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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

• whiplash451 2y ago
  Asking genuinely: is FSD enabled/accessible in EU?
  • AlotOfReading 2y ago
    FSD is currently neither legal nor enabled in the EU. That may change in the future.
• jqpabc123 2y ago
  By now, most people have probably heard that Tesla's attempt at "Full Self Driving" is really anything but --- after a decade of promises. The vehicle owners manual spells this out. As I understand it, the contentious issue is the fact that unlike most others, their attempt works mostly from visual feedback. In low visibility situations, their FSD has limited feedback and is essentially driving blind. It appears that Musk may be seeking a political solution to this technical problem.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    It’s really weird how much you comment about FSD being fake. My Tesla drives me 10+ miles daily and the only time I touch any controls is pulling in and out of my garage. Literally daily. I maybe disengage once every couple days just to be on the safe side in uncertain situations, it I’m sure it’d likely do fine there too. FSD works. It drives itself fine 99.99% of the time. It is better than most human drivers. I don’t know how you keep claiming it doesn’t or doesn’t exist.
    • jqpabc123 2y ago
      So you agree with Musk, the main problem with FSD is political? Tesla says on its website its "Full Self-Driving" software in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-opens-probe-into-24-mln-tesla-vehicles-over-full-self-driving-collisions-2024-10-18/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
    • sottol 2y ago
      The claim was about _full_ driving being anything but, ie not _fully_ self-driving, not being completely fake. Disengaging every 10-110 miles is just not "full", it's partial. And then the gp went into details in which specific situations fsd is especially problematic.
    • peutetre 2y ago
      The problem is Tesla and Musk have been lying about full self-driving for years. They have made specific claims of full autonomy with specific timelines and it's been a lie every time: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ In 2016 a video purporting to show full self-driving with the driver there purely "for legal reasons" was staged and faked: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel... In 2016 Tesla said that "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." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-stating-all-cars-have-self-driving-hardware/ https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s... Musk claimed there would be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road in 2020. That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-million-tesla-robotaxis-by-the-end-of-2020-where-are-they https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil... Tesla claimed Hardware 3 would be capable of full self-driving. When asked about Hardware 3 at Tesla's recent robotaxi event, Musk didn't want to "get nuanced". That's starting to look like fraud: https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-about-hw3-before-the-word-fraud-comes-out/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-abo... Had Tesla simply called it "driver assistance" that wouldn't be a lie. But they didn't do that. They doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the claim that it is "full self-driving" making the car "an appreciating asset" that it would be "financially insane" not to buy: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/elon-musk-any-other-car-than-a-tesla-in-3-years-like-owning-a-horse.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/elon-musk-any-other-car-than... https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/03/cars/musk-tesla-cars-value-ev-prices/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/03/cars/musk-tesla-cars-valu... It's not even bullshit artistry. It's just bullshit. Lying is part of the company culture at Tesla. Musk keeps lying because the lies keep working.
      • whamlastxmas 2y ago
        Most of this is extreme hyperbole and it’s really hard to believe this is a genuine good faith attempt at conversation instead of weird astroturfing, bc these tired inaccurate talking points are what come up in literally every single even remotely associated to Elon. It’s like there’s a dossier of talking points everyone is sharing The car drives itself. This is literally undeniable. You can test it today for free. Yeah it doesn’t have the last 0.01% done yet and yeah that’s probably a lot of work. But commenting like the GP is exhausting and just not reflective of reality
    • dham 2y ago
      It's similar to when DHH said they were not bundling code in production and all the Javascript bros said "No you can't do that it won't work". DHH was like "yes but I'm doing it" That's how it feels in FSD land right now. Everyone's saying FSD doesn't work and it'll never be here, but I'm literally using it every day lol.
  • enslavedrobot 2y ago
    Here's a video of FSD driving the same route as a waymo 42% faster with zero interventions. 23 min vs 33. This is my everyday. Enjoy. https://youtu.be/Kswp1DwUAAI?si=rX4L5FhMrPXpGx4V https://youtu.be/Kswp1DwUAAI?si=rX4L5FhMrPXpGx4V
    • ck2 2y ago
      There are also endless videos of teslas driving into pedestrians, plowing full speed into emergency vehicles parked with flashing lights, veering wildly from strange markings on the road, etc. etc. "works for me" is a very strange response for someone on Hacker News if you have any coding background - you should realize you are a beta tester unwittingly if not a full blown alpha tester in some cases All it will take is a non-standard event happening on your daily drive. Most certainly not wishing it on you, quite the opposite, trying to get you to accept that a perfect drive 99 times out of 100 is not enough.
