A video showing some of what the cameras on a Tesla are actually capturing while the car uses its Autopilot software to assist with driving has shocked people this week.
The video itself is actually from early 2020, but a Reddit post highlighting it went viral this week as people reacted to the pretty incredible footage and some were comparing it to the Terminator films.
The driving in the video is extremely mundane, which is almost the whole point - it shows a car driving in a couple of normal situations.
Footage is captured from the front of the car, though, and overlaid on it is the visual information that the Autopilot is actually processing, in the form of frames, lines and data points.
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The first clip, in the video shared by Carscoops on YouTube, sees the car approaching a small rural-looking intersection, and shows how the car detects another vehicle in front of it in a green box, as well as the road's marking and edges and a stop sign, to know what to do.
It's pretty impressive, but the next clip is way, way more complex.
It shows a drive down a city street with loads of parked cars, some traffic and even a couple of pedestrians.
The sheer amount of visual information being boxed up and stuck inside boundaries that the car can then track makes it almost hard to see what's going on, and underlines just how much of your environment a Tesla sees while you drive through it.
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In the comments on that Reddit post, meanwhile, the footage has people pretty amazed. The top comment in the thread, with over 1,000 upvotes on it in agreement, makes a funny comparison: "Put a red filter over this and it’s just the [...] terminator sight."
This points out that the amount of computer information overlaid on the footage makes it look a bit like the point-of-view shots in the Terminator movies, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and featuring killer robots from the future tracking and trying to kill humans.
Another comment is a little more technically minded, and points out that: "It doesn't 'see' this. The visual representation is for us humans. The computer just 'sees' numbers".
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Indeed, this footage is a composite for us to understand what the car is processing, rather than an actual representation of how it works - it's a demonstration, in effect.
Of course, as with any demonstration of automated or semi-automated driving, there are plenty of people voicing concerns about it, too.
One person wrote: "What about winter, when all the markings are under ice and snow?".
In fact, as a reply confirms, you're advised not to use Autopilot in anything other than calm conditions, since it's not best equipped to deal with bad weather and obscured signage, so the onus turns out to be on the driver in that sort of case.
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And also, given this video was made a few years ago, there are sure to be a lot of Tesla updates that haven't been taken into account.