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Get a Tesla if you want to learn about AI trying to kill you, says Steve Wozniak

131 points by clouddrover 4y ago

clouddrover 4y ago
The relevant section of the interview: https://youtu.be/OU9cKjWsvH0?t=499 https://youtu.be/OU9cKjWsvH0?t=499
gfody 4y ago
the very first time I tried fsd beta the car immediately tried to crash me into a lightpole. it was an unsettling experience. still the best car I've ever owned by far.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I love these Tesla reviews, which sound like a battered wife: "Sure, he slaps me around sometimes, but he's still the love of my life."
  - EngManagerIsMe 4y ago
    Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company... The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I remember years ago seeing videos/posts about how much safer the Tesla was as far as build qualities. I don't know if those are still there, but surely they have been watered down with all of the software so the overall rating of the car is much less.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
    That's the nature on fanboyism. I met an apple fanboy recently. His thing was that apple is amazing because they care the most about user experience, the design is so amazing, and it's so much better than anything else! After he talked at length about how everything about apple is great, I said that I'd learned that apple made iphones slow on purpose 3 years in and when caught said it was about saving battery. I said that's not a good user experience to me, if the phone becomes slow after 3 years. He told me that _his own iphone_ is going thru that, and he still hadn't time to buy a new one but he was going to, but it was great because it was a conscious design choice by apple. These people are just brainwashed by a brand.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      Your misrepresentation of the issue reeks of ideological fanboyism itself. As the battery ages, running at peak power can lead to random shutdowns/restarts. Apple chose to throttle the devices (which in most use cases is basically imperceptible) to avoid random shutdowns of the device, which in my view is indeed a better user experience. I have seen no indication that competing phones do not suffer the same issue. The notion that Apple deliberately hobbled their devices to reduce their lifetime in order to encourage sales is ludicrous; iPhones hold their resale value far better than other phones. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387 https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/21/iphone-trade-in-value/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/21/iphone-trade-in-value/
      - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
        > Your misrepresentation of the issue reeks of ideological fanboyism itself. What am I a fanboy of?
  - strken 4y ago
    In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using it. "He's a good dog, but he's completely uncontrollable if you take him to the beach because he tries to swim straight into the sea": well, if you don't go to the beach there's no problem.
    - svachalek 4y ago
      It's a $15000 product. There's nothing fair about saying "just don't use it". That's not even a valid excuse for when your $2 flashlight doesn't make light.
    - rodgerd 4y ago
      > In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using i I wasn't aware that I could disable FSD for Tesla owners when they're using the roads in my city. Could you point to that feature, please?
      - dylan604 4y ago
        Maybe that's one of the things you can get in the Nokia chassis hacking device floating around?
      - strken 4y ago
        The question there is whether Tesla owners are more likely to kill you than other drivers. I have no data on it.
  - NegativeK 4y ago
    Unlike an abusive spouse, Tesla's dangerous features are opt in. I love my Tesla. I think FSD is a horseshit scam with some neat tech that's nowhere near ready for the public. Fortunately, I don't pay for it, so it doesn't affect what I do with my car. I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth. And those in the middle generally wander off to do something far more productive literally anywhere else on the internet.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Nuance in an internet argument? Well I never!
      - ben0x539 4y ago
        Surely nuance doesn't always make for a better argument!
    - keyle 4y ago
      > I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth They sold it as autopilot. If you market something to do X and it does Y, you're bound to get people upset. Especially when it costs a chunk of the moon.
      - burnished 4y ago
        The people being upset don't seem to be the same as the people owning the Tesla's though? Just gauging from HN discussions, the comments with the most moral outrage seem to be coming from a place of pure principle. Edit: I scroll down and the first thing I see is a first person account of some one having sold theirs after disliking the overall experience, turning white. Welp, guess this is an opinion I should reflect on.
      - keldaris 4y ago
adoxyz 4y ago
Where's the lie?
ThunderBee 4y ago
Musk was definitely overly optimistic on the FSD timeline but the hate is pretty wild. Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver?
- mplewis 4y ago
  Tesla driving stats are cherry-picked, biased by the population of people with enough money to own a Tesla, biased by the locations where Teslas are driven, and doesn’t consider the failure modes that Autopilot faces that human drivers generally avoid (e.g. shearing off the side of a parked ambulance).
