22 ms·

Tesla FSD Beta almost causes a head-on collision [video]

179 points by ra7 4y ago

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Relevant footage at 8:00 in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEWi2nC-Wg&t=480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEWi2nC-Wg&t=480s See this screenshot, where for a split second the self-driving visualization shows with a blue line, the car deciding to drive straight across incoming traffic lanes, and apparently failing to see the incoming vehicle: https://hypertele.fi/temp/tesla.png https://hypertele.fi/temp/tesla.png
- netsharc 4y ago
  A split second after that, the road markings briefly disappeared on the in-car display. Seems like the oncoming headlights blinded the cameras.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    I'm curious at how much persistence the detected road markings have. Surely the car doesn't assume the previously observed and mapped road markings just fuckin' disappear the instant there is a camera or data ingestion error? The jitter evident in the road markings throughout the video doesn't massively inspire confidence.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      It's been a common issue in these systems that they seem to lack object permanence
      - code_runner 4y ago
        I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street.
        brigade 4y ago
        In addition to LiDAR, Tesla also bucks self-driving wisdom by refusing to use mapping data. Everyone else’s L3/L4 plans include a reference mapping of what they expect to see, with the car signaling a disengagement if it deviates too far from the reference.
        tablespoon 4y ago
        >> I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street. > I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street. I wonder if they could do something like a "Kalman filter" to address this. If you're driving forward on a road, the driving program shouldn't re-derive the scene from moment to moment, but it should update its existing picture with new data. If all the sudden its long-range sensors get jammed, it should be able use its last picture + dead reckoning for at least a little bit (though only for trying to stop in safe(r) position or avoiding entering a more dangerous area). It certainly shouldn't move into oncoming traffic, like this Tesla did. That's exactly what I would do as a human driver (say if all the sudden I'm in a white-out). I know where I am on the road and where the nearby cars were, so I have maybe 10 seconds to try to move off to the side and stop, even if I'm blinded.
        cameldrv 4y ago
        Yeah but they don't change within a few seconds. You constantly see the lane lines wiggling on these displays and that suggests to me that they have a problem with integrating information over time about objects.
      - travisporter 4y ago
        Tesla's Karpathy made it a point that they are now doing 4d training (time) and integrating all the camera data on last AI day. I don't own a tesla, but that talk got my hopes up stuff like this shouldn't happen
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        So they are finally working to add object permanence, to a feature they've been selling for like 6 years. It should have been there from day one.
        kaba0 4y ago
        How on earth did these shitty vehicles get on the road without it to begin with?
  - zaptrem 4y ago
    That happens whenever FSD beta is disengaged forcefully. It has nothing to do with what the car is actually perceiving.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    If your theory is correct, even a low grade laser jammer would be catastrophic out on the highways. Similar to what is used to jam military guidance tech, but not nearly as complex.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      I have personally witnessed low angle red sun give artifacts on a Velodyne Lidar. It was not repeatable another sunset, to make it worse.
  - nradov 4y ago
    In general current digital camera sensors still don't have as much dynamic range as the human eye, so when there's a bright light in one part of a scene they lose details in the shadows. It will probably be necessary to use multiple redundant cameras with varying apertures on the same axis and then overlay the images in software to simulate a wider dynamic range.
0x500x79 4y ago
I got curious. There is a tiny bit of rain in the video but according to tesla that should be supported: "Many factors can impact the performance of Autopilot, causing the system to be unable to function as intended. These include, but are not limited to: poor visibility (due to heavy rain, snow, fog, etc.)" But then it goes on to say: "right light (due to oncoming headlights, direct sunlight, etc.), mud, ice, snow, interference or obstruction by objects mounted onto the vehicle (such as a bike rack), obstruction caused by applying excessive paint or adhesive products (such as wraps, stickers, rubber coating, etc.) onto the vehicle; narrow, high curvature or winding roads, a damaged or misaligned bumper and extremely hot or cold temperatures." What? This is an amazing set of limitations that are normal occurrences on the roads I drive every day. These do not seem like edge cases. I hate the marketing from Tesla on this feature. When it is mentioned in press it makes it sound like the self-driving/autopilot is nearly done when in fact there is a ton of work that needs to be done here and a lot of people question whether their current approach can even work. I am by no means a self-driving expert, but this terrifies me. From the results in the video it is dangerous to have this on the road. I do not want my family anywhere near a car that is operating in autopilot mode.
- scohesc 4y ago
  It's the thing that nobody really talks about and conveniently ignores because if you do it means Tesla (and other AV companies) will go out of business. From my experience - if you don't have well maintained roads you're going to have problems with FSD. Raining? Water running over the camera/sensors will warp the image. Snowing? Can't see the road lines. Tesla can't even guarantee that their cars won't barrel directly into a fire truck that's stopped on a freeway trying to address an existing accident. In Canada, there's a federal mandate that forbids the use of oil-based roadmarkers - provinces instead use water-based roadpaint... you can literally see each year how that works out. Worn down/invisible road lines make it difficult for even experienced drivers to work out how many lanes a road has - good luck getting a computer to work out what lane it's in without any exterior help. Without some kind of guidance inside the road itself - RFID/Wireless tracking "beacons" of sorts to help keep the vehicles in their lanes - we're not going to see true FSD any time soon globally - probably just in nice climate countries/states like California, Texas, etc where the weather 99% of the time never changes from "clear and sunny". There's just too many variables for FSD to account for - especially with Tesla choosing to not use other tech like LiDAR, like others have mentioned. FSD isn't going to be around in any major capacity globally for at least another 15-20 years at least. Too many factors involved in making sure your multi-ton autonomous spontaneous death machine picks the right option when it sees the equivalent of the trolley problem with potentially only a few seconds to make the decisions.
axg11 4y ago
> "That was my first near-accident on beta" As a tech and machine learning maximalist I'm frustrated with how haphazardly Tesla is approaching self driving. This is not a technology that should be QA'd consumer-first. On top of that their approach of ditching LIDAR and other sensors is shooting themselves in the foot. Tesla is in danger of putting the entire AV industry back by ~5 years just through loss of reputation. Regulators and AV pessimists will jump on the opportunity to use Tesla as an example of why these vehicles should be completely banned from public roads. Cruise, Waymo, Zoox, et al. are testing and rolling out responsibly while Tesla is using their customer base as crash test dummies.
- belter 4y ago
  Will be fixed in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107 https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107 Edit: Adding \s \s \s
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Yeah we've never heard that before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI Musk has been claiming full self-driving to be just around the corner for 9 years straight. Every year. But I'm sure this time it's going to happen. It's bound to eventually right? (wrong)
    - 0x500x79 4y ago
      The trick is its "Fully Self-Driving" TM. Which doesn't mean what the rest of the industry means by that.
      - bcrosby95 4y ago
        Heh yeah, they'll just rename autopilot to "Fully Self-Driving", then act all confused when people think its fully self driving.
        4y ago
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I’ve stopped using FSD except on the highway when it uses the old model. Every single time I used FSD I experienced at least one moment of mortal terror as the car made an obviously wrong decision like lurching into oncoming traffic or off the road. I’m shocked frankly there aren’t more stories. The only thing I can imagine is people did like me and stopped using it.
- jread 4y ago
  +1 Bought a used X with FSD and learned the hard way to only use on freeways and highways in simple driving conditions or traffic. Even then I’m on constant alert for phantom braking. I can’t understand the $12,000 price justification.
- darknavi 4y ago
  FSD understands roads _so much better_ than the old stack. I like using without any "navigate" features, aka "drive in a straight line" mode when on surface streets.
- ink 4y ago
  This has been my experience as well.
- chronofar 4y ago
