "you're deviating across the lines". These detections are not always correct. Sometimes they have a hard time recognizing dotted lines, but not solid ones. In general they seem to be better at keeping the car on the road in a turn, and not so much with the multi-lane roads. It is equally confused by situations where the lines are an unexpected color (such as an old line painted over black, light glare off the paint, wet conditions, etc.)

Why are any of these companies allowed to test these cars in public without drivers ready to take over?

I have a 2017 VW Passat R-Line and occasionally it will randomly hit the breaks. Sometimes it'll slam on them and beep acting like I'm approaching a stopped car too fast, other times theres absolutely nothing in the road or in front of me. Its horrible. Also, when roads Y off, it sometimes will try to keep you in the original lane even if you need to go left.

you just got to love a dude thats under an NDA contract that will talk about stuff hes worked on

it's funny how even 10 years ago self driving was just a few years away. Maybe in another 10 years we'll be a little closer

Autonomous driving should stay illegal, and further legislation should be enacted banning any sort of device piloting our vehicles unless it has the capabilities of Lt. Cmdr. Data from Star Trek. I trust my 12 year old niece more than some computer behind the wheel of any automobile or truck.

'But we are close... Right?' Autonomous driving bro diplomatically says no without saying no 😂