5 ms·

I've commuted a bit on the German highways. I only run Autosteer, which is cruise-control + lane-control, and it disengages almost every time there's roadwork.

by sshine 4y ago

I've commuted a bit on the German highways. I only run Autosteer, which is cruise-control + lane-control, and it disengages almost every time there's roadwork. It is very bad at handling ambiguity when the road has both white and yellow navigation lines. There's a number of scenarios, some of which involve criss-crossing lines, some where they run mostly in parallel. The car sometimes wants to follow the white lines when the yellow are actually overrides. When the yellow lines are wrong (and should rightfully have been scraped off), this always leads to disengagement. For stretches where the yellow lines are correct, and the older white lines are off by half a meter so that there's effectively not enough space between the white lines and the concrete side, autosteer will sometimes try to switch to the white lines, which would lead to the car smashing into the concrete side. And sure, autosteer != FSD. But it's a much simpler problem that the Tesla still basically fails at. Sometimes, in fog, cruise-control will abrubtly break. Very nerve-wrecking. Relying fully on vision has its downside. Listening to Kaparthy on Lex Fridman's podcast, it sounds like this was cost-cutting. I can't believe that "nope, that big white thing isn't a wall" is not objectively better navigation.

Zigurd 4y ago
This is an example of the risks of vertical integration. Some of what Tesla needed/chose to do itself is paying off. More integration into a single electronics system puts Tesla ahead of an industry trend with many unique features. But rolling your own ADAS and FSD might result in having spent a lot for a result that is inferior to what ADAS suppliers can sell to other car OEMs, with no substantial benefit to the FSD effort, which is much riskier, with the added, and perhaps gratuitous risk of trying to do FSD with only camera sensors. The risks in that are not just it is a risky approach to real time sensor data, but that the data all your cars are collecting is worth a lot less for not having a LIDAR point cloud providing 3D data.
dmix 4y ago
I’m most curious how Teslas autosteer compares to CommaAI (or other offerings). I’ve been seriously considering letting CommaAIs set of supported cars to try it out. It’d be cool if there was a yearly competition to rank the basic lane keeping/speed matching/turning. Eventually when it’s actually full-self-driving they can rank FSD.
- chroma 4y ago
  This[1] is one of the videos on comma.ai’s website.[2] I count at least 10 disengagements. It doesn’t even follow the road in some cases. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NmBfgOanCyk https://youtube.com/watch?v=NmBfgOanCyk 2. https://comma.ai/openpilot https://comma.ai/openpilot
- techwizrd 4y ago
  My brother uses CommaAI's openpilot on his Honda HR-V, and it's really quite interesting. It does pretty well where we've tested in Virginia and Maryland, but we haven't compared it head-to-head against Tesla's offering.
cvak 4y ago
I tried VW(+Skoda), BMW, and Stelantis(Citroen/DS/Peugeot models) "Autosteer" in past year(changing comanies, waiting for new company car to be build while having Hertz rentals), plus I had autosteer with adaptive CC in Skoda from 2018. It got a lot better over the 2018 thing, that tried to crash itself on several roadworks, I actually almost scratch the car in first 100km I had it because of it. My latest BMW works perfectly fine in German roadworks with bright yellow lanes, Also all the stelantis cars I've driven (all 2020+ models) worked fine in that conditions. Camera system has problems when there's fog, or direct sun in precise angles. Radar has problems where there's lot of rain, and rainsplash from trucks, or snowy conditions, and the front radar gets frozen. But it's awesome as assistive system.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Skoda/VW lane assist feels like it would bounce you back and forth between the lane markings if you just let it do it's thing; more useful a backup system to stop you crossing the line when you have a lapse in concentration (which is how they describe it I believe).
  - cvak 4y ago
    They have several tiers of it I believe, the best one also offers automatic lane change, like BMW, it was actually working perfectly fine for me, with no back and forth bouncing - it had the annoying <steer a bit or I don't think you are holding the steering wheel> feature (Karoq 2018) - but newer models I think also have capacitive steering wheel, so you can only touch it.
    - cjrp 4y ago
      Hah, ironically my experience of it is based on a 2018 Karoq (perhaps with the most basic system, as you said).
  - sz4kerto 4y ago
    Yep, its function is basically: if your child distracts you and you don't pay attention for a few seconds then it'll try preventing you sliding into the other lane. Which is fine.
ajmurmann 4y ago
This comment made me wonder how they train the car for different sets of traffic rules. Some of this goes beyond formal rules. On most US highways you are technically supposed to overtake on the right, but it's totally common. In contrast in much of Europe this is actually enforced and the convention is that you only leave the rightmost lane while overtaking. Do you do 100% of training on data from the same region? Are there low-level skills that all translate and don't bring the risk of training contradictory expectations? Can you just annotate training data with the rule set/location that applies?
- D13Fd 4y ago
  > On most US highways you are technically supposed to overtake on the right You mean the left?
  - 9dev 4y ago
    I think they meant „aren’t technically supposed to“, that makes more sense
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Yeah, sorry, I omitted the "not". In practice both seem believable looking at traffic here.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  when it comes to decision-making there is a lot of hardcoded rules in these systems. They don't learn the speed limits or to stop at red lights. The learning is all in the perception and object recognition but a lot of the behavior is just explicit rules.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Bit by bit, it gets harder to figure out how buying a Tesla is ever the right answer. Autosteer (beta) is worse than the competition, traffic aware cruise control is timid to the point of braking for things which don't even exist, you don't get basic things like ultrasonic sensors, radar, rain-sensing wipers, or even carplay. And even when they do include something that sounds halfway cool, it turns out to be underwhelming -- the matrix headlights are all of 100 pixels, which would have been cool about 10 years ago. And they aren't even enabled. Given how poor automatic high beams are, do we really want to see how Tesla matrix headlights would work in real life?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  People will pay more for cars that project images they want to project. This explains pretty much all the car preference patterns for people who have enough money sloshing around that they don't need to purely focus on maximizing utility for cost but who don't have "I don't care what you think" money.
- tzs 4y ago
  > Bit by bit, it gets harder to figure out how buying a Tesla is ever the right answer Great car or great charging network. Pick one. If you pick charging network get a Tesla. Otherwise get something else.
  - mbesto 4y ago
    This. I really want to sell my Model S (for like an Audi for example), but no one can compete with its battery: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k1DOw-NwvW8E8tQeXlacnt201fNc5qZyAPC0_vnoFBw/edit#gid=1256284032 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k1DOw-NwvW8E8tQeXlac...
    - judge2020 4y ago
      Or rather, the Hummer EV has the battery of two Model S cars! It just is twice as inefficient..
  - 4y ago
nosianu 4y ago
Talking about "lane assist" on a German Autobahn - I had a bad, if not worse anecdote with a French (the model) rental car one or two years ago. I did not know that assistant was on, but had I known I would have thought nothing of it. Because what happened really surprised me: Entering a construction zone the assistant took the wheel away from me(!!!). I was steering manually, normally, but the assistant insisted I follow the previous line in the road, that lead right into the construction zone. Which was behind a concrete divider. I actually had to fight the "assistant", with not insignificant use of force on the wheel, to not crash sideways into that divider wall.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  I swear my car was (gently) fighting my steering here due to the lane keep feature before I turned it off. I frequently drive around potholes and dead animals and don't need the car trying to fix that for me.
judge2020 4y ago
> And sure, autosteer != FSD. But it's a much simpler problem that the Tesla still basically fails at. They've publicly admitted that the entire autosteer codebase hasn't been touched in over 4 years, since they fully pivoted to getting FSD in a usable level 2 state.