  Same. I've also stopped letting it make decisions about lane changes on highways, so it's basically just an advanced cruise control for me. Once the novelty wears off (both in the case of highway and more recently surface street beta), I ultimately want to use self-driving to remove cognitive load and provide a safer experience. The vehicle does a good job at keeping lanes at a relatively steady speed (note not great, phantom breaking is still a thing and it brakes/accelerates too fast still), but too often makes poor decisions which ends up increasing the amount of attention I have to pay, thus defeating the purpose. On some highways I frequent I can't even turn on auto-navigate at all, even w/ auto-lane change turned off, b/c for some bizarre reason it thinks it needs to get to the far left of a 16 lane highway to follow the route so it keeps bugging me even after I reject it (so again, just more of an annoyance). I pretty much only turn it on on surface streets when showing someone new in the car w/ me or driving on a long straight 2 lane backroad (which it does probably best of all). Personally I'm not as up in arms about Tesla being reckless as everyone else, I think they make it pretty clear you need to supervise the car thoroughly. But for me it's just not really even close to the level it would need to be to provide the convenience L4/L5 would.
nimbius 4y ago
tesla's 'self driving' features are something otherworldly to behold sometimes. ive seen a model X approach an intersection with a green light and a clear path of travel only to lock up the brakes and skid just a few feet short of the light. on a motorcycle ive merged in front of a tesla with plenty of headspace only to see it surge forward momentarily before applying every gram of brake-force to drag the car to a screeching halt. A few streets later this same tesla resumed travel next to me from the light, only to slowly and methodically merge into the shoulder and onto the grass before its driver took over.
lbriner 4y ago
I thought these cars had radar and/or lidar? The radar should "see" things 160 metres away so regardless of whether the Tesla thought these were cars, shouldn't it still have seen them as obstructions and avoided them? Is it possible overloading of the CPU that can't keep up with the volume of data being given to it by all of the various inputs?
- nebula8804 4y ago
  I might be wrong on this but I thought they removed Radar in recent models due to the parts shortage and just implemented it in software?
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  They ditched LIDAR a long time ago. They recently ditched radar. They're vision-only now.
  - knodi123 4y ago
    to a naive kid, this sounds like a great idea - humans are pretty much vision-only, so cars should be able to do the same! makes me feel like there are a lot of naive kids over there. I know they have some geniuses, I'm just saying how the decisions look from the outside.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Humans crash cars pretty regularly, but I bet if we had lidar/radar vision we could do a bit better too.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        “I didn’t see them coming!” —- 50% of humans after a crash
      - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        Humans crash cars because humans make stupid human mistakes. A computer doesn't "forget" to look before merging. A computer doesn't drive drunk, fall asleep, get road rage, or get distracted by a phone. A computer can see in all directions at once with enough sensors. I 100% believe that a vision-only self-driving system CAN work...but that radar/lidar providing extra signal would make it a lot easier to implement, especially at night when oncoming headlights can be blinding.
xnx 4y ago
Hopefully this upcoming documentary will help expose how reckless Elon/Tesla's approach has been to a wider audience. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/NYT-Presents/elon-musk-tesla-autopilot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/NYT-Presents/elon-musk-te... It's embarrassing to see articles that treat Waymo's Driver and Tesla's software as if they were anywhere in the same league.
staunch 4y ago
I understand why Tesla would let users beta test for them. It might even be ethical, taking a big picture view, but I don't understand what kind of person would use volunteer to be a beta tester. Is it about laziness, thrill seeking, ignorance, entertainment, or something else? It's little different from letting an 8 year old child take the wheel. Sure, it'd be fine most of the time but regularly, certainly, and randomly fail catastrophically. Just why?
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Why did people ride in the first cars? They were slow, prone to breakdowns, expensive to operate.
  - staunch 4y ago
    Not really. Even early on cars were quite fast and priced around the same as horses and a carriage, and without the hassle of dealing with horses. They did tend to break down a lot but were quite usable. Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      How often did horses breakdown? Do you see why someone from 1890 may think it is crazy to drive a car that frequently has a breakdown vs a horse? Similarly, 130 years from now people will ask "Why would you want to drive your self when there were self driving cars available? And someone else will have to explain that FSD required close supervision and needed interventions between 1 or 100 miles, depending on the driving situations."
      - nradov 4y ago
        Have you ever ridden a horse? They "breakdown" quite often. As soon as mass production of cars started, they were practically superior to horses in almost every way.
KaiserPro 4y ago
"FSD might be degraded due to weather" and it still allows it to be engaged? Surely as a life critical system, allowing it to carry on in a known degraded state isn't a great thing?
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  Company culture flows from the top - just as Musk is reckless (plenty of evidence for that around [1] [2]), so is Tesla. The only way it will stop is if regulators tell Tesla it must stop this beta from being used on public roads. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/court-says-musk-recklessly-tweeted-that-funding-secured-taking-tesla-private-2022-05-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/court-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
pengaru 4y ago
Criminally negligent trash I have zero interest sharing roads with.
whoisjuan 4y ago
I'm sure that Tesla will have to eventually bring back radar into the stack. The problem with a vision system only is that it relies on visual clues that can be easily blinded by the conditions of the road. For instance a sun glare, high beams from traffic, water on the windshield, or simply a small depression on the road terrain. These are the same things that can cause a traffic accident for a human with human eyes, so there's really no logical reason to assume that you can create a more performing and safer computer driver by emulating human vision only. Radar solves all these problems by enhancing the perception of the car and creating redundancy so the car can cross-check its assumptions about the road, the terrain, and the obstacles with two different and independent perception systems. I can't understand why they removed radar. You don't need to be an expert to understand why vision alone won't work.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > I can't understand why they removed radar. The cost per unit times 500k+ units/year is significant. Also, I think the radar they were using started getting deprecated by the manufacturer. Now, do I think they should have included RADAR -or- stopped selling FSD? Yes. I don't see how they can deliver FSD without RADAR.
  - stingrae 4y ago
    I was under the impression, that they removed it because they were having a hard time sourcing the components in the current chip shortage.
    - JoshCole 4y ago
      False impression and common. We don't need to guess here. There was an engineer talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Matching conference in 2021 in the Workshop on Autonomous Driving by Andrej Karpathy senior director of AI at Tesla. In the latter portions of the talk he dives deep into why they choose to go all in on video with compelling empirical results showing it to be far more accurate than vision + radar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414374 They do end up doing sensor fusion, but not when you would think. At training time they use radar still, because at training time you can do things to correct for radars errors, for example, you can use hindsight to reason about what happened. At inference time, the uncertainty of hallucinating radars is a real risk to safety. It says things aren't there when they are. It says things are there when they aren't. That makes it a lot harder for the car to plan out the next actions and promotes very dangerous action - like slamming on the brakes - which can surprise other drivers and cause accidents.
jffry 4y ago
Skip to the 8 minute mark to see the incident mentioned in the title
st-keller 4y ago
What troubles me everytime i watch a video linke this: Why isn’t there any indicator to which degree a car on FSD-Mode operates? I mean - if there are troubling conditions due to bad weather or missing road-marks - the system should be able to tell how well it can make decisions, right?
jonny_eh 4y ago
I realize this is an optional (and beta) feature but it gives me pause about buying a Tesla. If the company can be so careless releasing a feature like this, I worry about other safety related decisions there.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  It is worth repeating that other road users didn't opt into this beta, but are still put in harms way by it. For example if this incident had been head-on, the other driver wouldn't have taken any consolation in it being "only in beta" or "you opt into it" (they did not).
- hugs 4y ago
  That is exactly why I have no interest in buying a Tesla. The ethical way to test the feature is to build larger and more elaborate closed test tracks.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Which is exactly what Google did.[0][1] They built an entire fake city to test in: "Castle", California. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid... [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-castle-testing/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-ca...
martindbp 4y ago
