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Video of Tesla FSD almost hitting pedestrian receives DMCA takedown

491 points by camjohnson26 5y ago

blendergeek 5y ago
Can we find out who sent the takedown notice?
- beeboop 5y ago
  This is the part that matters. Anyone can DMCA anything
  - closetnerd 5y ago
    Are we thinking that Elon super fans might do this?
    - soheil 5y ago
      Or Elon haters to make it look like Elon is super paranoid?
      - addicted 5y ago
        Wow. We’re at the crisis actors stage of discourse.
    - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
      Edit: I was being dumb and am wrong. This is YouTube's internal system for copyrights not DCMA. Apologies. Old comment below... You can read up on how to submit DCMA takedowns for YouTube here -> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en The original uploader of the video submitted the DCMA takedown request.
      - judge2020 5y ago
        OP’s point is that anyone can lie in the DMCA takedown form and say they own the content. It’s illegal but I’m not aware of it ever coming back to the perpetrator in the form of jail time/lawsuit.
      - Someone1234 5y ago
        Your YouTube support link isn't about the DMCA, and in fact is an attempt at trying to get people to use their system instead of the DMCA. YouTube's internal copyright takedown system is just that: Internal. DMCA is a legal avenue that you can use against YouTube and their users, but it wouldn't be via their internal copyright take down system. It is in YouTube's best interests for you NOT to use the DMCA as there are avenues where it can leave YouTube themselves civilly liable (OCILLA[0]), so they work hard to funnel people into their internal copyright system that doesn't expose YT. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Notice_from_copyright_owner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
        LewisVerstappen 5y ago
        My mistake, apologies. Edited the comment to note my error.
  - lathiat 5y ago
    From the comments in this thread the Twitter copy was not the original creator of the video. The original creator posted it on YouTube but has since made the video private. And they DMCAd the person that reposted it on Twitter. I imagine they probably started getting a lot of negative attention. https://twitter.com/xythar/status/1438539880045309953?s=21 https://twitter.com/xythar/status/1438539880045309953?s=21
  - advisedwang 5y ago
    Anyone is physically capable of sending a DMCA takedown. However it is supposed to be from the copyright owner [17 USC 512(c)(3)(A)(i)] and if it isn't, it can be ignored [17 USC 512(c)(3)(B)] and makes the person who does it liable for damages [17 USC 512(f)(1)]. Although that's probably pretty hard to use in practice.
- riffic 5y ago
  lumen will have a copy
loceng 5y ago
"Almost hitting pedestrians" isn't how I'd describe what I saw in the video.
- kevinmgranger 5y ago
  Which makes it even more confusing as to why they'd Streisand effect themselves.
  - aquadrop 5y ago
    I doubt DMCA came from Tesla, they let worse videos take thousands of views on youtube and never done anything.
- devb 5y ago
  Ok, I’ll ask. How would you describe it?
  - soheil 5y ago
    "Car slightly spooks a couple of people including the driver who safely took over and resumed driving"
  - aquadrop 5y ago
    "Car doesn't yield to pedestrians". For "almost hit" I would expect car to run by pedestrian in less than half a meter or for pedestrian having to react quickly to avoid car.
    - stagger87 5y ago
      It makes more sense when you realize the car wasn't even supposed to be turning. Look at the nav screen. If this guy didn't take over, where exactly was the car going? I think it's very easy to speculate it wouldn't have ended well.
      - kbenson 5y ago
literallyaduck 5y ago
Not familiar with how the autopilot works, but the guy is touch the wheel a lot, is it the car driving, both, or just manual control? If it is just the car, it looks like it was trying to turn and didn't consider the people in the crosswalk. Edit: thanks for the explanation.
- hnthrow917 5y ago
  Just the car. The guy can override by taking hold of the wheel and overriding what the car wants.
- ashafer 5y ago
  iirc the car does all the driving but you have to have a hand "on the wheel" so they don't technically have to legally classify it as a self driving car or something. I'm guessing if he is videoing it and hovering over the wheel that much this has happened before and he is nervously expecting it?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Tesla has caused a lot of confusion by calling this system "full self driving", but in reality, this system is an SAE level 2 driver assistance system where the human is required to be in charge of driving at all times. https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/press-releases/2018/12/j3016-levels-of-automation-image.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre...
- kalleboo 5y ago
  This isn't the standard autopilot but the "full self driving" option that is currently in a limited beta (around 1000 users that have gone through extra approval, not just 100% random owners)
- jofaz 5y ago
  In the video there is a steering wheel symbol near the speed that is highlighted in blue. That indicates autopilot is engaged, when the driver turns the wheel to correct the mistake the symbol turns gray indicated autopilot disengaged.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
GDC7 5y ago
Can anybody update on who Tesla fans perceive as their mortal enemy right now? First it was big oil, then it was shortsellers, but I found those narratives sort of died out. Who are they beefing with right now?
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  Pedestrians.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The NTSB.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
partido3619463 5y ago
Is the car turning right (after a no right turn sign) while it was supposed to be going straight according to nav?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stagger87 5y ago
  Yes, and that's what makes it interesting in my mind. Where was the car going?
  - cmsj 5y ago
    It was hungry ;)
  - rvz 5y ago
    The car probably thought the pedestrian was an emergency vehicle, given the person was wearing a bright red coat and Teslas on FSD have a habit of crashing into them. To Downvoters: Well it is actually true. [0] and just recently another crash involving an emergency vehicle. [1] So there is a strange habit with Tesla FSD and red objects in its view. Given those incidents, care to explain why I am wrong? [0] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/23/tesla-autopilot-crash-fire-truck-ntsb/ https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/23/tesla-autopilot-crash-fi... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-identifies-12th-tesla-assisted-systems-car-crash-involving-emergency-vehicle-2021-09-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-ide...
    - NickM 5y ago
      care to explain why I am wrong Because even in cases where cars have hit emergency vehicles, it's because the software didn't see the vehicles at all and just continued driving straight in its lane. Whatever flaws the Tesla vision system may have, the idea that it is programmed to deliberately seek out and crash into emergency vehicles seems pretty far-fetched (much less that it would mistake a person wearing a red coat for an emergency vehicle and therefore attempt to crash into it); I assume this is why people are downvoting you.
traveler01 5y ago
Almost hitting pedestrian is a big stretch. Car had enough time to stop before he took hold. He probably just picked up the wheel because he didn't want the car going that way.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  It's barely a stretch. The car veers pretty significantly. The driver and the pedestrian both notice this and wave as a 'sorry'. The car may have stopped, of course we won't ever know, but it's absolutely wrong to say that it was just the wrong direction - again, both the driver and pedestrian acknowledge the aggressive turn.
  - traveler01 5y ago
    Car wasn't at a very high speed and if breaks are working normally it would have a lot of time to break before hitting the person. Almost hitting a pedestrian is a big stretch of a title, we don't really know what the car was going to do. Probably there's some logs on the car that will tell Tesla if the car would stop or not, but for the viewer of the video we don't really know.
- sfblah 5y ago
  I run a lot on streets. You do you, but this video is going to make me much more careful around Tesla cars from now on.
- bjtitus 5y ago
  This would have been reckless from a human driver and was just as reckless for FSD.
josefresco 5y ago
"almost hitting pedestrian" It wasn't even close. Look at where the ped is at 12 seconds, compared to the car. It's because he stopped the turn, and straightened the vehicle that the pedestrian stopped and looked up with concern (at 13 seconds). Even if the pedestrian broke out into a full run, they wouldn't have been in any real danger. This sort of close interplay between pedestrians and cars is very common in cities. The concern I have is that the "eye contact" element is lost. When in doubt of another motorists intentions, we make eye contact and look for acknowledgement or an indication of intent. This doesn't exist with FSD. Edit: Some people have pointed out the car wasn't supposed to be turning right which I missed. If that's the case, the situation and my opinion is completely different.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Agreed it wasn't close, but it's still not the kind of behavior you'd want to see in a robot car. If I were a passenger in a car where a human driver did this, I would wonder if they were impaired, and I would no longer trust their driving abilities. Tesla's whole selling point is that a) autonomous cars are safer than human drivers b) we are almost there. This clip shows both claims are questionable at the moment.
  - emn13 5y ago
    I wasn't close because the driver was paying absurdly close attention. We can't say if it would have been close or not, but there's certainly no hint the car had a handle on the situation, and it's clear to see it was making some kind of mistake, even if possible a non-fatal one.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Yeah. "It probably can't kill anyone if you watch it like a hawk at all times..." wasn't the FSD selling point.
- cogman10 5y ago
  I agree, but this is probably the worst behavior I've seen of the FSD software. It abruptly tried to do a right turn on a no-right intersection with no warning (map said it was supposed to go straight, it looked like it was going to do that right up to the last second). Putting aside the "almost hitting a pedestrian", this is really dangerous behavior for an autonomous vehicle.
bananapub 5y ago
for those unaware (like me), "FSD" is the extremely misleading term Tesla uses to describe their cars as "Full Self Driving".