      • enslavedrobot 2y ago
        Those are Autopilot videos this discussion is about FSD. FSD has driven ~2 billion miles at this point and had potentially 2 fatal accidents. The US average is 1.33 deaths/100 million miles. Tesla on FSD is easily 10x safer. Every day it gets safer.
        • diggernet 2y ago
          How many miles does it have on the latest software? Because any miles driven on previous software are no longer relevant. Especially with that big change in v12.
          • enslavedrobot 2y ago
            The miles driven are rising exponentially as the versions improve according to company filings. If the miles driven on previous versions are no longer relevant how can the NHTSA investigation of previous versions impact FSD regulation today? Given that the performance has improved dramatically over the last 6 months, it is very reasonable to assume that the miles driven to fatality ratio also improving. Using the value of 1.33 deaths per 100 million miles driven vs 2 deaths in 2 billion miles driven, FSD has saved approximately 24 lives so far.
• wnevets 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • smt88 2y ago
    If no one from Boeing is going to jail, Musk certainly isn't either (at least not for anything related to vehicle unsafety).
    • wnevets 2y ago
      > (at least not for anything related to vehicle unsafety). is that also true if the investigation determines elon saying tesla's having full self-driving capabilities is fraud?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• knob 2y ago
  Didn't Uber have something similar happen? Ran over a woman in Phoenix?
  • BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
    Yes. And Uber immediately shut down the program in the entire state of Arizona, halted all road testing for months, and then soon later eliminated their self driving unit entirely.
    • leoh 2y ago
      Elon is taking the SBF approach of double or nothing -- he hopes Trump will win, in which case Elon can continue to do as much harm as he likes.
• daghamm 2y ago
  While at it, please also investigate why it is sometimes impossible to leave a damaged vehicle. This has resulted in people dying more than once: https://apnews.com/article/car-crash-tesla-france-fire-be8ec1ef2253bd725f164c285d83317b https://apnews.com/article/car-crash-tesla-france-fire-be8ec...
  • MadnessASAP 2y ago
    The why is pretty well understood, no investigation needed. I don't like the design but it's because the doors are electronic and people don't know where the manual release is. In a panic people go on muscle memory, which is push the useless button. They don't remember to pull the unmarked unobtrusive handle that they may not even know exists. If it was up to me, sure have your electronic release, but make the manual release a big handle that looks like the ejection handle on a jet (yellow with black stripes, can't miss it). * Or even better, have the standard door handle mechanically connected to the latch through a spring loaded solenoid that disengages the mechanism. Thus when used under normal conditions it does the thing electronically but the moment power fails the door handle connects to the manual release.
    • daghamm 2y ago
      There are situations where manual release has not worked https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-manually-open-tesla-door-if-battery-power-dies-2023-8?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-manually-open-tesla-d...
      • willy_k 2y ago
        The article you provided does not say that. The only failure related to the manual release it mentions is that using it breaks the window. > Exton said he followed the instructions for the manual release to open the door, but that this "somehow broke the driver's window."
    • Clamchop 2y ago
      Or just use normal handles, inside and outside, like other cars. What they've done is made things worse by any objective metric in exchange for a "huh, nifty" that wears off after a few weeks.
• aanet 2y ago
  About damn time NHTSA opened this full scale investigation. Tesla's "autonowashing" has gone on for far too long. Per Reuters [1] "The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles. The preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety." Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality. NHTSA is reviewing the ability of FSD’s engineering controls to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions." Tesla has, of course, rather two-facedly called its FSD as SAE Level-2 for regulatory purposes, while selling its "full self driving" but also requiring supervision. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ No other company has been so irresponsible to its users, and without a care for any negative externalities imposed on non-consenting road users. I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away whenever I see them on highways. [FWIW, yes, I work in automated driving and know a thing or two about automotive safety.] [1] https://archive.is/20241018151106/https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-opens-probe-into-24-mln-tesla-vehicles-over-full-self-driving-collisions-2024-10-18/#selection-1453.0-1457.165 https://archive.is/20241018151106/https://www.reuters.com/bu...
  • ivewonyoung 2y ago
    > Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality. 45000 people die yearly just in the US in auto accidents. Those numbers and timeline you quoted seem insignificant at first glance magnified by people with an axe to grind like that guy running anti Tesla superbowl ads, who makes self driving software like you.
  • buzzert 2y ago
    > I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away whenever I see them on highways. Would you rather drive near a drunk driver using Tesla's FSD, or one without FSD?