by sshine 4y ago

Zigurd 4y ago

This is an example of the risks of vertical integration. Some of what Tesla needed/chose to do itself is paying off. More integration into a single electronics system puts Tesla ahead of an industry trend with many unique features. But rolling your own ADAS and FSD might result in having spent a lot for a result that is inferior to what ADAS suppliers can sell to other car OEMs, with no substantial benefit to the FSD effort, which is much riskier, with the added, and perhaps gratuitous risk of trying to do FSD with only camera sensors. The risks in that are not just it is a risky approach to real time sensor data, but that the data all your cars are collecting is worth a lot less for not having a LIDAR point cloud providing 3D data.

dmix 4y ago

I’m most curious how Teslas autosteer compares to CommaAI (or other offerings). I’ve been seriously considering letting CommaAIs set of supported cars to try it out. It’d be cool if there was a yearly competition to rank the basic lane keeping/speed matching/turning. Eventually when it’s actually full-self-driving they can rank FSD.

chroma 4y ago
This[1] is one of the videos on comma.ai’s website.[2] I count at least 10 disengagements. It doesn’t even follow the road in some cases. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NmBfgOanCyk https://youtube.com/watch?v=NmBfgOanCyk 2. https://comma.ai/openpilot https://comma.ai/openpilot
techwizrd 4y ago
My brother uses CommaAI's openpilot on his Honda HR-V, and it's really quite interesting. It does pretty well where we've tested in Virginia and Maryland, but we haven't compared it head-to-head against Tesla's offering.