- Jyaif 5y ago
  Technically it is fully self driving, it's "just" that you have a (much) lower chance of arriving safely at your destination than with a human driver.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    It's fully self driving until it cops out and gives it back to you
- rvz 5y ago
  The correct term is ‘Fools Self Driving’ given its users think that they are driving a ‘fully self driving’ car yet they have to be behind the wheel and pay attention to the road at all times. Not exactly the FSD robot-taxi experience the Tesla fans were promised. Instead, they got happily mislead with beta software.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Even more incredibly, "FSD" is an addon you pay for. So customers are paying for the lie.
brown9-2 5y ago
The tweet that went viral was a clip of a video posted by a Youtube channel owned by someone else. Seems pretty obvious the copyright owner who would make a claim against the tweet was the Youtube channel who owned the video.
ra7 5y ago
Interestingly, the original creator of the video has since made it private. FSD beta testers are carefully handpicked — a lot of the Tesla “influencers” are given access for some free marketing. I wonder how many FSD bad driving videos are not uploaded to YouTube at all because they don’t want to say anything negative about Tesla and possibly lose influence/ad revenue. This is on top of Tesla classifying FSD as level 2 system (while promoting as “level 5 soon”) so they don’t have to share data with CA DMV. Only reason not to be transparent like the others is if you’re not confident in your system.
- ballenf 5y ago
  Do you know if the terms of those arrangements give Tesla copyright ownership of the videos? Just wondering whether the driver or Tesla issued the DMCA.
  - sidibe 5y ago
    The driver is a big fan of Tesla (even in that video he was very impressed with FSD 10). I think he probably deleted it himself because of the backlash
- Shank 5y ago
  There's a mirror of the original video here: https://streamable.com/grihhc https://streamable.com/grihhc. I consider it fairly valuable to study academically, as it shows both how the Tesla autopilot system performs, and how the the driver reacts to the system, with the knowledge that it's a beta, and their manner of movement, operation, and knowledge of the system and what they let it do. I think the biggest problem I have is that the driver doesn't intervene/even really stop the car. The good autopilot 'test channels' like 'AI DRIVR' will routinely disengage if any safety concern is present. The monorail test driver, in contrast, knows the monorail is a problem and was criticized for not correcting the car driving under the monorail, which is already illegal behavior.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Based on the audio in the video it seems like they were testing a Tesla FSD update? It sounded like they deliberately drove it in an area that it did not handle well and even commented that it was 'better'. It seems like it thinks the lane shifted to the right because it had to reason to do a right turn. Anyone have more insight into what occurred?
mwint 5y ago
This looks like a weird navigation failure. It certainly shouldn't have made this maneuver at all, but it's provably false to say it would have run over the pedestrians... this frame shows it: https://i.stack.imgur.com/2KymN.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/2KymN.png Context - this is after the sudden sharp turn, as the driver is taking over. - We can see the system is still driving itself; the driver has not taken over and is not a factor. The blue steering wheel shows this. - The dotted line coming off the car shows its intended path. If you step through the video, you can see it decide it's going to make the turn (for some unknown reason). - Before the driver takes over, as this frame shows, we see the car decide to turn back to the left and resume its correct course. In fact, if you step through the video, you can see the car is turning the wheel to the left, rotating under the driver's hands before the driver applies enough force to disengage. - The car was aware of the pedestrian at the time it decided to make the turn (you can see them on the screen), and its clear the path would not have collided with the person even if the driver had not taken over, and the car had not corrected itself. - But the car did correct itself, and intended to resume its straight course before the driver took over, as that frame above shows. This is not "Tesla almost hits pedestrian!", this is "Tesla makes bad navigation decision, driver takes over before car would have safely corrected"
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Yeah, looks like it. Software could use some smoothing on its actions, though.
- stagger87 5y ago
  > but it's provably false to say it would have run over the pedestrians... You can't prove something like that, I mean consider the irony that you typed this statement right after > It certainly shouldn't have made this maneuver at all How can you prove that it wouldn't have made another unexpected maneuver? It's all speculation, and that's OK. I wish OP used a different title, because everyone seems to be getting hung up on it, when the lede is certainly the FSD being unable to maintain a straight line.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  I love that your defense is that the car would've stopped closer to the pedestrian than the driver did.
ChrisKnott 5y ago
Maximise the video and watch the left hand HUD pane from 0:10 to 0:11. The dotted black line coming from the front of the car (which I am assuming is the intended route) quickly snaps from straight ahead, to a hair pin right, to a normal right turn. Ignoring the fact that the right turn happened to be into a pedestrian crossing with people on it - what was the car even trying to do? The sat-nav shows it should have just continued forwards. I am astounded that software capable of these outputs is allowed on the roads. When could crossing a junction then taking a hairpin right back across it, ever be the correct thing to do?
- andreyk 5y ago
  Good catch! That's definitely quite concerning...
- taneq 5y ago
  On the one hand I applaud Tesla for being so open about what their system is thinking with their visualisations. That could be interpreted to show a deep belief in their system's capabilities. On the other hand, it's always terrified me how jittery any version of AutoPilot's perception of the world is. Would you let your car be driven by someone with zero object permanence, 10/20 vision and only a vague idea of the existence or properties of any object other than lane markings and number plates?
  - macNchz 5y ago
    I test drove a Model 3 yesterday and this was something that really jumped out at me. I didn't try any of the automatic driving features, but driving around Brooklyn watching the way the car was perceiving the world around it did not inspire confidence at all. Tesla's over the top marketing and hype seems at once to have been a key ingredient in their success, but also so frustrating because their product is genuinely awesome. I've long been kind of a skeptic but I could not have been more impressed with the test drive I took. It had me ready to buy in about 90 seconds. I wish there were actually-competitive competitors with similar range and power that aren't weird looking SUVs, from brands that don't lean into pure hype.
valine 5y ago
This is near the infamous monorail where previous versions of FSD would kamikaze into the giant concrete pillars. Presumably in response to the monorail failure Tesla updated their obstacle avoidance to handle unclassified objects. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1437322712339423237?s=21 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1437322712339423237?s=21 From the nav you can see the car is trying to go straight but swerves around some invisible obstacle. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a failure in their new “voxel based” collision avoidance.
- miken123 5y ago
  Funny, you see the same mistake at exactly the same spot, albeit less spectacular, in the video linked from the tweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWc-r0InwVk&t=148s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWc-r0InwVk&t=148s
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    It seems likely that navigation is momentarily seeing the straight-ahead as obstructed and trying to route around using the street on the right? But the car really needs to respond more calmly when doing navigation changes (see especially the car in the OP video - no safe driver changes course in a split second in the middle of an intersection, not at that speed).
- phkahler 5y ago
  Voxels? Wow. I was recently contemplating conscious driving vs ones own autopilot (when you get to work and dont remember any of the drive because it was unevetful). I realised that I sometimes drive largely in image space and other times in world space. It was an odd thing to deliberately flip between them. I don't really want to think about that...
joshribakoff 5y ago
I have FSD but not the beta. When cars cut across my lane autopilot will not react for a solid second or so, then proceeds to slam on the brakes after the car is clear. It does not instill confidence to say the least. From my POV it feels like someone put a debounce on the reaction to prevent phantom breaking, to the point the car doesn’t brake when it needs to.
- ptidhomme 5y ago
  IIRC there was also a 1 second delay before reaction on the Uber car that crashed into a pedestrian. There must be quite a lot of false alarms to filter out...
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I worry a little bit about things like this. If they were just using debouncing on a band-aid rather than dealing directly with the bad input that led to the phantom breaking, then that would seem to imply that the project is falling into the classic death march project trap. It turns out that the last 10% of the project is going to be 90% of the work. Meaning that the original schedule was off by an order of magnitude. But the business has made made huge promises that mean that the team is not at liberty to adjust the schedule accordingly. And so they're under ever increasing pressure to cut corners and pile on quick fixes.
  - zaptrem 5y ago
    Production AP is a completely different software stack than FSD beta. I think the only things that carry over are the car detection, VRU, and traffic light CV NNs.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  The part that always bothered me most about AP on the highway was how willing it is to drive full speed into an obvious problem. Obvious for me, that is. Dense merging traffic, for example -- I can see the conflict coming, I can read the way people are driving on that on-ramp, and I take defensive action. My Tesla would just drive right into the center of that mess than then panic when things got crazy. I no longer have my Tesla, but I stopped using AP before I sold the car, partly as a result of this behavior. And partly because phantom braking became pretty common for a number of overpasses we go under on our way to grandma's house, and it really scares the crap out of my wife & kids. Aside from phantom braking, the best use case for AP, in my opinion, is to be a jerk and cruise in the middle lane of the freeway. It deals okay with that most of the time.