Looks scary for sure. But the driver had the time to say "woa woa woa" before even starting to intervene, he knew the system was exhibiting erratic behavior. Had he acted appropriately this would never have been an issue. The system makes mistakes, plenty of mistakes. Absolutely nobody is claiming that it is safe yet. It's supposed to go with a human supervisor ready to intervene at all times. And so far it has worked, as there hasn't been a single confirmed accident aside a Youtuber driving into a bollard resulting in some paint damage (again, letting the system go longer than necessary in order to see what would happen), and this despite 60k+, approaching 100k drivers using it. It sure looks scary, but I expect HN to be smarter than that and actually look at the statistics.
- remus 4y ago
  > Looks scary for sure. But the driver had the time to say "woa woa woa" before even starting to intervene, he knew the system was exhibiting erratic behavior. Had he acted appropriately this would never have been an issue. From the video, there appears to be about 3-4 secs between it behaving fairly normally and it turning into oncoming traffic. To me that says the driver supervising the car has to be extremely attentive which is a pretty spicy place to be. I think for me the underlying point is that a system where the backup is "random human ready to take over at any point with <5secs notice" just doesn't seem very safe or ready for general consumption.
- Strilanc 4y ago
  > Absolutely nobody is claiming that it is safe yet. If you just go looking for a few minutes you can find all kinds of claims that Tesla's FSD system is safe or will be safe. It would be very easy to end up with the impression that it would never veer into oncoming traffic. For example: > "I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked," Musk told analysts. [1] I know that this is actually a statistical claim, not a claim that it will do uniformly better in all situations (like not veering into oncoming traffic). Regardless, you can find lots of "it's safer than people" and a lot of victim blaming when it's suddenly not safe. It was like ten years ago that Google's self driving effort concluded it wasn't safe to trust the driver to supervise the system. Saying it's safe if the driver catches mistakes is just shifting the blame. You can't say you have full self driving and say mistakes don't count if the driver's not paying attention! [1]: https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-full-self-driving-safer-than-a-human-elon-musk-claims/ https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-full-self-driving-safer-...
black_puppydog 4y ago
As someone who kinda-somewhat understands this tech (vision/ML person by training but not automotive) I find watching the self-driving progress to be cool tech, but really a solution in search of a problem. For me, the problem with cars is that we have too damn many of them. And making cars better is not gonna make there be fewer cars, at least not at scale. Yes, there might be some secondary effects from self-driving cars being available on-demand in a fleet, and then you don't need your own car anymore, so you're overall less likely to take a car except when you really need to. The same argument also applies pretty much the same way to Uber though, just with potentially with a slightly higher price tag because you have to pay the driver. And do we see decreased car ownership through market entry of Uber? In the end, cars are a problem for many reasons. Pollution (at usage time for IC, at production for EV), noise, accidents, the unspeakable hell-scape that is car-centric suburbia, loss of public space for humans, you name it. Having to actually drive them is not one of the problems besides safety. There should be fewer cars in total. Which would also largely cover the safety issues. So that's why the self-driving future for me is... kinda irrelevant really. Yes, the cars we will still have in the future might be cooler if they're self-driving, and I hope they are. But I don't get what all the fuss is about, really. This is not to offend anyone here of course; I get it. It is cool tech.
- martythemaniak 4y ago
  Well, the reason you have so many of them is because the cars are dumb and need to be linked to a specific "smart" operator. Thus everyone who needs go places also needs to have a car, a 1:1 mapping. If you move the smarts to the car, then you can change the ratio. But isn't this public transit? Yes and no. Public transit solves this ratio by at the cost of transfers and fixed lines and lack of comfort. Only autonomous EVs can have the rider to driver ratio of public transit, but the point to point and seating comfort of cars. Autonomous EVs can work with cities as they are, not as a minority would wish them to be.
  - potatoz2 4y ago
    The problem isn’t so much the total number of cars overall (although that’s a problem) but the number of cars _in use_ at any one time. It’s not really solvable to have individual cars once you reach a certain density, you simply don’t have room for everyone. Density has lots of advantages, so it emerges nonetheless, leaving you in a bind.
alaricus 4y ago
Has anyone impartial (not on Tesla's payroll) evaluated FSD?
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  It's a public beta that normal drivers can sign up for. So I'd say there's quite a lot of them out there
- darknavi 4y ago
  What do you mean evaluated? There are thousands of us using the FSD beta (including I assume the video from OP).
powerbroker 4y ago
Is there any chance that Elon Musk scrutinizes the 'active' v. 'non-active' users of FSD, just like he is doing with Twitter? In the interest of transparency, I think it would be very revealing, how many people have been shocked and dismayed by FSD performance to just entirely drop out of the beta FSD - but do so, via the entirely passive route of just not using it anymore.
- darknavi 4y ago
  I am in the beta and treat it just like normal AP. I tried it almost 100% of the time the first week while building a "relationship" with it. Now (months later) I only use it when I know it has high probability of success (known-good routes). I am sure there are a lot of people who stopped using it. I'd hope (but don't know for sure) that they could easily opt back out of the beta.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    .. and you paid 10 grand for that?
    - bdcravens 4y ago
      You can use if without having purchased it - it's available on a monthly subscription basis.
aaroninsf 4y ago
Incident of interest shortly after the 8 minute mark. Description: after right turn around 8 min, a few second of travel later it crosses left across lanes in preparation for a left turn. Instead of just changing lanes in preparation, then entering the well marked left turn lane, it prematurely crosses (double yellow) into what I think is dead-space between the alternating turn lanes (shared with oncoming traffic); there is no indication it's going to straighten.
Animats 4y ago
This was bad. Notice how little time the driver has to react. At 8:05, everything is going well. Straight road, no obstacles ahead. At 8:06, the car has veered into opposing traffic. So the driver had about 1 second to react to Tesla's mistakes. Now look at 2:51 .. 2:54, where the driver is distracted from the road for 3 seconds while operating the touchscreen interface. If the operator had been using the touchscreen in the same way at 8:06, there would have been a crash. This demonstrates a few things: * One fixed forward facing camera is not enough in rainy conditions at night. Humans will move their head a little in that situation to disambiguate raindrops and windshield dirt from distant lights. * The system seems to identify oncoming vehicles at night by recognizing two headlights. If reflections or rain on the windshield or additional lights confuse that pattern, the oncoming vehicle is not recognized. * Failure to recognize an obstacle seems to be treated as a no-obstacle condition.
- jakogut 4y ago
  > One forward facing camera is not enough in rainy conditions at night. Indeed, I wonder if that single camera is even binocular, or if they're using something like motion parallax to compute depth? The obvious problem with a single camera is that if it's degraded by dirt, debris, water, etc. you have no other input to fall back on. > The system seems to identify oncoming vehicles at night by recognizing two headlights. This seems untenable. I often see drivers with a headlight out, or even more commonly, driving at dusk or even night with their headlights completely off. Also, what about motorcycles?
  - disillusioned 4y ago
    There are three forward-facing cameras, each with a different depth of field, which I would _hope_ it can use as binocular vision, but this still doesn't solve for this exact problem when looking sideways! The single B-pillar-mounted cam, in my mind, cannot POSSIBLY be capable of, say, looking around a bush at an intersection of a side street connecting to a large, fast arterial road. Again, humans move their heads around the bush, they'll creep forward and then _lean_ forward to get a view around it, without having to extend the nose of the vehicle into the perpendicular traffic. The car simply does not have the sensors to be able to replicate this functionality. It has a single camera in the B-pillar for perpendicular vision. That's it. In a position fixed BEHIND THE DRIVER'S HEAD. I cannot fathom how that will ever work for these cases.
oh_sigh 4y ago
I don't know what's scarier - Tesla FSD, or people with the reaction time like the driver in the video...even after the car is clearly angled into oncoming traffic completely inappropriately, he doesn't immediately take control of the vehicle.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  I am sure he will get his FSD privileges suspended.
  - alanh 4y ago
    based on what? negative-value comment.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      I meant it as a joke (hopefully), but a technical reply to your question would be "violating the non-disclosure agreement": https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-nda-video-clips-controversy-full-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-n...
hatware 4y ago
