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I keep hearing horror stories about Tesla vehicles and I'm amazed that they're allowed on public roads (in the U.S.) with what appears to be alpha-level softwar

I keep hearing horror stories about Tesla vehicles and I'm amazed that they're allowed on public roads (in the U.S.) with what appears to be alpha-level software. I appreciate that the FSD mode is only to be used with the driver constantly monitoring and being aware, but that's an unrealistic expectation of people, not to mention a strange interpretation of "full self-driving".

brianwawok 4y ago
So that's a good hunch. Where is the data showing that Tesla software is causing more crashes than say people driving base? Without data, why are you thinking that something should be not allowed on the roads? Opinions without data are just that.. opinions. Would be a pretty terrible way to regulate.
- NhanH 4y ago
  Wait what? Tesla should be the one providing the data showing that it is safe for their software to be on the road, not the other way round. Vehicles have always need to be regulated to be on the road, rather than retroactive ban after they kill a bunch of people.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > rather than retroactive ban after they kill a bunch of people. I grew up in the US, in the 1970s-80s, when we had [optional] seatbelts, that would cut you in half, and snap your spine, exploding [leaded] gas tanks, glass that would slice you to ribbons, and steering wheels that would impale the drivers. It's always been retroactive. Ralph Nader made his name on Unsafe at Any Speed[0]. Money speaks very loudly in the US, and we have always been willing to sacrifice quite a few things (as long as the non-money-makers are making the sacrifices), and take huge risks (as long as the non-money-makers are taking the risks), for money. It's just the way we are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      The problems with this policy are obvious, but it brings benefits too: we are allowed to develop new technology. If self driving has to be rigorously proven before it can be tested, the chicken-egg problem simply resolves itself into "the tech won't be developed here." Is that really what HN wants?
      - kibwen 4y ago
        As a pedestrian and cyclist, what I want is to not become a statistic in a crash report. We can develop new things and test them under controlled conditions without having to put everyone outside the car at risk.
        jjoonathan 4y ago
        AI is easily our best bet against the true menace, which is distracted drivers. No, "controlled conditions" don't do a very good job of training or proving an AI. Supervised cars on actual roads is the way it has to be.
        acdha 4y ago
        Speed limiters and automatic braking get most of the benefits without any need for hard AI problems. What AI promises is a way for governments not to have to take the heat for holding drivers accountable, but hundreds of thousands of people are being killed waiting for it to materialize.
        piva00 4y ago
        The best bet against the true menace is to deploy public policies that reduces the true menace: the number of cars/drivers on the streets. That's the most sound policy, provide the public with alternative means of transportation that are convenient and more environment-friendly, leave room on the streets for the ones that actually require a car for their transportation. If you leave in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and can't be served by public transportation, great, you probably need a car. If you drive your car in cities for trips of 5-10km because it's convenient then we, as a society, should find ways to disincentivise this usage.
  - ajross 4y ago
    > Tesla should be the one providing the data showing that it is safe for their software to be on the road The linked article is literally about the data Tesla provides showing that their vehicles are safe, and it doesn't even refute the conclusions. It's about nitpicking at the margins. To be clear: Tesla's data says autopilot use is about an order of magnitude safer than human driving. The author complains that this is confounded by the fact that AP is used in different conditions where the baseline accident rate is lower. You need a lot of confounding effect to make up for an order of magnitude delta! Seems like everyone wants to skip that part and yell about the CEO instead. The cars are safe. They are extremely common vehicles now. If they were unsafe we would know. We know they are safe. Any argument needs to treat with this truth, or it's basically just a conspiracy theory.
    - ra7 4y ago
      > It's about nitpicking at the margins. The article is not nitpicking at the margins. It's showing how Tesla is making misleading claims out of their insufficient data by not accounting for operating conditions. That's literally how Tesla is claiming Autopilot is "an order of magnitude safer than human driving". > You need a lot of confounding effect to make up for an order of magnitude delta! Or you could just make misleading comparisons to claim that. That's pretty easy too.
      - ajross 4y ago
        It's just tiresome. You know the cars are safe. You want to say they're unsafe. But you can't, because they're safe. So you're yelling about what amounts to marketing strategy. Which, fine. Everyone does bad marketing, there's lots to yell about. Maybe consider yelling about the deceptive marketing practices of a product you do use? There are lots to choose from.
        ra7 4y ago
        "Our cars are safe" "Show us unbiased data proving it" "If it were unsafe, we would know" Sigh. I own a Tesla and use FSD, but thanks for assuming.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  Many people take the view that you shouldn't introduce a radical change in how cars work until it is proven safe, rather than feeling it should be allowed on public roads until it is proven unsafe.
