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My experience taking Tesla to court about FSD
- noncoml 3y agoIMHO Tesla's biggest mistake was to move away from Radar/Lidar/etc.. sensors. Their software feels years behind what most cars have these days. Some examples: - When you drive in the night on a dark highway the car keeps complaining that the door pillar cameras are blind. - Parking assist is a joke in calculating distances from other cars/obstacles. Also completely stops in poorly lit place. "Parking assist degraded" - The emergency line crossed alarm sometimes triggers while I am dead center in my lane - Blind spot monitor is basically unusable. Why would I want to look at the screen on my right when i try to change to the left lane. - Windscreen wipers going on randomly when there is absolutely no rain, but don't start when there is light rain. If they continue like this I can see BMW/Merc eating their lunch in a couple of years
- mcpackieh 3y agoThat decision was downstream of another mistake: selling a feature before the feature actually worked. They wanted to sell their cars as having all the hardware for FSD before FSD was actually implemented, and they wanted to make a tidy profit while doing it so they were strongly incentivized to conclude that the hardware needed for FSD would be cheap (excluding lidar.)
- clouddrover 3y agoAnd blatantly lying about it for years: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now... In 2016 Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". It was false at the time and it's still false seven years later.
- artursapek 3y agoIt's crazy to me that people paid for this feature like 5 years ago and never got it, and their cars are now depreciated >50% on top of that.
- sleepybrett 3y agoIt's also crazy to me reading this thread where people are talking about how they've bought OTHER teslas with FSD since their first. Suckers are apparently born every minute and some number of them NEVER LEARN.
- jrmg 3y agoIt’s the people saying things like “Full Self Driving obviously doesn’t mean that it can drive unsupervised!” that get me.
- preommr 3y agoWas it a mistake when it boosted the share price to make Musk the richest person alive with 0 consequences?
- qsdf38100 3y agoYou’re completely right, misleading people to make money is not a mistake from musk, it’s his job, he’s very good at it, and he indeed is shielded from any consequences since any crash while using "Full" Self Driving is still fully the driver’s fault.
- redox99 3y agoI think in Elon's book by Issac, it says that if it weren't for their FSD announcement, they would have gone under.
- solarkraft 3y agoIt was only a mistake if their goal is to be honest to their customers and provide the best possible product, but clearly other motives were/are involved ...
- artursapek 3y agoI drove Teslas for 4 years and recently went back to a humble Toyota. I really don't think the pure-camera FSD will ever work properly. Between a Model 3 and Model X I've seen them do so many goofy things on the road, and get stumped by very common environmental factors such as fog, and strong sun with snow on the ground (glare). I've seen FSD get confused by poorly marked roads and swerve into exit lanes, or drive on the complete wrong side of the road. I stopped trusting it and I think cameras alone are just not fault tolerant enough.
- astrange 3y agoRGB cameras aren't, but there are other kinds of vision they could be using, like IR and polarization cameras or event cameras for motion. It's certainly not good they've picked systems strictly worse than human vision.
- pengaru 3y agoI suspect the greater shortcoming isn't in the sensor suite department, but the intelligence department. Either way, what Tesla's putting on public roads currently seems criminally negligent and I simply don't understand why no TLA has intervened yet.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI think it’s because we see everyone texting while driving. No one wants to enforce safe driving.
- psunavy03 3y agoHow is it "criminally negligent" when the driver has the ability and the obligation to take over if the car starts to do something weird?
- pengaru 3y agoYou'd have to be actively ignoring reality to not know of Tesla's problems in the autonomy department. Just search for phantom braking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HDbDXeRSPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HDbDXeRSPw That's not even getting into the insanity that is having random members of the public LARP as FSD QA on public roads, shared with other random unwitting members of the public, who given the choice wouldn't want any of this happening around them while driving their kids to school.
- threeseed 3y agoHere is a video here showing the Tesla Vision implementation of parking sensors [1]. After all these years if Tesla's ML models are incapable of basic static object detection then I don't see how they belong on cars at high-speed. And it says a lot about Tesla management that this made it into the car at all let alone as a replacement for USS. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsRFTpaTwA&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsRFTpaTwA&t=1s
- rqtwteye 3y agoAre these sensors really that expensive? It seems incredibly dumb to not use sensors that give you more data than pure vision provides.
- eichin 3y agoAs of 5 or so years ago, the lidar used for this on the research side of things started at US$10k per unit (and for "surveying" you can do ok with one-on-top but for navigating you need something smaller and not sticking out of the roof, so then the car itself is a blind spot so you want 2x or 4x units.) As a robot developer, I was really hoping that high-volume self-driving would lead to lidar mass production (and thus price drops), and there was one promising non-mechanical lidar that was aiming for $1000/unit for an self-driving-grade sensor, but I've lost track of it...
- boatsie 3y agoI think at least the ultrasonic parking sensors that are on pretty much every other car are pretty cheap.
- eichin 3y agoThey are cheap, but range and resolution are terrible. More comparable are the radar units for the "car in your blindspot" lights in mirrors (not really comparable to lidar at all, just vastly better than sonar.) Tesla dropped those too, with a claim that they were a lot flakier than their optical system (which I don't dispute - the material the published about it was pretty convincing - though mostly it gave the impression that Tesla's radar implementation was terrible, and that optical modeling beating it wasn't as impressive as it might sound.)