Jyaif 5y ago
Not to pile on Tesla, but a yoke driving wheel will make taking over the FSD mode much harder.
jjj3j3j3j3 5y ago
This reminds me how film/music industry tried to DMCA youtube-dl project.
tdrdt 5y ago
According to Tesla's own legal documents FSD beta is still at level 2. Level 2 automated driving is defined as systems that provide steering and brake/acceleration support, as well as lane centering and adaptive cruise control. So it is the same as in most modern cars (other brands also have 'environment awareness') but Tesla still market it as 'sit back and close your eyes' driving.
jorpal 5y ago
Basic game theory dictates that if automated driving is seen as too safe, pedestrians will feel comfortable walking anywhere, anytime. Dense downtowns will become completely gridlocked and unusable for cars. Which maybe isn’t a bad thing. But if you want cars in cities you need them to be perceived as dangerous. Yeah I was convinced by Gladwell.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sprafa 5y ago
  You solve this face recognition and ticketing of offenders. The cars have cameras everywhere anyway
  - paulkrush 5y ago
    China has it so easy! This is not fare...
  - pidge 5y ago
    Yeah Los Angeles already fines pedestrians pretty aggressively for jaywalking, even on urban pedestrian-heavy streets. This maintains a different norm for the city about jaywalking than say Boston, so in principle the issue seems quite solvable.
- paulkrush 5y ago
  I agree, but also think we will adapt in many different ways. New types of tickets. There would be no go zones where pedestrians don't compile(or comply!). Mackinac island will not have this issue! And for fun I have to note basic game theory also dictates if we replace airbags with a sharped steel spike that comes out during accidents people will drive safer!
ghufran_syed 5y ago
I think we’re missing the point that this is currently designed for a driver to monitor at all times, the driver intervened appropriately, and thereby provided another training example for the network. This is also a beta version that is being tested by humans who have the legal and moral responsibility for control of the car.
- adflux 5y ago
  >designed for a driver to monitor at all times >calls it full self driving What a joke & GREAT way to mislead customers.
- toss1 5y ago
  And this is the WORST possible combination One of the attributes of human perception is that it is TERRIBLE at maintaining persistent vigilance without engagement. Even at a very low level, the nervous system is designed to habituate to constant stimuli; e.g., when you first encounter something that smells (good or bad) it can be overwhelming, but after a few minutes the same smell barely registers. More on point, spend some time looking forward at speed, or rotating (e.g., in a swivel chair), then stop quickly, and watch how your visual system creates the illusion of everything flowing in the opposite direction. Now, scale that up to higher levels of cognition. The more the car gets right, the worse will be the human's attention. When a car here does almost everything right, people can and will literally read or fall asleep at the wheel. Until that one critical failure. As a former licensed road racing driver and champion, I find the idea of anything between L2 and L4 to be terrifying. I can and have handled many very tricky and emergency situations at a wide range of speeds on everything from dry roads to wet ice (on and off the track) — when my attention was fully focused on the road, the situation, my grip levels, the balance of the car, etc. The idea of being largely unfocused while the car does almost everything, then having an alert and having to regain, in fractions of a second, full orientation to everything I need to know then take action, is terrifying. 60 mph is 88 feet per second. Even a quick reaction where I've squandered only a half second figuring out what to do is the difference between avoiding or stopping before an obstacle, and blowing ~50' past it, or over it, at speed. Attempts to say "it's just fine because a human is in the loop (and ultimately responsible)" are just bullsh*t and evading responsibility, even if human beta testing is fantastic for gathering massive amounts of data to analyze. Among high risk and speed sports, it is almost axiomatic for us to draw distinctions between "smart crazy" vs "dumb crazy", and everyone knows the difference without a definition. The best definition I heard was that it's the difference between [using knowledge, technology, and skill to make a hazardous activity reliably safe] vs [getting away with something]. You can 'get away' with Russian Roulette 5 out of six times, and you'll probably get a great adrenaline rush, but you can't expect to do so for long. Although this kind of "full self driving" has much better odds vs Russian Roulette, it is still unreliable, and the system of expecting the human to always be able to detect, orient, and respond in time to the car's errors is systematically unsafe. You will 'get away with it' a lot, and there will even be times when the system catches things the humans won't. But to place the entire "legal and moral responsibility" on the human to 100% reliably operate a system that is specifically designed against human capabilities is wrong, unless you want to say that this is a [no human should every operate under these conditions], like drunk driving, and outlaw the system and the action of operating it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fnord77 5y ago
welcome to our dystopian corporate future. video of company dumping toxic waste into the ocena? DMCA takedown !
ehz 5y ago
Totally naive guess, but could there be some misdetection of a road feature (Stoplight)? Car swerves very close to when people in the background wearing very bright neon and very bright red jackets cross each other.
perihelions 5y ago
Good thing evidentiary videos of car accidents are copyrightable. We wouldn't want to discourage auto-collision-footage-creators from creating content by failing to protect their exclusive monetization rights.
josephcsible 5y ago
Is there anywhere that says who issued the DMCA takedown? A lot of people are assuming it was Tesla, but I don't see any evidence of that.
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  This is not clear. I assume the original uploader of the video (the person who runs the Hyperchange YouTube channel).
koonsolo 5y ago
Maybe it's just me, but it seems the car wanted to make a right turn on the right part of that side street. There are no pedestrians there. It's actually the interference of the driver that stops the turn halfway, and steers towards the people at the left starting to cross that street. I wonder what would have happened when the driver didn't interfere. I guess that the right turn would have been completed without any problem. But maybe I'm missing some extra info here?
- crote 5y ago
  I neither see nor hear any indication of a turn signal, so I do not think it is actually trying to make a right turn. Besides, the pedestrians were already on the road when the car initiated the turn. Note the "one way" sign: that street only has a single lane, and that lane was already occupied. It should definitely have yielded.
  - mcdoogal 5y ago
    Agreed that I don’t think it was trying to turn. Crazy how the system just went for it even with pedestrians. However, I know this area well; that street it’s turning on to is actually 3 lanes with no parking on the right except for buses.
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  > I guess that the right turn would have been completed without any problem. The right turn would (at best) be completed by making pedestrians wait for the car, which is backwards.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  I don’t know what where you live, but here in the civilised world you’re not legally supposed to turn on to a road when there are freaking pedestrians already crossing it. You’re supposed to wait for them to fully complete their crossing, and yes: the overwhelming majority of drivers here abide by that requirement.
  - 5y ago
tibiahurried 5y ago
This tech is clearly not ready for mass adoption. I am surprised, to say the least, that they are allowed to sell cars with that, clearly not safe tech, on board. Where are the regulators?Pretending that it is all good?
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Tesla FSD Beta 10 veers into pedestrians with illegal right turn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 - Sept 2021 (118 comments) Less recent and less related: Watch a Tesla Fail an Automatic Braking Test and Vaporize a Robot Pedestrian - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588795 - Sept 2020 (111 comments)
- supperburg 5y ago
  Vaporize. What an objective and sensible term to describe something that I’m sure you are totally unbiased about…
  - dang 5y ago
    That's just the title of the submitted article. If we'd seen it at the time, we would have vaporized it...but no one bats a hundred :)
    - supperburg 5y ago
      I didn’t notice it was you Dan g
cronix 5y ago
I think the whole dream/goal of building a self driving car on top of a system completely designed for manual human interpretation and input is asinine, and that's before you even consider the complexity of adding other humans manually driving or suddenly walking in front of your car from a blind spot. Instead of building a digital system from the ground up, we are forcing manufacturers to come up with tech to read speed signs meant for human eyes and accurately interpret them under a myriad of conditions. What if it's covered in mud, or snow? Wouldn't coming up with national/international standards and a digital system work better for digital cars, like broadcasting speed limits instead of only relying on interpreting visual inputs, etc? Or standardizing the charging interface so you don't end up in a mac-like dongle hell and can just know no matter what car charging station you pull up to it will just work, like gas stations and standardized fueling systems work for all brand of ICE vehicles? I can go to any branded gas station and there isn't a station specific for just Ford cars. It just seems like a mish mash system of cludges hobbled together instead of a solid, well thought out system from the ground up. Due to that, we are making it 10x harder (and more dangerous) than it really needs to be. It's like saying you have to build all modern OS's on top of DOS made for 8 bit cpu's.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> What if it's covered in mud, or snow? That's the entire problem. These systems don't understand anything about the world. If you see a sign covered in snow you're going to recognize it as such and make your best guess as to what it says and weather you care. You probably don't need that information to drive safely because you have a lot of knowledge to fall back on. These things dont, so some folks want to improve GPS accuracy and maps and signage. That's not a viable solution on so many levels. General AI is the only way forward for fully autonomous cars.