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    you haven't made a convincing refutation of what he asked. For example, Tesla autopilot might have failure modes that human drivers avoid, but while that could be a PR nightmare for the technology wouldn't necessarily outweigh Teslas doing other things better that humans are poor at. And if people who can afford better cars driving better is true(?), that's a fact you'd get downvoted to hell for (unfairly) around here if you just stated it in a freestanding way.
  - sidibe 4y ago
    Most importantly: biased by the locations where drivers feel comfortable using autopilot. These numbers should only be compared to miles on cruise control in other cars.
- taneq 4y ago
  The closer you look at those statistics the more questionable they are. You can’t directly compare ‘overall crashes per kilometre across all human drivers and conditions’ with ‘crashes per kilometre while autopilot is active’ when autopilot being active implies: - driving on a divided highway (what’s the actual prerequisite?) - good enough weather for autopilot to engage - in a relatively new, high end luxury vehicle which is likely to be well maintained and have better handling and braking than average vehicles - likely to be driven by older middle-class drivers less prone to risk-taking - unclear what the cutoff is between ‘autopilot driving’ and ‘human driving’ during a crash, if autopilot disengaged before impact does that count as human or autopilot driving?
wedn3sday 4y ago
Yes, my model 3 once tried to run me into a semi, on the other hand I watch human drivers nearly kill pedestrians (myself included) on a daily bases.
wudangmonk 4y ago
"I think his point might be valid for gpt3.5 but has he tried 4.0? its on a completely different level, a game changer!." This is pretty much what I have come to expect from any post that has the words "AI" attached to it. As far as the tesla is concerned, its fun watching the screen to see what it identifies, and its cruise control works pretty well but the FSD should NEVER EVER be used. I test it every now and then against some freeway separators, and 5 years later its still trying to crash into them because somehow the road markers trump over the side collision detectors that are telling it there is a wall on that side.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  It's funny how all the grifters have moved on. Okay, the cars still can't drive themselves, but now surely AI is a year away from being conscious!
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Or, in a slightly less jaded take, the dreamers. Maybe not everyone excited by technology is trying to cheat you?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Both exist. I’ve seen a good number of folks who’ve gone from cryptocurrency to NFTs to AI in fairly quick succession, and I’m inclined to see that as grift.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Maybe just the majority, but I'd flip it as well and say a lot of people seeking investment are also pushing AI on the dumbest things. I've just stepped back from a company that was doing this claiming they are using AI but only in rewriting marketing blurbs or something along the lines of analyzing log files, but zero usage in the actual workflows/products of the company. Reeks of desperation, or scammy to be less generous.
rvz 4y ago
He's right you know. Installing Tesla FSD puts your car on LSD and hallucinates the moon as a yellow traffic light to slow down in the middle of the high way and runs into bright red emergency cars on the road. Nothing short of AI snake oil that puts the lives of drivers on the road at risk.
seshagiric 4y ago
Will autonomous driving help minimize auto-accidents? Yes. Is the technology there yet? No.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Will banning all human agency help minimize accidents of all kinds in life? Yes. Do we want to? No.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Human agency to impart 782,000 newtons at will regardless of intoxication, skill, alertness, etc causes accidents that kill and maim an awful lot of people. I for one look forward to the day that idiot weaving through traffic at 80mph in an enormous SUV agency is banned for my, my families, and everyone else’s sake.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      Do you also look forward to not being able to do anything else either? Because that's where things are heading if you continue to choose safety over freedom.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        You could make that argument about anything. You could make that argument about needing a license, or how you're not allowed to take a turn driving a plane.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        The bulk of our society seems to be losing the ability to be self-responsible and behaves erratically and dangerously and then blames everyone around them when it goes wrong. If that continues then the logical result is going to be the restriction of freedoms. If you want to fix that, you need to do something about the rising narcissism and irresponsibility in society. If you just try to lecture people about safety-vs-freedom, then you will be losing your freedom.
m463 4y ago
autopilot 1 is actually not that bad - if you understand the limitations. Just don't use it in town, and do your own steering on extremely curvy roads. I don't think it's any different from understanding the limitations of cruise control. If you stay aware, it can do a lot of work for you. (autopilot 1 is the first mobileye version)
