5 ms·

I find it funny to think back to the fervor of comments on HN a year ago about Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and i

by kbos87 2y ago

I find it funny to think back to the fervor of comments on HN a year ago about Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and ineffective. A year has gone by and not only have we not seen the catastrophe that was thought to be inevitable, but Autopilot has gotten leaps and bounds better. I use it every day and over the past few months it's gotten so good that there are few scenarios where I ever intervene, and when I do, it's because it's always because it's being a little too slow/hesitant for me at an intersection. I'm not a Musk fan one bit, but I see this as evidence that the popular narrative has diverged wildly from the reality of Tesla's product.

ajross 2y ago
Exactly. The technical argument about capabilities is largely settled at this point. Vision won, LiDAR didn't "lose", but it's clearly not any better. Yet every time the subject comes up we rehash the same arguments from 2020/21 as if the evidence of the last ~billion miles (or whatever) of road testing doesn't exist. The crashes didn't show up. The bodies aren't there. The disaster didn't happen. The product is "safe" for whatever reasonable definition you want to pick. And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Vision didn't "win" in any way, shape, or form. The only products on the road that offer actual self driving don't rely on vision only, they have vision + lidar + other sensors. Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
  - ajross 2y ago
    And exactly as predicted, these are all arguments that could have been made, verbatim, three years ago. And yet...
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      They are arguments that were made three years ago, and they are arguments that still hold up today.
      - ajross 2y ago
        But they didn't hold up. There are literally two orders of magnitude more vehicle-miles driven under FSD now than there were then, and there's absolutely no data showing a safety effect above the noise floor. Your argument is non-falsifiable nonsense, basically. You can continue making it forever, but that doesn't make it right.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        There are exactly 0 miles of FSD driven by the public without constant attention from a driver keeping their hand on the wheel. There are disengagements of FSD in virtually every trip, where the driver feels that they need to intervene or the car would do something wrong. The safety record of FSD is basically due to the human drivers, not the AI. Tesla themselves don't have any confidence that the car can drive without constant human attention. This is in contrast to Waymo and Mercedes, where the car actually drives itself, using both vision and other sensors, and the driver can actually disengage.
        ajross 2y ago
        Again, non-falsifiable so I can't argue. Good trick. My car still drives me around every day and no one is crashing, so I guess everyone wins. I have an amazing supercar and you don't need to feel wrong about it.
lucianbr 2y ago
I have seen this "huge improvement" comment about FSD just about in every discussion about FSD ever, since the first version. It keeps getting huge improvements, and it's still not done. At this point I expect version 579 of FSD will still be a "huge improvement" over 578, but just not 100% yet, and will soon be finished.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Each of Tesla's "huge improvements" seem to approximately halve the number of interventions. You can go from one intervention per minute to one per two minutes to one per four and so on. But you'll never hit zero.
  - lucianbr 2y ago
    There is no way in hell you have any kind of backing for the 50% halving number at each version. Prove me wrong. It's remarkable how many comments on "hacker news" are basically "I like it, trust me it works great". Line noise.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      LOL, I write a comment mentioning an intervention every 4 minutes and you interpret it as Tesla praise.
tsimionescu 2y ago
I've been seeing such comments for 4 years or more. Mercedes and Waymo actually have full self driving on the roads today, with regulatory approval and proven efficiency. Tesla has a nothing burger that disengage if you take your hands off the wheel.
- tzekid 2y ago
  Following a car in front of you in perfect conditions (otherwise it full-on disengages) just to comply with the regulatory labels is whack. I don't get why people cheer on it and even compare it with Tesla, which goes for ... actual self driving
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Because the Mercedes solution works, today, with legal guarantees, under quite precisely specified conditions. It allows you, in those specified and advertised conditions, to play a game or read a book or take a nap while driving. In contrast, Tesla only has promises. In practice, you can't do anything with FSD that you couldn't do without it, because you have to pay exactly as much attention when it's engaged as when it's disengaged, and you can't take your hands off the wheel or it full-on disengages. Mercedes has an excellent base to build up from. Tesla has next to nothing.
mateus1 2y ago
I’m not on the same boat, NTHSA has found Tesla’s Autopilot linked to increased accidents with “safety issues with Tesla Autopilot contributed to at least 467 collisions and 14 deaths from January 2018 through August 2023”. They have done a recalls and ar still investigating. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-with-autopilot-recall-data-or-face-fines.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-wit...
kube-system 2y ago
> Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and ineffective. A year has gone by and not only have we not seen the catastrophe that was thought to be inevitable, but Autopilot has gotten leaps and bounds better. Maybe it’s better in terms of customer satisfaction or reliability, but in terms of the SAR J3016 standard, it hasn’t improved at all.
wpietri 2y ago
It's wild to me that people argue automated driving is great based on individual personal experience. If I were to argue about manual driving from my personal driving, I'd be way off. I haven't had an accident in decades. Not even any close calls. If I extrapolating my accident rate out to the world, I would assume that human-driven cars are a perfectly safe technology. In the real world, all accidents are a long-tail phenomenon. They happen pretty rarely, often under conditions that are unusual or unexpected. So somebody saying "in these last few months I hardly ever have to intervene anymore to not die", a standard that would cause a driving instructor to fail a teen driver, not only doesn't give me confidence that this technology is a-ok for road use, but suggests to me they haven't really thought about what is required for safety at global scale.
- kbos87 2y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable for me to make a determination and offer my first hand experience about Autopilot's capabilities relative to that of my own and that of other drivers I see on the road. Accidents might be long-tail phenomenon but driving habits are observable. Autopilot has a consistent, safe, alert demeanor on the road. It reacts to vehicles I as a driver can't as quickly see, changing situations that it would take me an extra half second or more to react to. Compare that to the average human driver on the road - a third or more of whom you can expect to see holding a phone - and I think it's a reasonable conclusion to say it's already at least marginally better. And if we are talking about accidents, you can't deny that people are generally terrible at choosing the best possible reaction to an emergency situation that happens in the space of a few seconds.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    It's reasonable for you to offer your firsthand experience. It's unreasonable for you to think that you can offer a determination broader than that experience. For example, I might note that a couple weeks ago a Tesla almost crashed into a train: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crashes.264798/page-8#post-8259936 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crash... The dashcam vids are sobering: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt70Ee0_yoKiL75QQc?rlkey=qaeld9rx3glhzyvi97d3m1mhy&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt...