• dietsche 2y ago
  I would like more details. There are definitely situations where neither a car nor a human could respond quickly enough to a situation on the road. for example, I recently hit a deer. The dashcam shows that I had less than 100 feet from when the deer became visible due to terrain to impact while driving at 60 mph. Keeping in mind that stopping a car in 100 feet at 60 mph is impossible. Most vehicles need more than triple that without accounting for human reaction time.
  • ra7 2y ago
    Unfortunately, Tesla requests NHTSA to redact almost all useful information from their crash reports. So it's impossible to get more details. Here is the public database of all ADAS crashes: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_Incident_Reports_ADAS.csv https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
  • Log_out_ 2y ago
    just have a drone fly ahead and have the lidar pointcloud on hud. This are very bio-logic excuses :)
  • nomel 2y ago
    I've had a person, high on drugs, walk out from between bushes that were along the road. I screeched to a halt in front of them, but 1 second later and physics would have made it impossible, regardless of reaction time (or non-negligible speed).
  • arcanemachiner 2y ago
    This is called "overdriving your vision", and it's so common that it boggles my mind. (This opinion might have something to do with the deer I hit when I first started driving...) Drive according to the conditions, folks.
    • Kirby64 2y ago
      On many roads if a deer jumps across the road at the wrong time there’s literally nothing you can do. You can’t always drive at 30mph on back country roads just because a deer might hop out at you.
• ivewonyoung 2y ago
  > NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021 Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said. Another crash under investigation involved a reported injury > The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles. This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.
  • whiplash451 2y ago
    Did you scale your numbers in proportion of miles driven autonomously vs manually?
    • josephg 2y ago
      Yeah, that’d be the interesting figure: How many deaths per million miles driven? How does Tesla’s full self driving stack up against human drivers?
      • gostsamo 2y ago
        Even that is not good enough, because the "autopilot" usually is not engaged in challenging conditions making any direct comparisons not really reliable. You need similar roads in simila weather and similar time of the day for approximating good comparison.
        • ivewonyoung 2y ago
          How many of the 45,000 deaths on US roads( and an order of magnitude more injuries) occur due to 'challenging conditions' ?
  • dekhn 2y ago
• graeme 2y ago
  Will the review assess overall mortality of the vehicles compared to similar cars, and overall mortality while FSD is in use?
  • dekhn 2y ago
    No, that is not part of a review. They may use some reference aggregated industry data, but it's out of scope to answwer the question I think you're trying to imply.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • infamouscow 2y ago
    Lawyers are not known for their prowess in mathematics, let alone statistics. Making these arguments from the standpoint of an engineer is counterproductive.
    • fallingknife 2y ago
      Which is why they are the wrong people to run the country
      • paulryanrogers 2y ago
        Whom? Because math is important and so is law, among a variety of other things. s/ Thankfully the US presidential choices are at least rational, of sound mind, and well rounded people. Certainly no spoiled man children among them. /s
  • johnthebaptist 2y ago
    Yes, if tesla complies and provides that data
  • bbor 2y ago
    I get where you’re coming from and would also be interested to see, but based on the clips I’ve seen that wouldn’t be enough in this case. Of course the bias is inherent in what people choose to post (not normal and not terrible/litigable), but I think there’s enough at this point to perceive a stable pattern. Long story short, my argument is this: it doesn’t matter if you reduce serious crashes from 100PPM to 50PPM if 25PPM of those are new crash sources, speaking from a psychological and sociological perspective. Everyone should know that driving drunk, driving distracted, driving in bad weather, and in rural areas at dawn or dusk is dangerous, and takes appropriate precautions. But what do you do if your car might crash because someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was reflecting off another car in an unusual way? Could you really load up your kids and take your hands off the wheel knowing that at any moment you might hit an unexpected edge condition? Self driving cars are (presumably!) hard enough to trust already, since you’re giving away so much control. There’s a reason planes have to be way more than “better, statistically speaking” — we expect them to be nearly flawless, safety-wise.
• xvector 2y ago
  My Tesla routinely tries to kill me on absolutely normal California roads in normal sunny conditions, especially when there are cars parked on the side of the road (it often brakes thinking I'm about to crash into them, or even swerves into them thinking that's the "real" lane). Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
  • delichon 2y ago
    Why do you drive a car that routinely tries to kill you? That would put me right off. Can't you just turn off the autopilot?
    • ddingus 2y ago
      My guess is the driver tests it regularly. How does it do X, Y, ooh Z works, etc...
    • xvector 2y ago
      It's a pretty nice car when it's not trying to kill me
  • jrflowers 2y ago
    > My Tesla routinely tries to kill me > Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though. It is very generous that you would selflessly sacrifice your own life so that others might one day enjoy Elon’s dream of robot taxis without steering wheels
    • massysett 2y ago
      Even more generous to selflessly sacrifice the lives and property of others that the vehicle "self-drives" itself into.