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  If you can’t use it in town or on curvy roads, how is it better than my base model Forester’s lane/distance keeping? Every time someone explains the features to me, they all sound cool and my interest is piqued, but I never quite grok what it practically does that would change daily driving for me. I think lane changing might be neat but I just don’t do that much on the highway? For me the massive advancement was getting a car with EyeSight and now it keeps me in the lane and evenly spaced and makes stop and go traffic painless. Oh and all the safety stopping systems. Every car should have those! Beyond that feels like diminishing returns until we get to some new level of autonomy which no car currently has.
  - burnished 4y ago
    Does EyeSight do everything except change lanes/make 90 degree turns? Like, to the extent that it requires human oversight for safety reasons but is practically sufficient on its own? Because what you are describing is 100% of what I liked about the Tesla's capabilities.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      As long as the highway has half-decently painted lines. I can drive from London to Toronto without having to “drive.” It will get angry if my hand is off the wheel though so I just keep them there and feel the car making every curve and such. It will slow if traffic slows then speed back up. It’ll do stop and go traffic without me touching a pedal. It does curves better than I ever expected it to. Any curve you find on a highway it’ll handle. It can do some off-ramps if they’re not super tight. But I don’t generally trust it to do those. I don’t trust it on non-divided country roads so I don’t really try. And it turns itself off fully if there’s too much rain or snow. I test drove a Mazda… 5? Whatever the comparable is, and a Honda CRV and their systems didn’t come close. Couldn’t even tell if the Mazda’s was enabled. The CRV bounced from line to line in the lane. They use radar and a single tiny camera. EyeSight uses two big stereo cameras which I guess is the difference.
this_steve_j 4y ago
Get a Volvo if you want to learn about cars trying to not kill you, says Steve Notwosniak. The Volvo Cars Safety Centre crash lab opened in 2000 and contains two test tracks of 108 and 154 metres long respectively. The shorter of the two is moveable and can be positioned at an angle between 0 and 90 degrees, allowing for crash test at different angles and speeds, or to simulate a crash between two moving cars. Cars are crashed at speeds up to 120 km/h. Outside, there is room for performing tests like roll-over crashes and run-off road scenarios, whereby cars are launched into a ditch at high speeds. Here, Volvo Cars also offers rescue services opportunities to hone their life-saving skills, as it did earlier this year when it dropped new Volvos from a height of 30 metres to simulate the heavy damage found in extreme crash scenarios. https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/275423/two-decades-in-the-service-of-saving-lives-volvo-cars-safety-centre-celebrates-20-years https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
- badwolf 4y ago
  Volvo really is impressive with how much they put into safety and testing. As for self-driving, I've had great driving experiences with their Pilot Assist.
- testfrequency 4y ago
  If Volvos are supposed to be the safest cars, why are they often not given top performance marks by the IIHS? I get that Volvo’s whole image is their safety, but real world data does not back that up entirely
  - digdugdirk 4y ago
    I would be interested to see actual "real world" data vs "standard crash test" data. It's much easier to design something for excellent performance on a small subset of rigorously defined tests, vs designing for any/every possible outcome.
  - nickvanw 4y ago
    They do generally receive favorable marks by the IIHS: https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-the-highest-iihs-1846801481 https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-.... Even updated tests (released post-launch of the car) tend to treat them pretty favorably: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-industrys-revamped-frontal-crash-tests/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-... I think of the IIHS as a sort of benchmarking organization - not representative of the real world like any microbenchmark, but also correlated with production performance on some level. They seem to do quite well in their microbenchmarks.
chasing 4y ago
My Tesla erratically turns the bright headlights on at seemingly random times like when I’m pulling into my covered driveway when it’s cloudy or at night when I’m driving right behind someone. I figure this is actually a good thing: Reminds me to not turn on any other more potentially-destructive AI-powered features.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  My Tesla consistently believes there's a big rig parked next to it in my garage. Not kidding.
  - givemeethekeys 4y ago
    Is there a way to calm it down by turning off some features? I ask because I'm in the "hey, I love the range, and simplicity.. would buy one as soon as I can afford it.. just don't care about anything beyond cruise control" camp.
    - robotresearcher 4y ago
      I have turned on the 'visualize everything that is perceived' feature, which is disabled by default. I don’t have FSD. I am not encouraged to buy it, based on what the car perceives.
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      You have to turn them off on each drive. You can just cruise control on it’s own - it works really well.
  - qwerpy 4y ago
    Mine too. It also thinks my partially raised garage door is a truck, when the door is about 3 ft in the air, where a truck's tailgate would be. When actually on the road it's decent at identifying things without false positives.
  - schappim 4y ago
    FYI, there's actually a big rig parked next to my garage. Not kidding.
sashank_1509 4y ago
