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Tesla’s robotaxi can’t drive in the rain, and dumps passengers if the weather looks risky. | FuelArc (fuelarc.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/nottheonion@lemmy.world/t/2358847

Imagine a taxi that can't operate in the rain. That is what Tesla has delivered in Austin TX.

These riders learned that the hard way, but don't have anything particularly negative to say about it... That's the advantage of only making a Robotaxi service available to hand-picked Tesla influencers.

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[–] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is why most of the robotaxi testing is only in dryer fair weather areas. All of them have issues with precipitation.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, sort of!

    The reason almost everyone starts in Phoenix AZ is partially the lack of rain. It's also a friendly regulatory environment and a dead-simple street grid structure.

    Austin TX gets as much rain as, say, Chicago IL, neither is particularly dry. And Atlanta GA is very, very rainy. On paper it actually gets more rain than Seattle WA.

    FWIW, LiDAR based autonomous vehicles have figured this out, Waymo can handle all but the heaviest rain (which, TBF, humans also cannot reliably handle)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Huh I never thought of that. Its a whole new engineering problem the ai wouldn't be trained to handle the different coefficient of friction cos it would be so underrepresented in the training data. Not to mention how it inhibits vision and lidar.

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