7 ms·

Looks like that intersection could fool a few human drivers too.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
Could it? There's a lot of signals pointing in different directions but it's pretty hard to miss both the one directly in front or the one right next to the car. Plus, if you see both red and green lights, your first instinct as a driver (human or not) should be to stop and re-examine more closely, not run through it.
wpsimon3 3y ago
True, but I suspect a human driver would take a moment to assess the situation instead of just continuing on confidently.
- tekla 3y ago
  If so, why didn't they tap the brake?
  - wpsimon3 3y ago
    I suspect the driver, based on their commentary in the video, was trying to see if this was a one-off fluke or something more consistent (they mention the car already blew through that light once before). I would hope a driver using FSD or any other system like it would be alert/aware to intervene...but for this video, it looks like they were trying to see how the car would react.
    - tekla 3y ago
      They could have run that same test at like 5-10 mph and accomplished the same thing without possibly causing an accident. This entirely feels like a manufactured scenario since they simply did not act like a informed driver, and decided to freak out.
      - nickthegreek 3y ago
        Are you stating that they did not have FSD on and simply faked it for the views?
        tekla 3y ago
        I'm insinuating they they knew they were approaching an intersection that they knew FSD had trouble with, purposefully did not slow down the cruise control to attempt a safe approach, and purposefully did not tap the brakes even when it was obvious the car was not stopping or slowing down in a safe manner, and then reacted on camera insinuating it was entirely surprising to them. If none of this is true, than they are incredibly shitty drivers that were not paying attention to what was happening and let the car cruise through a red light. The exact same scenario would have occurred with a standard 1990 era cruise control system.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        Well duh they're shitty drivers with no respect for a public road, they bought Tesla "full self driving" """beta""" and are testing it against unwilling other drivers! "They're a bad person so this must be fake", or maybe they're a bad person which is exactly why they thought doing something like this is okay
        nickthegreek 3y ago
        I agree with your first paragraph. They tested the red light issue after experiencing it to make sure it was not a fluke. Their yelling was unnecessary.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      You're saying the driver decided to experiment with this rather than following the law?
      - wpsimon3 3y ago
        ...yes? It's pretty clear from the video this was done as a "test." The article mentions the drivers experience working on FSD and they have a YouTube page dedicated to stuff like this linked in the article.
        tekla 3y ago
        So the test involved letting the car go at 30mph through a live intersection, not taking any emergency steps such as checks notes stepping on the brake when approaching the red light at 25mph, and then cursing about it afterwards and STILL not making any attempts to correct it?
        wpsimon3 3y ago
        Unfortunately, yeah, seems that way...just like you said "they chose to do nothing" and luckily no one was in/approaching the intersection. Look I'm all for knowing this information, that something like this can happen. But to be clear, in no way do I condone how it was done. This seems reckless for the sake of clicks.
  - stouset 3y ago
    For the same reason they shouted in fake surprise anger, despite clearly anticipating this would happen.
- TheHypnotist 3y ago
  Not true. This is very obviously a red light for that lane.
  - tekla 3y ago
    There is a green light literally right next to it. I was also initially confused as to which lane either was pointing at. They are not offset angle wise very much.
- hn_user82179 3y ago
  In general I agree, but yesterday I saw a car blow through a stop sign at an intersection and then honk at the cars going perpendicularly through the intersection (they had no stop signs) :/ people are pretty happy to be confidently wrong.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    And that's fine, but if you had a button to sell that exact person's driving to everyone as "full self driving", and you pressed it, I hope you understand most people would consider that a problem.
agloe_dreams 3y ago
Just watched the video. Any driver who cannot correctly tell on an oblique intersection which light is theirs is a driver who should be fined until they can..or have their license taken away. Any programmer can clearly tell why FSD got it wrong (It saw the glow of the other road's green light on the angle) but nonetheless it was wrong and legally wrong.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  Then the driver of that car should be fined and/or have their licence taken away.
  - lawn 3y ago
    Yes, the driver was absolutely irresponsible. But the serious issue with the FSD doesn't become moot because of this.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    While I agree, I think I need to wait until that package in that car is not called 'Full Self Driving'.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      I don't think that what some idiot company names things is an excuse for some idiot driver to risk people's lives.
    - valval 3y ago
      What about the part about it that says it’s in “beta” and requires the driver to pay full attention at all times?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Whoever is responsible for the intersection should also be fined. Our whole safety culture is based on being as clear as possible with redundancies from the consumer and the provider (i.e., assume the worst, provide the best).
pc86 3y ago
Absolutely, but I think what most humans would do is slow down - especially at night - and not go through the intersection at 27 when they were approaching at 30. FSD appears to just make a binary "go/stop" decision and commit fully rather than slowing down when there is decreased confidence as a person would/should. Definitely poor intersection design though as well. I've seen lights with extensions around the bulb to prevent them from being seen from obtuse angles, I wonder why these lights don't have those? Especially at night it would completely block your vision of the light(s) that don't apply to your road.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  If the Tesla's self driving software had to be limited in speed based on it's confidence, it wouldn't be able to driver faster than 15 mph. Tesla's self driving is ENTIRELY based around "Fuck it, I'll probably be fine"
  - valval 3y ago
    Source: just made it up
shiftpgdn 3y ago
Everyone always gets upset at me when I bring this up. The infamous fatal "autopiloted" Model X crash in the Bay Area happened because the road lanes were painted to drive the car into the narrow side of a jersey barrier. The next day a near fatal accident happened in the exact same spot, likely because Caltrans as an organization has little to no liability and generally doesn't stay on top of freeway conditions. There is an intersection in Houston that is one of the most dangerous in the USA that kills a dozen people a year due to poor design and planning from TxDOT. There are probably hundreds of intersections like this around the country that will need to be fixed. If I go paint road lines into a wall painted like a tunnel, are the drivers who hit the tunnel wall responsible, or is it me who painted the road lines?
- m463 3y ago
  I drove past the location of the model X crash shortly afterwards. The white lines of the two adjacent lanes made it look like there was a well-defined lane there, with the barrier right in the center. Here's a pretty good picture of what it looked like then: https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/model-x-barrier-crash-2018-image-700x433.jpg https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/m... You can see there is no hatching to make it obvious it was a non-drivable area. I would have expected something like this might have made a difference: https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png (that said, why didn't radar help?)
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    I don't buy any of the excuses, honestly. If the software can be that easily fooled by slightly broken white lines, it's not ready for release. That area of 101 simply isn't that difficult to parse (for humans). If it can't deal with that, how can it driven in places where the roads are truly awful? Lots of places in the USA alone with much worse road conditions than anything CalTrans is responsible for. Also, there's a huge yellow and black chevron block visible in that picture that any human driver paying attention would have seen and easily avoided. Crosshatching is unnecessary if you're paying the least bit of attention to what's in front of you. What was the software's issue here? It is absolutely a problem with the Tesla software that it wasn't able to parse that area properly. Doesn't necessarily mean the human driver wasn't at fault.
cddotdotslash 3y ago
It’s an extremely common pattern for the lights for one direction of an intersection to be visible from the other (usually at an angle). Very few human drivers would confuse the two. At the very least they would slow down until they were able to confirm rather than driving full speed ahead like this car seemed to do.
- cchance 3y ago
  not anywhere i've lived in the US
TheHypnotist 3y ago
You aren't serious, are you?
surfpel 3y ago
Amusingly the driver also mistook it for green initially. Indeed a confusing intersection

