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Tesla offers ‘Full Self-Driving’ option, prompting criticism from regulators

40 points by noptd 5y ago

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Funny how others opting into a beta could now cause bodily injury to completely unsuspecting bystanders.
- jrockway 5y ago
  I think Tesla is definitely going to end up killing more people with their software, but it probably ends up being a rounding error in the big scheme of things. People driving themselves home after a few too many beers are killing more people than driving AIs, and I honestly expect it to stay that way even with Tesla's reckless approach. Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    While just an anecdote, Leo Laporte mentioned recently his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. Based solely on news like that and others I get the sense that Tesla's radar-averse solution is far worse than the average driver.
    - toast0 5y ago
      > his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. In a way, consistency here is good. If it only sometimes tries to crash itself, it's harder to fix and it may indicate a bigger recognition problem. Of course, that doesn't mean the product is any good, or that selling it is reasonable.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      Yeah. I think Tesla is making a mistake in going for cost optimization before their product actually works. You can see that it's technically possible to drive on sight alone; that's how humans drive cars. (But, it's not completely clear cut to me. Having the cameras in every Tesla means that they have a lot of data to use in their simulations, and that might help them more than depth data from lidar. I don't really know.) Their current strategy does get people hyped. I wonder how many people you can program a machine to run over before it becomes an unprofitable activity. I have a random comment I'll interject but it's totally off topic. My impression from watching people show off their Teslas is that they are constantly in awe of being able to get to work without controlling their car. But many of us have been commuting to work hands free for decades -- it's called public transportation. One person uses the power of electricity to take hundreds of people around the city, every 1.5 minutes during rush hour. It is pretty nice. But we didn't need self-driving cars to get there, we just needed to design our living and working spaces for hands-free commuting. Shrug.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    You can send someone to prison if they hurt someone driving drunk or distracted. Can we do the same thing to Autopilot users? Someone has to be seriously punished when they hurt people, and unless there's some meaningful way to send Tesla to prison, the beta testers will have to do.
    - cmeacham98 5y ago
      If my brakes fail and I hit an innocent bystander (assume I could not have reasonably prevented this collision), am I going to prison? No. Are the manufacturer or designer of my brake being sent to prison? Probably not, as long as this isn't a consistent issue. Tesla should be penalized for reckless behavior in the promotion and development of their FSD. However, reality is any product performing a sufficiently risky action for sufficiently many people will have a very small number of catastrophic failures. I could make a similar argument to yours for cars, planes, much of modern medicine, most electric products, alcoholic drinks, etc, etc.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    What about an AI that refuses to start for a drunk driver? Boom, problem solved at the fraction of complexity and no innocent people get butchered up in the testing phase of a software that simply can’t reliably work with current tech.
    - blackbrokkoli 5y ago
      Personally I like the ability to drive myself to the ER or away from an abusive spouse not being dependent on the false-positive rate of some device built by a notoriously shoddy car manufacturer, but to each their own I suppose.
      - lozenge 5y ago
        So drive yourself, don't rely on an AI.
        atatatat 5y ago
        What will your answer be when it's mandated, either by law, insurance companies, or a combination of both?
      - kaba0 5y ago
        As everything, it is a tradeoff. I would personally prefer not to have neither drunk drivers, nor overhyped smart-vacuums going around the roads. But as for the very specific emergency case while you are drunk, it could be overridden with some visible sign turning on notifying other drivers - but it would need some law background, so eg. a cop can escort you in that case, etc. But tesla’s fake self-driving doesn’t help anyone.
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    Uh... self driving electric cars actually change 2/3 of the problem. In a couple of iterations it will be orders of magnitudes safer than drivers, to the point where you'll be able to get home drunk in your own car. Also orders of magnitude less pollution where humans live. Last 1/3 is simple car size, aka congestion. Ironically, this will probably be solved by the Boring Company and teslas. I'm a huge proponent of bike lanes + e-vehicles. But let's be serious, Teslas really are changing the game. Well, or will, once the price goes down in 10 years.