A few years ago, I went to Las Vegas for the first time and had a chance to ride in a self driving BMW 5 series. There was an engineer in the passenger seat, and a full time driver to take over. I forget the company, but it wasn't Tesla/Waymo/Uber. It was a pretty short ride, near the end an Escalade cut us off pretty egregiously, and the car dove out of the way while braking. I was still so glad we had a backup driver and engineer. I remember thinking how hard those situations will be for a computer to detect, predict, and act better than a human could. It's going to be a bumpy road getting to transportation utopia.
- dorkwood 4y ago
  Sounds like Motional.
blenderdt 4y ago
I don't understand why the display in Teslas are always so jumpy/glitchy. For example the road. Sometimes parts of the road turn on and off. Or cars and pedestrians jumping all over the place. Doesn't Tesla do some kind of estimation where objects will be next?
yumraj 4y ago
Does anyone know if auto insurance companies charge a premium if you've a Tesla with FSD, since effectively it's an additional, and rather immature, driver?
- bdcravens 4y ago
  FSD is a feature you can subscribe to by the month, which would be hard to adjust for, so they're likely to lump all Tesla into the same actuarial category.
verelo 4y ago
I keep saying this, but i feel so ripped off with FSD. Why? 1. If i sell, it does not transfer to the new owner. Edit: people disputed this - but i think this only happens if you also hand over the account. Either way, given this write up, it seems rather complex and imo, it shouldn't be if Tesla is trying to be genuinely honestly (https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/does-full-self-driving-fsd-transfer-when-you-sell-a-tesla/ https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/does-full-self-driving-f...) 2. If i sell, I cannot keep it for my next car 3. The subscription option came out a month after we bought our car. Its about 10 years of FSD subscription payments 4. Saving the best for last - it doesn't work / exist If i could get a refund I would. I cannot wait for the class action against Tesla for this, i'll be the first to signup.
- SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
  Purchased FSD does transfer to a new owner, unless you sell to Tesla. If that class action happens, the most you can hope for is a settlement that allows you to either transfer it to your next car or get a comically tiny payout.
  - verelo 4y ago
    Re the transfer, i thought it did go away unless you also hand over the account to the car. If i could transfer it for life, i'd gladly take that...i mean, i just dont want my money to disappear. I don't really want some small payout, i essentially either want to keep the right to get it (hopefully, one day) or get refunded.
    - SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
      You might be thinking of unlimited supercharging - that was initially tied to the car, then they started removing it if the car was moved to another account.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    I'm not sure why you assume a class action would result in a comically tiny payout. The VW emissions cheating scandal had a class action payout of $5,000 - $10,000 per person plus VW buying back their car at pre-scandal values. I can easily imagine a Tesla FSD class-action being a token amount plus their FSD fee back. I mean, yes, it would be an interest free loan to TSLA, but your money back is a real thing.
Y-bar 4y ago
Why at 7 min 14 sec does the car accelerates to 50 when there is a posted speed limit for 40? https://youtu.be/zDEWi2nC-Wg?t=435 https://youtu.be/zDEWi2nC-Wg?t=435
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  The video's author addresses this in a comment: > My offset is set at +10 so it goes 10 (km/h) over the posted speed limit Which is an... interesting feature. On the one hand, human drivers frequently exceed posted speed limits. But allowing self-driving tech to ignore speed limits feels wrong somehow. Though it's better than your car snitching on you if you speed. Edit: From an implementation perpective, this should really be a percentage. 10 km/h is only 10% over the speed limit at highway speeds (typically 100 km/h in Canada), but quite dangerous in a school zone (30 km/h) or on a 40 km/h residential street.
bmitc 4y ago
I've seen enough fails from Tesla's Autopilot and FSD Beta (typing those names out feels so laughable given how far away they are to describing the things they're meant to, other than Beta) that I actively avoid any Tesla I see on the road. I never know if the car is being driven by someone or one of these tools are engaged. I almost feel there should be regulation that communicates to other drivers that a human is not controlling the vehicle. It really bothers me that we have been opt-in without choice into Tesla's marketing and hype bubble and live on the streets research and development. These are people's lives. The road isn't a place to move fast and break things. If one gets hit by a Tesla car under one of these "automated" systems, what prevents a person from holding Tesla responsible?
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  >I almost feel there should be regulation that communicates to other drivers that a human is not controlling the vehicle That's an awesome idea which would really expose how trustworthy it actually is/isn't. Learner drivers are required to show "L" plates here in Australia and have to have a fully licensed driver ready to help, a Tesla is no different so should require the same conditions.
AlexandrB 4y ago
I'd love to see Musk put his money where his mouth is and have Tesla accept liability for accidents that occur with FSD active, similar to what Mercedes is doing[1]. Mercedes's system has many limitations (see article), but it's better than Tesla's approach of constantly over-promising. Maybe having some money on the line would force Tesla marketing to narrow down the use cases where they're actually confident in FSD vs. ones where it should not be used. [1] https://www.motor1.com/news/575167/mercedes-accepts-liability-autonomous-crash/ https://www.motor1.com/news/575167/mercedes-accepts-liabilit...
jlbooker 4y ago
It's very clearly Beta. No one claimed it's perfect/done/finished. Why is everyone so shocked that beta software has bugs? We can certainly debate whether it's ethical to put beta software out on the public roads. Perhaps the Minimum Viable Product method isn't the best approach for transportation hardware. But... surely we can all expect that beta software has bugs. So yes -- I expect it to be driving like a drunk 10yr old. Ideally that'll slowly improve as the software matures. That it made a mistake and has a bug isn't really news though.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  >I expect it to be driving like a drunk 10yr old. Then it shouldn't be on public roads. Tesla could spend 3 billion dollars and build huge road complexes to test their stuff instead of putting the rest of us at risk.
turtledove 4y ago
I'm shocked that Tesla has the fanbase it has. The slipshod nature of their manufacturing and their self driving is putting humans at risk - and not just the drivers. I own a Tesla, and it's been a moderately ok ownership experience, but I've been dealing with issues with the car since day one, and I'd never consider buying another one other manufacturers get their electric vehicles dialed in. Tesla is rapidly becoming synonymous with low quality in my mind, which is the opposite of what I think they want their brand to be.
osynavets 4y ago
Genuinely don't understand why they ditched LIDAR sensor from their solution. LIDAR + image recognition looks like a win choice for this problem.
disillusioned 4y ago
Here's a video I shot when we test drove my friend's FSD beta back in November of 2021 when it was on 10.4: https://youtu.be/qKvhvwmynZc https://youtu.be/qKvhvwmynZc It's downright terrifying. At one point, it swerved us into a suicide lane WHERE ANOTHER TRUCK WAS STOPPED AND FACING US, and he had to take over to avoid it just, well, killing us. In clear, broad daylight with no weather. My biggest critique that seems completely unsolvable is what I (the passenger) mention at the beginning of this video and throughout: the B-pillar and STATIC positioning of the ONLY side-facing camera makes things VERY difficult on the car as it attempts to turn out from a small feeder road onto a large, fast, multi-lane arterial road. There are limitless occlusions that get in the way, that humans compensate for by moving their head, binocular vision, and gently easing the car forward a bit to see around something, but not so much that you put your nose out into traffic. (Though, also definitely that, people do that all the time.) The car cannot do anything but ease itself forward. It can't "look around" a telephone or utility box or a bush that hasn't been trimmed down in a bit. It frankly can't even do the human mental gymnastics of being able to see motion THROUGH the branches of a fairly dense bush and interpreting that as a likely vehicle. The number of times we encounter these situations and compensate for them on a daily basis is astounding. The Tesla is simply not equipped with the sensors needed to address this, in any stretch of the imagination. Fixed frame. Fixed focal length. Fixed location. No pan or tilt. No way to see "around" something. A single side-facing camera located BEHIND the driver's head. Tell me how a Tesla ever manages to turn out on to a road, from a neighborhood 25 mph road to a "nominally-45-mph-but-really-65-mph" road like the one outside my house, when I have to crane my neck around the bush that blocks us, and I know I need to start looking well ahead of the bush to understand the traffic dynamics as I approach?
- t0mas88 4y ago
  It's crazy that they didn't put at least an extra camera in the place where for example BMW has their "side view camera" option for pulling out of parking spaces. That's right at the sides of the nose. Would have cost them less than $ 100 per car, while FSD costs thousands...
rasz 4y ago
One glance at the screen and you immediately notice whatever they use (ML, shitty hardcoded algorithm, some hybrid in between) has zero persistence, no object permanence. Objects vanish and reappear randomly, float in space. Would you trust a driver with 0.016 second short term memory? At 8:05 right before he grabs the wheel you can see projected trajectory (blue line) jump for one video frame from right side of yellow lines to the oncoming lane and then jump back. Its like being driven by a hamster on crack.