    • judge2020 2y ago
      If the data sharing checkboxes are clicked, OP can still help send in training data while driving on his own.
• botanical 2y ago
  Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test unproven technology on the public. Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
  • krasin 2y ago
    > Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test unproven technology on the public. China and Russia do it too. It's not an excuse, but definitely not just the US.
  • CTDOCodebases 2y ago
    Meh. Happens all around the world. Even if the product works there is no guarantee that it will be safe. Asbestos products are a good example of this. A more recent one is Teflon made with PFOAs or engineered stone like Caesarstone.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • dzhiurgis 2y ago
    If it takes 3 months to approve where steel rocket falls you might as well give up iterating something as complex as FSD.
    • bckr 2y ago
      Drive it in larger and larger closed courses. Expand to neighboring areas with consent of the communities involved. Agree on limited conditions until enough data has been gathered to expand those conditions.
      • romon 2y ago
        While controlled conditions promote safety, they do not yield effective training data.
• dzhiurgis 2y ago
  What is FSD uptake rate. I bet it’s less than 1% since in most countries it’s not even available…
• massysett 2y ago
  "Tesla says on its website its FSD software in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous." Despite it being called "Full Self-Driving." Tesla should be sued out of existence.
  • bagels 2y ago
    It didn't always say that. It used to be more misleading, and claim that the cars have "Full Self Driving Hardware", with an exercise for the reader to deduce that it didn't come with "Full Self Driving Software" too.
    • peutetre 2y ago
      And Musk doesn't want to "get nuanced" about the hardware: https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-about-hw3-before-the-word-fraud-comes-out/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-abo...
  • fallingknife 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • vineyardmike 2y ago
      Magic isn’t real. No one should be confused that the eraser isn’t magic. Fully self driving cars are real. Just not made by Tesla.
      • bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        What's the verdict on X-Ray Specs?
        • largbae 2y ago
          I think everyone just gave up and went to pornhub
        • 2y ago
• Aeolun 2y ago
  I love how the image in the article has a caption that says it tells you to pay attention to the road, but I had to zoom in all the way to figure out where that message actually was. I’d expect something big and red with a warning triangle or something, but it’s a tiny white message in the center of the screen.
  • valine 2y ago
    It gets progressively bigger and louder the longer you ignore it. After 30ish seconds it sounds an alarm and kicks you out.
    • FireBeyond 2y ago
      > After 30ish seconds it sounds an alarm and kicks you out. That's much better. When AP functionality was introduced, the alarm was fifteen MINUTES.
  • taspeotis 2y ago
    Ah yes, red with a warning like “WARNING: ERROR: THE SITUATION IS NORMAL!” Some cars that have cruise control but an analog gauge cluster that can’t display WARNING ERRORs even hide stuff like “you still have to drive the car” in a manual you have to read yet nobody cares about that. Honestly driving a car should require some sort of license for a bare minimum of competence.
• 23B1 2y ago
  "Move fast and kill people" Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable places to invest.
  • hnburnsy 2y ago
    Move slow and kill peo
  • hnburnsy 2y ago
    Move slow and kill people... GM ignition switch deaths 124 https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ignition-switch-death-toll/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ig...
    • 23B1 2y ago
      And?
  • CrimsonRain 2y ago
    Nobody needs to hear your nonsense rants. A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like garbage.
    • leoh 2y ago
      I read their "nonsense rant" and I appreciated it. >A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like garbage. This is a nonsense rant in my opinion.
    • 23B1 2y ago
      Found the guy who bought $TSLA at its ATH
• wg0 2y ago
  In all the hype of AI etc, if you think about it then the foundational problem is that even Computer Vision is not a solved problem at the human level of accuracy and that's at the heart of the issue of both Tesla and that Amazon checkout. Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout".
  • vineyardmike 2y ago
    > Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout". I don’t think this would actually work, as silly a thought experiment as it is. The problem isn’t the vision, it’s state management and cost. It was very easy (but expensive) to see and classify via CV if a person picked something up, it just requires hundreds of concurrent high resolution streams and a way to stitch the global state from all the videos. A little 1 inch person on each shelf needs a good way to communicate to every other tiny person what they say, and come to consensus. If 5 people/cameras detect person A picking something up, you need to differentiate between every permutation within 5 discrete actions and 1 seen 5 times. In case you didn’t know, Amazon actually hired hundreds of people in India to review the footage and correct mistakes (for training the models). They literally had a human on each shelf. And they still had issues with the state management. With people.