Lots of “Tesla FSD Beta almost killed me” in the comments here but then I see hundreds of videos like this: https://youtu.be/Mj6vXnEYAUg https://youtu.be/Mj6vXnEYAUg I choose to believe my eyes, it seems like FSD Beta can see almost everything a human sees. In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human. It’s planning needs some work, it seems to lack longer term planning, frequently putting itself in positions where it needs to do 3-4 quick consecutive lane changes. You may hate Elons politics, but the FSD Beta has been released to 100k+ Tesla owners and it’s not inconceivable that no one will be in the drivers seat in the next 5 yrs. Edit: as mentioned in the comments below FSD can’t handle parking lots which is annoying because that was the one place I hoped it would work the most.
- ra7 4y ago
  > In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human. Is this from personal experience of using FSD Beta or are you relying purely on YouTube videos to assess its performance? Because not everyone drives around recording videos for YouTube.
  - sashank_1509 4y ago
    I use it every time I take my Tesla out unless I feel like driving. I rarely intervene on my drive to work. But honestly I’m not impressed by this because this was true a year ago, FSD has no problem with the light traffic roads of the Bay Area. FSD also I’ve found rarely has issues in SF, it can infamously do the Lombard Street in SF with no problems but I’m guessing it’s overfit to SF at this point since the FSD team is in the bay area. I’m more intrigued by the YouTube videos of people trying it out in Florida, Texas etc.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    I’ve been using FSD in my 3 for months now and I’d miss a car without it. It’s still definitely beta quality, but it’s a clear step up from enhanced autopilot and can take me from the on-ramp to my office without intervention (about thirty miles in California’s central coast). It would be door-to-door, but it doesn’t work well in parking lots and there’s a couple complicated intersections in my small town that it can’t handle yet.
senectus1 4y ago
I have a 2023 Rav4 with lane assist and adaptive curise control. these "AI" or simple self driving features are really showing me the fallibility of self driving. the car panics at silly things, and is entirely too aggressive with braking. Its also quite daft in the times when it just wont use braking like going downhill in adaptive cruise control, the car will not use brakes to stay within the speed limit when going downhill. It will just beep really annoyingly (no it cant be turned off). but if a car in front of it starts slowing down it will be quite happy to heavily slam the brakes on (nothing dangerous, just that its either on or off.. it wont graduate the application). I know Tesla's version is an order of magnitude better but i can easily see how it can be fooled or do the wrong thing. I wouldn't trust it un attended.
antipaul 4y ago
> It looks like Woz is not scared of Tesla’s “hardcore litigation” team, which has been a bit trigger-happy when it comes to suing people for defamation lately. Anyone can expand?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  That quote has links in the article. Following it has lots more detailed information.
yalogin 4y ago
Oh no! I have a lot of respect for Wozniak. Now I have to watch musk call him all kinds of names. I shudder to imagine how nasty and petty musk will get.
floatinglotus 4y ago
I tried the self driving mode and it couldn’t handle a very popular and common road in Pennsylvania. I have a friend who had his Tesla in the shop for 2 months and literally had no alternate car for this period. Autonomous driving is not real. Do not believe Elon-hype. The cars have a surprisingly high number of defects and bizarre issues.
machdiamonds 4y ago
For people that care about statistics rather than anecdotes: "In the last 12 months, a Tesla with FSD Beta engaged experienced an airbag-deployed crash about every 3.2 M miles, which is ~5x safer than the most recently available US average of 0.6M miles/police-reported crash" - https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1631063252875505669?lang=en https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1631063252875505669?lang=en
- TheAlchemist 4y ago
  If you really care about statistics, you will look into how biased their data is. It's intentional and very misleading. As per your own link - it's comparing apple to oranges (airbag-deployed crash vs police-reported crash). It's not accounting for different drivers or road profiles. Check some independent reviews of the data - it paints a very different picture from what Tesla would like us to believe.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  For people that care about statistics rather than advertising: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-again-paints-a-very-misleading-story-with-their-crash-data/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-...
calvinmorrison 4y ago
I saw steve Wozniak speak at a business event less than two months ago. I was falling asleep after hours of business boring. When asked about - in regard to AI - how these technology leaders should be held accountable, he quoth Dr. Ted Kaczynski and mumbled something about execution. After a brief pause he walked it back but it sure woke me up!
dietsche 4y ago
My Tesla has been great. It saw a pedestrian in all black at night in a cross walk that I didn’t see. The car stopped, and I think it saved a life. Auto pilot is super nice on the Highway and in stop and go traffic. FSD drives like an 8 year old stole the car and is driving for the first time :) TLDR we’re going on a road trip next month and taking the Tesla. When taking the jeep was mentioned, no one wanted to drive, lol!
Tommstein 4y ago
Rented a Tesla for a day back in 2021 and tried to let it drive itself, can confirm it spent the day trying to murder me.