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    Right now, the TSLAs with FSD will disable it in snow+rain, so I assume that even if TSLA achieves L4, it will be only under ideal conditions until they have enough data to resolve these edge cases.
diebeforei485 5y ago
This was a private beta, to be clear.
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  Except for the people walking / driving on the road.
microtherion 5y ago
I don't think a DMCA notice is what "take ownership of your mistakes" means.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Wait, why did the steering wheel and the car swerve right here? Because the pedestrian that was passed or because the one waiting to cross? And wasn't the drivers intent to drive straight ahead?
antattack 5y ago
How about changing the title to be more accurate: "Video accusing Tesla FSD beta of almost hitting pedestrian receives DMCA take-down."
klik99 5y ago
On the video - "almost hitting" is a VERY misleading way to phrase it, I see worse driving on a daily basis from human beings. However, I'm glad for the high visibility and scrutiny because we should hold FSD to a higher standard and the pressure will create a better product. (I drive one and use self-driving) On the DMCA takedown - that's pretty sketchy.
- sandos 5y ago
  I agree this was not even a close call, also maybe its all due to driver interrupting the autopilot, but this video still shows to many problems for FSD.
plausibledeny 5y ago
This is Fifth Ave and Lenora in Seattle (about a block away from Amazon Spheres). Lenora is a one-way and you can take a right off of 5th onto Lenora (basically heading toward the water). The signage (and road in general) is confusing because of the monorail pylons.
sandos 5y ago
Haha, I commented on this exact sort of video, one titled something with "success" where the car somehow managed to get past that monorail but in an extremely sketchy way, way worse than any learner driver would every do. This FSD beta seems way too cocky and at the same time confused underneath, I think we will see quite a few incidents with this one unless everyones a good boy and is really in the loop with taking over quickly.
giantrobot 5y ago
FSD without LIDAR/radar is a fool's errand. Camera-only systems just do not pull in enough data to drive on real roads around real hazards. For one they do not actual approximate human eyes since our eyes themselves are gimbaled in our skulls and our skull is gimbaled on our necks. Our eyes can switch their focus very quickly and return to scanning very easily. Not only are we processing the visual information but also feedback from all of our body positioning and other sensory inputs. Driving heavily relies on our proprioception. Fully autonomous cars need a lot of different sensors and processing power. Even driver assist should be using a lot of sensors. Autonomous driving needs more and better sensors than humans because it needs to deal with humans that are both smarter and more irrational than the automation. Besides conscious abilities humans have a lot of inherent self-preservation instincts that might be locally optimum for survival but globally poor choices. Tesla scrimping on sensors because their boss is an egomaniac is the height of hubris. A web service moving fast and breaking things and choosing cheap but redundant options is fine. Usually the worst that happens is people lose money or some data. Moving fast and breaking things in a car is literally life and death. Musk's hubris around FSD is sociopathic.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Even worse, we actually rely heavily on our knowledge of the world, common sense,and physical intuition to make sense of our vision. Put a human in a room with no shadows, unrecognizable objects, and misleadingly sized objects (tiny cars, huge animals), and then watch them fail to judge distances or other vision tasks.
cma 5y ago
There was a popular Hacker News thread on this video too that was removed somehow without being marked dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 It was on the front page and then a few minutes later not on the first 5+ pages.
bogwog 5y ago
Does anyone know if there have been efforts to connect a city's traffic lights/data with a self driving system like this? That crosswalk had a timer on it, and if that status could be accessed by the Tesla in real time, the autopilot would have known not to make that turn even if the cameras were telling it something else. Idk if those things are networked, but it seems like a good investment to do that if it means safer self-driving cars.
ummonk 5y ago
Seeing this video, I imagine that driving with FSD in a busy city is significantly more taxing and stressful than driving without.
sorokod 5y ago
If a pedestrian got hurt, what would be the legal liability of the driver who didn't have his hands on the steering wheel?
- sidibe 5y ago
  100% on the driver. "Full self driving" is for marketing only and they supposedly make it very clear to the customers.
  - paxys 5y ago
    This will have to be settled in court eventually (I'm guessing very soon, looking at all these videos). It's very unlikely that car manufacturers will be able to avoid all responsibility just because of fine print in the terms of service.
gutino 5y ago
I do not see how the pedestrian would have benn hit. For me the car was turning very sharply, away from them.
WA 5y ago
Reminder that Tesla will kill critical videos of FSD, but still to this day has not taken down the fabricated "full self driving demo" from their own website since 2016: https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware... Tesla (and fanboys) say that they are clear about the limited capabilities of Autopilot and FSD when in reality, they indirectly support all fan-videos by letting them live on YouTube while DMCAing critical videos. They want you to believe that FSD is more capable than it truly is.
- notJim 5y ago
  > Tesla will kill critical videos of FSD Examples?
  - bhelkey 5y ago
    The implication is that Tesla DMCAed the video in TFA. Obviously, I don't know if that is true that, 1 the video was DMCAed and 2 that Tesla sent the DMCA takedown request.
    - notJim 5y ago
      I think most likely the person who created the video must have done it. I don't see how Tesla would own the copyright. This also isn't the first time one of these videos has gone viral, and the other ones were not taken down.
- 93po 5y ago
  How was it fabricated?
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Is there any evidence for the video being DMCA'd (and if so, who sent the takedown - IIRC youtube shows that), instead of being taken private by the uploader as the link in the tweet indicates? Edit: It's about the copy on Twitter, https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1438141148816609285 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1438141148816609285
acd 5y ago
Selfvdriving cars almost hitting a pedestrian is terrible. Socialmedia platforms is an attention economy, where the most spectacular posts get attention. I think its diverting attention to the wrong causes.
acd 5y ago
A self driving car almost hitting a pedestrian is terrible. Socialmedia platforms is an attention economy, where the most spectacular unusual posts gets most attention! I think its diverting attention to the wrong causes.
supperburg 5y ago
Recently I have been wondering why there are no videos of FSD v10 on any of the mainstream platforms which apparently includes HN now. There are tons and tons of videos of FSD doing amazing, amazing things. The situations it handles are unbelievable. There are tons of videos of it making end to end trips with few or no interventions all while handling insane environments that would break every other self driving system. If you showed these videos to someone in 1990 they would exclaim that the car “drives itself,” regardless of the knowledge that a person has to supervise and that it makes mistakes. We have arrived. And there isn’t any sign of it on cnn, Reddit or hacker news. But what you do see on these platforms are the handful of cases where FSD made a serious mistake. The overall picture painted by these platforms is incorrect.
jancsika 5y ago
I love reading about self-driving cars and cryptocurrencies on HN. Suddenly, all the orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency/performance/scaling/production/integrity/etc. go out the window. Apparently they get replaced with conversations that devolve into how bad humans have been at the tasks that the fanboys are hoping get replaced by marginal-at-best tech. E.g., git discussion on HN: of course we all know how git leverages merkel trees to make it workable to produce millions-of-line ambitious projects across timezones with people we've never even met before (much less are willing to fool around giving repo permissions to). But goddammit it takes more than five minutes to learn the feature branch flow. That's unacceptable! self-driving car discussion on HN: I've seen plenty of human psychopaths nearly mow down a pedestrian at an intersection so how is software doing the same thing any worse?
jmcguckin 5y ago
At the time the car was going to make a right hand turn, it looks like the pedestrian hadn't even stepped off the curb. I don't see the problem.
gremloni 5y ago
People are going to die. I’m okay with it. These people are not hand selected to be sacrifices. If single deaths can do stall progress the west is going to get nowhere.
GrimRe 5y ago
Are we just ignoring the fact that Russ Mitchell is an infamous Elon hater and that the DMCA has nothing to do with the content of the video? The video was re-uploaded by a 3rd party and the original video owner makes a living off YouTube videos so rightfully asked YouTube to take it down. Onto the ostensible issue of the car "almost hitting a pedestrian" ... This is a beta software that is equivalent to cruise control from a liability perspective. Its an advanced driving assistance feature. The driver must be ready to take over control at any moment as was the case here.
weezin 5y ago
I think I've seen a similar video in a previous FSD version and the car tries to swerve into the concrete pillar, so I think this person was trying to stress test that same situation, which I guess you can say it improved. I'm assuming this situation had something to do with the pillar again. Who knows though the reroute was really weird.
chrismcb 5y ago
A video like this shouldn't be copyrightable. There were no creative aspects in developing it.