    • wg0 2y ago
      Yeah - that's exactly is my point that humans were required to recognize and computer vision is NOT a solved problem regardless of tech bros misleading techno optimism. Distributed communication and state management on the other hand is a solved problem already mostly with known parameters. How else do you think thousand and thousands of Kubernetes work in the wild.
      • Schiendelman 2y ago
        I think you're missing the point GP made: humans couldn't do it. They tried to get humans to do it, and humans had an unacceptable error rate. This is important. The autonomous driving problem and the grocery store problem are both about trade-offs, one isn't clearly better than the other.
• gnuser 2y ago
  I worked in 18 a wheeler automation unicorn. Never rode in one once for a reason.
  • akira2501 2y ago
    Automate the transfer yards, shipping docks, and trucking terminals. Make movement of cargo across these limited use areas entirely automated and as smooth as butter. Queue drivers up and have their loads automatically placed up front so they can drop and hook in a few minutes and get back on the road. I honestly think that's the _easier_ problem to solve by at least two orders of magnitude.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      Did you miss the news about the recent strike by the very people you are suggesting to eliminate? This automation was one of the points of contention. Solving the problem might not be as easy as you suggest as long as their are powerful unions involved
      • akira2501 2y ago
        This automation is inevitable. The ports are a choke point created by unnatural monopoly and a labor union is the incorrect solution. Particularly because their labor actions have massive collateral damage to other labor interests. I believe that if trucking were properly unionized the port unions would be crushed. They're not that powerful they've just outlived this particular modernization the longest out of their former contemporaries.
        • dylan604 2y ago
          So a union is okay for the trucking industry, but not for the dock workers? And what exactly will the truckers be trucking if the ports are crushed?
    • porphyra 2y ago
      There are a bunch of companies working on that. So far off the top of my head I know of: * Outrider: https://www.outrider.ai/ https://www.outrider.ai/ * Cyngn: https://www.cyngn.com/ https://www.cyngn.com/ * Fernride: https://www.fernride.com/ https://www.fernride.com/ Any ideas what other ones are out there?
• xqcgrek2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • leoh 2y ago
    This is your second comment saying the exact same thing.
• lngnmn2 2y ago
  [dead]
• UltraSane 2y ago
  I'm astonished at how long Musk has been able to keep his autonomous driving con going. He has been lying about it to inflate Tesla shares for 10 years now.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Without consequences, there is no reason to stop.
    • UltraSane 2y ago
      When is the market going to realize Tesla is NEVER going to have real level 4 autonomy where Tesla takes legal liability for crashes the way Waymo has?
      • tstrimple 2y ago
        Market cares far more about money than lives. Until the lives lost cost more than their profit, they give less than zero fucks. Capitalism. Yay!
      • Youssef-1992 2y ago
        [flagged]
  • jjmarr 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • UltraSane 2y ago
      It "works" if you mean often does incredibly stupid and dangerous things and requires a person to be ready to take over for it at any moment to prevent a crash. So far no Tesla car has ever legally driven even a single mile without a person in the driver's seat.
      • jjmarr 2y ago
• DoesntMatter22 2y ago
  Each version has improved. FSD is realistically the hardest thing humanity as ever tried to do. It involves an enormous amount of manpower, compute power and human discoveries, and has to work right in billions of scenarios. Building a self flying plane is comically easy by comparison. Building Starship is easier by comparison.
  • gitaarik 2y ago
    Ah ok, first it is possible within 2 years, and now it is humanity's hardest problem? If it's really that hard I think we better put our resources into something more useful, like new energy solutions, seems we have an energy crisis.
    • DoesntMatter22 2y ago
      It's the hardest thing humans have ever tried to do yes. It took less time to go to the moon. There are tons of companies and governments working on energy solutions, there is ample time for Tesla to work on self driving. Also, do we really have an energy crisis? Are you experiencing rolling blackouts?
• Animats 2y ago
  If Trump is elected, this probe will be stopped.
  • leoh 2y ago
    Almost certainly would happen and very depressing.
• gitaarik 2y ago
  It concerns me that these Tesla's can suddenly start acting differently after a software update. Seems like a great target for a cyber attack. Or just a fail from the company. A little bug that is accidentally spread to millions of cars all over the world. And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on the road, and then Tesla adds a new fancy feature to their software and rolls out an update. How are we to be confident that it's safe?
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    Imagine all Teslas doing a full left right now. And full right in left steer countries. OTA updates and auto updates in general is just a thing that should not be in vehicles. The ecu:s should have to be air gaped to the internet to be considered road worthy.
  • boshalfoshal 2y ago
    > how are we to be confident that its safe? I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates to your car like vscode does. Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback comes back, they start sending it out wider. Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that. Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case, yes they should be held accountable. These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things, there is an actual process to this.
