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Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving Capability' Falls Short of Its Name

107 points by rakkhi 6y ago

ForHackernews 6y ago
Wow, this is pretty damning: > Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control is designed to come to a complete stop at all stoplights, even when they are green, unless the driver overrides the system. We found several problems with this system, including the basic idea that it goes against normal driving practice for a car to start slowing to a stop for a green light. At times, it also drove through stop signs, slammed on the brakes for yield signs even when the merge was clear, and stopped at every exit while going around a traffic circle. (emphasis mine) Is that really how this feature is intended to work?
- wmeredith 6y ago
  No. I’d go so far as to say this doesn’t work at all. That sounds dangerous as hell and would be a menace on the road.
- untog 6y ago
  EDIT: HN isn’t a place to make jokes
  - anarazel 6y ago
    That seems more like a leadership than an employee issue.
  - quesera 6y ago
    That was Zuckerberg, not Musk.
- wilg 6y ago
  It will notify you that it is approaching a traffic control, and if you do not confirm that you want to proceed through, it will slow to a stop. Presumably the idea is this is safer than blowing through an intersection accidentally, which seems reasonable. You do not have to confirm if there is a car in front of you or it sees other cars proceeding through the intersection. I think it (stopping at traffic controls) works quite well for a feature that rolled out only a few months ago. The article is generally accurate, but almost all these features are still labeled "beta" and work pretty well, though certainly not perfectly. The idea is they will improve over time and eventually get there, the article kind of assumes they are all supposed to be flawless which I don't think is particularly accurate. If you interpret "Full Self Driving" as "everything works flawlessly" it's going to be a disappointment. That's fair enough for a naive reading of the phrase, you can argue that's overselling the potential of the feature, but perfect driving at this time is not what is actually claimed. I think on balance all these features are pretty positive and designed smartly so that the driver can understand what is happening and correct the car's actions, and it does seem like they are improving over time.
  - tsherr 6y ago
    One doesn't interpret "self-driving". The definition of self driving is something that drives itself. Period. Adding "full" in front of it makes it emphatic. It's the same as saying something is "free" or "completely free". There's no nuance here. He's lying in his marketing. Even a Musk fanboy can't argue that I'm not saying it isn't good, it just isn't what he claims it is.
    - wilg 6y ago
      I just am not that interested in the semantics of the name. I understand your point, that’s fine, I didn’t name it. The idea is that you buy an option for the car that they claim will not now but in the future allow the car to qualify as “Full Self Driving” by some definition. It is not claimed that it will do that now, it’s fine to be skeptical that will ever happen to your satisfaction, but the feature has always been something that will be delivered over time.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    I don't consider driving through stop lights a beta feature. Even if only happens one time out of a thousand it's still a threat to life, and a possible class action suit. There isn't room for a threat-to-life feature to improve incrementally, and it's very curious to see anyone suggest that it's somehow tolerable to risk the lives of customers with not-quite-there-yet-but-we'll-get-back-to-you-soon features.
    - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
      That's pretty much why they require the driver to be paying attention with their hands on the wheel at all times. Any user who treats it otherwise is asking for trouble.
      - wilg 6y ago
        Yeah, like any car if you do not operate it properly it will fail to handle an intersection. I don’t think I buy that a driver assistance system that does not always intervene is dangerous, when the expectation, design, and legal agreement is you must drive the car responsibly. I’m not sure it’s conceptually different from a safety perspective as something like cruise control.
- mlindner 6y ago
  That's not what it does at all.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
I would find it kind of satisfying if Waymo solidly won the self-driving race. It would be a triumph of solid engineering over unreliable "good-enough" solutions.
- 256lie 6y ago
  It is unlikely to me that any company will "win" the self-driving race in this decade.
  - switch11 6y ago
    would be surprised if anyone came up with an actual self driving car in the next 2 to 3 decades
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    I used to have the same confidence about no AI beating the best human at Go any time soon. Now I see the problem of self driving is now just data and and computation, each of which grows by bounds every month...
    - 256lie 6y ago
      Go can be simulated and self-trained. Self driving cars are robots interacting in the real world with multiple, stochastic agents. Real time hardware systems that are reliable and commercially viable will also be extremely difficult.