491 points by camjohnson26 5y ago

blendergeek 5y ago

Can we find out who sent the takedown notice?

beeboop 5y ago
This is the part that matters. Anyone can DMCA anything
- closetnerd 5y ago
  Are we thinking that Elon super fans might do this?
  - soheil 5y ago
    Or Elon haters to make it look like Elon is super paranoid?
    - addicted 5y ago
      Wow. We’re at the crisis actors stage of discourse.
  - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
    Edit: I was being dumb and am wrong. This is YouTube's internal system for copyrights not DCMA. Apologies. Old comment below... You can read up on how to submit DCMA takedowns for YouTube here -> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en The original uploader of the video submitted the DCMA takedown request.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      OP’s point is that anyone can lie in the DMCA takedown form and say they own the content. It’s illegal but I’m not aware of it ever coming back to the perpetrator in the form of jail time/lawsuit.
    - Someone1234 5y ago
      Your YouTube support link isn't about the DMCA, and in fact is an attempt at trying to get people to use their system instead of the DMCA. YouTube's internal copyright takedown system is just that: Internal. DMCA is a legal avenue that you can use against YouTube and their users, but it wouldn't be via their internal copyright take down system. It is in YouTube's best interests for you NOT to use the DMCA as there are avenues where it can leave YouTube themselves civilly liable (OCILLA[0]), so they work hard to funnel people into their internal copyright system that doesn't expose YT. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Notice_from_copyright_owner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
      - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
        My mistake, apologies. Edited the comment to note my error.
- lathiat 5y ago
  From the comments in this thread the Twitter copy was not the original creator of the video. The original creator posted it on YouTube but has since made the video private. And they DMCAd the person that reposted it on Twitter. I imagine they probably started getting a lot of negative attention. https://twitter.com/xythar/status/1438539880045309953?s=21 https://twitter.com/xythar/status/1438539880045309953?s=21
- advisedwang 5y ago
  Anyone is physically capable of sending a DMCA takedown. However it is supposed to be from the copyright owner [17 USC 512(c)(3)(A)(i)] and if it isn't, it can be ignored [17 USC 512(c)(3)(B)] and makes the person who does it liable for damages [17 USC 512(f)(1)]. Although that's probably pretty hard to use in practice.
riffic 5y ago
lumen will have a copy

loceng 5y ago

"Almost hitting pedestrians" isn't how I'd describe what I saw in the video.

kevinmgranger 5y ago
Which makes it even more confusing as to why they'd Streisand effect themselves.
- aquadrop 5y ago
  I doubt DMCA came from Tesla, they let worse videos take thousands of views on youtube and never done anything.
devb 5y ago
Ok, I’ll ask. How would you describe it?
- soheil 5y ago
  "Car slightly spooks a couple of people including the driver who safely took over and resumed driving"
- aquadrop 5y ago
  "Car doesn't yield to pedestrians". For "almost hit" I would expect car to run by pedestrian in less than half a meter or for pedestrian having to react quickly to avoid car.
  - stagger87 5y ago
    It makes more sense when you realize the car wasn't even supposed to be turning. Look at the nav screen. If this guy didn't take over, where exactly was the car going? I think it's very easy to speculate it wouldn't have ended well.
    - kbenson 5y ago

literallyaduck 5y ago

Not familiar with how the autopilot works, but the guy is touch the wheel a lot, is it the car driving, both, or just manual control? If it is just the car, it looks like it was trying to turn and didn't consider the people in the crosswalk. Edit: thanks for the explanation.

hnthrow917 5y ago
Just the car. The guy can override by taking hold of the wheel and overriding what the car wants.
ashafer 5y ago
iirc the car does all the driving but you have to have a hand "on the wheel" so they don't technically have to legally classify it as a self driving car or something. I'm guessing if he is videoing it and hovering over the wheel that much this has happened before and he is nervously expecting it?
- kube-system 5y ago
  Tesla has caused a lot of confusion by calling this system "full self driving", but in reality, this system is an SAE level 2 driver assistance system where the human is required to be in charge of driving at all times. https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/press-releases/2018/12/j3016-levels-of-automation-image.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre...
kalleboo 5y ago
This isn't the standard autopilot but the "full self driving" option that is currently in a limited beta (around 1000 users that have gone through extra approval, not just 100% random owners)
jofaz 5y ago
In the video there is a steering wheel symbol near the speed that is highlighted in blue. That indicates autopilot is engaged, when the driver turns the wheel to correct the mistake the symbol turns gray indicated autopilot disengaged.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

GDC7 5y ago

Can anybody update on who Tesla fans perceive as their mortal enemy right now? First it was big oil, then it was shortsellers, but I found those narratives sort of died out. Who are they beefing with right now?

cool_dude85 5y ago
Pedestrians.
jeffbee 5y ago
The NTSB.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

partido3619463 5y ago

Is the car turning right (after a no right turn sign) while it was supposed to be going straight according to nav?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stagger87 5y ago
Yes, and that's what makes it interesting in my mind. Where was the car going?
- cmsj 5y ago
  It was hungry ;)
- rvz 5y ago
  The car probably thought the pedestrian was an emergency vehicle, given the person was wearing a bright red coat and Teslas on FSD have a habit of crashing into them. To Downvoters: Well it is actually true. [0] and just recently another crash involving an emergency vehicle. [1] So there is a strange habit with Tesla FSD and red objects in its view. Given those incidents, care to explain why I am wrong? [0] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/23/tesla-autopilot-crash-fire-truck-ntsb/ https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/23/tesla-autopilot-crash-fi... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-identifies-12th-tesla-assisted-systems-car-crash-involving-emergency-vehicle-2021-09-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-ide...
  - NickM 5y ago
    care to explain why I am wrong Because even in cases where cars have hit emergency vehicles, it's because the software didn't see the vehicles at all and just continued driving straight in its lane. Whatever flaws the Tesla vision system may have, the idea that it is programmed to deliberately seek out and crash into emergency vehicles seems pretty far-fetched (much less that it would mistake a person wearing a red coat for an emergency vehicle and therefore attempt to crash into it); I assume this is why people are downvoting you.

traveler01 5y ago

Almost hitting pedestrian is a big stretch. Car had enough time to stop before he took hold. He probably just picked up the wheel because he didn't want the car going that way.

staticassertion 5y ago
It's barely a stretch. The car veers pretty significantly. The driver and the pedestrian both notice this and wave as a 'sorry'. The car may have stopped, of course we won't ever know, but it's absolutely wrong to say that it was just the wrong direction - again, both the driver and pedestrian acknowledge the aggressive turn.
- traveler01 5y ago
  Car wasn't at a very high speed and if breaks are working normally it would have a lot of time to break before hitting the person. Almost hitting a pedestrian is a big stretch of a title, we don't really know what the car was going to do. Probably there's some logs on the car that will tell Tesla if the car would stop or not, but for the viewer of the video we don't really know.
sfblah 5y ago
I run a lot on streets. You do you, but this video is going to make me much more careful around Tesla cars from now on.
bjtitus 5y ago
This would have been reckless from a human driver and was just as reckless for FSD.

josefresco 5y ago

"almost hitting pedestrian" It wasn't even close. Look at where the ped is at 12 seconds, compared to the car. It's because he stopped the turn, and straightened the vehicle that the pedestrian stopped and looked up with concern (at 13 seconds). Even if the pedestrian broke out into a full run, they wouldn't have been in any real danger. This sort of close interplay between pedestrians and cars is very common in cities. The concern I have is that the "eye contact" element is lost. When in doubt of another motorists intentions, we make eye contact and look for acknowledgement or an indication of intent. This doesn't exist with FSD. Edit: Some people have pointed out the car wasn't supposed to be turning right which I missed. If that's the case, the situation and my opinion is completely different.

ModernMech 5y ago
Agreed it wasn't close, but it's still not the kind of behavior you'd want to see in a robot car. If I were a passenger in a car where a human driver did this, I would wonder if they were impaired, and I would no longer trust their driving abilities. Tesla's whole selling point is that a) autonomous cars are safer than human drivers b) we are almost there. This clip shows both claims are questionable at the moment.
- emn13 5y ago
  I wasn't close because the driver was paying absurdly close attention. We can't say if it would have been close or not, but there's certainly no hint the car had a handle on the situation, and it's clear to see it was making some kind of mistake, even if possible a non-fatal one.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Yeah. "It probably can't kill anyone if you watch it like a hawk at all times..." wasn't the FSD selling point.
cogman10 5y ago
I agree, but this is probably the worst behavior I've seen of the FSD software. It abruptly tried to do a right turn on a no-right intersection with no warning (map said it was supposed to go straight, it looked like it was going to do that right up to the last second). Putting aside the "almost hitting a pedestrian", this is really dangerous behavior for an autonomous vehicle.

bananapub 5y ago

for those unaware (like me), "FSD" is the extremely misleading term Tesla uses to describe their cars as "Full Self Driving".