    • madeforhnyo 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760
• soerxpso 2y ago
  For whatever it's worth, Teslas with Autopilot enabled crash about once every 4.5M miles driven, whereas the overall rate in the US is roughly one crash every 70K miles driven. Of course, the selection effects around that stat can be debated (people probably enable autopilot in situations that are safer than average, the average tesla owner might be driving more carefully or in safer areas than the average driver, etc), but it is a pretty significant difference. (Those numbers are what I could find at a glance; DYOR if you'd like more rigor). We have a lot of traffic fatalities in the US (in some states, an entire order of magnitude worse than in some EU countries), but it's generally not considered an issue. Nobody asks, "These agents are crashing a lot; are they really competent to drive?" when the agent is human, but when the agent is digital it becomes a popular question even with a much lower crash rate.
  • deely3 2y ago
    > Gaps in Tesla's telematic data create uncertainty regarding the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage. Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes.3 A review of NHTSA's 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments.
    • soerxpso 2y ago
      This is an interesting point and definitely an adjustment that should be made to the interpretation of the data. That would still put the estimate far below the national average (assuming an 18% deployment rate, from 4.5M to 25M).
• alexjplant 2y ago
  > The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul Garcia, public information officer for the department. Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.
  • theossuary 2y ago
    You know what they say, if you want to kill someone in the US, do it in a car.
    • littlestymaar 2y ago
      Crash Course: If You Want to Get Away With Murder Buy a Car Woodrow Phoenix
    • immibis 2y ago
      In the US it seems you'd do it with a gun, but in Germany it's cars. There was this elderly driver who mowed down a family in a bike lane waiting to cross the road in Berlin, driving over the barriers between the bike lane and the car lane because the cars in the car lane were too slow. Released without conviction - it was an unforeseeable accident.
  • macintux 2y ago
    I have no idea what the conditions were like for this incident, but I’ve blown through a 4-way stop sign when the sun was setting. There’s only so much sunglasses can do.
    • eptcyka 2y ago
      If environmental factors incapacitate you, should you not slow down or stop?
    • vortegne 2y ago
      You shouldn't be on the road then? If you can't see, you should slow down. If you can't handle driving in given conditions safely for everyone involved, you should slow down or stop. If everybody would drive like you, there'd be a whole lot more death on the roads.
• rKarpinski 2y ago
  'Pedestrian' in this context seems pretty misleading "Two vehicles collided on the freeway, blocking the left lane. A Toyota 4Runner stopped, and two people got out to help with traffic control. A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one of the people who exited from it. " edit: Parent article was changed... I was referring to the title of the NPR article.
  • Retric 2y ago
    More clarity may change people’s opinion of the accident, but IMO pedestrian meaningfully represents someone who is limited to human locomotion and lacks any sort of protection in a collision. Which seems like a reasonable description of the type of failure involved in the final few seconds before impact.
    • Moombla 2y ago
      [dead]
    • rKarpinski 2y ago
      Omitting that the pedestrian was on a freeway meaningfully mis-represents the situation.
      • Retric 2y ago
        People walking on freeways may be rare from the perspective of an individual driver but not a self driving system operating on millions of vehicles.
        • rKarpinski 2y ago
          What does that have to do with the original article's misleading title?
          • Retric 2y ago
            I don’t think it’s misleading. It’s a tile not some hundred word description of what exactly happened. Calling them motorists would definitely be misleading by comparison. Using the simple “fatal crash” of the linked title implies the other people might in be responsible which is misleading. Using accident but saying Tesla was at fault could open them up to liability and therefore isn’t an option.
• AlchemistCamp 2y ago
  The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.
  • iovrthoughtthis 2y ago
    at least 10x better than a human
    • becquerel 2y ago
      I believe Waymo has already beaten this metric.
      • szundi 2y ago
        Waymo is limited to cities that their engineers has to map and this map maintained. You cannot put a waymo in a new city before that. With Tesla, what you get is universal.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • RivieraKid 2y ago
          Waymo is robust to removing the map / lidars / radars / cameras or adding inaccuracies to any of these 4 inputs. (Not sure if this is true for the production system or the one they're still working on.)
        • dageshi 2y ago
          I think the Waymo approach is the one that will actually deliver some measure of self driving cars that people will be comfortable to use. It won't operate everywhere, but it will gradually expand to cover large areas and it will keep expanding till it's near ubiquitous. I'm dubious that the Tesla approach will actually ever work.