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        cars are also racking up millions of virtual miles in parallel...
- nwienert 6y ago
  You’re defining solid-engineering funny. You need a mass amount of data to train on. How do you get that? Its an engineering or a business problem, depending how how you look at it - how do you get a ton of people driving for you? Tesla has the better business model here. That leads to more data, which is the most important factor in training. Now, google is orders of magnitude bigger and had a huge head start, perhaps they brute force their way to the lead. But being more conservative != better engineering. You could philosophically disagree with many things Tesla is doing, but in terms of solving self driving cars I think they have the better strategy that gives their engineers the data they need. Tesla is in the real world recording every car they sell through vastly more dynamic scenario/terrain. That’s smart engineering.
256lie 6y ago
Something about lidar being doomed to fail.
swiley 6y ago
Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it. The sensor array is too limited and they’re leaning too much on ML.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it. The everyone you hear from is very different from the everyone I hear from. I dislike Tesla's approach, but you have to admit that a ton of people are on board their hype train.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Ive seen lots of people excited about tesla stock. Some people who were already fans of their car seemed to buy into the hype but I haven’t heard any non-fanboy who has paid any attention to self driving say they expected this to work out.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      The problem is that most people are not paying huge attention to self-driving and the marketing will end up causing some people to misjudge the capabilities and get them killed. At which point fanboys will move the goalposts to "it kills less people than humans operating cars", which I don't think is necessarily true depending on how you want to measure that.
- jayd16 6y ago
  A human could drive the car with just the sensor input so in a very real way this is not correct. I agree that Tesla still has a long way to go though.
  - swiley 6y ago
    With just the low dynamic range fixed framerate monocular camera input? I’m not sure I could. Also, everyone knows computers still aren’t as good at vision recognition as humans are.
fouc 6y ago
And all of these issues will be fixed in Tesla’s over-the-air software updates eventually I imagine.
- 256lie 6y ago
  Why do you imagine that? When will they fix them all?
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    I think they would be violating the terms of the sale if they don't fix the issues present and roll out all the features described in FSD. Granted, that's no guarantee they will either. So far they have made significant fixes and rolled out new features. As long as they keep that up they'll eventually deliver something reliable with all the features listed. As to when, it'll probably be next season. No clue on which year though... :P
- threeseed 6y ago
  You can’t ship new hardware over the air. Tesla is never going to have a solid self driving system without LiDAR. Radar’s range is limited and cameras are simply not suitable for reliable depth perception and bounding box detection.
  - belltaco 6y ago
    Humans don't have LIDAR, they have only 2 eyes and not even radar. Yet they're able to drive pretty well, it's because they have great software to power that limited hardware.
    - throwaway4220 6y ago
      Yes, but Tesla has a bunch of cameras not two human eyes. Edit: I wonder if a human can learn to drive a Tesla remotely better than another human with radar and multiple camera input by representing them in some useful way.
fnord77 6y ago
I suspect some aspects of driving a car consumes a majority of a person's brain power, even if it doesn't feel like it. Ever get into a situation where there's on-ramps and off-ramps on both sides, you've never been on that stretch of road before and there's a lot of traffic? Driver conversation stops. Driver paying attention to the audiobook or podcast playing stops. It takes all your attention. If that's the case, then maybe we won't get true self-driving until these systems have the processing power of a human brain...
- 256lie 6y ago
  Not processing power but a better world model of physics and reasoning. Humans can understand other drivers intentions and when laws can be bent based on the context to avoid dangerous situations.
- dstaley 6y ago
  > Ever get into a situation where there's on-ramps and off-ramps on both sides, you've never been on that stretch of road before and there's a lot of traffic? One advantage cars with large sensor suites have over humans is that they can see and process information from all around them. In your specific example, the car can watch both on an off ramps at the same time, isn't phased by the "newness" of the road since other cars have navigated this section of road hundreds of times before it has, and can keep tabs on cars obscured by line of sight due to the car's ability to bounce signals off of vehicles.
  - fnord77 6y ago
