Tesle v Austinu vozijo samo do 23. ure: Sive mucke na sivem asfaltu ali zakaj Tesle ponoči slabše vidijo

Elon Musk je priznal, da Teslini robotaksiji ponoči ne vozijo, ker kamere v temi ne vidijo dovolj dobro.

Na vprašanje, zakaj storitev v Austinu ne deluje vso noč, je odgovoril, da je glavna ovira zaznavanje hišnih ljubljenčkov: »Dobesedno poskušamo se izogniti sivim mucam na sivem asfaltu v temi.« Teslin račun Robotaxi je nato sporočil, da so obratovanje v Austinu podaljšali z 22. do 23. ure.

Ob zagonu junija 2025 so vožnje sprejemali do polnoči – storitev torej danes zapira uro prej kot ob začetku, je opozoril Electrek.

Tesla just pushed Austin Robotaxi operating hours from 10 PM to 11 PM, and Elon Musk explained what is keeping them off the road later: they are literally trying to avoid hitting grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark. For years Musk called lidar a crutch and insisted vision-only is everything. Now in low-light, low-contrast conditions, camera-only autonomy hits a wall because a grey animal blends right into the asphalt, which happens to be the exact physics problem active lidar solves instantly.

— Caius (@yaw59041) October 4, 2026

Musk je sam zavrgel radar in lidar

Težava ni naključna, temveč posledica Muskove odločitve.

Tesla je maja 2021 iz avtomobilov odstranila radar – po poročanju medijev kljub nasprotovanju lastnih inženirjev –, leta 2022 ultrazvočne senzorje, lidarja pa ni nikoli vgradila. Musk je to javno slavil:

Someone should tell Elon about these really cool technologies called radar and lidar. That is The Verge's take on the grey kitten story, and honestly it deserves a real answer. The pluses for Tesla's bet. Cameras are cheap and every Tesla on the road is a training car. FSD's fixes ship in software: v14.3 cut reaction time 20 percent and specifically targeted small animals. Elon Musk's point this weekend was that AI photon counting lets visual cameras see well in the dark. If vision clears the safety bar, the economics are brutal. Tesla's Robotaxi fares run about a third of Waymo's. The minuses. Tesla said it out loud: the cars cannot reliably see pets at night yet. Austin hours went midnight to 2am to 10pm, now 11pm, gated on this exact problem. The bar is the whole bet. Waymo's side. Full stack: lidar, radar, 13 cameras. And still: six recalls. A driverless car hit a 9 year old in a Santa Monica school zone in January, with NHTSA and NTSB investigations still open. One drove into a flooded road in San Antonio and got swept into a creek. Thirteen drove into closed freeway construction zones at speed, and Waymo pulled the fleet off freeways. Lidar did not prevent any of it. The difference that matters. Waymo is the robotaxi business today: nearly 4,000 cars, 10 plus cities, hundreds of thousands of paid trips a week. Tesla is dozens of cars in Texas, invite only. So the race is simple. Waymo has to get cheaper faster than Tesla gets safer. Tesla has to get safer faster than Waymo gets cheaper. The sensor was never the whole answer. The software was always the race.

— The Tesla Signal (@TheTeslaSignal) October 5, 2026

• april 2019: »Lidar je pot norcev. Kdor se zanaša na lidar, je obsojen na propad.«
• februar 2022: lidar je »zapeljiv lokalni maksimum«;
• avgust 2025: lidar in radar naj bi »zmanjševala varnost zaradi tekmovanja med senzorji«;
• maj 2026: objavil je posnetek »rekonstrukcije štetja fotonov«, ki naj bi dokazoval, da FSD ponoči dobro vidi.

V zasebnih sporočilih novinarju Electreka pa je priznal, da bi bila »kamera z radarjem visoke ločljivosti boljša od samega vida«.

avto-tesla.jpg

Fizika je preprosta. Kamere so pasivne in odvisne od svetlobe in kontrasta, zato v temi težko zaznajo temne predmete z nizkim kontrastom.

Lidar oddaja lastne laserske impulze in meri razdaljo in obliko v treh dimenzijah – v temi deluje enako dobro kot podnevi.

Tesla's robotaxis in Austin now take riders until 11pm, up from 10. On Saturday Musk said what keeps them off the road after that. "Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark." That's a real problem. A gray cat on a dark road is hard to pick out with cameras, and cameras are what a Tesla drives with. Waymo's cars carry lidar, which doesn't need light, and they run through the night. Every hour a robotaxi sits parked is an hour it carries nobody. From 11pm to 6am is seven of those hours. Round-the-clock service in Austin is reportedly waiting on FSD v15, expected this month. Seven hours a night is the gap it has to close.

— Jonas (@jonaslamis) October 6, 2026

Radar vidi skozi meglo, prah in bleščanje. Vse kaže, da je bila odločitev za »samo kamere« napaka, ki jo je narekovala predvsem cena, ne varnost.

Pri Rivianu pravijo, da lidar danes stane le še »nekaj sto dolarjev« na vozilo.

Preiskava in dokument »Radar nas reši«

Ameriška agencija za varnost v prometu NHTSA vodi poglobljeno preiskavo FSD na približno 3,2 milijona vozil zaradi devetih nesreč v razmerah slabe vidljivosti – bleščanja sonca, megle in prahu –, med njimi ene smrtne.