179 points by ra7 4y ago

Relevant footage at 8:00 in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEWi2nC-Wg&t=480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEWi2nC-Wg&t=480s See this screenshot, where for a split second the self-driving visualization shows with a blue line, the car deciding to drive straight across incoming traffic lanes, and apparently failing to see the incoming vehicle: https://hypertele.fi/temp/tesla.png https://hypertele.fi/temp/tesla.png

netsharc 4y ago
A split second after that, the road markings briefly disappeared on the in-car display. Seems like the oncoming headlights blinded the cameras.
- Arrath 4y ago
  I'm curious at how much persistence the detected road markings have. Surely the car doesn't assume the previously observed and mapped road markings just fuckin' disappear the instant there is a camera or data ingestion error? The jitter evident in the road markings throughout the video doesn't massively inspire confidence.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    It's been a common issue in these systems that they seem to lack object permanence
    - code_runner 4y ago
      I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street.
      - brigade 4y ago
        In addition to LiDAR, Tesla also bucks self-driving wisdom by refusing to use mapping data. Everyone else’s L3/L4 plans include a reference mapping of what they expect to see, with the car signaling a disengagement if it deviates too far from the reference.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        >> I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street. > I imagine this is actually a pretty tough problem to solve.... road marking change dramatically within a few feet sometimes.... most of the residential streets in the historic area I live in have no markings at all but its also an area where markings, composition of road materials etc are subject to change QUICKLY from street to street. I wonder if they could do something like a "Kalman filter" to address this. If you're driving forward on a road, the driving program shouldn't re-derive the scene from moment to moment, but it should update its existing picture with new data. If all the sudden its long-range sensors get jammed, it should be able use its last picture + dead reckoning for at least a little bit (though only for trying to stop in safe(r) position or avoiding entering a more dangerous area). It certainly shouldn't move into oncoming traffic, like this Tesla did. That's exactly what I would do as a human driver (say if all the sudden I'm in a white-out). I know where I am on the road and where the nearby cars were, so I have maybe 10 seconds to try to move off to the side and stop, even if I'm blinded.
      - cameldrv 4y ago
        Yeah but they don't change within a few seconds. You constantly see the lane lines wiggling on these displays and that suggests to me that they have a problem with integrating information over time about objects.
    - travisporter 4y ago
      Tesla's Karpathy made it a point that they are now doing 4d training (time) and integrating all the camera data on last AI day. I don't own a tesla, but that talk got my hopes up stuff like this shouldn't happen
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        So they are finally working to add object permanence, to a feature they've been selling for like 6 years. It should have been there from day one.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        How on earth did these shitty vehicles get on the road without it to begin with?
- zaptrem 4y ago
  That happens whenever FSD beta is disengaged forcefully. It has nothing to do with what the car is actually perceiving.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  If your theory is correct, even a low grade laser jammer would be catastrophic out on the highways. Similar to what is used to jam military guidance tech, but not nearly as complex.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    I have personally witnessed low angle red sun give artifacts on a Velodyne Lidar. It was not repeatable another sunset, to make it worse.
- nradov 4y ago
  In general current digital camera sensors still don't have as much dynamic range as the human eye, so when there's a bright light in one part of a scene they lose details in the shadows. It will probably be necessary to use multiple redundant cameras with varying apertures on the same axis and then overlay the images in software to simulate a wider dynamic range.

0x500x79 4y ago

I got curious. There is a tiny bit of rain in the video but according to tesla that should be supported: "Many factors can impact the performance of Autopilot, causing the system to be unable to function as intended. These include, but are not limited to: poor visibility (due to heavy rain, snow, fog, etc.)" But then it goes on to say: "right light (due to oncoming headlights, direct sunlight, etc.), mud, ice, snow, interference or obstruction by objects mounted onto the vehicle (such as a bike rack), obstruction caused by applying excessive paint or adhesive products (such as wraps, stickers, rubber coating, etc.) onto the vehicle; narrow, high curvature or winding roads, a damaged or misaligned bumper and extremely hot or cold temperatures." What? This is an amazing set of limitations that are normal occurrences on the roads I drive every day. These do not seem like edge cases. I hate the marketing from Tesla on this feature. When it is mentioned in press it makes it sound like the self-driving/autopilot is nearly done when in fact there is a ton of work that needs to be done here and a lot of people question whether their current approach can even work. I am by no means a self-driving expert, but this terrifies me. From the results in the video it is dangerous to have this on the road. I do not want my family anywhere near a car that is operating in autopilot mode.

scohesc 4y ago
It's the thing that nobody really talks about and conveniently ignores because if you do it means Tesla (and other AV companies) will go out of business. From my experience - if you don't have well maintained roads you're going to have problems with FSD. Raining? Water running over the camera/sensors will warp the image. Snowing? Can't see the road lines. Tesla can't even guarantee that their cars won't barrel directly into a fire truck that's stopped on a freeway trying to address an existing accident. In Canada, there's a federal mandate that forbids the use of oil-based roadmarkers - provinces instead use water-based roadpaint... you can literally see each year how that works out. Worn down/invisible road lines make it difficult for even experienced drivers to work out how many lanes a road has - good luck getting a computer to work out what lane it's in without any exterior help. Without some kind of guidance inside the road itself - RFID/Wireless tracking "beacons" of sorts to help keep the vehicles in their lanes - we're not going to see true FSD any time soon globally - probably just in nice climate countries/states like California, Texas, etc where the weather 99% of the time never changes from "clear and sunny". There's just too many variables for FSD to account for - especially with Tesla choosing to not use other tech like LiDAR, like others have mentioned. FSD isn't going to be around in any major capacity globally for at least another 15-20 years at least. Too many factors involved in making sure your multi-ton autonomous spontaneous death machine picks the right option when it sees the equivalent of the trolley problem with potentially only a few seconds to make the decisions.

axg11 4y ago

> "That was my first near-accident on beta" As a tech and machine learning maximalist I'm frustrated with how haphazardly Tesla is approaching self driving. This is not a technology that should be QA'd consumer-first. On top of that their approach of ditching LIDAR and other sensors is shooting themselves in the foot. Tesla is in danger of putting the entire AV industry back by ~5 years just through loss of reputation. Regulators and AV pessimists will jump on the opportunity to use Tesla as an example of why these vehicles should be completely banned from public roads. Cruise, Waymo, Zoox, et al. are testing and rolling out responsibly while Tesla is using their customer base as crash test dummies.

belter 4y ago
Will be fixed in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107 https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107 Edit: Adding \s \s \s
- masklinn 4y ago
  Yeah we've never heard that before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI Musk has been claiming full self-driving to be just around the corner for 9 years straight. Every year. But I'm sure this time it's going to happen. It's bound to eventually right? (wrong)
  - 0x500x79 4y ago
    The trick is its "Fully Self-Driving" TM. Which doesn't mean what the rest of the industry means by that.
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      Heh yeah, they'll just rename autopilot to "Fully Self-Driving", then act all confused when people think its fully self driving.
      - 4y ago

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I’ve stopped using FSD except on the highway when it uses the old model. Every single time I used FSD I experienced at least one moment of mortal terror as the car made an obviously wrong decision like lurching into oncoming traffic or off the road. I’m shocked frankly there aren’t more stories. The only thing I can imagine is people did like me and stopped using it.

jread 4y ago
+1 Bought a used X with FSD and learned the hard way to only use on freeways and highways in simple driving conditions or traffic. Even then I’m on constant alert for phantom braking. I can’t understand the $12,000 price justification.
darknavi 4y ago
FSD understands roads _so much better_ than the old stack. I like using without any "navigate" features, aka "drive in a straight line" mode when on surface streets.
ink 4y ago
This has been my experience as well.
chronofar 4y ago
Same. I've also stopped letting it make decisions about lane changes on highways, so it's basically just an advanced cruise control for me. Once the novelty wears off (both in the case of highway and more recently surface street beta), I ultimately want to use self-driving to remove cognitive load and provide a safer experience. The vehicle does a good job at keeping lanes at a relatively steady speed (note not great, phantom breaking is still a thing and it brakes/accelerates too fast still), but too often makes poor decisions which ends up increasing the amount of attention I have to pay, thus defeating the purpose. On some highways I frequent I can't even turn on auto-navigate at all, even w/ auto-lane change turned off, b/c for some bizarre reason it thinks it needs to get to the far left of a 16 lane highway to follow the route so it keeps bugging me even after I reject it (so again, just more of an annoyance). I pretty much only turn it on on surface streets when showing someone new in the car w/ me or driving on a long straight 2 lane backroad (which it does probably best of all). Personally I'm not as up in arms about Tesla being reckless as everyone else, I think they make it pretty clear you need to supervise the car thoroughly. But for me it's just not really even close to the level it would need to be to provide the convenience L4/L5 would.