    - WA 5y ago
      "Couple of iterations" – since 2016. Tesla is changing nothing here. Waymo is, but only in Phoenix, AZ.
- mlindner 5y ago
  There hasn't even been a single crash by a driver using the full self driving beta yet. And they have a screening system in place before people can use it that will filter out bad drivers.
  - dmitrygr 5y ago
    > a screening system in place before people can use it that will filter out bad drivers sure? if that exists, why not just wire that up to the DMV?
    - TingPing 5y ago
      They just want NDA signatures.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Why should they filter out bad drivers if it safer and working system? Shouldn't those be exactly the people to use it if it was actually working?
lucasyvas 5y ago
Tesla being irresponsible about this aside, self-driving cars/transportation have existed for years - it's called rail. Yes, yes - there will always be room for personal vehicles. But this conundrum is the epitome of excessive and terrible infrastructure design, to the N-th layer. Look at how much fuss this causes when it's better replaced by competent public transit. Mark it as another useless invention to paper over a huge crack just so we can continue to sell everyone a car.
- gremloni 5y ago
  I hate the constraint of public transportation and I suspect I’m not the only one.
  - sasaf5 5y ago
    I hate the constraints of private transportation more.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Is that a problem of public transport in general or just of the public transport available to you? In most European cities e.g. buses have separate lanes and go every 10 minutes bringing you often faster to your destination than a private car can, not even counting the cost and time burden of finding parking, maintaining your car, insurance, ... It all depends on your local context, but where I live there is great and cheap transport and if I have a need for a car I can get one from stations across the city for 2-5€/hour + 1-3c/km, significantly cheaper than even a fully paid off car would be for the same trip, if you count insurance, maintenance, and petrol.
    - gremloni 5y ago
      It’s not so much about the price or availability. I just prefer to have my own space and not have to share a resource and be in a crowd while traveling.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  also bike/ebike in dense urban areas it's a serious contender (free health, free workout, free meditation, near zero cost for the non-e bike, faster in traffic jams)
lolc 5y ago
> If driving behavior is good for 7 days, beta access will be granted. People pay for software that's supposed to drive the car. Why does it matter how the passanger drives? Well, because the software is a student driver. It fucks up in weird ways. It needs close supervision by an expert driver.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  right? i cant quite make out the value prop of paying $10k to babysit a twitchy computer
- genericone 5y ago
  Its to prevent attention seekers from enabling FSD and then going into the backseat... again.
  - lolc 5y ago
    Isn't that the promise of self-driving? To be passenger? Tesla could have called it "supervised self-driving", and that would be fine with me. But "full self-driving" sounded like more value when they wanted to sell the feature. So they went with that.
noptd 5y ago
https://archive.is/2Xl8I https://archive.is/2Xl8I
NoblePublius 5y ago
Does anyone actually believe that this sudden federal interest in autopilot is anything but lobbyist pressure from unionized legacy automakers?
- atatatat 5y ago
  Just seems like the normal wildly delayed reaction partially prompted by sufficient social outrage (also normal).
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    there is no data whatsoever to suggest that autopilot is a net safety hazard. And The White House excluded tesla from their “American Made Electric Car” day. When asked why, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said “this is not a luxury event.” It’s just goes to show you how utterly false all alleged progressive politicians are. Tesla is singlehandedly solving climate change with sustainable energy but because it’s workers vote not to unionize, they must be stopped.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Killers killing each other on the street are possibly not a "net loss", but that doesn't mean that specific thing doesn't cause harm, or cause trends causing greater harm.
akomtu 5y ago
AI has become the new snake oil.
davidjytang 5y ago
My college friend was fatally wounded in a Tesla. From time to time I go on Tesla's forum and was always surprised to see discussions there heavily leaned toward "Pilot Error" on any Tesla self-driving related accident. Like in what zones or some specific type of roads you should not enable FSD, if driver failed to remember then it's pilot error. I'm always confused about the *F* in FSD.