by kbos87 2y ago

ajross 2y ago

Exactly. The technical argument about capabilities is largely settled at this point. Vision won, LiDAR didn't "lose", but it's clearly not any better. Yet every time the subject comes up we rehash the same arguments from 2020/21 as if the evidence of the last ~billion miles (or whatever) of road testing doesn't exist. The crashes didn't show up. The bodies aren't there. The disaster didn't happen. The product is "safe" for whatever reasonable definition you want to pick. And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Vision didn't "win" in any way, shape, or form. The only products on the road that offer actual self driving don't rely on vision only, they have vision + lidar + other sensors. Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
- ajross 2y ago
  And exactly as predicted, these are all arguments that could have been made, verbatim, three years ago. And yet...
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    They are arguments that were made three years ago, and they are arguments that still hold up today.
    - ajross 2y ago
      But they didn't hold up. There are literally two orders of magnitude more vehicle-miles driven under FSD now than there were then, and there's absolutely no data showing a safety effect above the noise floor. Your argument is non-falsifiable nonsense, basically. You can continue making it forever, but that doesn't make it right.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        There are exactly 0 miles of FSD driven by the public without constant attention from a driver keeping their hand on the wheel. There are disengagements of FSD in virtually every trip, where the driver feels that they need to intervene or the car would do something wrong. The safety record of FSD is basically due to the human drivers, not the AI. Tesla themselves don't have any confidence that the car can drive without constant human attention. This is in contrast to Waymo and Mercedes, where the car actually drives itself, using both vision and other sensors, and the driver can actually disengage.
        ajross 2y ago
        Again, non-falsifiable so I can't argue. Good trick. My car still drives me around every day and no one is crashing, so I guess everyone wins. I have an amazing supercar and you don't need to feel wrong about it.