cvak 4y ago

I tried VW(+Skoda), BMW, and Stelantis(Citroen/DS/Peugeot models) "Autosteer" in past year(changing comanies, waiting for new company car to be build while having Hertz rentals), plus I had autosteer with adaptive CC in Skoda from 2018. It got a lot better over the 2018 thing, that tried to crash itself on several roadworks, I actually almost scratch the car in first 100km I had it because of it. My latest BMW works perfectly fine in German roadworks with bright yellow lanes, Also all the stelantis cars I've driven (all 2020+ models) worked fine in that conditions. Camera system has problems when there's fog, or direct sun in precise angles. Radar has problems where there's lot of rain, and rainsplash from trucks, or snowy conditions, and the front radar gets frozen. But it's awesome as assistive system.

cjrp 4y ago
Skoda/VW lane assist feels like it would bounce you back and forth between the lane markings if you just let it do it's thing; more useful a backup system to stop you crossing the line when you have a lapse in concentration (which is how they describe it I believe).
- cvak 4y ago
  They have several tiers of it I believe, the best one also offers automatic lane change, like BMW, it was actually working perfectly fine for me, with no back and forth bouncing - it had the annoying <steer a bit or I don't think you are holding the steering wheel> feature (Karoq 2018) - but newer models I think also have capacitive steering wheel, so you can only touch it.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    Hah, ironically my experience of it is based on a 2018 Karoq (perhaps with the most basic system, as you said).
- sz4kerto 4y ago
  Yep, its function is basically: if your child distracts you and you don't pay attention for a few seconds then it'll try preventing you sliding into the other lane. Which is fine.

ajmurmann 4y ago

This comment made me wonder how they train the car for different sets of traffic rules. Some of this goes beyond formal rules. On most US highways you are technically supposed to overtake on the right, but it's totally common. In contrast in much of Europe this is actually enforced and the convention is that you only leave the rightmost lane while overtaking. Do you do 100% of training on data from the same region? Are there low-level skills that all translate and don't bring the risk of training contradictory expectations? Can you just annotate training data with the rule set/location that applies?

D13Fd 4y ago
> On most US highways you are technically supposed to overtake on the right You mean the left?
- 9dev 4y ago
  I think they meant „aren’t technically supposed to“, that makes more sense
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Yeah, sorry, I omitted the "not". In practice both seem believable looking at traffic here.
Barrin92 4y ago
when it comes to decision-making there is a lot of hardcoded rules in these systems. They don't learn the speed limits or to stop at red lights. The learning is all in the perception and object recognition but a lot of the behavior is just explicit rules.

rootusrootus 4y ago

Bit by bit, it gets harder to figure out how buying a Tesla is ever the right answer. Autosteer (beta) is worse than the competition, traffic aware cruise control is timid to the point of braking for things which don't even exist, you don't get basic things like ultrasonic sensors, radar, rain-sensing wipers, or even carplay. And even when they do include something that sounds halfway cool, it turns out to be underwhelming -- the matrix headlights are all of 100 pixels, which would have been cool about 10 years ago. And they aren't even enabled. Given how poor automatic high beams are, do we really want to see how Tesla matrix headlights would work in real life?

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
People will pay more for cars that project images they want to project. This explains pretty much all the car preference patterns for people who have enough money sloshing around that they don't need to purely focus on maximizing utility for cost but who don't have "I don't care what you think" money.
tzs 4y ago
> Bit by bit, it gets harder to figure out how buying a Tesla is ever the right answer Great car or great charging network. Pick one. If you pick charging network get a Tesla. Otherwise get something else.
- mbesto 4y ago
  This. I really want to sell my Model S (for like an Audi for example), but no one can compete with its battery: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k1DOw-NwvW8E8tQeXlacnt201fNc5qZyAPC0_vnoFBw/edit#gid=1256284032 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k1DOw-NwvW8E8tQeXlac...
  - judge2020 4y ago
    Or rather, the Hummer EV has the battery of two Model S cars! It just is twice as inefficient..
- 4y ago

nosianu 4y ago

Talking about "lane assist" on a German Autobahn - I had a bad, if not worse anecdote with a French (the model) rental car one or two years ago. I did not know that assistant was on, but had I known I would have thought nothing of it. Because what happened really surprised me: Entering a construction zone the assistant took the wheel away from me(!!!). I was steering manually, normally, but the assistant insisted I follow the previous line in the road, that lead right into the construction zone. Which was behind a concrete divider. I actually had to fight the "assistant", with not insignificant use of force on the wheel, to not crash sideways into that divider wall.

ridgered4 4y ago
I swear my car was (gently) fighting my steering here due to the lane keep feature before I turned it off. I frequently drive around potholes and dead animals and don't need the car trying to fix that for me.

judge2020 4y ago

> And sure, autosteer != FSD. But it's a much simpler problem that the Tesla still basically fails at. They've publicly admitted that the entire autosteer codebase hasn't been touched in over 4 years, since they fully pivoted to getting FSD in a usable level 2 state.