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Many of the comments here seem a bit... unfair to me, considering that these clips were handpicked. I watched (and fast-forwarded) through a few of the origina

by cs702 5y ago

Many of the comments here seem a bit... unfair to me, considering that these clips were handpicked. I watched (and fast-forwarded) through a few of the original, full-length videos from which these clips were taken. The full-length videos show long drives (in some cases, hours long) almost entirely without human intervention, under conditions explicitly meant to be difficult for self-driving vehicles. One thing I really liked seeing in the full-length videos is that FSD 9 is much better than previous efforts at requesting human intervention in advance, with plenty of time to react, when the software is confused by upcoming road situations. The handpicked clips are exceptions. For BETA software, FSD 9 is doing remarkably well, in my view. I mean, it's clearly NOT yet ready for wide release, but it's much closer than all previous versions of Tesla FSD I've seen before, and acceptable for a closed-to-the-public Beta program.

richwater 5y ago
It literally doesn't matter how well it does in 90% of situations when the other 10% can injure or kill people in relatively basic scenarios like the Tweets presented. I mean the car almost ran into a concrete pillar like it wasn't even there. > For BETA software, FSD 9 is doing remarkably well If this was a React website, that'd be great. But it's a production $40,000 multi ton automobile.
- bob33212 5y ago
  People will die today because a driver was drunk/distracted/suicidal/rode raged or had a medical problem. Are you OK with that or do you think we should attempt to fix that with software? If you do think you should attempt to fix that, do you understand that software engineering is a iterative process? It gets safer overtime.
  - foepys 5y ago
    > People will die today because a driver was drunk/distracted/suicidal/rode raged or had a medical problem. That's a straw man argument. Mandatory breathalyzer tests before every engine start and yearly medical and psychological check-ups would solve a lot of these problems as well. > It gets safer overtime. There is no evidence of this happening yet. It's still trying to drive people into concrete pillars. Remember that you only need to drive into a pillar once to die. Passing it 10,000 times before doesn't help when an update suddenly decides that the pillar is now a lane. I'd be totally fine with Tesla testing this with trained drivers in suitable areas but giving this into the hands of amateurs is pure "move fast and break things", with "break" meaning ending lives. The worst thing is: all of these videos feature sunny weather. How bad would it be in the rain? Ever tried to take picture in the dark with even light rain? Cameras are very bad at this.
    - camjohnson26 5y ago
      Local maximums exist. If ML models were guaranteed to improve over time we would have no more problems to solve.
    - bob33212 5y ago
      What are you proposing? If someone is overweight with high blood pressure and a higher risk for a heart attack we should take away their license? These drivers are vetted and their usage is monitored, many are employees. In the long run automated driving will save many more lives than it takes. Just like automated elevators. https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-driverless-elevators-drew-skepticism#:~:text=The%20automatic%20elevator%20was%20invented,and%20automatic%20elevators%20became%20ubiquitous https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-dr....
      - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
        > What are you proposing? If someone is overweight with high blood pressure and a higher risk for a heart attack we should take away their license? This does not seem like an important nit to pick, so I'm wondering why you're picking it. The number of people killed or injured because a driver had a heart attack at the wheel is vanishingly small compared to drunk or distracted driving. So let's reframe your question as you should have asked it: "If someone is driving drunk or distracted we should take away their license?" Yes. Absolutely.
        fastball 5y ago
        Clearly it's not that simple, otherwise we'd have done it already.
        Uehreka 5y ago
        We… already have? Drunk driving is grounds for license suspension, heavy fines and jail time in (I’m pretty sure) every US state. We may still have drunk drivers, but it seems odd to suggest that we aren’t doing anything about it. Cops, judges and juries take it super seriously. If you get caught drunk driving in America: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    Eliminating drinking would get rid of a huge number of automobile accidents. Sober humans are incredible drivers and we don’t have self driving cars that are better than even poor humans, as long as they aren’t impaired.
- cs702 5y ago
  > ...doesn't matter how well it does in 90% of situations... Based on the full-length videos, I'd say it's more like 99.9% or even 99.99% for FSD 9.
  - tartrate 5y ago
    Not sure if 99.99% refers to distance or time, but either way I'm not sure it's a good metric since it only takes a second or two to kill someone.
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      The same applies to easily distracted human drivers. 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year.
      - studentrob 5y ago
        Apples to apples would be comparing miles driven on FSD autopilot to miles driven by human drivers in similar makes of vehicle on the same types of roads in the same weather conditions. Human drivers don't steer towards concrete pillars every time they drive down the street.