    ok - here's a better example - skillful drivers on a highway can predict when another driver might change lanes just from the "body language" of that car. It's pretty subtle and I don't think all human drivers can recognize it, much less SOA AI. Along the same vein, most drivers will become extra vigilant of another car that's driving in a way that's the least bit erratic, giving that car a wide berth.
- samatman 6y ago
  Yes and no. ENIAC exceeded the processing power of a human brain. Only for solving systems of equations, a task which humans find very difficult, and for which computers are naturally suited. But we would never have built it if this weren't the case. Chess fell to AI decades before Go did, because computers find Go more difficult, due to the much greater branching factor. Humans are more naturally suited to Go, we can "cheat" by training our built-in shape and pattern recognition subsystems. It's true that driving a car recruits many adaptive subsystems of a human brain. It's further along the spectrum of 'easy for humans, hard for computers'. But what I want to illustrate is that the 'processing power of a human brain' isn't very well-defined, and isn't the relevant factor for why self-driving has proven remarkably difficult. It's not clear to me that full self-driving, at the level where there's no steering wheel in the car, can be achieved without general AI. I don't even think it's a useful goal, since the really difficult tasks are things like "park your car in this particular place in a field when arriving at a wedding", rather than situations a human would have to suddenly take over for. But I have to employ my full concentration to add two five-digit numbers in my head, and while I once knew the trick for multiplication, today I'm quite incapable. Yet there's nothing more trivial for a computer.
mdorazio 6y ago
This seems right about where I expected their real-world capabilities to be today based on their sensor setup and the state of ML for self-driving. i.e. not very good, and nowhere near the Elon hype train or timetable. The real question is how much of this can actually be fixed by software updates alone. Personally, I don't think they can even get to 99% reliability on these use cases, let alone the number of 9s required to be at least as good as the human drivers it's supposed to replace. My money is still solidly on Waymo being the frontrunner for years.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Actually 3D video and pose detection significantly improved this year in research, but it takes a few years to put it into production, and it needs to mature a little bit. I'm sure both Tesla and Waymo are looking at those research advancements.
jarbus 6y ago
Shameless self promotion, I wrote an article on this a while back: https://jarbus.net/Tesla-and-False-Advertising-In-AI https://jarbus.net/Tesla-and-False-Advertising-In-AI Elon Musk is just blatantly falsely advertising FSD by this point. He's trying to sell a technology that a) doesn't exist, and b) has no guarantees of being ready anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised if people started demanding refunds pretty soon.
- deleted 6y ago
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- judge2020 6y ago
  I don't think anyone takes Elon's word as final. Even if they did, when you buy a Tesla it has the FSD computer disclaimer on the purchase page, and enabling any of the features in the UI show as "beta" and have giant warnings[0] before you can enable them. Given the beta wording, plus the fact that you already are getting insane value with the promise of continuous over-the-air updates for years (2012 cars still get updates, although the exciting changes in recent updates usually deal with the new hardware old cars don't have), I don't think anyone is going to start asking for refunds. 0: https://images.app.goo.gl/KphqD7BPbcCvDXpw8 https://images.app.goo.gl/KphqD7BPbcCvDXpw8
candiddevmike 6y ago
All of the current gen assisted/self driving tech seems like it's operating in a legal grey area like Uber. Every car manufacturer assumes people are still behind the wheel, and the government is (naively?) going along with it. "By operating this vehicle you agree to..." seems to dissolve them of any responsibility, including around quality of software, and it honestly scares the hell out of me. I don't know what the fix is for this, the genies out of the bottle here. We won't have reliable self driving cars for years (decades?), and until then we're stuck in this horrible wild west where an off by one error can cause a pileup on the highway. Let's stop the the assisted/self driving stuff until we have a regulatory framework that can prove the tech works in various conditions, much like seatbelts and collision testing.
- throwaway122378 6y ago
  We need a digital infrastructure plan. Nationwide upgrade to create a universal platform for autonomous vehicles including a common protocol language, smart signs, smart traffic lights, location beacons, improved highway infrastructure, upgrades laws and more.
- z6 6y ago
  We have these accidents and pileups constantly without involvement of assisted driving technology. By your logic we should disallow anything that could ever hurt anybody.
  - candiddevmike 6y ago