  - try_the_bass 4y ago
    It seems like it's impossible to prove that it's safe on public roads without actually using it on public roads, though? Wouldn't that be an impossible ask, by definition?
    - kibwen 4y ago
      It is entirely possible to test things under controlled trials to simulate real-world conditions. To use an analogy, we don't just test new medicines by putting them on the shelves and waiting for consumers to report side effects. We have strenuous trials first to give us baseline confidence in the product.
      - try_the_bass 4y ago
        I would argue that it's impossible to simulate real-world conditions for a task as complex as driving. There are too many edge cases and different combinations of environmental factors, many of which involve the inherent unpredictability of other drivers. I would assume medicines have similar or higher levels of complexity involved. However, the medicine analogy is poor. We often release medicines for use even when they have incredibly harmful side-effects. We do the testing to quantify and understand those side-effects, not prove that each medicine does exactly what it should with no side effects.
    - cptcobalt 4y ago
      Exactly. There's no better facsimilie for the sheer variety of public roads than, well, public roads. Tesla even has rigorous simulation in place for hostile situations that should never occur on public roads: A good general overview from two minute papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkiTejoyms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkiTejoyms Tesla's AI Day 2022 video, timestamped around labeling and simulation https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=6037 https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=6037
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Yes, and we have to mind the denominator too. Waymo just announced 1 million self driving miles, Tesla just announced 150 million self driving miles.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Waymo had 20 million self driving miles on public roads in 2021. Earlier this year, Waymo announced 1 million self driving miles on public roads with nobody in the driver's seat. Tesla has 0 such miles.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      Thanks for clarifying! So Tesla has 7x the miles and so if their test program is riskier we should expect to see >7x the number of accidents.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
        We see far more than 7x at fault accidents. As far as I know, Waymo has had none. Tesla has had so many that it had to post a recall notice.
      - bradtemp 4y ago
        No because when Tesla's system has a problem, as my car does a few times each trip, I grab the wheel. And waymo also has cars with safety drivers but also has run a million miles without one. Run Tesla FSD with no intervention for a million miles and it would have thousands of accidents. Thousands, where it was at fault. Waymo had 2 or 3 minor parking lot style no damage contacts in their million. Not thousands
  - ra7 4y ago
    Waymo self driving is not at all the same as Tesla’s. One is fully driverless and the other requires driver monitoring.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
- MBCook 4y ago
  Only Tesla has that data, so no one can link to it. If it showed things were better than average it would fit their message and I’d expect them to publish it. If it showed things were average it would not fit their narrative. If it showed things were worse it would contradict their narrative. Seems like there is only one reason to withhold numbers or publish them in a misleading way. They prove your claims that your tech is way safer wrong in some way.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Tesla has said they intend to pick the "better than human" fight at 5 billion miles, when they believe their advantage will be decisive rather than having an outcome that depends on how you count.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      So... until they reach that number, they'll publish misleading stats (i.e. outcomes that favor them depending on how they count)?
    - hansvm 4y ago
      Even then there'll be a distribution shift effect they need to account for. Not everyone is allowed into the FSD program, and the fact that they're self-selecting to use FSD additionally biases the roads and conditions where they choose to do so. Moreover, how you count is still very relevant if all the hairy events happen when a human operator takes control -- the car screwed up, but the resulting crash gets blamed on the operator who couldn't react to the ensuing shitshow in time, and even if total crashes/fatalities are lower when counting those events you still have the self-selection problem of perhaps those FSD operators in those conditions being better at recovery from car-induced errors than the general population in arbitrary conditions would be. Like...maybe it's fine. But even at 0 fatal crashes in 5 billion miles they won't have a strong argument that a more widely deployed FSD would have similar success without a lot more data to explain how the thing they measured directly connects to the thing they'll want to claim it represents.
      - 4y ago
- simondotau 4y ago
  It’s rather telling that the reply saying “show me evidence” is being voted down while the assertions mixed with disdain for Musk are being voted up. Look, I get that Musk isn’t popular here. But please, give me some hope for humanity and at least pretend to care about facts and evidence.
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    Our point of view is that we should not allow beta self driving software on the roads until it is proven safe. We do not know how safe it is, nor can we know because Tesla controls that data and is not transparent with it.