131 points by clouddrover 4y ago

The relevant section of the interview: https://youtu.be/OU9cKjWsvH0?t=499 https://youtu.be/OU9cKjWsvH0?t=499

the very first time I tried fsd beta the car immediately tried to crash me into a lightpole. it was an unsettling experience. still the best car I've ever owned by far.

jiggawatts 4y ago
I love these Tesla reviews, which sound like a battered wife: "Sure, he slaps me around sometimes, but he's still the love of my life."
- EngManagerIsMe 4y ago
  Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company... The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I remember years ago seeing videos/posts about how much safer the Tesla was as far as build qualities. I don't know if those are still there, but surely they have been watered down with all of the software so the overall rating of the car is much less.
- hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
  That's the nature on fanboyism. I met an apple fanboy recently. His thing was that apple is amazing because they care the most about user experience, the design is so amazing, and it's so much better than anything else! After he talked at length about how everything about apple is great, I said that I'd learned that apple made iphones slow on purpose 3 years in and when caught said it was about saving battery. I said that's not a good user experience to me, if the phone becomes slow after 3 years. He told me that _his own iphone_ is going thru that, and he still hadn't time to buy a new one but he was going to, but it was great because it was a conscious design choice by apple. These people are just brainwashed by a brand.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Your misrepresentation of the issue reeks of ideological fanboyism itself. As the battery ages, running at peak power can lead to random shutdowns/restarts. Apple chose to throttle the devices (which in most use cases is basically imperceptible) to avoid random shutdowns of the device, which in my view is indeed a better user experience. I have seen no indication that competing phones do not suffer the same issue. The notion that Apple deliberately hobbled their devices to reduce their lifetime in order to encourage sales is ludicrous; iPhones hold their resale value far better than other phones. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387 https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/21/iphone-trade-in-value/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/21/iphone-trade-in-value/
    - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
      > Your misrepresentation of the issue reeks of ideological fanboyism itself. What am I a fanboy of?
- strken 4y ago
  In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using it. "He's a good dog, but he's completely uncontrollable if you take him to the beach because he tries to swim straight into the sea": well, if you don't go to the beach there's no problem.
  - svachalek 4y ago
    It's a $15000 product. There's nothing fair about saying "just don't use it". That's not even a valid excuse for when your $2 flashlight doesn't make light.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    > In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using i I wasn't aware that I could disable FSD for Tesla owners when they're using the roads in my city. Could you point to that feature, please?
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Maybe that's one of the things you can get in the Nokia chassis hacking device floating around?
    - strken 4y ago
      The question there is whether Tesla owners are more likely to kill you than other drivers. I have no data on it.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  Unlike an abusive spouse, Tesla's dangerous features are opt in. I love my Tesla. I think FSD is a horseshit scam with some neat tech that's nowhere near ready for the public. Fortunately, I don't pay for it, so it doesn't affect what I do with my car. I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth. And those in the middle generally wander off to do something far more productive literally anywhere else on the internet.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Nuance in an internet argument? Well I never!
    - ben0x539 4y ago
      Surely nuance doesn't always make for a better argument!
  - keyle 4y ago
    > I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth They sold it as autopilot. If you market something to do X and it does Y, you're bound to get people upset. Especially when it costs a chunk of the moon.
    - burnished 4y ago
      The people being upset don't seem to be the same as the people owning the Tesla's though? Just gauging from HN discussions, the comments with the most moral outrage seem to be coming from a place of pure principle. Edit: I scroll down and the first thing I see is a first person account of some one having sold theirs after disliking the overall experience, turning white. Welp, guess this is an opinion I should reflect on.
    - keldaris 4y ago

adoxyz 4y ago

Where's the lie?

ThunderBee 4y ago

Musk was definitely overly optimistic on the FSD timeline but the hate is pretty wild. Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver?