    Exactly, why add another way for humans to be negligent? I would absolutely love to see mass transit replace self driving cars as the panacea to our transportation issues.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      Exactly. I don't think people realize just how terrible cars at at scaling, whether they are human driven or completely controlled centrally as a fleet. Even parking a single car requires as much square footage as the typical worker requirement for office space. And if you don't have onsite parking, you have double the miles travelled as cars leave the central business district to temporary storage far away, only to come back to pick people up for their commutes back. The past century of car-based thinking has damaged the US's planning brains. We need to go back to first principles and think about serving the needs and wants of humans, rather than serving the needs of a hugely space inefficient and health-damaging transit mode.
sega_sai 6y ago
To be honest I just don't understand how what is shown could be legal -- Having a beta software on something that could easily kill, making the drivers/passengers other road users lab rats and beta-testers. I do admire what Musk did with SpaceX, but the 'self-driving' aspect of Tesla is just disgusting.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  I don't like the way Autopilot and FSD are advertised, and they're very clear that when you buy FSD it's a promise and not a product. What you get are incremental updates and new features hopefully leading to actual FSD. You are not a beta tester testing out pre-release software, the features you received are considered complete. The stationary object detection problem that has caused fatalities is industry wide. The combination of failures that lead to Walter Huang's death however aren't in my opinion. I think GM's monitoring system is the right solution until FSD is solved, Tesla's steering wheel torque monitoring isn't enough.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > You are not a beta tester testing out pre-release software, the features you received are considered complete. Well, then, why are they labelled 'beta'?
smabie 6y ago
I don't understand, why would you ever want the car to stop at a green light? Can it not reliably read the traffic light color?
- deleted 6y ago
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- lreeves 6y ago
  I am absolutely shocked by this and am amazed that this is the first time I've heard of it.
thesausageking 6y ago
In the summer of 2015, Elon Musk said the software upgrade Tesla was rolling out would allow the Model S to have hands-free autopilot. 5 years later and even for an extra $8k we still don't have hands-free autopilot.
shermanmccoy 6y ago
Who would've thought that relying on a statistical model, whose many thousands of parameters are not understand, would lead to such an erratic end product?
nradov 6y ago
What does HN think of the Ghost self driving product? Is it real or a scam? They claim to be able to add limited level 3 autonomous operation to most late model cars. https://gh.st/home https://gh.st/home
- jeffreygoesto 6y ago
  Highway seems simpler, but it isn't. Just different. Being able to predict the necessary time ahead with limited sensors at high speeds is as hard as predicting a high number of participants going slower in the city. Personally I think level 3 should be banned (can't find it, but I think Volvo blogged about it years ago), because the system just cannot detect that it will fail in some seconds and give the driver enough time to react.
  - jeffreygoesto 6y ago
    This well known Tesla fatality [0] illustrates my point. Unfortunately. The model built up by the system was free (enough) of contradictions and the reaction of speeding up right into that barrier was a totally correct one. From the system's "point of view". Neither sensor- nor interpretation-wise we are close enough to humans with those systems if the operating domain is not extremely limited. All general highway systems are operating in a too open environment to be safe (that is, we won't see real L3 or higher systems there in the near future). Sorry, Ghost. Ask other people who have been there. By the way, Google's tiny slow cars driving in the valley only were exactly the strategy to limit the operational domain. Once they opened up that domain, they started to struggle again with the same problems as all others (admittedly on another level of mastering it though)... [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150546/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-invesigation-huang-ntsb-hearing-live-stream https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150546/tesla-autopilot-...
deleted 6y ago
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jarvar 6y ago
Would keeping Autopilot 'dumb' be a good way to keep users engaged and continue training the network? While Tesla keeps and improves a far more capable version of autopilot internally? I think autopilot is a huge legal burden for Tesla, and I would imagine being careful is a high priority. Once Tesla starts marketing full self driving capability, it will open a gateway of legal troubles that they'll need to deal with once the system is fully capable and can no longer hide behind the 'beta' word. They've put out videos showing autopilot doing complex things and I think that's a pre-release version of autopilot they were using. IDK though, just wondering.