        ricardobeat 5y ago
        Only when they’re drunk, or looking at a mobile phone, or having a heated argument! The new software seen here hasn’t been released so there’s no data yet. We cannot possibly make an assessment based on a few hand-picked videos - a quick YouTube search will give you thousands of human driver examples that are even more dumb.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    That might be acceptable for minor failures but not for catastrophic failure.
  - Veserv 5y ago
    The rate of driving fatalities is ~1 per 60 million miles driven. At an average speed of 60 mph that would be ~1 per million hours. Even if we were to assume there would be only one fatality-inducing error per hour, 99.99% success rate would make FSD 9 100x more dangerous than the average driver. I do not remember the exact numbers, but that would make FSD something like 1000x more dangerous than the classic example of a deathtrap, the Ford Pinto.
rhinoceraptor 5y ago
The fact that it 'only' requires human intervention so rarely is still incredibly dangerous. You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a 'beta' is just insanity. How many more people need to die as a result of Autopilot?
- cs702 5y ago
  > You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. I agree. Everyone agrees. That's why FSD Beta 9 is closed to the public. My understanding is that only a few thousand approved drivers can use it. > Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a 'beta' is just insanity. How many more people need to die as a result of Autopilot? FSD 9 isn't being "distributed to the public." It's a closed Beta. Please don't attack a straw-man.
  - steelframe 5y ago
    What are the qualifications of the people selected to participate in the Beta? Do they have any particular experience or receive special training that would set them apart from the general public?
    - SirZimzim 5y ago
      Yes, even if it's a limited release unless these people are professional drivers or Tesla employees these are just people from the public.
  - atoav 5y ago
    What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Or are they just colateral? A closed beta needs to happen on private roads. If it happens on public roads it is not a closed beta.
CJefferson 5y ago
In my opinion, a self-driving car which drives me smoothly for 6 hours then drives straight into a concrete pillar without warning isn't doing "remarkably well". That should be enough to get it pulled.
cameldrv 5y ago
Supposedly there are a "few thousand" FSD beta testers, and only a small fraction of them are videoing their drives and uploading them to YouTube. Beta 9 has existed for 2 days. This puts a pretty high lower bound on the serious error rate.
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  The consensus is that there far fewer than a few thousand
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    More than 2 thousands Tesla employees and at least dozens of non employees (source: teslamotorsclub.com)
throwaway-8c93 5y ago
FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine. The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  You know these are extract from multiple hours of video and it's a closed beta?
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    "The airplane rarely explodes! We're down to one explosion every 500 hours!"
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    a closed beta of a system that is "orders of magnitude better, completely reimagined"... videos like this certainly don't seem to show revolutionary growth in the usability of FSD, indeed "more of the same".
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how many hours of video there is, all it takes is hitting one pole to dramatically impact your life or the lives of others. As a pedestrian and someone who shares the road with drivers who use FSD, I don't get to opt out of this "closed beta", and I certainly wouldn't care about how many hours of quality content it has on YouTube if it caused a car to hit me or drove me off the road.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  I'm with you on the second point strongly. But IMHO it's not full self driving if it requests the driver to take over even once. If there's an insane storm or something then it's ok for FSD to know it should disable and then you have to drive 100% control. The middle ground is more like assisted driving which doesn't seem safe according to most HN comments.
alkonaut 5y ago
If this happened all in one month of constant driving, I'd say it isn't fit even for limited closed testing in public traffic. It should be back at the closed circuit with inflatable cars. If it was cut down from just one or a few days of driving that's horrifying.
lp0_on_fire 5y ago
People who drink and drive may very well be perfect sober drivers 99.9% of the time but that doesn't excuse the .1% of the time that they're running into things. Also, this beta isn't "closed-to-the-public". The "public" is an active and unwilling participant in it.
dillondoyle 5y ago
At least for me it's because these highlighted errors are so egregious and so obvious for humans. Don't swerve into the giant concrete polls. The 99% of 'good' doesn't matter if you keep driving into giant barriers.
GhostVII 5y ago
For level 5 (which Elon promised), FSD has to go tens of thousands of miles without a collision-avoiding intervention. Right now it can't even do 10 miles. Cherry picking is completely fine because with the limited number of beta users, even a few incidents is enough to show that FSD isn't nearly ready for level 5. And it's pretty easy to make a car that can self drive on simple roads without a tonne of traffic, so being able to do that without intervention isn't much of an accomplishment.