- noncoml 3y agoEven if we take this at face value, and assume that the camera is better, the implementation is horrible. Don’t force the driver to look at the screen in the middle, put red lights in the mirrors instead. But as usual Tesla likes to be different for the shake of being different even if this makes the car worse
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rand846633 3y agoVery nicely done by the author! Great read! Slightly OT: What is currently the best self driving product the market has to offer? And what is it capable of?
- _ea1k 3y agoIf you mean real self driving, I'd guess Waymo. I haven't ridden it, but the reports sound much better for it than the others. Possibly mobileye, but I've only seen company produced videos. If you mean customer purchasable products, they all have various pros and cons. Out of spec motoring does a pretty good test called the "hogback challenge". GM SuperCruise tends to do well there, but there are lots of others that do well too.
- wilg 3y agoI think your analysis is right. I also would say Tesla FSD beta is clearly the winner of customer purchasable products. It's worth pointing out that Waymo and Cruise very often fall back to remote operators when the car gets confused. This is no problem if you're evaluating how successful they'll be at operating a taxi service, but makes it more difficult to compare to consumer systems that do not work that way.
- _ea1k 3y agoFSD Beta definitely has the most capability. But that also means that it requires the most hand-holding (literally, since it isn't hands free). Super Cruise and Blue Cruise have the benefit of offering hands off on the highway, but also can't do all the fancy city streets stuff that FSD Beta can. It really just depends on what you want, IMO.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoSelf driving rides at Disney.
- intangible 3y agoI think Mercedes is the only company willing to take liability for their self-driving features. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892154/mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-autonomous-level-3-test https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892154/mercedes-benz-dr... If your Tesla crashes while using FSD, it's completely your fault, according to them.
- vtail 3y agoI'm reading all the comments criticizing FSD, and I honestly feel like we watch two different movies. My Tesla drives me from home to work, or from work to a downtown restaurant (granted, all within Silicon Valley where they probably have most of the data), mostly without my involvement. With the latest version, the car is occasionally too hesitant, and - very rarely - confused (e.g. by a railroad traffic light next to a road), but that doesn't subtract much from the experience. I don't know of any other driving assist system that get anywhere close to this. Every time I tried fancy rental cars (BMWs, Audis, Mercedes) with the latest and greatest driver assist, it's feels like a joke. What am I missing?
- maxerickson 3y agoIt's called "Full Self Driving" and you are touting that it is better than vehicles with "driver assist".
- brandonagr2 3y agoSelf driving does not equal unsupervised driving (the phrase is not synonymous with autonomous driving). The same way that cruise control doesn't mean the car controls the cruising with no supervision.
- user_named 3y agoOk?
- vtail 3y agoI was partly responding to this comment: "Their software feels years behind what most cars have these days.". I think it's the other way around - the best software offered by conventional manufacturers (the best they can offer) is years behind Tesla's.
- habitue 3y agoMaybe that comment was referring to like cruise or waymo?
- denysvitali 3y agoI think they got what they deserve. Although this is a small claim and not a class action - this is one small step towards stopping them with lying. I like Tesla, but I really can't stand some of the things they overpromise, or some stupid choices like removing USS from their cars. To be fair, I think that most of the things I am complaining about come from Mr. Musk choices...
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoAnd they also removed the radar, now relying purely on the camera to measure the distance to the car in front of them.
- brandonagr2 3y agoAnd it works better now, the previous low resolution radar was not helpful once the vision stack is sufficiently advanced
- londons_explore 3y agoI wanna know how many of these refunds they've done... I always suspected they'd refund FSD if you complained enough, and was surprised to not find a single person talking about a refund - so presumably the vast majority accept the gag order rather than take it to court!
- modeless 3y agoI wondered if this was possible. Good job not caving on the gag clauses. Personally I'll keep FSD as it's actually useful sometimes and I like to test the improvements as they come out (responsibly). It's pretty much what I expected when I bought it (at a much lower price). But I could definitely understand if some people wanted refunds, especially if they bought at the recent high prices.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"It seems to me like Telsa's desire to settle was triggered by the court hearing date being set. Their initial settlement offer had three things I didn't like in it: 1) They only offered -L-5800 - but if I was successful in court I would get 8% interest on this amount from 1st Jan 2020 to the judgement, as well as court fees. 2) There was a "non-advice" clause, that I wouldn't help anyone with a similar claim to mine. 3) There was a confidentiality clause, that I wouldn't be able to discuss with anyone about the settlement." He declined this offer and Tesla made a better one, more money and obviously no restriction on discussing the settlement and helping others.
- failbuffer 3y agoNotably, Tesla countered by upping the offer but keeping the gag provisions. It was only when it was clear author wouldn't budge that they folded on those clauses. His conclusion was they really wanted to avoid the legal precedent (and attendant headlines). Tesla knows those crows will eventually come home to roost and the longer they can put it off the more they'll mitigate the blowback.
- camila45 3y ago[dead]
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