Could it? There's a lot of signals pointing in different directions but it's pretty hard to miss both the one directly in front or the one right next to the car. Plus, if you see both red and green lights, your first instinct as a driver (human or not) should be to stop and re-examine more closely, not run through it.

wpsimon3 3y ago

True, but I suspect a human driver would take a moment to assess the situation instead of just continuing on confidently.

tekla 3y ago
If so, why didn't they tap the brake?
- wpsimon3 3y ago
  I suspect the driver, based on their commentary in the video, was trying to see if this was a one-off fluke or something more consistent (they mention the car already blew through that light once before). I would hope a driver using FSD or any other system like it would be alert/aware to intervene...but for this video, it looks like they were trying to see how the car would react.
  - tekla 3y ago
    They could have run that same test at like 5-10 mph and accomplished the same thing without possibly causing an accident. This entirely feels like a manufactured scenario since they simply did not act like a informed driver, and decided to freak out.
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      Are you stating that they did not have FSD on and simply faked it for the views?
      - tekla 3y ago
        I'm insinuating they they knew they were approaching an intersection that they knew FSD had trouble with, purposefully did not slow down the cruise control to attempt a safe approach, and purposefully did not tap the brakes even when it was obvious the car was not stopping or slowing down in a safe manner, and then reacted on camera insinuating it was entirely surprising to them. If none of this is true, than they are incredibly shitty drivers that were not paying attention to what was happening and let the car cruise through a red light. The exact same scenario would have occurred with a standard 1990 era cruise control system.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        Well duh they're shitty drivers with no respect for a public road, they bought Tesla "full self driving" """beta""" and are testing it against unwilling other drivers! "They're a bad person so this must be fake", or maybe they're a bad person which is exactly why they thought doing something like this is okay
        nickthegreek 3y ago
        I agree with your first paragraph. They tested the red light issue after experiencing it to make sure it was not a fluke. Their yelling was unnecessary.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    You're saying the driver decided to experiment with this rather than following the law?
    - wpsimon3 3y ago
      ...yes? It's pretty clear from the video this was done as a "test." The article mentions the drivers experience working on FSD and they have a YouTube page dedicated to stuff like this linked in the article.
      - tekla 3y ago
        So the test involved letting the car go at 30mph through a live intersection, not taking any emergency steps such as checks notes stepping on the brake when approaching the red light at 25mph, and then cursing about it afterwards and STILL not making any attempts to correct it?
        wpsimon3 3y ago
        Unfortunately, yeah, seems that way...just like you said "they chose to do nothing" and luckily no one was in/approaching the intersection. Look I'm all for knowing this information, that something like this can happen. But to be clear, in no way do I condone how it was done. This seems reckless for the sake of clicks.
- stouset 3y ago
  For the same reason they shouted in fake surprise anger, despite clearly anticipating this would happen.
TheHypnotist 3y ago
Not true. This is very obviously a red light for that lane.
- tekla 3y ago
  There is a green light literally right next to it. I was also initially confused as to which lane either was pointing at. They are not offset angle wise very much.
hn_user82179 3y ago
In general I agree, but yesterday I saw a car blow through a stop sign at an intersection and then honk at the cars going perpendicularly through the intersection (they had no stop signs) :/ people are pretty happy to be confidently wrong.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  And that's fine, but if you had a button to sell that exact person's driving to everyone as "full self driving", and you pressed it, I hope you understand most people would consider that a problem.