by cs702 5y ago

richwater 5y ago

It literally doesn't matter how well it does in 90% of situations when the other 10% can injure or kill people in relatively basic scenarios like the Tweets presented. I mean the car almost ran into a concrete pillar like it wasn't even there. > For BETA software, FSD 9 is doing remarkably well If this was a React website, that'd be great. But it's a production $40,000 multi ton automobile.

bob33212 5y ago
People will die today because a driver was drunk/distracted/suicidal/rode raged or had a medical problem. Are you OK with that or do you think we should attempt to fix that with software? If you do think you should attempt to fix that, do you understand that software engineering is a iterative process? It gets safer overtime.
- foepys 5y ago
  > People will die today because a driver was drunk/distracted/suicidal/rode raged or had a medical problem. That's a straw man argument. Mandatory breathalyzer tests before every engine start and yearly medical and psychological check-ups would solve a lot of these problems as well. > It gets safer overtime. There is no evidence of this happening yet. It's still trying to drive people into concrete pillars. Remember that you only need to drive into a pillar once to die. Passing it 10,000 times before doesn't help when an update suddenly decides that the pillar is now a lane. I'd be totally fine with Tesla testing this with trained drivers in suitable areas but giving this into the hands of amateurs is pure "move fast and break things", with "break" meaning ending lives. The worst thing is: all of these videos feature sunny weather. How bad would it be in the rain? Ever tried to take picture in the dark with even light rain? Cameras are very bad at this.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    Local maximums exist. If ML models were guaranteed to improve over time we would have no more problems to solve.
  - bob33212 5y ago
    What are you proposing? If someone is overweight with high blood pressure and a higher risk for a heart attack we should take away their license? These drivers are vetted and their usage is monitored, many are employees. In the long run automated driving will save many more lives than it takes. Just like automated elevators. https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-driverless-elevators-drew-skepticism#:~:text=The%20automatic%20elevator%20was%20invented,and%20automatic%20elevators%20became%20ubiquitous https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-dr....
    - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
      > What are you proposing? If someone is overweight with high blood pressure and a higher risk for a heart attack we should take away their license? This does not seem like an important nit to pick, so I'm wondering why you're picking it. The number of people killed or injured because a driver had a heart attack at the wheel is vanishingly small compared to drunk or distracted driving. So let's reframe your question as you should have asked it: "If someone is driving drunk or distracted we should take away their license?" Yes. Absolutely.
      - fastball 5y ago
        Clearly it's not that simple, otherwise we'd have done it already.
        Uehreka 5y ago
        We… already have? Drunk driving is grounds for license suspension, heavy fines and jail time in (I’m pretty sure) every US state. We may still have drunk drivers, but it seems odd to suggest that we aren’t doing anything about it. Cops, judges and juries take it super seriously. If you get caught drunk driving in America: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200.
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  Eliminating drinking would get rid of a huge number of automobile accidents. Sober humans are incredible drivers and we don’t have self driving cars that are better than even poor humans, as long as they aren’t impaired.
cs702 5y ago
> ...doesn't matter how well it does in 90% of situations... Based on the full-length videos, I'd say it's more like 99.9% or even 99.99% for FSD 9.
- tartrate 5y ago
  Not sure if 99.99% refers to distance or time, but either way I'm not sure it's a good metric since it only takes a second or two to kill someone.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    The same applies to easily distracted human drivers. 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year.
    - studentrob 5y ago
      Apples to apples would be comparing miles driven on FSD autopilot to miles driven by human drivers in similar makes of vehicle on the same types of roads in the same weather conditions. Human drivers don't steer towards concrete pillars every time they drive down the street.
      - ricardobeat 5y ago
        Only when they’re drunk, or looking at a mobile phone, or having a heated argument! The new software seen here hasn’t been released so there’s no data yet. We cannot possibly make an assessment based on a few hand-picked videos - a quick YouTube search will give you thousands of human driver examples that are even more dumb.
- serverholic 5y ago
  That might be acceptable for minor failures but not for catastrophic failure.
- Veserv 5y ago
  The rate of driving fatalities is ~1 per 60 million miles driven. At an average speed of 60 mph that would be ~1 per million hours. Even if we were to assume there would be only one fatality-inducing error per hour, 99.99% success rate would make FSD 9 100x more dangerous than the average driver. I do not remember the exact numbers, but that would make FSD something like 1000x more dangerous than the classic example of a deathtrap, the Ford Pinto.