107 points by rakkhi 6y ago

Wow, this is pretty damning: > Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control is designed to come to a complete stop at all stoplights, even when they are green, unless the driver overrides the system. We found several problems with this system, including the basic idea that it goes against normal driving practice for a car to start slowing to a stop for a green light. At times, it also drove through stop signs, slammed on the brakes for yield signs even when the merge was clear, and stopped at every exit while going around a traffic circle. (emphasis mine) Is that really how this feature is intended to work?

wmeredith 6y ago
No. I’d go so far as to say this doesn’t work at all. That sounds dangerous as hell and would be a menace on the road.
untog 6y ago
EDIT: HN isn’t a place to make jokes
- anarazel 6y ago
  That seems more like a leadership than an employee issue.
- quesera 6y ago
  That was Zuckerberg, not Musk.
wilg 6y ago
It will notify you that it is approaching a traffic control, and if you do not confirm that you want to proceed through, it will slow to a stop. Presumably the idea is this is safer than blowing through an intersection accidentally, which seems reasonable. You do not have to confirm if there is a car in front of you or it sees other cars proceeding through the intersection. I think it (stopping at traffic controls) works quite well for a feature that rolled out only a few months ago. The article is generally accurate, but almost all these features are still labeled "beta" and work pretty well, though certainly not perfectly. The idea is they will improve over time and eventually get there, the article kind of assumes they are all supposed to be flawless which I don't think is particularly accurate. If you interpret "Full Self Driving" as "everything works flawlessly" it's going to be a disappointment. That's fair enough for a naive reading of the phrase, you can argue that's overselling the potential of the feature, but perfect driving at this time is not what is actually claimed. I think on balance all these features are pretty positive and designed smartly so that the driver can understand what is happening and correct the car's actions, and it does seem like they are improving over time.
- tsherr 6y ago
  One doesn't interpret "self-driving". The definition of self driving is something that drives itself. Period. Adding "full" in front of it makes it emphatic. It's the same as saying something is "free" or "completely free". There's no nuance here. He's lying in his marketing. Even a Musk fanboy can't argue that I'm not saying it isn't good, it just isn't what he claims it is.
  - wilg 6y ago
    I just am not that interested in the semantics of the name. I understand your point, that’s fine, I didn’t name it. The idea is that you buy an option for the car that they claim will not now but in the future allow the car to qualify as “Full Self Driving” by some definition. It is not claimed that it will do that now, it’s fine to be skeptical that will ever happen to your satisfaction, but the feature has always been something that will be delivered over time.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I don't consider driving through stop lights a beta feature. Even if only happens one time out of a thousand it's still a threat to life, and a possible class action suit. There isn't room for a threat-to-life feature to improve incrementally, and it's very curious to see anyone suggest that it's somehow tolerable to risk the lives of customers with not-quite-there-yet-but-we'll-get-back-to-you-soon features.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    That's pretty much why they require the driver to be paying attention with their hands on the wheel at all times. Any user who treats it otherwise is asking for trouble.
    - wilg 6y ago
      Yeah, like any car if you do not operate it properly it will fail to handle an intersection. I don’t think I buy that a driver assistance system that does not always intervene is dangerous, when the expectation, design, and legal agreement is you must drive the car responsibly. I’m not sure it’s conceptually different from a safety perspective as something like cruise control.
mlindner 6y ago
That's not what it does at all.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

I would find it kind of satisfying if Waymo solidly won the self-driving race. It would be a triumph of solid engineering over unreliable "good-enough" solutions.

