Looks like it could use some more... training.

Off Track

You'd hope that your super-duper advanced self-driving tech that you're trusting your life with knows what it's looking at on the road. But that's apparently asking a lot of a Tesla.

Just take a peek at this viral video taken by the driver of a Model Y. While waiting at a railroad crossing, the center console visualization of the Tesla's "vision" shows that it's mistaking a passing train first as semi-trailers — then as a procession of comically huge and elongated cars, roughly the size and shape of, well, train cars. 

Watching the onboard computer try to make sense of this mysterious transportation technology in real time is a sight to behold: the cars, already the width of the road they're crossing, grow lengthier before our eyes, flicker in and out of existence, and even show up occasionally outside the track.

"Look how elongated they are!" the driver cackles. "I have never seen that."

Tunnel Vision

Reports of the issue with the Tesla Vision technology — which relies solely on cameras without the help of lidar and other sensors — go back at least as far as 2022, not long after the system was rolled out.

Even if it's just an issue of getting proper graphics in place, it's striking that the automaker would leave it unfinished for so long. Wouldn't this alarm drivers and undermine their trust in Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, especially since this tech has a history of slamming into trains? How is it that so many other objects, like traffic cones, get 3D models and not trains? 

Maybe it's just not a priority; Tesla CEO Elon Musk once suggested that trains would get their own graphics — but that was over two years ago.

Whatever the reason for the dire lack of Train Representation, it does make for a pretty blunt metaphor for Musk's well documented animus towards public transportation. Famously, Musk once proposed building the Hyperloop, a network of vacuum tunnels that would transport passengers to different cities at incredible speeds. Later he admitted he never intended to build the ambitious system, with critics accusing him of pushing the idea as a ploy to kill California's plans to build high-speed rail.

Like the struggling Tesla computer, the man's brain will also bend over backwards to invent anything but a train; just look at his Boring Company "Loops," which are networks of underground, single lane tunnels for Tesla cars to drive through — a slower and dumber subway, basically.

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