agloe_dreams 3y ago

Just watched the video. Any driver who cannot correctly tell on an oblique intersection which light is theirs is a driver who should be fined until they can..or have their license taken away. Any programmer can clearly tell why FSD got it wrong (It saw the glow of the other road's green light on the angle) but nonetheless it was wrong and legally wrong.

olddustytrail 3y ago
Then the driver of that car should be fined and/or have their licence taken away.
- lawn 3y ago
  Yes, the driver was absolutely irresponsible. But the serious issue with the FSD doesn't become moot because of this.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  While I agree, I think I need to wait until that package in that car is not called 'Full Self Driving'.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    I don't think that what some idiot company names things is an excuse for some idiot driver to risk people's lives.
  - valval 3y ago
    What about the part about it that says it’s in “beta” and requires the driver to pay full attention at all times?
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Whoever is responsible for the intersection should also be fined. Our whole safety culture is based on being as clear as possible with redundancies from the consumer and the provider (i.e., assume the worst, provide the best).

pc86 3y ago

Absolutely, but I think what most humans would do is slow down - especially at night - and not go through the intersection at 27 when they were approaching at 30. FSD appears to just make a binary "go/stop" decision and commit fully rather than slowing down when there is decreased confidence as a person would/should. Definitely poor intersection design though as well. I've seen lights with extensions around the bulb to prevent them from being seen from obtuse angles, I wonder why these lights don't have those? Especially at night it would completely block your vision of the light(s) that don't apply to your road.

mrguyorama 3y ago
If the Tesla's self driving software had to be limited in speed based on it's confidence, it wouldn't be able to driver faster than 15 mph. Tesla's self driving is ENTIRELY based around "Fuck it, I'll probably be fine"
- valval 3y ago
  Source: just made it up

shiftpgdn 3y ago

Everyone always gets upset at me when I bring this up. The infamous fatal "autopiloted" Model X crash in the Bay Area happened because the road lanes were painted to drive the car into the narrow side of a jersey barrier. The next day a near fatal accident happened in the exact same spot, likely because Caltrans as an organization has little to no liability and generally doesn't stay on top of freeway conditions. There is an intersection in Houston that is one of the most dangerous in the USA that kills a dozen people a year due to poor design and planning from TxDOT. There are probably hundreds of intersections like this around the country that will need to be fixed. If I go paint road lines into a wall painted like a tunnel, are the drivers who hit the tunnel wall responsible, or is it me who painted the road lines?

m463 3y ago
I drove past the location of the model X crash shortly afterwards. The white lines of the two adjacent lanes made it look like there was a well-defined lane there, with the barrier right in the center. Here's a pretty good picture of what it looked like then: https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/model-x-barrier-crash-2018-image-700x433.jpg https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/m... You can see there is no hatching to make it obvious it was a non-drivable area. I would have expected something like this might have made a difference: https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png (that said, why didn't radar help?)
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  I don't buy any of the excuses, honestly. If the software can be that easily fooled by slightly broken white lines, it's not ready for release. That area of 101 simply isn't that difficult to parse (for humans). If it can't deal with that, how can it driven in places where the roads are truly awful? Lots of places in the USA alone with much worse road conditions than anything CalTrans is responsible for. Also, there's a huge yellow and black chevron block visible in that picture that any human driver paying attention would have seen and easily avoided. Crosshatching is unnecessary if you're paying the least bit of attention to what's in front of you. What was the software's issue here? It is absolutely a problem with the Tesla software that it wasn't able to parse that area properly. Doesn't necessarily mean the human driver wasn't at fault.

cddotdotslash 3y ago

It’s an extremely common pattern for the lights for one direction of an intersection to be visible from the other (usually at an angle). Very few human drivers would confuse the two. At the very least they would slow down until they were able to confirm rather than driving full speed ahead like this car seemed to do.

cchance 3y ago
not anywhere i've lived in the US

TheHypnotist 3y ago

You aren't serious, are you?

surfpel 3y ago

Amusingly the driver also mistook it for green initially. Indeed a confusing intersection