mplewis 4y ago
Tesla driving stats are cherry-picked, biased by the population of people with enough money to own a Tesla, biased by the locations where Teslas are driven, and doesn’t consider the failure modes that Autopilot faces that human drivers generally avoid (e.g. shearing off the side of a parked ambulance).
- fsckboy 4y ago
  you haven't made a convincing refutation of what he asked. For example, Tesla autopilot might have failure modes that human drivers avoid, but while that could be a PR nightmare for the technology wouldn't necessarily outweigh Teslas doing other things better that humans are poor at. And if people who can afford better cars driving better is true(?), that's a fact you'd get downvoted to hell for (unfairly) around here if you just stated it in a freestanding way.
- sidibe 4y ago
  Most importantly: biased by the locations where drivers feel comfortable using autopilot. These numbers should only be compared to miles on cruise control in other cars.
taneq 4y ago
The closer you look at those statistics the more questionable they are. You can’t directly compare ‘overall crashes per kilometre across all human drivers and conditions’ with ‘crashes per kilometre while autopilot is active’ when autopilot being active implies: - driving on a divided highway (what’s the actual prerequisite?) - good enough weather for autopilot to engage - in a relatively new, high end luxury vehicle which is likely to be well maintained and have better handling and braking than average vehicles - likely to be driven by older middle-class drivers less prone to risk-taking - unclear what the cutoff is between ‘autopilot driving’ and ‘human driving’ during a crash, if autopilot disengaged before impact does that count as human or autopilot driving?

wedn3sday 4y ago

Yes, my model 3 once tried to run me into a semi, on the other hand I watch human drivers nearly kill pedestrians (myself included) on a daily bases.

wudangmonk 4y ago

"I think his point might be valid for gpt3.5 but has he tried 4.0? its on a completely different level, a game changer!." This is pretty much what I have come to expect from any post that has the words "AI" attached to it. As far as the tesla is concerned, its fun watching the screen to see what it identifies, and its cruise control works pretty well but the FSD should NEVER EVER be used. I test it every now and then against some freeway separators, and 5 years later its still trying to crash into them because somehow the road markers trump over the side collision detectors that are telling it there is a wall on that side.

stefan_ 4y ago
It's funny how all the grifters have moved on. Okay, the cars still can't drive themselves, but now surely AI is a year away from being conscious!
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Or, in a slightly less jaded take, the dreamers. Maybe not everyone excited by technology is trying to cheat you?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Both exist. I’ve seen a good number of folks who’ve gone from cryptocurrency to NFTs to AI in fairly quick succession, and I’m inclined to see that as grift.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Maybe just the majority, but I'd flip it as well and say a lot of people seeking investment are also pushing AI on the dumbest things. I've just stepped back from a company that was doing this claiming they are using AI but only in rewriting marketing blurbs or something along the lines of analyzing log files, but zero usage in the actual workflows/products of the company. Reeks of desperation, or scammy to be less generous.

rvz 4y ago

He's right you know. Installing Tesla FSD puts your car on LSD and hallucinates the moon as a yellow traffic light to slow down in the middle of the high way and runs into bright red emergency cars on the road. Nothing short of AI snake oil that puts the lives of drivers on the road at risk.

seshagiric 4y ago

Will autonomous driving help minimize auto-accidents? Yes. Is the technology there yet? No.

userbinator 4y ago
Will banning all human agency help minimize accidents of all kinds in life? Yes. Do we want to? No.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Human agency to impart 782,000 newtons at will regardless of intoxication, skill, alertness, etc causes accidents that kill and maim an awful lot of people. I for one look forward to the day that idiot weaving through traffic at 80mph in an enormous SUV agency is banned for my, my families, and everyone else’s sake.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Do you also look forward to not being able to do anything else either? Because that's where things are heading if you continue to choose safety over freedom.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      You could make that argument about anything. You could make that argument about needing a license, or how you're not allowed to take a turn driving a plane.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      The bulk of our society seems to be losing the ability to be self-responsible and behaves erratically and dangerously and then blames everyone around them when it goes wrong. If that continues then the logical result is going to be the restriction of freedoms. If you want to fix that, you need to do something about the rising narcissism and irresponsibility in society. If you just try to lecture people about safety-vs-freedom, then you will be losing your freedom.

m463 4y ago

autopilot 1 is actually not that bad - if you understand the limitations. Just don't use it in town, and do your own steering on extremely curvy roads. I don't think it's any different from understanding the limitations of cruise control. If you stay aware, it can do a lot of work for you. (autopilot 1 is the first mobileye version)