nimbius 4y ago

tesla's 'self driving' features are something otherworldly to behold sometimes. ive seen a model X approach an intersection with a green light and a clear path of travel only to lock up the brakes and skid just a few feet short of the light. on a motorcycle ive merged in front of a tesla with plenty of headspace only to see it surge forward momentarily before applying every gram of brake-force to drag the car to a screeching halt. A few streets later this same tesla resumed travel next to me from the light, only to slowly and methodically merge into the shoulder and onto the grass before its driver took over.

lbriner 4y ago

I thought these cars had radar and/or lidar? The radar should "see" things 160 metres away so regardless of whether the Tesla thought these were cars, shouldn't it still have seen them as obstructions and avoided them? Is it possible overloading of the CPU that can't keep up with the volume of data being given to it by all of the various inputs?

nebula8804 4y ago
I might be wrong on this but I thought they removed Radar in recent models due to the parts shortage and just implemented it in software?
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
They ditched LIDAR a long time ago. They recently ditched radar. They're vision-only now.
- knodi123 4y ago
  to a naive kid, this sounds like a great idea - humans are pretty much vision-only, so cars should be able to do the same! makes me feel like there are a lot of naive kids over there. I know they have some geniuses, I'm just saying how the decisions look from the outside.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Humans crash cars pretty regularly, but I bet if we had lidar/radar vision we could do a bit better too.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      “I didn’t see them coming!” —- 50% of humans after a crash
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      Humans crash cars because humans make stupid human mistakes. A computer doesn't "forget" to look before merging. A computer doesn't drive drunk, fall asleep, get road rage, or get distracted by a phone. A computer can see in all directions at once with enough sensors. I 100% believe that a vision-only self-driving system CAN work...but that radar/lidar providing extra signal would make it a lot easier to implement, especially at night when oncoming headlights can be blinding.

xnx 4y ago

Hopefully this upcoming documentary will help expose how reckless Elon/Tesla's approach has been to a wider audience. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/NYT-Presents/elon-musk-tesla-autopilot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/NYT-Presents/elon-musk-te... It's embarrassing to see articles that treat Waymo's Driver and Tesla's software as if they were anywhere in the same league.

staunch 4y ago

I understand why Tesla would let users beta test for them. It might even be ethical, taking a big picture view, but I don't understand what kind of person would use volunteer to be a beta tester. Is it about laziness, thrill seeking, ignorance, entertainment, or something else? It's little different from letting an 8 year old child take the wheel. Sure, it'd be fine most of the time but regularly, certainly, and randomly fail catastrophically. Just why?

gitfan86 4y ago
Why did people ride in the first cars? They were slow, prone to breakdowns, expensive to operate.
- staunch 4y ago
  Not really. Even early on cars were quite fast and priced around the same as horses and a carriage, and without the hassle of dealing with horses. They did tend to break down a lot but were quite usable. Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    How often did horses breakdown? Do you see why someone from 1890 may think it is crazy to drive a car that frequently has a breakdown vs a horse? Similarly, 130 years from now people will ask "Why would you want to drive your self when there were self driving cars available? And someone else will have to explain that FSD required close supervision and needed interventions between 1 or 100 miles, depending on the driving situations."
    - nradov 4y ago
      Have you ever ridden a horse? They "breakdown" quite often. As soon as mass production of cars started, they were practically superior to horses in almost every way.

KaiserPro 4y ago

"FSD might be degraded due to weather" and it still allows it to be engaged? Surely as a life critical system, allowing it to carry on in a known degraded state isn't a great thing?

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
Company culture flows from the top - just as Musk is reckless (plenty of evidence for that around [1] [2]), so is Tesla. The only way it will stop is if regulators tell Tesla it must stop this beta from being used on public roads. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/court-says-musk-recklessly-tweeted-that-funding-secured-taking-tesla-private-2022-05-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/court-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...

pengaru 4y ago

Criminally negligent trash I have zero interest sharing roads with.

whoisjuan 4y ago

I'm sure that Tesla will have to eventually bring back radar into the stack. The problem with a vision system only is that it relies on visual clues that can be easily blinded by the conditions of the road. For instance a sun glare, high beams from traffic, water on the windshield, or simply a small depression on the road terrain. These are the same things that can cause a traffic accident for a human with human eyes, so there's really no logical reason to assume that you can create a more performing and safer computer driver by emulating human vision only. Radar solves all these problems by enhancing the perception of the car and creating redundancy so the car can cross-check its assumptions about the road, the terrain, and the obstacles with two different and independent perception systems. I can't understand why they removed radar. You don't need to be an expert to understand why vision alone won't work.

HWR_14 4y ago
> I can't understand why they removed radar. The cost per unit times 500k+ units/year is significant. Also, I think the radar they were using started getting deprecated by the manufacturer. Now, do I think they should have included RADAR -or- stopped selling FSD? Yes. I don't see how they can deliver FSD without RADAR.
- stingrae 4y ago
  I was under the impression, that they removed it because they were having a hard time sourcing the components in the current chip shortage.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    False impression and common. We don't need to guess here. There was an engineer talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Matching conference in 2021 in the Workshop on Autonomous Driving by Andrej Karpathy senior director of AI at Tesla. In the latter portions of the talk he dives deep into why they choose to go all in on video with compelling empirical results showing it to be far more accurate than vision + radar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414374 They do end up doing sensor fusion, but not when you would think. At training time they use radar still, because at training time you can do things to correct for radars errors, for example, you can use hindsight to reason about what happened. At inference time, the uncertainty of hallucinating radars is a real risk to safety. It says things aren't there when they are. It says things are there when they aren't. That makes it a lot harder for the car to plan out the next actions and promotes very dangerous action - like slamming on the brakes - which can surprise other drivers and cause accidents.

jffry 4y ago

Skip to the 8 minute mark to see the incident mentioned in the title

st-keller 4y ago

What troubles me everytime i watch a video linke this: Why isn’t there any indicator to which degree a car on FSD-Mode operates? I mean - if there are troubling conditions due to bad weather or missing road-marks - the system should be able to tell how well it can make decisions, right?

jonny_eh 4y ago

I realize this is an optional (and beta) feature but it gives me pause about buying a Tesla. If the company can be so careless releasing a feature like this, I worry about other safety related decisions there.

Someone1234 4y ago
It is worth repeating that other road users didn't opt into this beta, but are still put in harms way by it. For example if this incident had been head-on, the other driver wouldn't have taken any consolation in it being "only in beta" or "you opt into it" (they did not).
hugs 4y ago
That is exactly why I have no interest in buying a Tesla. The ethical way to test the feature is to build larger and more elaborate closed test tracks.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Which is exactly what Google did.[0][1] They built an entire fake city to test in: "Castle", California. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid... [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-castle-testing/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-ca...

martindbp 4y ago

Looks scary for sure. But the driver had the time to say "woa woa woa" before even starting to intervene, he knew the system was exhibiting erratic behavior. Had he acted appropriately this would never have been an issue. The system makes mistakes, plenty of mistakes. Absolutely nobody is claiming that it is safe yet. It's supposed to go with a human supervisor ready to intervene at all times. And so far it has worked, as there hasn't been a single confirmed accident aside a Youtuber driving into a bollard resulting in some paint damage (again, letting the system go longer than necessary in order to see what would happen), and this despite 60k+, approaching 100k drivers using it. It sure looks scary, but I expect HN to be smarter than that and actually look at the statistics.