• frabjoused 2y ago
  I don't understand why this debate/probing is not just data driven. Driving is all big data. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport This report does not include fatalities, which seems to be the key point in question. Unless the above report has some bias or is false, Teslas in autopilot appear 10 times safer than the US average. Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla? And otherwise, if the stats say it is safer, why is there any debate at all?
  • bastawhiz 2y ago
    Autopilot is not FSD.
    • frabjoused 2y ago
      That's a good point. Are there no published numbers on FSD?
  • JTatters 2y ago
    Those statistics are incredibly misleading. - It is safe to assume that the vast majority of autopilot miles are on highways (although Tesla don't release this information). - By far the safest roads per mile driven are highways. - Autopilot will engage least during the most dangerous conditions (heavy rain, snow, fog, nighttime).
  • notshift 2y ago
    Without opening the link, the problem with every piece of data I’ve seen from Tesla is they’re comparing apples to oranges. FSD won’t activate in adverse driving conditions, aka when accidents are much more likely to occur. And/or drivers are choosing not to use it in those conditions.
  • FireBeyond 2y ago
    > Unless the above report has some bias or is false Welcome to Tesla. The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to FSD mode: the conditions, weather, road, location, traffic all have to meet a certain quality threshold before the system will be enabled (or not disable itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear spring day to Pittsburgh December nights. There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers, all conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all traffic. It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are not that stupid, so it's willfully misleading. > This report does not include fatalities It also doesn't consider any incident where there was not airbag deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially reasonable until you consider: - first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision exceeds threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety systems consider duration of impact, speeds, G-forces, amount of intrusion, angle of collision, and a multitude of other factors before deciding what, if any, systems to fire (seatbelt tensioners, airbags, etc.) So hit something at 30mph with the right variables? Tesla: "this is not an accident". - Tesla also does not consider "incident was so catastrophic that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an accident, because "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella could also include egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", as also not an accident and also "not counted". > Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla? They do not. They also refuse to give the public much of any data beyond these carefully curated numbers. Hell, NHTSA/NTSB also mostly have to drag heavily redacted data kicking and screaming out of Tesla's hands.
• testfrequency 2y ago
  I was in a Model 3 Uber yesterday and my driver had to serve onto and up a curb to avoid an (idiot) who was trying to turn into traffic going in the other direction. The Model 3 had every opportunity in the world to brake and it didn’t, we were probably only going 25mph. I know this is about FSD here, but that moment 100% made me realize Tesla has awful obstacle avoidance. I just happen to be looking forward and it was a very plain and clear T-Bone avoidance, and at no point did the car handle or trigger anything. Thankfully everyone was ok, but the front lip got pretty beat up from driving up the curb. Of course the driver at fault that caused the whole incident drove off.
  • averageRoyalty 2y ago
    Was the Uber driver using FSD or autopilot? Obstacle avoidance and automatic braking can easily be switched on or off by the driver.
    • testfrequency 2y ago
      Neither, they were…driving. Also, I’d be shocked if they turned off either of those emergency features (and why would you, especially an uber driver). Those settings are also reset every trip, it’s not realistic to assume that this guy configured his car to act less safe.
• bastawhiz 2y ago
  Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. I got a one month free trial of FSD and turned it off after two weeks. Quite simply: it's dangerous. - It failed with a cryptic system error while driving - It started making a left turn far too early that would have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually intervene. - In my opinion, the default setting accelerates way too aggressively. I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver and it is too aggressive for my taste. - It tried to make way too many right turns on red when it wasn't safe to. It would creep into the road, almost into the path of oncoming vehicles. - It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto the highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system should have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first place. - It would switch lanes to go faster on the highway, but then missed an exit on at least one occasion because it couldn't make it back into the right lane in time. Stupid. After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith that this is a reasonable system. Hell, even autopilot does dumb shit on a regular basis. I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year.
  • frabjoused 2y ago
    The thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers. If it is dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the reported numbers show more accidents when FSD is on? When I did the trial on my Tesla, I also noted these kinds of things and felt like I had to take control. But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      You can measure risks without having to witness disaster.
    • ForHackernews 2y ago
      Maybe other human drivers are reacting quickly and avoiding potential accidents from dangerous computer driving? That would be ironic, but I'm sure it's possible in some situations.
    • 2y ago
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  Come on US, regulate interstate commerce and tell them to delete these cameras Lidar is goated and if tesla didn’t want that they can pursue a different perception solution, allowing for innovation But just visual cameras aiming to replicate us, ban that
• xqcgrek2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • _ea1k 2y ago
    In this case, I do not think so. NHTSA generally does an excellent job of looking at the big picture without bias. Although I must admit that their last investigation felt like an exception. The changes that they enforced seemed to be fairly dubious.