Waterluvian 4y ago
If you can’t use it in town or on curvy roads, how is it better than my base model Forester’s lane/distance keeping? Every time someone explains the features to me, they all sound cool and my interest is piqued, but I never quite grok what it practically does that would change daily driving for me. I think lane changing might be neat but I just don’t do that much on the highway? For me the massive advancement was getting a car with EyeSight and now it keeps me in the lane and evenly spaced and makes stop and go traffic painless. Oh and all the safety stopping systems. Every car should have those! Beyond that feels like diminishing returns until we get to some new level of autonomy which no car currently has.
- burnished 4y ago
  Does EyeSight do everything except change lanes/make 90 degree turns? Like, to the extent that it requires human oversight for safety reasons but is practically sufficient on its own? Because what you are describing is 100% of what I liked about the Tesla's capabilities.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    As long as the highway has half-decently painted lines. I can drive from London to Toronto without having to “drive.” It will get angry if my hand is off the wheel though so I just keep them there and feel the car making every curve and such. It will slow if traffic slows then speed back up. It’ll do stop and go traffic without me touching a pedal. It does curves better than I ever expected it to. Any curve you find on a highway it’ll handle. It can do some off-ramps if they’re not super tight. But I don’t generally trust it to do those. I don’t trust it on non-divided country roads so I don’t really try. And it turns itself off fully if there’s too much rain or snow. I test drove a Mazda… 5? Whatever the comparable is, and a Honda CRV and their systems didn’t come close. Couldn’t even tell if the Mazda’s was enabled. The CRV bounced from line to line in the lane. They use radar and a single tiny camera. EyeSight uses two big stereo cameras which I guess is the difference.

this_steve_j 4y ago

Get a Volvo if you want to learn about cars trying to not kill you, says Steve Notwosniak. The Volvo Cars Safety Centre crash lab opened in 2000 and contains two test tracks of 108 and 154 metres long respectively. The shorter of the two is moveable and can be positioned at an angle between 0 and 90 degrees, allowing for crash test at different angles and speeds, or to simulate a crash between two moving cars. Cars are crashed at speeds up to 120 km/h. Outside, there is room for performing tests like roll-over crashes and run-off road scenarios, whereby cars are launched into a ditch at high speeds. Here, Volvo Cars also offers rescue services opportunities to hone their life-saving skills, as it did earlier this year when it dropped new Volvos from a height of 30 metres to simulate the heavy damage found in extreme crash scenarios. https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/275423/two-decades-in-the-service-of-saving-lives-volvo-cars-safety-centre-celebrates-20-years https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...

badwolf 4y ago
Volvo really is impressive with how much they put into safety and testing. As for self-driving, I've had great driving experiences with their Pilot Assist.
testfrequency 4y ago
If Volvos are supposed to be the safest cars, why are they often not given top performance marks by the IIHS? I get that Volvo’s whole image is their safety, but real world data does not back that up entirely
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  I would be interested to see actual "real world" data vs "standard crash test" data. It's much easier to design something for excellent performance on a small subset of rigorously defined tests, vs designing for any/every possible outcome.
- nickvanw 4y ago
  They do generally receive favorable marks by the IIHS: https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-the-highest-iihs-1846801481 https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-.... Even updated tests (released post-launch of the car) tend to treat them pretty favorably: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-industrys-revamped-frontal-crash-tests/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-... I think of the IIHS as a sort of benchmarking organization - not representative of the real world like any microbenchmark, but also correlated with production performance on some level. They seem to do quite well in their microbenchmarks.

chasing 4y ago

My Tesla erratically turns the bright headlights on at seemingly random times like when I’m pulling into my covered driveway when it’s cloudy or at night when I’m driving right behind someone. I figure this is actually a good thing: Reminds me to not turn on any other more potentially-destructive AI-powered features.

robotresearcher 4y ago
My Tesla consistently believes there's a big rig parked next to it in my garage. Not kidding.
- givemeethekeys 4y ago
  Is there a way to calm it down by turning off some features? I ask because I'm in the "hey, I love the range, and simplicity.. would buy one as soon as I can afford it.. just don't care about anything beyond cruise control" camp.
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    I have turned on the 'visualize everything that is perceived' feature, which is disabled by default. I don’t have FSD. I am not encouraged to buy it, based on what the car perceives.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    You have to turn them off on each drive. You can just cruise control on it’s own - it works really well.
- qwerpy 4y ago
  Mine too. It also thinks my partially raised garage door is a truck, when the door is about 3 ft in the air, where a truck's tailgate would be. When actually on the road it's decent at identifying things without false positives.
- schappim 4y ago
  FYI, there's actually a big rig parked next to my garage. Not kidding.

sashank_1509 4y ago

Lots of “Tesla FSD Beta almost killed me” in the comments here but then I see hundreds of videos like this: https://youtu.be/Mj6vXnEYAUg https://youtu.be/Mj6vXnEYAUg I choose to believe my eyes, it seems like FSD Beta can see almost everything a human sees. In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human. It’s planning needs some work, it seems to lack longer term planning, frequently putting itself in positions where it needs to do 3-4 quick consecutive lane changes. You may hate Elons politics, but the FSD Beta has been released to 100k+ Tesla owners and it’s not inconceivable that no one will be in the drivers seat in the next 5 yrs. Edit: as mentioned in the comments below FSD can’t handle parking lots which is annoying because that was the one place I hoped it would work the most.