remus 4y ago
> Looks scary for sure. But the driver had the time to say "woa woa woa" before even starting to intervene, he knew the system was exhibiting erratic behavior. Had he acted appropriately this would never have been an issue. From the video, there appears to be about 3-4 secs between it behaving fairly normally and it turning into oncoming traffic. To me that says the driver supervising the car has to be extremely attentive which is a pretty spicy place to be. I think for me the underlying point is that a system where the backup is "random human ready to take over at any point with <5secs notice" just doesn't seem very safe or ready for general consumption.
Strilanc 4y ago
> Absolutely nobody is claiming that it is safe yet. If you just go looking for a few minutes you can find all kinds of claims that Tesla's FSD system is safe or will be safe. It would be very easy to end up with the impression that it would never veer into oncoming traffic. For example: > "I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked," Musk told analysts. [1] I know that this is actually a statistical claim, not a claim that it will do uniformly better in all situations (like not veering into oncoming traffic). Regardless, you can find lots of "it's safer than people" and a lot of victim blaming when it's suddenly not safe. It was like ten years ago that Google's self driving effort concluded it wasn't safe to trust the driver to supervise the system. Saying it's safe if the driver catches mistakes is just shifting the blame. You can't say you have full self driving and say mistakes don't count if the driver's not paying attention! [1]: https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-full-self-driving-safer-than-a-human-elon-musk-claims/ https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-full-self-driving-safer-...

black_puppydog 4y ago

As someone who kinda-somewhat understands this tech (vision/ML person by training but not automotive) I find watching the self-driving progress to be cool tech, but really a solution in search of a problem. For me, the problem with cars is that we have too damn many of them. And making cars better is not gonna make there be fewer cars, at least not at scale. Yes, there might be some secondary effects from self-driving cars being available on-demand in a fleet, and then you don't need your own car anymore, so you're overall less likely to take a car except when you really need to. The same argument also applies pretty much the same way to Uber though, just with potentially with a slightly higher price tag because you have to pay the driver. And do we see decreased car ownership through market entry of Uber? In the end, cars are a problem for many reasons. Pollution (at usage time for IC, at production for EV), noise, accidents, the unspeakable hell-scape that is car-centric suburbia, loss of public space for humans, you name it. Having to actually drive them is not one of the problems besides safety. There should be fewer cars in total. Which would also largely cover the safety issues. So that's why the self-driving future for me is... kinda irrelevant really. Yes, the cars we will still have in the future might be cooler if they're self-driving, and I hope they are. But I don't get what all the fuss is about, really. This is not to offend anyone here of course; I get it. It is cool tech.

martythemaniak 4y ago
Well, the reason you have so many of them is because the cars are dumb and need to be linked to a specific "smart" operator. Thus everyone who needs go places also needs to have a car, a 1:1 mapping. If you move the smarts to the car, then you can change the ratio. But isn't this public transit? Yes and no. Public transit solves this ratio by at the cost of transfers and fixed lines and lack of comfort. Only autonomous EVs can have the rider to driver ratio of public transit, but the point to point and seating comfort of cars. Autonomous EVs can work with cities as they are, not as a minority would wish them to be.
- potatoz2 4y ago
  The problem isn’t so much the total number of cars overall (although that’s a problem) but the number of cars _in use_ at any one time. It’s not really solvable to have individual cars once you reach a certain density, you simply don’t have room for everyone. Density has lots of advantages, so it emerges nonetheless, leaving you in a bind.

alaricus 4y ago

Has anyone impartial (not on Tesla's payroll) evaluated FSD?

colejohnson66 4y ago
It's a public beta that normal drivers can sign up for. So I'd say there's quite a lot of them out there
darknavi 4y ago
What do you mean evaluated? There are thousands of us using the FSD beta (including I assume the video from OP).

powerbroker 4y ago

Is there any chance that Elon Musk scrutinizes the 'active' v. 'non-active' users of FSD, just like he is doing with Twitter? In the interest of transparency, I think it would be very revealing, how many people have been shocked and dismayed by FSD performance to just entirely drop out of the beta FSD - but do so, via the entirely passive route of just not using it anymore.

darknavi 4y ago
I am in the beta and treat it just like normal AP. I tried it almost 100% of the time the first week while building a "relationship" with it. Now (months later) I only use it when I know it has high probability of success (known-good routes). I am sure there are a lot of people who stopped using it. I'd hope (but don't know for sure) that they could easily opt back out of the beta.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  .. and you paid 10 grand for that?
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    You can use if without having purchased it - it's available on a monthly subscription basis.

aaroninsf 4y ago

Incident of interest shortly after the 8 minute mark. Description: after right turn around 8 min, a few second of travel later it crosses left across lanes in preparation for a left turn. Instead of just changing lanes in preparation, then entering the well marked left turn lane, it prematurely crosses (double yellow) into what I think is dead-space between the alternating turn lanes (shared with oncoming traffic); there is no indication it's going to straighten.

Animats 4y ago

This was bad. Notice how little time the driver has to react. At 8:05, everything is going well. Straight road, no obstacles ahead. At 8:06, the car has veered into opposing traffic. So the driver had about 1 second to react to Tesla's mistakes. Now look at 2:51 .. 2:54, where the driver is distracted from the road for 3 seconds while operating the touchscreen interface. If the operator had been using the touchscreen in the same way at 8:06, there would have been a crash. This demonstrates a few things: * One fixed forward facing camera is not enough in rainy conditions at night. Humans will move their head a little in that situation to disambiguate raindrops and windshield dirt from distant lights. * The system seems to identify oncoming vehicles at night by recognizing two headlights. If reflections or rain on the windshield or additional lights confuse that pattern, the oncoming vehicle is not recognized. * Failure to recognize an obstacle seems to be treated as a no-obstacle condition.

jakogut 4y ago
> One forward facing camera is not enough in rainy conditions at night. Indeed, I wonder if that single camera is even binocular, or if they're using something like motion parallax to compute depth? The obvious problem with a single camera is that if it's degraded by dirt, debris, water, etc. you have no other input to fall back on. > The system seems to identify oncoming vehicles at night by recognizing two headlights. This seems untenable. I often see drivers with a headlight out, or even more commonly, driving at dusk or even night with their headlights completely off. Also, what about motorcycles?
- disillusioned 4y ago
  There are three forward-facing cameras, each with a different depth of field, which I would _hope_ it can use as binocular vision, but this still doesn't solve for this exact problem when looking sideways! The single B-pillar-mounted cam, in my mind, cannot POSSIBLY be capable of, say, looking around a bush at an intersection of a side street connecting to a large, fast arterial road. Again, humans move their heads around the bush, they'll creep forward and then _lean_ forward to get a view around it, without having to extend the nose of the vehicle into the perpendicular traffic. The car simply does not have the sensors to be able to replicate this functionality. It has a single camera in the B-pillar for perpendicular vision. That's it. In a position fixed BEHIND THE DRIVER'S HEAD. I cannot fathom how that will ever work for these cases.

oh_sigh 4y ago

I don't know what's scarier - Tesla FSD, or people with the reaction time like the driver in the video...even after the car is clearly angled into oncoming traffic completely inappropriately, he doesn't immediately take control of the vehicle.

lostmsu 4y ago
I am sure he will get his FSD privileges suspended.
- alanh 4y ago
  based on what? negative-value comment.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    I meant it as a joke (hopefully), but a technical reply to your question would be "violating the non-disclosure agreement": https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-nda-video-clips-controversy-full-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-n...

hatware 4y ago

A few years ago, I went to Las Vegas for the first time and had a chance to ride in a self driving BMW 5 series. There was an engineer in the passenger seat, and a full time driver to take over. I forget the company, but it wasn't Tesla/Waymo/Uber. It was a pretty short ride, near the end an Escalade cut us off pretty egregiously, and the car dove out of the way while braking. I was still so glad we had a backup driver and engineer. I remember thinking how hard those situations will be for a computer to detect, predict, and act better than a human could. It's going to be a bumpy road getting to transportation utopia.

dorkwood 4y ago
Sounds like Motional.

blenderdt 4y ago

I don't understand why the display in Teslas are always so jumpy/glitchy. For example the road. Sometimes parts of the road turn on and off. Or cars and pedestrians jumping all over the place. Doesn't Tesla do some kind of estimation where objects will be next?

yumraj 4y ago

Does anyone know if auto insurance companies charge a premium if you've a Tesla with FSD, since effectively it's an additional, and rather immature, driver?

bdcravens 4y ago
FSD is a feature you can subscribe to by the month, which would be hard to adjust for, so they're likely to lump all Tesla into the same actuarial category.

verelo 4y ago

I keep saying this, but i feel so ripped off with FSD. Why? 1. If i sell, it does not transfer to the new owner. Edit: people disputed this - but i think this only happens if you also hand over the account. Either way, given this write up, it seems rather complex and imo, it shouldn't be if Tesla is trying to be genuinely honestly (https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/does-full-self-driving-fsd-transfer-when-you-sell-a-tesla/ https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/does-full-self-driving-f...) 2. If i sell, I cannot keep it for my next car 3. The subscription option came out a month after we bought our car. Its about 10 years of FSD subscription payments 4. Saving the best for last - it doesn't work / exist If i could get a refund I would. I cannot wait for the class action against Tesla for this, i'll be the first to signup.

SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
Purchased FSD does transfer to a new owner, unless you sell to Tesla. If that class action happens, the most you can hope for is a settlement that allows you to either transfer it to your next car or get a comically tiny payout.
- verelo 4y ago
  Re the transfer, i thought it did go away unless you also hand over the account to the car. If i could transfer it for life, i'd gladly take that...i mean, i just dont want my money to disappear. I don't really want some small payout, i essentially either want to keep the right to get it (hopefully, one day) or get refunded.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
    You might be thinking of unlimited supercharging - that was initially tied to the car, then they started removing it if the car was moved to another account.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I'm not sure why you assume a class action would result in a comically tiny payout. The VW emissions cheating scandal had a class action payout of $5,000 - $10,000 per person plus VW buying back their car at pre-scandal values. I can easily imagine a Tesla FSD class-action being a token amount plus their FSD fee back. I mean, yes, it would be an interest free loan to TSLA, but your money back is a real thing.

Y-bar 4y ago

Why at 7 min 14 sec does the car accelerates to 50 when there is a posted speed limit for 40? https://youtu.be/zDEWi2nC-Wg?t=435 https://youtu.be/zDEWi2nC-Wg?t=435

AlexandrB 4y ago
The video's author addresses this in a comment: > My offset is set at +10 so it goes 10 (km/h) over the posted speed limit Which is an... interesting feature. On the one hand, human drivers frequently exceed posted speed limits. But allowing self-driving tech to ignore speed limits feels wrong somehow. Though it's better than your car snitching on you if you speed. Edit: From an implementation perpective, this should really be a percentage. 10 km/h is only 10% over the speed limit at highway speeds (typically 100 km/h in Canada), but quite dangerous in a school zone (30 km/h) or on a 40 km/h residential street.

bmitc 4y ago

I've seen enough fails from Tesla's Autopilot and FSD Beta (typing those names out feels so laughable given how far away they are to describing the things they're meant to, other than Beta) that I actively avoid any Tesla I see on the road. I never know if the car is being driven by someone or one of these tools are engaged. I almost feel there should be regulation that communicates to other drivers that a human is not controlling the vehicle. It really bothers me that we have been opt-in without choice into Tesla's marketing and hype bubble and live on the streets research and development. These are people's lives. The road isn't a place to move fast and break things. If one gets hit by a Tesla car under one of these "automated" systems, what prevents a person from holding Tesla responsible?

brokenmachine 4y ago
>I almost feel there should be regulation that communicates to other drivers that a human is not controlling the vehicle That's an awesome idea which would really expose how trustworthy it actually is/isn't. Learner drivers are required to show "L" plates here in Australia and have to have a fully licensed driver ready to help, a Tesla is no different so should require the same conditions.

AlexandrB 4y ago

I'd love to see Musk put his money where his mouth is and have Tesla accept liability for accidents that occur with FSD active, similar to what Mercedes is doing[1]. Mercedes's system has many limitations (see article), but it's better than Tesla's approach of constantly over-promising. Maybe having some money on the line would force Tesla marketing to narrow down the use cases where they're actually confident in FSD vs. ones where it should not be used. [1] https://www.motor1.com/news/575167/mercedes-accepts-liability-autonomous-crash/ https://www.motor1.com/news/575167/mercedes-accepts-liabilit...

jlbooker 4y ago

It's very clearly Beta. No one claimed it's perfect/done/finished. Why is everyone so shocked that beta software has bugs? We can certainly debate whether it's ethical to put beta software out on the public roads. Perhaps the Minimum Viable Product method isn't the best approach for transportation hardware. But... surely we can all expect that beta software has bugs. So yes -- I expect it to be driving like a drunk 10yr old. Ideally that'll slowly improve as the software matures. That it made a mistake and has a bug isn't really news though.

JaimeThompson 4y ago
>I expect it to be driving like a drunk 10yr old. Then it shouldn't be on public roads. Tesla could spend 3 billion dollars and build huge road complexes to test their stuff instead of putting the rest of us at risk.

turtledove 4y ago

I'm shocked that Tesla has the fanbase it has. The slipshod nature of their manufacturing and their self driving is putting humans at risk - and not just the drivers. I own a Tesla, and it's been a moderately ok ownership experience, but I've been dealing with issues with the car since day one, and I'd never consider buying another one other manufacturers get their electric vehicles dialed in. Tesla is rapidly becoming synonymous with low quality in my mind, which is the opposite of what I think they want their brand to be.

osynavets 4y ago

Genuinely don't understand why they ditched LIDAR sensor from their solution. LIDAR + image recognition looks like a win choice for this problem.

disillusioned 4y ago

Here's a video I shot when we test drove my friend's FSD beta back in November of 2021 when it was on 10.4: https://youtu.be/qKvhvwmynZc https://youtu.be/qKvhvwmynZc It's downright terrifying. At one point, it swerved us into a suicide lane WHERE ANOTHER TRUCK WAS STOPPED AND FACING US, and he had to take over to avoid it just, well, killing us. In clear, broad daylight with no weather. My biggest critique that seems completely unsolvable is what I (the passenger) mention at the beginning of this video and throughout: the B-pillar and STATIC positioning of the ONLY side-facing camera makes things VERY difficult on the car as it attempts to turn out from a small feeder road onto a large, fast, multi-lane arterial road. There are limitless occlusions that get in the way, that humans compensate for by moving their head, binocular vision, and gently easing the car forward a bit to see around something, but not so much that you put your nose out into traffic. (Though, also definitely that, people do that all the time.) The car cannot do anything but ease itself forward. It can't "look around" a telephone or utility box or a bush that hasn't been trimmed down in a bit. It frankly can't even do the human mental gymnastics of being able to see motion THROUGH the branches of a fairly dense bush and interpreting that as a likely vehicle. The number of times we encounter these situations and compensate for them on a daily basis is astounding. The Tesla is simply not equipped with the sensors needed to address this, in any stretch of the imagination. Fixed frame. Fixed focal length. Fixed location. No pan or tilt. No way to see "around" something. A single side-facing camera located BEHIND the driver's head. Tell me how a Tesla ever manages to turn out on to a road, from a neighborhood 25 mph road to a "nominally-45-mph-but-really-65-mph" road like the one outside my house, when I have to crane my neck around the bush that blocks us, and I know I need to start looking well ahead of the bush to understand the traffic dynamics as I approach?

t0mas88 4y ago
It's crazy that they didn't put at least an extra camera in the place where for example BMW has their "side view camera" option for pulling out of parking spaces. That's right at the sides of the nose. Would have cost them less than $ 100 per car, while FSD costs thousands...

rasz 4y ago

One glance at the screen and you immediately notice whatever they use (ML, shitty hardcoded algorithm, some hybrid in between) has zero persistence, no object permanence. Objects vanish and reappear randomly, float in space. Would you trust a driver with 0.016 second short term memory? At 8:05 right before he grabs the wheel you can see projected trajectory (blue line) jump for one video frame from right side of yellow lines to the oncoming lane and then jump back. Its like being driven by a hamster on crack.