256lie 6y ago
It is unlikely to me that any company will "win" the self-driving race in this decade.
- switch11 6y ago
  would be surprised if anyone came up with an actual self driving car in the next 2 to 3 decades
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  I used to have the same confidence about no AI beating the best human at Go any time soon. Now I see the problem of self driving is now just data and and computation, each of which grows by bounds every month...
  - 256lie 6y ago
    Go can be simulated and self-trained. Self driving cars are robots interacting in the real world with multiple, stochastic agents. Real time hardware systems that are reliable and commercially viable will also be extremely difficult.
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      cars are also racking up millions of virtual miles in parallel...
nwienert 6y ago
You’re defining solid-engineering funny. You need a mass amount of data to train on. How do you get that? Its an engineering or a business problem, depending how how you look at it - how do you get a ton of people driving for you? Tesla has the better business model here. That leads to more data, which is the most important factor in training. Now, google is orders of magnitude bigger and had a huge head start, perhaps they brute force their way to the lead. But being more conservative != better engineering. You could philosophically disagree with many things Tesla is doing, but in terms of solving self driving cars I think they have the better strategy that gives their engineers the data they need. Tesla is in the real world recording every car they sell through vastly more dynamic scenario/terrain. That’s smart engineering.

256lie 6y ago

Something about lidar being doomed to fail.

swiley 6y ago

Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it. The sensor array is too limited and they’re leaning too much on ML.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it. The everyone you hear from is very different from the everyone I hear from. I dislike Tesla's approach, but you have to admit that a ton of people are on board their hype train.
- swiley 6y ago
  Ive seen lots of people excited about tesla stock. Some people who were already fans of their car seemed to buy into the hype but I haven’t heard any non-fanboy who has paid any attention to self driving say they expected this to work out.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    The problem is that most people are not paying huge attention to self-driving and the marketing will end up causing some people to misjudge the capabilities and get them killed. At which point fanboys will move the goalposts to "it kills less people than humans operating cars", which I don't think is necessarily true depending on how you want to measure that.
jayd16 6y ago
A human could drive the car with just the sensor input so in a very real way this is not correct. I agree that Tesla still has a long way to go though.
- swiley 6y ago
  With just the low dynamic range fixed framerate monocular camera input? I’m not sure I could. Also, everyone knows computers still aren’t as good at vision recognition as humans are.

fouc 6y ago

And all of these issues will be fixed in Tesla’s over-the-air software updates eventually I imagine.

256lie 6y ago
Why do you imagine that? When will they fix them all?
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  I think they would be violating the terms of the sale if they don't fix the issues present and roll out all the features described in FSD. Granted, that's no guarantee they will either. So far they have made significant fixes and rolled out new features. As long as they keep that up they'll eventually deliver something reliable with all the features listed. As to when, it'll probably be next season. No clue on which year though... :P
threeseed 6y ago
You can’t ship new hardware over the air. Tesla is never going to have a solid self driving system without LiDAR. Radar’s range is limited and cameras are simply not suitable for reliable depth perception and bounding box detection.
- belltaco 6y ago
  Humans don't have LIDAR, they have only 2 eyes and not even radar. Yet they're able to drive pretty well, it's because they have great software to power that limited hardware.
  - throwaway4220 6y ago
    Yes, but Tesla has a bunch of cameras not two human eyes. Edit: I wonder if a human can learn to drive a Tesla remotely better than another human with radar and multiple camera input by representing them in some useful way.

fnord77 6y ago

I suspect some aspects of driving a car consumes a majority of a person's brain power, even if it doesn't feel like it. Ever get into a situation where there's on-ramps and off-ramps on both sides, you've never been on that stretch of road before and there's a lot of traffic? Driver conversation stops. Driver paying attention to the audiobook or podcast playing stops. It takes all your attention. If that's the case, then maybe we won't get true self-driving until these systems have the processing power of a human brain...