Jyaif 5y ago
Technically it is fully self driving, it's "just" that you have a (much) lower chance of arriving safely at your destination than with a human driver.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  It's fully self driving until it cops out and gives it back to you
rvz 5y ago
The correct term is ‘Fools Self Driving’ given its users think that they are driving a ‘fully self driving’ car yet they have to be behind the wheel and pay attention to the road at all times. Not exactly the FSD robot-taxi experience the Tesla fans were promised. Instead, they got happily mislead with beta software.
kzrdude 5y ago
Even more incredibly, "FSD" is an addon you pay for. So customers are paying for the lie.

brown9-2 5y ago

The tweet that went viral was a clip of a video posted by a Youtube channel owned by someone else. Seems pretty obvious the copyright owner who would make a claim against the tweet was the Youtube channel who owned the video.

ra7 5y ago

Interestingly, the original creator of the video has since made it private. FSD beta testers are carefully handpicked — a lot of the Tesla “influencers” are given access for some free marketing. I wonder how many FSD bad driving videos are not uploaded to YouTube at all because they don’t want to say anything negative about Tesla and possibly lose influence/ad revenue. This is on top of Tesla classifying FSD as level 2 system (while promoting as “level 5 soon”) so they don’t have to share data with CA DMV. Only reason not to be transparent like the others is if you’re not confident in your system.

ballenf 5y ago
Do you know if the terms of those arrangements give Tesla copyright ownership of the videos? Just wondering whether the driver or Tesla issued the DMCA.
- sidibe 5y ago
  The driver is a big fan of Tesla (even in that video he was very impressed with FSD 10). I think he probably deleted it himself because of the backlash
Shank 5y ago
There's a mirror of the original video here: https://streamable.com/grihhc https://streamable.com/grihhc. I consider it fairly valuable to study academically, as it shows both how the Tesla autopilot system performs, and how the the driver reacts to the system, with the knowledge that it's a beta, and their manner of movement, operation, and knowledge of the system and what they let it do. I think the biggest problem I have is that the driver doesn't intervene/even really stop the car. The good autopilot 'test channels' like 'AI DRIVR' will routinely disengage if any safety concern is present. The monorail test driver, in contrast, knows the monorail is a problem and was criticized for not correcting the car driving under the monorail, which is already illegal behavior.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

Based on the audio in the video it seems like they were testing a Tesla FSD update? It sounded like they deliberately drove it in an area that it did not handle well and even commented that it was 'better'. It seems like it thinks the lane shifted to the right because it had to reason to do a right turn. Anyone have more insight into what occurred?

mwint 5y ago

This looks like a weird navigation failure. It certainly shouldn't have made this maneuver at all, but it's provably false to say it would have run over the pedestrians... this frame shows it: https://i.stack.imgur.com/2KymN.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/2KymN.png Context - this is after the sudden sharp turn, as the driver is taking over. - We can see the system is still driving itself; the driver has not taken over and is not a factor. The blue steering wheel shows this. - The dotted line coming off the car shows its intended path. If you step through the video, you can see it decide it's going to make the turn (for some unknown reason). - Before the driver takes over, as this frame shows, we see the car decide to turn back to the left and resume its correct course. In fact, if you step through the video, you can see the car is turning the wheel to the left, rotating under the driver's hands before the driver applies enough force to disengage. - The car was aware of the pedestrian at the time it decided to make the turn (you can see them on the screen), and its clear the path would not have collided with the person even if the driver had not taken over, and the car had not corrected itself. - But the car did correct itself, and intended to resume its straight course before the driver took over, as that frame above shows. This is not "Tesla almost hits pedestrian!", this is "Tesla makes bad navigation decision, driver takes over before car would have safely corrected"

renewiltord 5y ago
Yeah, looks like it. Software could use some smoothing on its actions, though.
stagger87 5y ago
> but it's provably false to say it would have run over the pedestrians... You can't prove something like that, I mean consider the irony that you typed this statement right after > It certainly shouldn't have made this maneuver at all How can you prove that it wouldn't have made another unexpected maneuver? It's all speculation, and that's OK. I wish OP used a different title, because everyone seems to be getting hung up on it, when the lede is certainly the FSD being unable to maintain a straight line.
yellow_lead 5y ago
I love that your defense is that the car would've stopped closer to the pedestrian than the driver did.

ChrisKnott 5y ago

Maximise the video and watch the left hand HUD pane from 0:10 to 0:11. The dotted black line coming from the front of the car (which I am assuming is the intended route) quickly snaps from straight ahead, to a hair pin right, to a normal right turn. Ignoring the fact that the right turn happened to be into a pedestrian crossing with people on it - what was the car even trying to do? The sat-nav shows it should have just continued forwards. I am astounded that software capable of these outputs is allowed on the roads. When could crossing a junction then taking a hairpin right back across it, ever be the correct thing to do?

andreyk 5y ago
Good catch! That's definitely quite concerning...
taneq 5y ago
On the one hand I applaud Tesla for being so open about what their system is thinking with their visualisations. That could be interpreted to show a deep belief in their system's capabilities. On the other hand, it's always terrified me how jittery any version of AutoPilot's perception of the world is. Would you let your car be driven by someone with zero object permanence, 10/20 vision and only a vague idea of the existence or properties of any object other than lane markings and number plates?
- macNchz 5y ago
  I test drove a Model 3 yesterday and this was something that really jumped out at me. I didn't try any of the automatic driving features, but driving around Brooklyn watching the way the car was perceiving the world around it did not inspire confidence at all. Tesla's over the top marketing and hype seems at once to have been a key ingredient in their success, but also so frustrating because their product is genuinely awesome. I've long been kind of a skeptic but I could not have been more impressed with the test drive I took. It had me ready to buy in about 90 seconds. I wish there were actually-competitive competitors with similar range and power that aren't weird looking SUVs, from brands that don't lean into pure hype.

valine 5y ago

This is near the infamous monorail where previous versions of FSD would kamikaze into the giant concrete pillars. Presumably in response to the monorail failure Tesla updated their obstacle avoidance to handle unclassified objects. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1437322712339423237?s=21 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1437322712339423237?s=21 From the nav you can see the car is trying to go straight but swerves around some invisible obstacle. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a failure in their new “voxel based” collision avoidance.

miken123 5y ago
Funny, you see the same mistake at exactly the same spot, albeit less spectacular, in the video linked from the tweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWc-r0InwVk&t=148s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWc-r0InwVk&t=148s
- kzrdude 5y ago
  It seems likely that navigation is momentarily seeing the straight-ahead as obstructed and trying to route around using the street on the right? But the car really needs to respond more calmly when doing navigation changes (see especially the car in the OP video - no safe driver changes course in a split second in the middle of an intersection, not at that speed).
phkahler 5y ago
Voxels? Wow. I was recently contemplating conscious driving vs ones own autopilot (when you get to work and dont remember any of the drive because it was unevetful). I realised that I sometimes drive largely in image space and other times in world space. It was an odd thing to deliberately flip between them. I don't really want to think about that...

joshribakoff 5y ago

I have FSD but not the beta. When cars cut across my lane autopilot will not react for a solid second or so, then proceeds to slam on the brakes after the car is clear. It does not instill confidence to say the least. From my POV it feels like someone put a debounce on the reaction to prevent phantom breaking, to the point the car doesn’t brake when it needs to.

ptidhomme 5y ago
IIRC there was also a 1 second delay before reaction on the Uber car that crashed into a pedestrian. There must be quite a lot of false alarms to filter out...
mumblemumble 5y ago
I worry a little bit about things like this. If they were just using debouncing on a band-aid rather than dealing directly with the bad input that led to the phantom breaking, then that would seem to imply that the project is falling into the classic death march project trap. It turns out that the last 10% of the project is going to be 90% of the work. Meaning that the original schedule was off by an order of magnitude. But the business has made made huge promises that mean that the team is not at liberty to adjust the schedule accordingly. And so they're under ever increasing pressure to cut corners and pile on quick fixes.
- zaptrem 5y ago
  Production AP is a completely different software stack than FSD beta. I think the only things that carry over are the car detection, VRU, and traffic light CV NNs.
rootusrootus 5y ago
The part that always bothered me most about AP on the highway was how willing it is to drive full speed into an obvious problem. Obvious for me, that is. Dense merging traffic, for example -- I can see the conflict coming, I can read the way people are driving on that on-ramp, and I take defensive action. My Tesla would just drive right into the center of that mess than then panic when things got crazy. I no longer have my Tesla, but I stopped using AP before I sold the car, partly as a result of this behavior. And partly because phantom braking became pretty common for a number of overpasses we go under on our way to grandma's house, and it really scares the crap out of my wife & kids. Aside from phantom braking, the best use case for AP, in my opinion, is to be a jerk and cruise in the middle lane of the freeway. It deals okay with that most of the time.