rhinoceraptor 5y ago

The fact that it 'only' requires human intervention so rarely is still incredibly dangerous. You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a 'beta' is just insanity. How many more people need to die as a result of Autopilot?

cs702 5y ago
> You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. I agree. Everyone agrees. That's why FSD Beta 9 is closed to the public. My understanding is that only a few thousand approved drivers can use it. > Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a 'beta' is just insanity. How many more people need to die as a result of Autopilot? FSD 9 isn't being "distributed to the public." It's a closed Beta. Please don't attack a straw-man.
- steelframe 5y ago
  What are the qualifications of the people selected to participate in the Beta? Do they have any particular experience or receive special training that would set them apart from the general public?
  - SirZimzim 5y ago
    Yes, even if it's a limited release unless these people are professional drivers or Tesla employees these are just people from the public.
- atoav 5y ago
  What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Or are they just colateral? A closed beta needs to happen on private roads. If it happens on public roads it is not a closed beta.

CJefferson 5y ago

In my opinion, a self-driving car which drives me smoothly for 6 hours then drives straight into a concrete pillar without warning isn't doing "remarkably well". That should be enough to get it pulled.

cameldrv 5y ago

Supposedly there are a "few thousand" FSD beta testers, and only a small fraction of them are videoing their drives and uploading them to YouTube. Beta 9 has existed for 2 days. This puts a pretty high lower bound on the serious error rate.

camjohnson26 5y ago
The consensus is that there far fewer than a few thousand
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  More than 2 thousands Tesla employees and at least dozens of non employees (source: teslamotorsclub.com)

throwaway-8c93 5y ago

FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine. The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
You know these are extract from multiple hours of video and it's a closed beta?
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  "The airplane rarely explodes! We're down to one explosion every 500 hours!"
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  a closed beta of a system that is "orders of magnitude better, completely reimagined"... videos like this certainly don't seem to show revolutionary growth in the usability of FSD, indeed "more of the same".
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  It doesn't matter how many hours of video there is, all it takes is hitting one pole to dramatically impact your life or the lives of others. As a pedestrian and someone who shares the road with drivers who use FSD, I don't get to opt out of this "closed beta", and I certainly wouldn't care about how many hours of quality content it has on YouTube if it caused a car to hit me or drove me off the road.
dillondoyle 5y ago
I'm with you on the second point strongly. But IMHO it's not full self driving if it requests the driver to take over even once. If there's an insane storm or something then it's ok for FSD to know it should disable and then you have to drive 100% control. The middle ground is more like assisted driving which doesn't seem safe according to most HN comments.

alkonaut 5y ago

If this happened all in one month of constant driving, I'd say it isn't fit even for limited closed testing in public traffic. It should be back at the closed circuit with inflatable cars. If it was cut down from just one or a few days of driving that's horrifying.

lp0_on_fire 5y ago

People who drink and drive may very well be perfect sober drivers 99.9% of the time but that doesn't excuse the .1% of the time that they're running into things. Also, this beta isn't "closed-to-the-public". The "public" is an active and unwilling participant in it.

dillondoyle 5y ago

At least for me it's because these highlighted errors are so egregious and so obvious for humans. Don't swerve into the giant concrete polls. The 99% of 'good' doesn't matter if you keep driving into giant barriers.

GhostVII 5y ago

For level 5 (which Elon promised), FSD has to go tens of thousands of miles without a collision-avoiding intervention. Right now it can't even do 10 miles. Cherry picking is completely fine because with the limited number of beta users, even a few incidents is enough to show that FSD isn't nearly ready for level 5. And it's pretty easy to make a car that can self drive on simple roads without a tonne of traffic, so being able to do that without intervention isn't much of an accomplishment.