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I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. Autopilot on freewa

I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the complaints about the name it’s exactly what is claimed. Auto park is bad. It doesn’t detect the spot half the time and it’s not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces where it would actually be useful. Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It’s often too timid to actually switch lanes if there’s traffic. I like the signal-to-lane-change. Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time) claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and don’t pay attention. Every year it’s another few months away. I doubt it’s actually possible with the hardware on the car at this point. Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. It’s glossing over the very important bits of “with the compute power in the car” and “within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques”. I have no doubt that autonomous driving is possible - it’s actively happening in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model Y can do what I paid for, and that’s unethical. This doesn’t need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.

logifail 4y ago
> But the software has stagnated [..] I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...) I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it. If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...
- wpietri 4y ago
  I think the implication is that the current software is just not very good. It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and leave you with annoying issues. But it could also partly be a case of differing expectations. The web has trained us all that software generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up paying good money to replace the car stereo with something that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my dashboard.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7. It's the same as it was in its year 1. Q: Why would that be frustrating?
    - notahacker 4y ago
      It's just not as much fun when you're not renting your UX so next year could bring you better collision avoidance or require you to pay for an upgrade to continue to be able to recline your seats
      - logifail 4y ago
        > better collision avoidance Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're apparently still working ok. Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white line right into the space my vehicle would have been in. Talk about adrenaline rush :(
janalsncm 4y ago
> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
  > we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are. For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1] More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there. Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
  - notahacker 4y ago
    It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
    - naniwaduni 4y ago
      7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
dagmx 4y ago
To add to one of your points, The Tesla auto park is legitimately awful. https://youtu.be/nsb2XBAIWyA https://youtu.be/nsb2XBAIWyA Every time we try it for a spot to reverse into, the linear regression it must be doing is so apparent. It violently tries to turn left and right rapidly trying to straighten itself. It works better for parallel spots but often gives up half way because it made a bad angle choice. We’ve tried it in various models in addition to our own Model Y. They’re just embarrassingly bad at it.
- miketery 4y ago
  This is kind of scary, it seems they’re trying to use black box Ai/ml for parking where a simple PID controller would do excellent given an input of a target box and current location.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Indeed. Why do Tesla go for ML to poorly solve problems long solved by well understood PID controllers? The cynical in me feels this is to do with employees at Tesla want to work with new and shiny ML instead of old boring PID tech for the sake of "resume driven engineering".
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      I suspect these decisions are driven from the top down. We know who loves a shiny tech choice at Tesla. The company has been quite proud of their end to end ML system in presentations. But it sounds like they’re struggling with execution.
      - hengestone 4y ago
        My brother in law works as an engineer for Tesla Palo Alto: according to him these features are all driven from the very top. Always at the expense of fixing bugs, or getting even basic things working reliably in ways that would make driving safer and more enjoyable. Make your own conclusions about buying one. I would steer clear, literally, knowing some of the bugs in there.
gaius_baltar 4y ago
> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Specially because we don't drive with eyes only, we use at least our ears too for hearing unusual noises and the balance sense for detecting vibrations, changes on road surface, and to get feedback about orientation changes.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Teslas have those sensors, but don’t currently use some of them (like microphones) as inputs. Unlike human drivers, a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently and in real time.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    Yet it still doesn’t work.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently But most humans can in most cases feel when there is a loss of traction on the road. Although agreed it comes nothing close to what the car knows. That said I am not sure that this is a core feature needed to make FSD work.
- Moru 4y ago
  No idea what resolution those cameras are, can they be as good as our auto-adapting eyes together with our brains? They are pretty neat features after all, trained right. And will we loose our abilities if we don't keep working on them, building our feature set?
  - filoleg 4y ago
    The resolution is pretty good, but they got one other massive advantage over human eyes even without sound - a full 360 degree view at any given time that doesn't require turning head, thanks to the array of cameras covering everything all at once.
KyeRussell 4y ago
With the amount of theorising and handwringing people do wrt Elon’s motives or reasons for having this view of FSD, there seems to be a lot of people that don’t want to acknowledge him for the boring stereotype that he is: a manager / salesperson completely out of his depth making wild unsubstantiated claims. It’s just that the autocratic role he demands within organisations, and his relatively newfound publicity fuelled by his legion of fetishists, means that we all hear about it. I only vaguely (for a developer) know about AI / computer vision, yet I’m still made deeply anxious by the implication that we will somehow in the foreseeable future be able to pull this off at ALL, let alone with 1.5 hands tied behind our backs as Tesla insists.
_ea1k 4y ago
> I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. I'm not sure that I agree with this, tbh. More of the regular AP stack is moving to the FSD underpinnings, and I'd expect the nav on autopilot feature to be a part of that eventually. All of those are much needed fixes, IMO. I bet the recent big improvements to the auto-high-beam functionality is related too. I do wish they'd focus on something more like a FSD-lite for the highway, though. Let me go hands off for a little longer as long as the driver facing camera is detecting attention.