    - simondotau 4y ago
      Should we allow teenagers to drive on the road before they have proven to be safe? We don’t know how safe they are.
      - jackmott42 4y ago
        No, we should require that they pass a driving test, pay for insurance, and register their vehicle with license plates. If I were emperor I would raise the driving age to 18 as well. vote often, vote early
        simondotau 4y ago
        A person who was passed a driving test, paid for insurance and registered the vehicle is responsible for the car at all times, even when FSD beta is operating. Come to Australia, the driving age here is 18. (And for your first three years as a licensed driver, you have to show plates to indicate your lack of experience because, unlike in the stupid USA, we don’t assume that passing one driving test is enough to qualify you as a “good driver”.)
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        No, and we don't. That's why driving instruction and driving tests exist.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Where is the data showing that heroin is not good at curing COVID?
drowsspa 4y ago
Honestly, all due to the Musk influence you can "move fast and break things" even when it comes to 1-ton machines with humans inside moving at 80 miles an hour. That Tesla was allowed to test in production with basically no legal liability is so messed up
- ajross 4y ago
  FWIW: Tesla is absolutely liable for any damages resulting from AP/FSD usage. They aren't protected in any way by law or regulation. You want to sue them, you go right ahead. Normally I'd expect the fact that they aren't losing these suits regularly to factor as a prior in people's opinions about the cars' safety. But I've also been in enough of these threads to know that it's actually all about people's opinions of the CEO and not the product.
  - bradtemp 4y ago
    That's not correct, they are no more liable than carmakers are if you are using cruise control. Unless you can show in court that their system was defective. It is designed to not be able to do the full driving task, to need interventions. It performs as designed.
    - ajross 4y ago
      Isn't that what I said? The logic above would work the same for cruise control. If you ship a bad cruise control or other automation system, you get sued and lose. Toyota paid out more than a billion dollars a few years back due to[1] problems with their fly-by-wire accelerator design. It's not like you can't punish an automaker for safety issues. They get sued all the time, successfully. Except, notably, the one you want to yell about the most. I'm just saying that should maybe be part of your analysis. Look. The cars are safe. We've been having the same argument, again and again, for years and years now. People show up in these threads just taking as a given that these systems are unsafe, and refuse to adjust that prior as these cars become some of the most popular products as a market. [1] What were perceived as -- IIRC it's since been argued that the problem in the suit didn't actually exist. And they settled anyway!
rvz 4y ago
There is a very good reason why people don't trust this absolute snake oil in the first place other than it being pushed by Tesla and Elon. FSD (Fools Self Driving) feature is a complete scam with dangerous and deceptive advertising putting the lives of the driver and others at risk. The Tesla vehicles themselves are not.
- programmarchy 4y ago
  Elon is obviously doing many stupid things but there’s many smart people at Tesla working on this issue so it’s not exactly a complete scam. Isn’t it more realistic that FSD is one of those classic engineering problems where the last 10% takes 90% of the effort? Also, the “move fast and break things” is symptomatic of the broader tech industry. Despite being glorified for decades, it’s become a toxic mentality that’s hurt us with social media, and is now exponentially more pronounced with AI. Sure, maybe Elon should be “made an example of”, but collectively we need to sober up and realize this is a systematic issue in tech rather than scapegoating one eccentric billionaire.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    "Move fast and break things" isn't entirely inappropriate in the world of non-consequential software, i.e. software not affecting lives or money. But for software affecting lives (people could die) or money (deposits and transfers could go awry) then "move fast and break things" is unethical. Obviously this bit would apply to things such as cars and airplanes, too. You really don't want us building the controls of a nuclear power plant, do you? Probably not. I'm appalled the NTSB hasn't reigned in Tesla. I'm cynical enough to start wondering what officials they've "bought off."
    - programmarchy 4y ago
      Would it be unethical if FSD Beta causes 1,000 fatalities but FSD 1.0 prevents 1,000,000 fatalities? Real world training data is needed to get from Beta to 1.0. Seems like you are oversimplifying the ethical decision being made by NTSB.
starbase 4y ago
> only to be used with the driver constantly monitoring and being aware, but that's an unrealistic expectation FSD monitors the driver for indicators of inattention, e.g. not looking at the road. First you get a visual alert, then a shrill alarm, and if you're still not paying attention the vehicle slows to a stop. Drivers with a history of inattention are locked out of FSD. Contrast with traditional cruise control where you can fall asleep at the wheel going 100mph and it'll hold that speed until you crash. Of course no one wrings their hands about that.
- kaba0 4y ago
  People suck at context switching. Even if the driver is looking at the road, they can’t suddenly be put in the context and expect to do well.