40 points by noptd 5y ago

paulryanrogers 5y ago

Funny how others opting into a beta could now cause bodily injury to completely unsuspecting bystanders.

jrockway 5y ago
I think Tesla is definitely going to end up killing more people with their software, but it probably ends up being a rounding error in the big scheme of things. People driving themselves home after a few too many beers are killing more people than driving AIs, and I honestly expect it to stay that way even with Tesla's reckless approach. Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  While just an anecdote, Leo Laporte mentioned recently his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. Based solely on news like that and others I get the sense that Tesla's radar-averse solution is far worse than the average driver.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. In a way, consistency here is good. If it only sometimes tries to crash itself, it's harder to fix and it may indicate a bigger recognition problem. Of course, that doesn't mean the product is any good, or that selling it is reasonable.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Yeah. I think Tesla is making a mistake in going for cost optimization before their product actually works. You can see that it's technically possible to drive on sight alone; that's how humans drive cars. (But, it's not completely clear cut to me. Having the cameras in every Tesla means that they have a lot of data to use in their simulations, and that might help them more than depth data from lidar. I don't really know.) Their current strategy does get people hyped. I wonder how many people you can program a machine to run over before it becomes an unprofitable activity. I have a random comment I'll interject but it's totally off topic. My impression from watching people show off their Teslas is that they are constantly in awe of being able to get to work without controlling their car. But many of us have been commuting to work hands free for decades -- it's called public transportation. One person uses the power of electricity to take hundreds of people around the city, every 1.5 minutes during rush hour. It is pretty nice. But we didn't need self-driving cars to get there, we just needed to design our living and working spaces for hands-free commuting. Shrug.
- sterlind 5y ago
  You can send someone to prison if they hurt someone driving drunk or distracted. Can we do the same thing to Autopilot users? Someone has to be seriously punished when they hurt people, and unless there's some meaningful way to send Tesla to prison, the beta testers will have to do.
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    If my brakes fail and I hit an innocent bystander (assume I could not have reasonably prevented this collision), am I going to prison? No. Are the manufacturer or designer of my brake being sent to prison? Probably not, as long as this isn't a consistent issue. Tesla should be penalized for reckless behavior in the promotion and development of their FSD. However, reality is any product performing a sufficiently risky action for sufficiently many people will have a very small number of catastrophic failures. I could make a similar argument to yours for cars, planes, much of modern medicine, most electric products, alcoholic drinks, etc, etc.
- kaba0 5y ago
  What about an AI that refuses to start for a drunk driver? Boom, problem solved at the fraction of complexity and no innocent people get butchered up in the testing phase of a software that simply can’t reliably work with current tech.
  - blackbrokkoli 5y ago
    Personally I like the ability to drive myself to the ER or away from an abusive spouse not being dependent on the false-positive rate of some device built by a notoriously shoddy car manufacturer, but to each their own I suppose.
    - lozenge 5y ago
      So drive yourself, don't rely on an AI.
      - atatatat 5y ago
        What will your answer be when it's mandated, either by law, insurance companies, or a combination of both?
    - kaba0 5y ago
      As everything, it is a tradeoff. I would personally prefer not to have neither drunk drivers, nor overhyped smart-vacuums going around the roads. But as for the very specific emergency case while you are drunk, it could be overridden with some visible sign turning on notifying other drivers - but it would need some law background, so eg. a cop can escort you in that case, etc. But tesla’s fake self-driving doesn’t help anyone.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  Uh... self driving electric cars actually change 2/3 of the problem. In a couple of iterations it will be orders of magnitudes safer than drivers, to the point where you'll be able to get home drunk in your own car. Also orders of magnitude less pollution where humans live. Last 1/3 is simple car size, aka congestion. Ironically, this will probably be solved by the Boring Company and teslas. I'm a huge proponent of bike lanes + e-vehicles. But let's be serious, Teslas really are changing the game. Well, or will, once the price goes down in 10 years.
  - WA 5y ago
    "Couple of iterations" – since 2016. Tesla is changing nothing here. Waymo is, but only in Phoenix, AZ.
mlindner 5y ago
There hasn't even been a single crash by a driver using the full self driving beta yet. And they have a screening system in place before people can use it that will filter out bad drivers.
- dmitrygr 5y ago
  > a screening system in place before people can use it that will filter out bad drivers sure? if that exists, why not just wire that up to the DMV?
  - TingPing 5y ago
    They just want NDA signatures.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Why should they filter out bad drivers if it safer and working system? Shouldn't those be exactly the people to use it if it was actually working?

