In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
I wondered how the hell it managed to fool LIDAR, well…
The tl;dr here is that Elon said that humans have eyes and they work, and eyes are like cameras, so use cameras instead of expensive LIDAR. Dick fully inside car door for the slam.
In theory he’s not wrong, except for that part where neither the optics nor (especially) the software come anywhere close to matching the performance of human eyes and brains and won’t for the foreseeable future.
And human eyes/brains aren’t good enough anyway. The whole hype about self-driving cars was that they were supposed to be better than humans.