Od Tesle je zahtevala notranji dokument z zgovornim naslovom »Radar Saves Us« (Radar nas reši), ki po oceni agencije govori o tem, kako dobro Tesla pozna omejitve sistema, ki se zanaša le na kamere.

Če bi se izkazalo, da je Tesla vedela, da radar ujame primere, ki jih kamere zgrešijo, bi se oblikovalska odločitev lahko spremenila v znano napako – in v odpoklic.

Kako vozijo drugi

Konkurenca ima drugačen pristop. Waymo, ki ga upravlja Googlova matična družba Alphabet, v šesti generaciji sistema uporablja 13 kamer, 4 lidarje in 6 radarjev.

Njegovih okoli 4000 vozil brez voznika vozi 24 ur na dan, tudi ponoči. Soizvršni direktor Dmitri Dolgov je avgusta pokazal posnetek popolnoma temne ulice: na kameri skoraj ni bilo videti ničesar, lidar pa je pokazal vse.

Na lidarje in radarje se zanašajo tudi drugi ponudniki robotaksijev, od Amazonovega Zooxa do kitajskega Baidu Apollo Go.

"Lidar is a fool's errand. Anyone relying on lidar is doomed." Elon Musk, April 2019. "Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark." Elon Musk, this weekend, on why Tesla's Robotaxi still can't drive late at night. A grey kitten on a grey road at night is the textbook case where cameras struggle: almost no light, almost no contrast. It's exactly what lidar is for. Lidar fires its own light. It doesn't need the kitten to be a different colour from the road. It only needs the kitten to stick up from it. Kittens tend to do that. None of this is new. In 2021, Musk told Electrek that "vision with high-res radar would be better than pure vision." Tesla removed radar anyway. Where things stand: → Waymo: 13 cameras, 4 lidars, 6 radars. Around 4,000 driverless cars. Open 24 hours. → Tesla Robotaxi: cameras only. It launched in June 2025 taking rides until midnight. Today it closes at 11 pm. → And the cost argument is gone. Rivian says lidar now costs it "a few hundred dollars" per car. I worked on self-driving at Apple, Mercedes, Bosch and VW. Every company running driverless cars at scale today uses cameras, lidar and radar together. Elon is one of the great builders of our time. He is also not a god. On lidar, he was loudly, confidently and expensively wrong. Being wrong is part of engineering. Refusing to update for seven years is the expensive part. Ten years ago this month, Tesla said every car it built had the hardware for full self-driving. Sorry, Tesla shareholders. Source: Electrek (Fred Lambert, 3 Oct 2026)

— Arjun Jain | Fast Code AI (@Arjunjain) October 4, 2026

Po drugi strani pa so se nedavno v hudem dežju bolje znašle Tesle, Waymo pa je svoj servis ugasnil.

GOOD NEWS Austin was hit with heavy downpours recently, but instead of stalling out, Tesla’s Robotaxis were cruising through the storm picking up fares left and right  Meanwhile, Waymo vehicles loaded with a bunch of LiDAR sensors didn't dare show their faces Ride requests are flooding in faster than the fleet can handle, so Tesla is hiking up the service prices to balance supply The nastier the weather gets, the rougher it is for Waymo—and the bigger the payday for Tesla https://t.co/bjCpd0nxjv

— Ming (@tslaming) October 3, 2026

Spopad med zagovorniki lidarja in radarjev ter optikov zato še vedno ni odločen...

Teslini robotaksiji tako v Austinu ponoči ne smejo voziti brez omejitev – a navadne Tesle s FSD po cestah vozijo z enakimi kamerami ob vsaki uri, brez »policijske ure«.

Slovenija je FSD že dovolila

To je pomembno tudi za nas.

Slovenija je 8. septembra kot šesta država EU dovolila Teslin sistem FSD (Supervised) na javnih cestah – za Nizozemsko, Litvo, Estonijo, Dansko in Belgijo. Po poročanju The Next Web sistema ni sama testirala, temveč se je oprla na vzajemno priznavanje certifikata nizozemskega regulatorja RDW. Gre za sistem druge stopnje, pri katerem je voznik ves čas pravno odgovoren.

Prav o tem certifikatu je Reuters ta teden razkril neprijetne podrobnosti. Iz več sto strani dopisovanja, ki jih povzema Electrek, je razvidno, da je Tesla na RDW izvajala pritisk: račun za 365.000 evrov je označila za »izjemno visok« in zadržala plačilo, zahtevala, naj se namesto inšpektorjevih testov upoštevajo njena lastna poročila, in dobila vnaprejšnja obvestila o testih ter imena varnostnih voznikov.

Sedem raziskovalcev prometne varnosti je ocenilo, da je bil vzorec premajhen za trditve o večji varnosti. RDW podatkov s testov ni objavil.

Vseevropsko glasovanje o FSD je preloženo najmanj na december.

Do takrat se bodo Tesle s FSD tudi po slovenskih cestah vozile tudi ponoči – s sistemom, za katerega Musk sam priznava, da v temi ne vidi sivih muck na sivem asfaltu.