brianwawok 4y ago

So that's a good hunch. Where is the data showing that Tesla software is causing more crashes than say people driving base? Without data, why are you thinking that something should be not allowed on the roads? Opinions without data are just that.. opinions. Would be a pretty terrible way to regulate.

NhanH 4y ago
Wait what? Tesla should be the one providing the data showing that it is safe for their software to be on the road, not the other way round. Vehicles have always need to be regulated to be on the road, rather than retroactive ban after they kill a bunch of people.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > rather than retroactive ban after they kill a bunch of people. I grew up in the US, in the 1970s-80s, when we had [optional] seatbelts, that would cut you in half, and snap your spine, exploding [leaded] gas tanks, glass that would slice you to ribbons, and steering wheels that would impale the drivers. It's always been retroactive. Ralph Nader made his name on Unsafe at Any Speed[0]. Money speaks very loudly in the US, and we have always been willing to sacrifice quite a few things (as long as the non-money-makers are making the sacrifices), and take huge risks (as long as the non-money-makers are taking the risks), for money. It's just the way we are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    The problems with this policy are obvious, but it brings benefits too: we are allowed to develop new technology. If self driving has to be rigorously proven before it can be tested, the chicken-egg problem simply resolves itself into "the tech won't be developed here." Is that really what HN wants?
    - kibwen 4y ago
      As a pedestrian and cyclist, what I want is to not become a statistic in a crash report. We can develop new things and test them under controlled conditions without having to put everyone outside the car at risk.
      - jjoonathan 4y ago
        AI is easily our best bet against the true menace, which is distracted drivers. No, "controlled conditions" don't do a very good job of training or proving an AI. Supervised cars on actual roads is the way it has to be.
        acdha 4y ago
        Speed limiters and automatic braking get most of the benefits without any need for hard AI problems. What AI promises is a way for governments not to have to take the heat for holding drivers accountable, but hundreds of thousands of people are being killed waiting for it to materialize.
        piva00 4y ago
        The best bet against the true menace is to deploy public policies that reduces the true menace: the number of cars/drivers on the streets. That's the most sound policy, provide the public with alternative means of transportation that are convenient and more environment-friendly, leave room on the streets for the ones that actually require a car for their transportation. If you leave in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and can't be served by public transportation, great, you probably need a car. If you drive your car in cities for trips of 5-10km because it's convenient then we, as a society, should find ways to disincentivise this usage.
- ajross 4y ago
  > Tesla should be the one providing the data showing that it is safe for their software to be on the road The linked article is literally about the data Tesla provides showing that their vehicles are safe, and it doesn't even refute the conclusions. It's about nitpicking at the margins. To be clear: Tesla's data says autopilot use is about an order of magnitude safer than human driving. The author complains that this is confounded by the fact that AP is used in different conditions where the baseline accident rate is lower. You need a lot of confounding effect to make up for an order of magnitude delta! Seems like everyone wants to skip that part and yell about the CEO instead. The cars are safe. They are extremely common vehicles now. If they were unsafe we would know. We know they are safe. Any argument needs to treat with this truth, or it's basically just a conspiracy theory.
  - ra7 4y ago
    > It's about nitpicking at the margins. The article is not nitpicking at the margins. It's showing how Tesla is making misleading claims out of their insufficient data by not accounting for operating conditions. That's literally how Tesla is claiming Autopilot is "an order of magnitude safer than human driving". > You need a lot of confounding effect to make up for an order of magnitude delta! Or you could just make misleading comparisons to claim that. That's pretty easy too.
    - ajross 4y ago
      It's just tiresome. You know the cars are safe. You want to say they're unsafe. But you can't, because they're safe. So you're yelling about what amounts to marketing strategy. Which, fine. Everyone does bad marketing, there's lots to yell about. Maybe consider yelling about the deceptive marketing practices of a product you do use? There are lots to choose from.
      - ra7 4y ago
        "Our cars are safe" "Show us unbiased data proving it" "If it were unsafe, we would know" Sigh. I own a Tesla and use FSD, but thanks for assuming.
jackmott42 4y ago
Many people take the view that you shouldn't introduce a radical change in how cars work until it is proven safe, rather than feeling it should be allowed on public roads until it is proven unsafe.
- try_the_bass 4y ago
  It seems like it's impossible to prove that it's safe on public roads without actually using it on public roads, though? Wouldn't that be an impossible ask, by definition?
  - kibwen 4y ago
    It is entirely possible to test things under controlled trials to simulate real-world conditions. To use an analogy, we don't just test new medicines by putting them on the shelves and waiting for consumers to report side effects. We have strenuous trials first to give us baseline confidence in the product.
    - try_the_bass 4y ago