Jyaif 5y ago

Not to pile on Tesla, but a yoke driving wheel will make taking over the FSD mode much harder.

jjj3j3j3j3 5y ago

This reminds me how film/music industry tried to DMCA youtube-dl project.

tdrdt 5y ago

According to Tesla's own legal documents FSD beta is still at level 2. Level 2 automated driving is defined as systems that provide steering and brake/acceleration support, as well as lane centering and adaptive cruise control. So it is the same as in most modern cars (other brands also have 'environment awareness') but Tesla still market it as 'sit back and close your eyes' driving.

jorpal 5y ago

Basic game theory dictates that if automated driving is seen as too safe, pedestrians will feel comfortable walking anywhere, anytime. Dense downtowns will become completely gridlocked and unusable for cars. Which maybe isn’t a bad thing. But if you want cars in cities you need them to be perceived as dangerous. Yeah I was convinced by Gladwell.

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sprafa 5y ago
You solve this face recognition and ticketing of offenders. The cars have cameras everywhere anyway
- paulkrush 5y ago
  China has it so easy! This is not fare...
- pidge 5y ago
  Yeah Los Angeles already fines pedestrians pretty aggressively for jaywalking, even on urban pedestrian-heavy streets. This maintains a different norm for the city about jaywalking than say Boston, so in principle the issue seems quite solvable.
paulkrush 5y ago
I agree, but also think we will adapt in many different ways. New types of tickets. There would be no go zones where pedestrians don't compile(or comply!). Mackinac island will not have this issue! And for fun I have to note basic game theory also dictates if we replace airbags with a sharped steel spike that comes out during accidents people will drive safer!

ghufran_syed 5y ago

I think we’re missing the point that this is currently designed for a driver to monitor at all times, the driver intervened appropriately, and thereby provided another training example for the network. This is also a beta version that is being tested by humans who have the legal and moral responsibility for control of the car.

adflux 5y ago
>designed for a driver to monitor at all times >calls it full self driving What a joke & GREAT way to mislead customers.
toss1 5y ago
And this is the WORST possible combination One of the attributes of human perception is that it is TERRIBLE at maintaining persistent vigilance without engagement. Even at a very low level, the nervous system is designed to habituate to constant stimuli; e.g., when you first encounter something that smells (good or bad) it can be overwhelming, but after a few minutes the same smell barely registers. More on point, spend some time looking forward at speed, or rotating (e.g., in a swivel chair), then stop quickly, and watch how your visual system creates the illusion of everything flowing in the opposite direction. Now, scale that up to higher levels of cognition. The more the car gets right, the worse will be the human's attention. When a car here does almost everything right, people can and will literally read or fall asleep at the wheel. Until that one critical failure. As a former licensed road racing driver and champion, I find the idea of anything between L2 and L4 to be terrifying. I can and have handled many very tricky and emergency situations at a wide range of speeds on everything from dry roads to wet ice (on and off the track) — when my attention was fully focused on the road, the situation, my grip levels, the balance of the car, etc. The idea of being largely unfocused while the car does almost everything, then having an alert and having to regain, in fractions of a second, full orientation to everything I need to know then take action, is terrifying. 60 mph is 88 feet per second. Even a quick reaction where I've squandered only a half second figuring out what to do is the difference between avoiding or stopping before an obstacle, and blowing ~50' past it, or over it, at speed. Attempts to say "it's just fine because a human is in the loop (and ultimately responsible)" are just bullsh*t and evading responsibility, even if human beta testing is fantastic for gathering massive amounts of data to analyze. Among high risk and speed sports, it is almost axiomatic for us to draw distinctions between "smart crazy" vs "dumb crazy", and everyone knows the difference without a definition. The best definition I heard was that it's the difference between [using knowledge, technology, and skill to make a hazardous activity reliably safe] vs [getting away with something]. You can 'get away' with Russian Roulette 5 out of six times, and you'll probably get a great adrenaline rush, but you can't expect to do so for long. Although this kind of "full self driving" has much better odds vs Russian Roulette, it is still unreliable, and the system of expecting the human to always be able to detect, orient, and respond in time to the car's errors is systematically unsafe. You will 'get away with it' a lot, and there will even be times when the system catches things the humans won't. But to place the entire "legal and moral responsibility" on the human to 100% reliably operate a system that is specifically designed against human capabilities is wrong, unless you want to say that this is a [no human should every operate under these conditions], like drunk driving, and outlaw the system and the action of operating it.

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fnord77 5y ago

welcome to our dystopian corporate future. video of company dumping toxic waste into the ocena? DMCA takedown !

ehz 5y ago

Totally naive guess, but could there be some misdetection of a road feature (Stoplight)? Car swerves very close to when people in the background wearing very bright neon and very bright red jackets cross each other.

perihelions 5y ago

Good thing evidentiary videos of car accidents are copyrightable. We wouldn't want to discourage auto-collision-footage-creators from creating content by failing to protect their exclusive monetization rights.

josephcsible 5y ago

Is there anywhere that says who issued the DMCA takedown? A lot of people are assuming it was Tesla, but I don't see any evidence of that.

diebeforei485 5y ago
This is not clear. I assume the original uploader of the video (the person who runs the Hyperchange YouTube channel).

koonsolo 5y ago

Maybe it's just me, but it seems the car wanted to make a right turn on the right part of that side street. There are no pedestrians there. It's actually the interference of the driver that stops the turn halfway, and steers towards the people at the left starting to cross that street. I wonder what would have happened when the driver didn't interfere. I guess that the right turn would have been completed without any problem. But maybe I'm missing some extra info here?

crote 5y ago
I neither see nor hear any indication of a turn signal, so I do not think it is actually trying to make a right turn. Besides, the pedestrians were already on the road when the car initiated the turn. Note the "one way" sign: that street only has a single lane, and that lane was already occupied. It should definitely have yielded.
- mcdoogal 5y ago
  Agreed that I don’t think it was trying to turn. Crazy how the system just went for it even with pedestrians. However, I know this area well; that street it’s turning on to is actually 3 lanes with no parking on the right except for buses.
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
> I guess that the right turn would have been completed without any problem. The right turn would (at best) be completed by making pedestrians wait for the car, which is backwards.
TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
I don’t know what where you live, but here in the civilised world you’re not legally supposed to turn on to a road when there are freaking pedestrians already crossing it. You’re supposed to wait for them to fully complete their crossing, and yes: the overwhelming majority of drivers here abide by that requirement.
- 5y ago

tibiahurried 5y ago

This tech is clearly not ready for mass adoption. I am surprised, to say the least, that they are allowed to sell cars with that, clearly not safe tech, on board. Where are the regulators?Pretending that it is all good?

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Tesla FSD Beta 10 veers into pedestrians with illegal right turn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 - Sept 2021 (118 comments) Less recent and less related: Watch a Tesla Fail an Automatic Braking Test and Vaporize a Robot Pedestrian - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588795 - Sept 2020 (111 comments)

supperburg 5y ago
Vaporize. What an objective and sensible term to describe something that I’m sure you are totally unbiased about…
- dang 5y ago
  That's just the title of the submitted article. If we'd seen it at the time, we would have vaporized it...but no one bats a hundred :)
  - supperburg 5y ago
    I didn’t notice it was you Dan g

cronix 5y ago

I think the whole dream/goal of building a self driving car on top of a system completely designed for manual human interpretation and input is asinine, and that's before you even consider the complexity of adding other humans manually driving or suddenly walking in front of your car from a blind spot. Instead of building a digital system from the ground up, we are forcing manufacturers to come up with tech to read speed signs meant for human eyes and accurately interpret them under a myriad of conditions. What if it's covered in mud, or snow? Wouldn't coming up with national/international standards and a digital system work better for digital cars, like broadcasting speed limits instead of only relying on interpreting visual inputs, etc? Or standardizing the charging interface so you don't end up in a mac-like dongle hell and can just know no matter what car charging station you pull up to it will just work, like gas stations and standardized fueling systems work for all brand of ICE vehicles? I can go to any branded gas station and there isn't a station specific for just Ford cars. It just seems like a mish mash system of cludges hobbled together instead of a solid, well thought out system from the ground up. Due to that, we are making it 10x harder (and more dangerous) than it really needs to be. It's like saying you have to build all modern OS's on top of DOS made for 8 bit cpu's.

phkahler 5y ago
>> What if it's covered in mud, or snow? That's the entire problem. These systems don't understand anything about the world. If you see a sign covered in snow you're going to recognize it as such and make your best guess as to what it says and weather you care. You probably don't need that information to drive safely because you have a lot of knowledge to fall back on. These things dont, so some folks want to improve GPS accuracy and maps and signage. That's not a viable solution on so many levels. General AI is the only way forward for fully autonomous cars.
- misiti3780 5y ago
  Right now, the TSLAs with FSD will disable it in snow+rain, so I assume that even if TSLA achieves L4, it will be only under ideal conditions until they have enough data to resolve these edge cases.

diebeforei485 5y ago

This was a private beta, to be clear.