lucasyvas 5y ago

Tesla being irresponsible about this aside, self-driving cars/transportation have existed for years - it's called rail. Yes, yes - there will always be room for personal vehicles. But this conundrum is the epitome of excessive and terrible infrastructure design, to the N-th layer. Look at how much fuss this causes when it's better replaced by competent public transit. Mark it as another useless invention to paper over a huge crack just so we can continue to sell everyone a car.

gremloni 5y ago
I hate the constraint of public transportation and I suspect I’m not the only one.
- sasaf5 5y ago
  I hate the constraints of private transportation more.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Is that a problem of public transport in general or just of the public transport available to you? In most European cities e.g. buses have separate lanes and go every 10 minutes bringing you often faster to your destination than a private car can, not even counting the cost and time burden of finding parking, maintaining your car, insurance, ... It all depends on your local context, but where I live there is great and cheap transport and if I have a need for a car I can get one from stations across the city for 2-5€/hour + 1-3c/km, significantly cheaper than even a fully paid off car would be for the same trip, if you count insurance, maintenance, and petrol.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    It’s not so much about the price or availability. I just prefer to have my own space and not have to share a resource and be in a crowd while traveling.
agumonkey 5y ago
also bike/ebike in dense urban areas it's a serious contender (free health, free workout, free meditation, near zero cost for the non-e bike, faster in traffic jams)

lolc 5y ago

> If driving behavior is good for 7 days, beta access will be granted. People pay for software that's supposed to drive the car. Why does it matter how the passanger drives? Well, because the software is a student driver. It fucks up in weird ways. It needs close supervision by an expert driver.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
right? i cant quite make out the value prop of paying $10k to babysit a twitchy computer
genericone 5y ago
Its to prevent attention seekers from enabling FSD and then going into the backseat... again.
- lolc 5y ago
  Isn't that the promise of self-driving? To be passenger? Tesla could have called it "supervised self-driving", and that would be fine with me. But "full self-driving" sounded like more value when they wanted to sell the feature. So they went with that.

noptd 5y ago

https://archive.is/2Xl8I https://archive.is/2Xl8I

NoblePublius 5y ago

Does anyone actually believe that this sudden federal interest in autopilot is anything but lobbyist pressure from unionized legacy automakers?

atatatat 5y ago
Just seems like the normal wildly delayed reaction partially prompted by sufficient social outrage (also normal).
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  there is no data whatsoever to suggest that autopilot is a net safety hazard. And The White House excluded tesla from their “American Made Electric Car” day. When asked why, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said “this is not a luxury event.” It’s just goes to show you how utterly false all alleged progressive politicians are. Tesla is singlehandedly solving climate change with sustainable energy but because it’s workers vote not to unionize, they must be stopped.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Killers killing each other on the street are possibly not a "net loss", but that doesn't mean that specific thing doesn't cause harm, or cause trends causing greater harm.

akomtu 5y ago

AI has become the new snake oil.

davidjytang 5y ago

My college friend was fatally wounded in a Tesla. From time to time I go on Tesla's forum and was always surprised to see discussions there heavily leaned toward "Pilot Error" on any Tesla self-driving related accident. Like in what zones or some specific type of roads you should not enable FSD, if driver failed to remember then it's pilot error. I'm always confused about the *F* in FSD.