      I would argue that it's impossible to simulate real-world conditions for a task as complex as driving. There are too many edge cases and different combinations of environmental factors, many of which involve the inherent unpredictability of other drivers. I would assume medicines have similar or higher levels of complexity involved. However, the medicine analogy is poor. We often release medicines for use even when they have incredibly harmful side-effects. We do the testing to quantify and understand those side-effects, not prove that each medicine does exactly what it should with no side effects.
  - cptcobalt 4y ago
    Exactly. There's no better facsimilie for the sheer variety of public roads than, well, public roads. Tesla even has rigorous simulation in place for hostile situations that should never occur on public roads: A good general overview from two minute papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkiTejoyms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkiTejoyms Tesla's AI Day 2022 video, timestamped around labeling and simulation https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=6037 https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=6037
jjoonathan 4y ago
Yes, and we have to mind the denominator too. Waymo just announced 1 million self driving miles, Tesla just announced 150 million self driving miles.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Waymo had 20 million self driving miles on public roads in 2021. Earlier this year, Waymo announced 1 million self driving miles on public roads with nobody in the driver's seat. Tesla has 0 such miles.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Thanks for clarifying! So Tesla has 7x the miles and so if their test program is riskier we should expect to see >7x the number of accidents.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      We see far more than 7x at fault accidents. As far as I know, Waymo has had none. Tesla has had so many that it had to post a recall notice.
    - bradtemp 4y ago
      No because when Tesla's system has a problem, as my car does a few times each trip, I grab the wheel. And waymo also has cars with safety drivers but also has run a million miles without one. Run Tesla FSD with no intervention for a million miles and it would have thousands of accidents. Thousands, where it was at fault. Waymo had 2 or 3 minor parking lot style no damage contacts in their million. Not thousands
- ra7 4y ago
  Waymo self driving is not at all the same as Tesla’s. One is fully driverless and the other requires driver monitoring.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
MBCook 4y ago
Only Tesla has that data, so no one can link to it. If it showed things were better than average it would fit their message and I’d expect them to publish it. If it showed things were average it would not fit their narrative. If it showed things were worse it would contradict their narrative. Seems like there is only one reason to withhold numbers or publish them in a misleading way. They prove your claims that your tech is way safer wrong in some way.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Tesla has said they intend to pick the "better than human" fight at 5 billion miles, when they believe their advantage will be decisive rather than having an outcome that depends on how you count.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    So... until they reach that number, they'll publish misleading stats (i.e. outcomes that favor them depending on how they count)?
  - hansvm 4y ago
    Even then there'll be a distribution shift effect they need to account for. Not everyone is allowed into the FSD program, and the fact that they're self-selecting to use FSD additionally biases the roads and conditions where they choose to do so. Moreover, how you count is still very relevant if all the hairy events happen when a human operator takes control -- the car screwed up, but the resulting crash gets blamed on the operator who couldn't react to the ensuing shitshow in time, and even if total crashes/fatalities are lower when counting those events you still have the self-selection problem of perhaps those FSD operators in those conditions being better at recovery from car-induced errors than the general population in arbitrary conditions would be. Like...maybe it's fine. But even at 0 fatal crashes in 5 billion miles they won't have a strong argument that a more widely deployed FSD would have similar success without a lot more data to explain how the thing they measured directly connects to the thing they'll want to claim it represents.
    - 4y ago
simondotau 4y ago
It’s rather telling that the reply saying “show me evidence” is being voted down while the assertions mixed with disdain for Musk are being voted up. Look, I get that Musk isn’t popular here. But please, give me some hope for humanity and at least pretend to care about facts and evidence.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  Our point of view is that we should not allow beta self driving software on the roads until it is proven safe. We do not know how safe it is, nor can we know because Tesla controls that data and is not transparent with it.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    Should we allow teenagers to drive on the road before they have proven to be safe? We don’t know how safe they are.
    - jackmott42 4y ago
      No, we should require that they pass a driving test, pay for insurance, and register their vehicle with license plates. If I were emperor I would raise the driving age to 18 as well. vote often, vote early
      - simondotau 4y ago
        A person who was passed a driving test, paid for insurance and registered the vehicle is responsible for the car at all times, even when FSD beta is operating. Come to Australia, the driving age here is 18. (And for your first three years as a licensed driver, you have to show plates to indicate your lack of experience because, unlike in the stupid USA, we don’t assume that passing one driving test is enough to qualify you as a “good driver”.)
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      No, and we don't. That's why driving instruction and driving tests exist.
kaba0 4y ago
Where is the data showing that heroin is not good at curing COVID?