256lie 6y ago
Not processing power but a better world model of physics and reasoning. Humans can understand other drivers intentions and when laws can be bent based on the context to avoid dangerous situations.
dstaley 6y ago
> Ever get into a situation where there's on-ramps and off-ramps on both sides, you've never been on that stretch of road before and there's a lot of traffic? One advantage cars with large sensor suites have over humans is that they can see and process information from all around them. In your specific example, the car can watch both on an off ramps at the same time, isn't phased by the "newness" of the road since other cars have navigated this section of road hundreds of times before it has, and can keep tabs on cars obscured by line of sight due to the car's ability to bounce signals off of vehicles.
- fnord77 6y ago
  ok - here's a better example - skillful drivers on a highway can predict when another driver might change lanes just from the "body language" of that car. It's pretty subtle and I don't think all human drivers can recognize it, much less SOA AI. Along the same vein, most drivers will become extra vigilant of another car that's driving in a way that's the least bit erratic, giving that car a wide berth.
samatman 6y ago
Yes and no. ENIAC exceeded the processing power of a human brain. Only for solving systems of equations, a task which humans find very difficult, and for which computers are naturally suited. But we would never have built it if this weren't the case. Chess fell to AI decades before Go did, because computers find Go more difficult, due to the much greater branching factor. Humans are more naturally suited to Go, we can "cheat" by training our built-in shape and pattern recognition subsystems. It's true that driving a car recruits many adaptive subsystems of a human brain. It's further along the spectrum of 'easy for humans, hard for computers'. But what I want to illustrate is that the 'processing power of a human brain' isn't very well-defined, and isn't the relevant factor for why self-driving has proven remarkably difficult. It's not clear to me that full self-driving, at the level where there's no steering wheel in the car, can be achieved without general AI. I don't even think it's a useful goal, since the really difficult tasks are things like "park your car in this particular place in a field when arriving at a wedding", rather than situations a human would have to suddenly take over for. But I have to employ my full concentration to add two five-digit numbers in my head, and while I once knew the trick for multiplication, today I'm quite incapable. Yet there's nothing more trivial for a computer.

mdorazio 6y ago

This seems right about where I expected their real-world capabilities to be today based on their sensor setup and the state of ML for self-driving. i.e. not very good, and nowhere near the Elon hype train or timetable. The real question is how much of this can actually be fixed by software updates alone. Personally, I don't think they can even get to 99% reliability on these use cases, let alone the number of 9s required to be at least as good as the human drivers it's supposed to replace. My money is still solidly on Waymo being the frontrunner for years.

xiphias2 6y ago
Actually 3D video and pose detection significantly improved this year in research, but it takes a few years to put it into production, and it needs to mature a little bit. I'm sure both Tesla and Waymo are looking at those research advancements.

jarbus 6y ago

Shameless self promotion, I wrote an article on this a while back: https://jarbus.net/Tesla-and-False-Advertising-In-AI https://jarbus.net/Tesla-and-False-Advertising-In-AI Elon Musk is just blatantly falsely advertising FSD by this point. He's trying to sell a technology that a) doesn't exist, and b) has no guarantees of being ready anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised if people started demanding refunds pretty soon.

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judge2020 6y ago
I don't think anyone takes Elon's word as final. Even if they did, when you buy a Tesla it has the FSD computer disclaimer on the purchase page, and enabling any of the features in the UI show as "beta" and have giant warnings[0] before you can enable them. Given the beta wording, plus the fact that you already are getting insane value with the promise of continuous over-the-air updates for years (2012 cars still get updates, although the exciting changes in recent updates usually deal with the new hardware old cars don't have), I don't think anyone is going to start asking for refunds. 0: https://images.app.goo.gl/KphqD7BPbcCvDXpw8 https://images.app.goo.gl/KphqD7BPbcCvDXpw8

candiddevmike 6y ago

All of the current gen assisted/self driving tech seems like it's operating in a legal grey area like Uber. Every car manufacturer assumes people are still behind the wheel, and the government is (naively?) going along with it. "By operating this vehicle you agree to..." seems to dissolve them of any responsibility, including around quality of software, and it honestly scares the hell out of me. I don't know what the fix is for this, the genies out of the bottle here. We won't have reliable self driving cars for years (decades?), and until then we're stuck in this horrible wild west where an off by one error can cause a pileup on the highway. Let's stop the the assisted/self driving stuff until we have a regulatory framework that can prove the tech works in various conditions, much like seatbelts and collision testing.