logifail 4y ago

> But the software has stagnated [..] I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...) I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it. If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...

wpietri 4y ago
I think the implication is that the current software is just not very good. It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and leave you with annoying issues. But it could also partly be a case of differing expectations. The web has trained us all that software generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up paying good money to replace the car stereo with something that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my dashboard.
- logifail 4y ago
  > on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7. It's the same as it was in its year 1. Q: Why would that be frustrating?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    It's just not as much fun when you're not renting your UX so next year could bring you better collision avoidance or require you to pay for an upgrade to continue to be able to recline your seats
    - logifail 4y ago
      > better collision avoidance Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're apparently still working ok. Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white line right into the space my vehicle would have been in. Talk about adrenaline rush :(

janalsncm 4y ago

> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
> we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are. For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1] More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there. Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- notahacker 4y ago
  It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.

dagmx 4y ago

To add to one of your points, The Tesla auto park is legitimately awful. https://youtu.be/nsb2XBAIWyA https://youtu.be/nsb2XBAIWyA Every time we try it for a spot to reverse into, the linear regression it must be doing is so apparent. It violently tries to turn left and right rapidly trying to straighten itself. It works better for parallel spots but often gives up half way because it made a bad angle choice. We’ve tried it in various models in addition to our own Model Y. They’re just embarrassingly bad at it.

miketery 4y ago
This is kind of scary, it seems they’re trying to use black box Ai/ml for parking where a simple PID controller would do excellent given an input of a target box and current location.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Indeed. Why do Tesla go for ML to poorly solve problems long solved by well understood PID controllers? The cynical in me feels this is to do with employees at Tesla want to work with new and shiny ML instead of old boring PID tech for the sake of "resume driven engineering".
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    I suspect these decisions are driven from the top down. We know who loves a shiny tech choice at Tesla. The company has been quite proud of their end to end ML system in presentations. But it sounds like they’re struggling with execution.
    - hengestone 4y ago
      My brother in law works as an engineer for Tesla Palo Alto: according to him these features are all driven from the very top. Always at the expense of fixing bugs, or getting even basic things working reliably in ways that would make driving safer and more enjoyable. Make your own conclusions about buying one. I would steer clear, literally, knowing some of the bugs in there.

gaius_baltar 4y ago

> Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. Specially because we don't drive with eyes only, we use at least our ears too for hearing unusual noises and the balance sense for detecting vibrations, changes on road surface, and to get feedback about orientation changes.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Teslas have those sensors, but don’t currently use some of them (like microphones) as inputs. Unlike human drivers, a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently and in real time.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Yet it still doesn’t work.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently But most humans can in most cases feel when there is a loss of traction on the road. Although agreed it comes nothing close to what the car knows. That said I am not sure that this is a core feature needed to make FSD work.
Moru 4y ago
No idea what resolution those cameras are, can they be as good as our auto-adapting eyes together with our brains? They are pretty neat features after all, trained right. And will we loose our abilities if we don't keep working on them, building our feature set?
- filoleg 4y ago
  The resolution is pretty good, but they got one other massive advantage over human eyes even without sound - a full 360 degree view at any given time that doesn't require turning head, thanks to the array of cameras covering everything all at once.

KyeRussell 4y ago

With the amount of theorising and handwringing people do wrt Elon’s motives or reasons for having this view of FSD, there seems to be a lot of people that don’t want to acknowledge him for the boring stereotype that he is: a manager / salesperson completely out of his depth making wild unsubstantiated claims. It’s just that the autocratic role he demands within organisations, and his relatively newfound publicity fuelled by his legion of fetishists, means that we all hear about it. I only vaguely (for a developer) know about AI / computer vision, yet I’m still made deeply anxious by the implication that we will somehow in the foreseeable future be able to pull this off at ALL, let alone with 1.5 hands tied behind our backs as Tesla insists.

_ea1k 4y ago

> I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. I'm not sure that I agree with this, tbh. More of the regular AP stack is moving to the FSD underpinnings, and I'd expect the nav on autopilot feature to be a part of that eventually. All of those are much needed fixes, IMO. I bet the recent big improvements to the auto-high-beam functionality is related too. I do wish they'd focus on something more like a FSD-lite for the highway, though. Let me go hands off for a little longer as long as the driver facing camera is detecting attention.