FartyMcFarter 5y ago
Except for the people walking / driving on the road.

microtherion 5y ago

I don't think a DMCA notice is what "take ownership of your mistakes" means.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Wait, why did the steering wheel and the car swerve right here? Because the pedestrian that was passed or because the one waiting to cross? And wasn't the drivers intent to drive straight ahead?

antattack 5y ago

How about changing the title to be more accurate: "Video accusing Tesla FSD beta of almost hitting pedestrian receives DMCA take-down."

klik99 5y ago

On the video - "almost hitting" is a VERY misleading way to phrase it, I see worse driving on a daily basis from human beings. However, I'm glad for the high visibility and scrutiny because we should hold FSD to a higher standard and the pressure will create a better product. (I drive one and use self-driving) On the DMCA takedown - that's pretty sketchy.

sandos 5y ago
I agree this was not even a close call, also maybe its all due to driver interrupting the autopilot, but this video still shows to many problems for FSD.

plausibledeny 5y ago

This is Fifth Ave and Lenora in Seattle (about a block away from Amazon Spheres). Lenora is a one-way and you can take a right off of 5th onto Lenora (basically heading toward the water). The signage (and road in general) is confusing because of the monorail pylons.

sandos 5y ago

Haha, I commented on this exact sort of video, one titled something with "success" where the car somehow managed to get past that monorail but in an extremely sketchy way, way worse than any learner driver would every do. This FSD beta seems way too cocky and at the same time confused underneath, I think we will see quite a few incidents with this one unless everyones a good boy and is really in the loop with taking over quickly.

giantrobot 5y ago

FSD without LIDAR/radar is a fool's errand. Camera-only systems just do not pull in enough data to drive on real roads around real hazards. For one they do not actual approximate human eyes since our eyes themselves are gimbaled in our skulls and our skull is gimbaled on our necks. Our eyes can switch their focus very quickly and return to scanning very easily. Not only are we processing the visual information but also feedback from all of our body positioning and other sensory inputs. Driving heavily relies on our proprioception. Fully autonomous cars need a lot of different sensors and processing power. Even driver assist should be using a lot of sensors. Autonomous driving needs more and better sensors than humans because it needs to deal with humans that are both smarter and more irrational than the automation. Besides conscious abilities humans have a lot of inherent self-preservation instincts that might be locally optimum for survival but globally poor choices. Tesla scrimping on sensors because their boss is an egomaniac is the height of hubris. A web service moving fast and breaking things and choosing cheap but redundant options is fine. Usually the worst that happens is people lose money or some data. Moving fast and breaking things in a car is literally life and death. Musk's hubris around FSD is sociopathic.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Even worse, we actually rely heavily on our knowledge of the world, common sense,and physical intuition to make sense of our vision. Put a human in a room with no shadows, unrecognizable objects, and misleadingly sized objects (tiny cars, huge animals), and then watch them fail to judge distances or other vision tasks.

cma 5y ago

There was a popular Hacker News thread on this video too that was removed somehow without being marked dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28545010 It was on the front page and then a few minutes later not on the first 5+ pages.

bogwog 5y ago

Does anyone know if there have been efforts to connect a city's traffic lights/data with a self driving system like this? That crosswalk had a timer on it, and if that status could be accessed by the Tesla in real time, the autopilot would have known not to make that turn even if the cameras were telling it something else. Idk if those things are networked, but it seems like a good investment to do that if it means safer self-driving cars.

ummonk 5y ago

Seeing this video, I imagine that driving with FSD in a busy city is significantly more taxing and stressful than driving without.

sorokod 5y ago

If a pedestrian got hurt, what would be the legal liability of the driver who didn't have his hands on the steering wheel?

sidibe 5y ago
100% on the driver. "Full self driving" is for marketing only and they supposedly make it very clear to the customers.
- paxys 5y ago
  This will have to be settled in court eventually (I'm guessing very soon, looking at all these videos). It's very unlikely that car manufacturers will be able to avoid all responsibility just because of fine print in the terms of service.

gutino 5y ago

I do not see how the pedestrian would have benn hit. For me the car was turning very sharply, away from them.

WA 5y ago

Reminder that Tesla will kill critical videos of FSD, but still to this day has not taken down the fabricated "full self driving demo" from their own website since 2016: https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware... Tesla (and fanboys) say that they are clear about the limited capabilities of Autopilot and FSD when in reality, they indirectly support all fan-videos by letting them live on YouTube while DMCAing critical videos. They want you to believe that FSD is more capable than it truly is.

notJim 5y ago
> Tesla will kill critical videos of FSD Examples?
- bhelkey 5y ago
  The implication is that Tesla DMCAed the video in TFA. Obviously, I don't know if that is true that, 1 the video was DMCAed and 2 that Tesla sent the DMCA takedown request.
  - notJim 5y ago
    I think most likely the person who created the video must have done it. I don't see how Tesla would own the copyright. This also isn't the first time one of these videos has gone viral, and the other ones were not taken down.
93po 5y ago
How was it fabricated?

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Is there any evidence for the video being DMCA'd (and if so, who sent the takedown - IIRC youtube shows that), instead of being taken private by the uploader as the link in the tweet indicates? Edit: It's about the copy on Twitter, https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1438141148816609285 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1438141148816609285

acd 5y ago

Selfvdriving cars almost hitting a pedestrian is terrible. Socialmedia platforms is an attention economy, where the most spectacular posts get attention. I think its diverting attention to the wrong causes.

acd 5y ago

A self driving car almost hitting a pedestrian is terrible. Socialmedia platforms is an attention economy, where the most spectacular unusual posts gets most attention! I think its diverting attention to the wrong causes.

supperburg 5y ago

Recently I have been wondering why there are no videos of FSD v10 on any of the mainstream platforms which apparently includes HN now. There are tons and tons of videos of FSD doing amazing, amazing things. The situations it handles are unbelievable. There are tons of videos of it making end to end trips with few or no interventions all while handling insane environments that would break every other self driving system. If you showed these videos to someone in 1990 they would exclaim that the car “drives itself,” regardless of the knowledge that a person has to supervise and that it makes mistakes. We have arrived. And there isn’t any sign of it on cnn, Reddit or hacker news. But what you do see on these platforms are the handful of cases where FSD made a serious mistake. The overall picture painted by these platforms is incorrect.

jancsika 5y ago

I love reading about self-driving cars and cryptocurrencies on HN. Suddenly, all the orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency/performance/scaling/production/integrity/etc. go out the window. Apparently they get replaced with conversations that devolve into how bad humans have been at the tasks that the fanboys are hoping get replaced by marginal-at-best tech. E.g., git discussion on HN: of course we all know how git leverages merkel trees to make it workable to produce millions-of-line ambitious projects across timezones with people we've never even met before (much less are willing to fool around giving repo permissions to). But goddammit it takes more than five minutes to learn the feature branch flow. That's unacceptable! self-driving car discussion on HN: I've seen plenty of human psychopaths nearly mow down a pedestrian at an intersection so how is software doing the same thing any worse?

jmcguckin 5y ago

At the time the car was going to make a right hand turn, it looks like the pedestrian hadn't even stepped off the curb. I don't see the problem.

gremloni 5y ago

People are going to die. I’m okay with it. These people are not hand selected to be sacrifices. If single deaths can do stall progress the west is going to get nowhere.

GrimRe 5y ago

Are we just ignoring the fact that Russ Mitchell is an infamous Elon hater and that the DMCA has nothing to do with the content of the video? The video was re-uploaded by a 3rd party and the original video owner makes a living off YouTube videos so rightfully asked YouTube to take it down. Onto the ostensible issue of the car "almost hitting a pedestrian" ... This is a beta software that is equivalent to cruise control from a liability perspective. Its an advanced driving assistance feature. The driver must be ready to take over control at any moment as was the case here.

weezin 5y ago

I think I've seen a similar video in a previous FSD version and the car tries to swerve into the concrete pillar, so I think this person was trying to stress test that same situation, which I guess you can say it improved. I'm assuming this situation had something to do with the pillar again. Who knows though the reroute was really weird.

chrismcb 5y ago

A video like this shouldn't be copyrightable. There were no creative aspects in developing it.