throwaway122378 6y ago
We need a digital infrastructure plan. Nationwide upgrade to create a universal platform for autonomous vehicles including a common protocol language, smart signs, smart traffic lights, location beacons, improved highway infrastructure, upgrades laws and more.
z6 6y ago
We have these accidents and pileups constantly without involvement of assisted driving technology. By your logic we should disallow anything that could ever hurt anybody.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  Exactly, why add another way for humans to be negligent? I would absolutely love to see mass transit replace self driving cars as the panacea to our transportation issues.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Exactly. I don't think people realize just how terrible cars at at scaling, whether they are human driven or completely controlled centrally as a fleet. Even parking a single car requires as much square footage as the typical worker requirement for office space. And if you don't have onsite parking, you have double the miles travelled as cars leave the central business district to temporary storage far away, only to come back to pick people up for their commutes back. The past century of car-based thinking has damaged the US's planning brains. We need to go back to first principles and think about serving the needs and wants of humans, rather than serving the needs of a hugely space inefficient and health-damaging transit mode.

sega_sai 6y ago

To be honest I just don't understand how what is shown could be legal -- Having a beta software on something that could easily kill, making the drivers/passengers other road users lab rats and beta-testers. I do admire what Musk did with SpaceX, but the 'self-driving' aspect of Tesla is just disgusting.

cptskippy 6y ago
I don't like the way Autopilot and FSD are advertised, and they're very clear that when you buy FSD it's a promise and not a product. What you get are incremental updates and new features hopefully leading to actual FSD. You are not a beta tester testing out pre-release software, the features you received are considered complete. The stationary object detection problem that has caused fatalities is industry wide. The combination of failures that lead to Walter Huang's death however aren't in my opinion. I think GM's monitoring system is the right solution until FSD is solved, Tesla's steering wheel torque monitoring isn't enough.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > You are not a beta tester testing out pre-release software, the features you received are considered complete. Well, then, why are they labelled 'beta'?

smabie 6y ago

I don't understand, why would you ever want the car to stop at a green light? Can it not reliably read the traffic light color?

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lreeves 6y ago
I am absolutely shocked by this and am amazed that this is the first time I've heard of it.

thesausageking 6y ago

In the summer of 2015, Elon Musk said the software upgrade Tesla was rolling out would allow the Model S to have hands-free autopilot. 5 years later and even for an extra $8k we still don't have hands-free autopilot.

shermanmccoy 6y ago

Who would've thought that relying on a statistical model, whose many thousands of parameters are not understand, would lead to such an erratic end product?

nradov 6y ago

What does HN think of the Ghost self driving product? Is it real or a scam? They claim to be able to add limited level 3 autonomous operation to most late model cars. https://gh.st/home https://gh.st/home

jeffreygoesto 6y ago
Highway seems simpler, but it isn't. Just different. Being able to predict the necessary time ahead with limited sensors at high speeds is as hard as predicting a high number of participants going slower in the city. Personally I think level 3 should be banned (can't find it, but I think Volvo blogged about it years ago), because the system just cannot detect that it will fail in some seconds and give the driver enough time to react.
- jeffreygoesto 6y ago
  This well known Tesla fatality [0] illustrates my point. Unfortunately. The model built up by the system was free (enough) of contradictions and the reaction of speeding up right into that barrier was a totally correct one. From the system's "point of view". Neither sensor- nor interpretation-wise we are close enough to humans with those systems if the operating domain is not extremely limited. All general highway systems are operating in a too open environment to be safe (that is, we won't see real L3 or higher systems there in the near future). Sorry, Ghost. Ask other people who have been there. By the way, Google's tiny slow cars driving in the valley only were exactly the strategy to limit the operational domain. Once they opened up that domain, they started to struggle again with the same problems as all others (admittedly on another level of mastering it though)... [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150546/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-invesigation-huang-ntsb-hearing-live-stream https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150546/tesla-autopilot-...

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jarvar 6y ago

Would keeping Autopilot 'dumb' be a good way to keep users engaged and continue training the network? While Tesla keeps and improves a far more capable version of autopilot internally? I think autopilot is a huge legal burden for Tesla, and I would imagine being careful is a high priority. Once Tesla starts marketing full self driving capability, it will open a gateway of legal troubles that they'll need to deal with once the system is fully capable and can no longer hide behind the 'beta' word. They've put out videos showing autopilot doing complex things and I think that's a pre-release version of autopilot they were using. IDK though, just wondering.