lucianbr 2y ago

I have seen this "huge improvement" comment about FSD just about in every discussion about FSD ever, since the first version. It keeps getting huge improvements, and it's still not done. At this point I expect version 579 of FSD will still be a "huge improvement" over 578, but just not 100% yet, and will soon be finished.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Each of Tesla's "huge improvements" seem to approximately halve the number of interventions. You can go from one intervention per minute to one per two minutes to one per four and so on. But you'll never hit zero.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  There is no way in hell you have any kind of backing for the 50% halving number at each version. Prove me wrong. It's remarkable how many comments on "hacker news" are basically "I like it, trust me it works great". Line noise.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    LOL, I write a comment mentioning an intervention every 4 minutes and you interpret it as Tesla praise.

tsimionescu 2y ago

I've been seeing such comments for 4 years or more. Mercedes and Waymo actually have full self driving on the roads today, with regulatory approval and proven efficiency. Tesla has a nothing burger that disengage if you take your hands off the wheel.

tzekid 2y ago
Following a car in front of you in perfect conditions (otherwise it full-on disengages) just to comply with the regulatory labels is whack. I don't get why people cheer on it and even compare it with Tesla, which goes for ... actual self driving
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Because the Mercedes solution works, today, with legal guarantees, under quite precisely specified conditions. It allows you, in those specified and advertised conditions, to play a game or read a book or take a nap while driving. In contrast, Tesla only has promises. In practice, you can't do anything with FSD that you couldn't do without it, because you have to pay exactly as much attention when it's engaged as when it's disengaged, and you can't take your hands off the wheel or it full-on disengages. Mercedes has an excellent base to build up from. Tesla has next to nothing.

mateus1 2y ago

I’m not on the same boat, NTHSA has found Tesla’s Autopilot linked to increased accidents with “safety issues with Tesla Autopilot contributed to at least 467 collisions and 14 deaths from January 2018 through August 2023”. They have done a recalls and ar still investigating. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-with-autopilot-recall-data-or-face-fines.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-wit...

kube-system 2y ago

> Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and ineffective. A year has gone by and not only have we not seen the catastrophe that was thought to be inevitable, but Autopilot has gotten leaps and bounds better. Maybe it’s better in terms of customer satisfaction or reliability, but in terms of the SAR J3016 standard, it hasn’t improved at all.

wpietri 2y ago

It's wild to me that people argue automated driving is great based on individual personal experience. If I were to argue about manual driving from my personal driving, I'd be way off. I haven't had an accident in decades. Not even any close calls. If I extrapolating my accident rate out to the world, I would assume that human-driven cars are a perfectly safe technology. In the real world, all accidents are a long-tail phenomenon. They happen pretty rarely, often under conditions that are unusual or unexpected. So somebody saying "in these last few months I hardly ever have to intervene anymore to not die", a standard that would cause a driving instructor to fail a teen driver, not only doesn't give me confidence that this technology is a-ok for road use, but suggests to me they haven't really thought about what is required for safety at global scale.

kbos87 2y ago
It's perfectly reasonable for me to make a determination and offer my first hand experience about Autopilot's capabilities relative to that of my own and that of other drivers I see on the road. Accidents might be long-tail phenomenon but driving habits are observable. Autopilot has a consistent, safe, alert demeanor on the road. It reacts to vehicles I as a driver can't as quickly see, changing situations that it would take me an extra half second or more to react to. Compare that to the average human driver on the road - a third or more of whom you can expect to see holding a phone - and I think it's a reasonable conclusion to say it's already at least marginally better. And if we are talking about accidents, you can't deny that people are generally terrible at choosing the best possible reaction to an emergency situation that happens in the space of a few seconds.
- wpietri 2y ago
  It's reasonable for you to offer your firsthand experience. It's unreasonable for you to think that you can offer a determination broader than that experience. For example, I might note that a couple weeks ago a Tesla almost crashed into a train: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crashes.264798/page-8#post-8259936 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crash... The dashcam vids are sobering: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt70Ee0_yoKiL75QQc?rlkey=qaeld9rx3glhzyvi97d3m1mhy&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt...