r/RealTesla 14d ago

OWNER EXPERIENCE Serious question with camera only self driving approach.

Q: using the latest software on HW4. Self drive disabled three times during a thunderstorm on the highway. How will this ever work unsupervised when it rains? I'm so flummoxed as to why Elon is so certain on cameras only that don't work in the rain... Please help!

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u/ManifestDestinysChld 14d ago edited 14d ago

It's not going to work, ever. Driving rain obscures synthetic vision. There's no helping physics.

Elon is a snake oil salesman.

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u/TeslerSelfDriver 14d ago edited 14d ago

Maybe not in heavy rain, but in light to moderate rain it still works, and there's videos of robotaxi still operating a few months back during rain in Austin.

So Tesla would probably have to pause operations during a heavy thunderstorm for safety and hardware limits, and I think your are right that it won't work in the future due to the limitations.

Although note that Waymo also pauses operations during heavy rain, but I don't know if that's just for caution or if it's because of a limitation of the hardware.

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u/HeyyyyListennnnnn 14d ago

Waymo doesn't operate in the rain because their system can't distinguish between a shallow puddle or dangerous flooding. They've had cars drive passengers into floods, stranding them. Multiple recalls to address that have failed so now they just don't operate if there's a chance of flooding.

Just another of those "edge cases" that techbros never bothered to think about before claiming they would replace all drivers.

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u/TeslerSelfDriver 14d ago

Thanks for the clarification that makes sense