ra7 4y ago
> In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human. Is this from personal experience of using FSD Beta or are you relying purely on YouTube videos to assess its performance? Because not everyone drives around recording videos for YouTube.
- sashank_1509 4y ago
  I use it every time I take my Tesla out unless I feel like driving. I rarely intervene on my drive to work. But honestly I’m not impressed by this because this was true a year ago, FSD has no problem with the light traffic roads of the Bay Area. FSD also I’ve found rarely has issues in SF, it can infamously do the Lombard Street in SF with no problems but I’m guessing it’s overfit to SF at this point since the FSD team is in the bay area. I’m more intrigued by the YouTube videos of people trying it out in Florida, Texas etc.
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  I’ve been using FSD in my 3 for months now and I’d miss a car without it. It’s still definitely beta quality, but it’s a clear step up from enhanced autopilot and can take me from the on-ramp to my office without intervention (about thirty miles in California’s central coast). It would be door-to-door, but it doesn’t work well in parking lots and there’s a couple complicated intersections in my small town that it can’t handle yet.

senectus1 4y ago

I have a 2023 Rav4 with lane assist and adaptive curise control. these "AI" or simple self driving features are really showing me the fallibility of self driving. the car panics at silly things, and is entirely too aggressive with braking. Its also quite daft in the times when it just wont use braking like going downhill in adaptive cruise control, the car will not use brakes to stay within the speed limit when going downhill. It will just beep really annoyingly (no it cant be turned off). but if a car in front of it starts slowing down it will be quite happy to heavily slam the brakes on (nothing dangerous, just that its either on or off.. it wont graduate the application). I know Tesla's version is an order of magnitude better but i can easily see how it can be fooled or do the wrong thing. I wouldn't trust it un attended.

antipaul 4y ago

> It looks like Woz is not scared of Tesla’s “hardcore litigation” team, which has been a bit trigger-happy when it comes to suing people for defamation lately. Anyone can expand?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
That quote has links in the article. Following it has lots more detailed information.

yalogin 4y ago

Oh no! I have a lot of respect for Wozniak. Now I have to watch musk call him all kinds of names. I shudder to imagine how nasty and petty musk will get.

floatinglotus 4y ago

I tried the self driving mode and it couldn’t handle a very popular and common road in Pennsylvania. I have a friend who had his Tesla in the shop for 2 months and literally had no alternate car for this period. Autonomous driving is not real. Do not believe Elon-hype. The cars have a surprisingly high number of defects and bizarre issues.

machdiamonds 4y ago

For people that care about statistics rather than anecdotes: "In the last 12 months, a Tesla with FSD Beta engaged experienced an airbag-deployed crash about every 3.2 M miles, which is ~5x safer than the most recently available US average of 0.6M miles/police-reported crash" - https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1631063252875505669?lang=en https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1631063252875505669?lang=en

TheAlchemist 4y ago
If you really care about statistics, you will look into how biased their data is. It's intentional and very misleading. As per your own link - it's comparing apple to oranges (airbag-deployed crash vs police-reported crash). It's not accounting for different drivers or road profiles. Check some independent reviews of the data - it paints a very different picture from what Tesla would like us to believe.
clouddrover 4y ago
For people that care about statistics rather than advertising: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-again-paints-a-very-misleading-story-with-their-crash-data/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-...

calvinmorrison 4y ago

I saw steve Wozniak speak at a business event less than two months ago. I was falling asleep after hours of business boring. When asked about - in regard to AI - how these technology leaders should be held accountable, he quoth Dr. Ted Kaczynski and mumbled something about execution. After a brief pause he walked it back but it sure woke me up!

dietsche 4y ago

My Tesla has been great. It saw a pedestrian in all black at night in a cross walk that I didn’t see. The car stopped, and I think it saved a life. Auto pilot is super nice on the Highway and in stop and go traffic. FSD drives like an 8 year old stole the car and is driving for the first time :) TLDR we’re going on a road trip next month and taking the Tesla. When taking the jeep was mentioned, no one wanted to drive, lol!

Tommstein 4y ago

Rented a Tesla for a day back in 2021 and tried to let it drive itself, can confirm it spent the day trying to murder me.