drowsspa 4y ago

Honestly, all due to the Musk influence you can "move fast and break things" even when it comes to 1-ton machines with humans inside moving at 80 miles an hour. That Tesla was allowed to test in production with basically no legal liability is so messed up

ajross 4y ago
FWIW: Tesla is absolutely liable for any damages resulting from AP/FSD usage. They aren't protected in any way by law or regulation. You want to sue them, you go right ahead. Normally I'd expect the fact that they aren't losing these suits regularly to factor as a prior in people's opinions about the cars' safety. But I've also been in enough of these threads to know that it's actually all about people's opinions of the CEO and not the product.
- bradtemp 4y ago
  That's not correct, they are no more liable than carmakers are if you are using cruise control. Unless you can show in court that their system was defective. It is designed to not be able to do the full driving task, to need interventions. It performs as designed.
  - ajross 4y ago
    Isn't that what I said? The logic above would work the same for cruise control. If you ship a bad cruise control or other automation system, you get sued and lose. Toyota paid out more than a billion dollars a few years back due to[1] problems with their fly-by-wire accelerator design. It's not like you can't punish an automaker for safety issues. They get sued all the time, successfully. Except, notably, the one you want to yell about the most. I'm just saying that should maybe be part of your analysis. Look. The cars are safe. We've been having the same argument, again and again, for years and years now. People show up in these threads just taking as a given that these systems are unsafe, and refuse to adjust that prior as these cars become some of the most popular products as a market. [1] What were perceived as -- IIRC it's since been argued that the problem in the suit didn't actually exist. And they settled anyway!

rvz 4y ago

There is a very good reason why people don't trust this absolute snake oil in the first place other than it being pushed by Tesla and Elon. FSD (Fools Self Driving) feature is a complete scam with dangerous and deceptive advertising putting the lives of the driver and others at risk. The Tesla vehicles themselves are not.

programmarchy 4y ago
Elon is obviously doing many stupid things but there’s many smart people at Tesla working on this issue so it’s not exactly a complete scam. Isn’t it more realistic that FSD is one of those classic engineering problems where the last 10% takes 90% of the effort? Also, the “move fast and break things” is symptomatic of the broader tech industry. Despite being glorified for decades, it’s become a toxic mentality that’s hurt us with social media, and is now exponentially more pronounced with AI. Sure, maybe Elon should be “made an example of”, but collectively we need to sober up and realize this is a systematic issue in tech rather than scapegoating one eccentric billionaire.
- taylodl 4y ago
  "Move fast and break things" isn't entirely inappropriate in the world of non-consequential software, i.e. software not affecting lives or money. But for software affecting lives (people could die) or money (deposits and transfers could go awry) then "move fast and break things" is unethical. Obviously this bit would apply to things such as cars and airplanes, too. You really don't want us building the controls of a nuclear power plant, do you? Probably not. I'm appalled the NTSB hasn't reigned in Tesla. I'm cynical enough to start wondering what officials they've "bought off."
  - programmarchy 4y ago
    Would it be unethical if FSD Beta causes 1,000 fatalities but FSD 1.0 prevents 1,000,000 fatalities? Real world training data is needed to get from Beta to 1.0. Seems like you are oversimplifying the ethical decision being made by NTSB.

starbase 4y ago

> only to be used with the driver constantly monitoring and being aware, but that's an unrealistic expectation FSD monitors the driver for indicators of inattention, e.g. not looking at the road. First you get a visual alert, then a shrill alarm, and if you're still not paying attention the vehicle slows to a stop. Drivers with a history of inattention are locked out of FSD. Contrast with traditional cruise control where you can fall asleep at the wheel going 100mph and it'll hold that speed until you crash. Of course no one wrings their hands about that.

kaba0 4y ago
People suck at context switching. Even if the driver is looking at the road, they can’t suddenly be put in the context and expect to do well.