• bastloing 2y ago
  It was way safer to ride a horse and buggy
• jgalt212 2y ago
  The SEC is clearly afraid of Musk. I wonder what the intimidation factor is at NHTSA.
  • leoh 2y ago
    Not meaningful enough.
• Rebuff5007 2y ago
  Tesla testing and developing FSD with normal consumer drivers frankly seems criminal. Test drivers for AV companies get advanced driver training, need to filed detailed reports about the cars response to various driving scenarios, and generally are paid to be as attentive as possible. The fact that any old tech-bro or un-assuming old lady can buy this thing and be on their phone when the car could potentially turn into oncoming traffic is mind boggling.
  • buzzert 2y ago
    > can buy this thing and be on their phone when the car could potentially turn into oncoming traffic is mind boggling This is incorrect. Teslas have driver monitoring software, and if the driver is detected using a phone while driving, will almost immediately give a loud warning and disable FSD.
  • trompetenaccoun 2y ago
    >Test drivers for AV companies get advanced driver training, need to filed detailed reports about the cars response to various driving scenarios, and generally are paid to be as attentive as possible. Like this one, who ran over and killed a woman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg While not fully being the driver's fault, during the investigation they were found to have watched TV on their smartphone at the time of the accident and the driver-facing camera clearly showed them not even looking at the road! Such attentiveness.
• quitit 2y ago
  "Full Self-Driving" but it's not "full" self-driving, as it requires active supervision. So it's marketed with a nod and wink, as if the supervision requirement is just a peel away disclaimer to satisfy old and stuffy laws that are out of step with the latest technology. When in reality it really does need active supervision. But the nature of the technology is this approach invites the driver to distraction, because what's the use in "full self driving" if one needs to have their hands on the wheel and feet near the pedals ready to take control at a moments notice? Worsening this problem is that the Teslas have shown themselves to drive erratically at unexpected times such as phantom braking or misidentifying natural phenomena for traffic lights. One day people will look back on letting FSD exist in the market and roll their eyes in disbelief of the recklessness.
• JumpinJack_Cash 2y ago
  Unpopular take: Even with perfect FSD which is much better than the average human driver (say having the robotic equivalent of a Lewis Hamilton in every car) the productivity and health gains won't be as great as people anticipate. Sure way less traffic deaths but the spike in depression especially among males would be something very big. Life events are much outside of our control, having a 5000lbs thing that can get to 150mph if needed and responds exactly to the accelerator, brake and steering wheel input...well that makes people feel in control and very powerful while behind the aforementioned steering wheel. Also productivity...I don't know...people think a whole lot and do a whole lot of self reflection while they are driving and when they arrive at destination they just implement the thoughts they had while driving. The ability to talk on the phone has been there for quite some time now too, so thinking and communicating can be done while driving already, what would FSD add?
  • HaZeust 2y ago
    As a sports car owner, I see where you're coming from -- but MANY do not. We are the 10%, the other 90% see their vehicle as an A-B tool, and you can clearly see that displayed with the average, utilitarian car models that the vast majority of the public buy. There will be no "spike" in depression; simply put, there's not enough people that care about their car, how it gets from point A to point B, or what contribution they give, if any, into that.
    • JumpinJack_Cash 2y ago
      Maybe they don't care about their car to be a sports car but they surely enjoy some pleasure out of the control of being at the helm of something powerful like a car (even though it's not a sports car) Also even people in small cars they think a lot while driving already, and they also communicate, how much more productive they could be with FSD?
      • HaZeust 2y ago
        I really don't think you're right about the average person, or even a notable size of people, believing in the idea of their car being their "frontier of freedom" as was popular in the 70-80's media. I don't think that many people care about driving nowadays.
• diebeforei485 2y ago
  [flagged]
• drodio 2y ago
  I drive a 2024 Tesla Model Y and another person in my family drives a 2021 Model Y. Both cars are substantially similar (the 2021 actually has more sensors than the 2024, which is strictly cameras-only). Both cars are running 12.5 -- and I agree that it's dramatically improved over 12.3. I really enjoy driving. I've got a #vanlife Sprinter that I'll do 14 hour roadtrips in with my kids. For me, the Tesla's self-driving capability is a "nice to have" -- it sometimes drives like a 16 year old who just got their license (especially around braking. Somehow it's really hard to nail the "soft brake at a stop sign" which seems like it should be be easy. I find that passengers in the car are most uncomfortable when the car brakes like this -- and I'm the most embarrassed because they all look at me like I completely forgot how to do a smooth stop at a stop sign). Other times, the Tesla's self-driving is magical and nearly flawless -- especially on long highway road trips, like up to Tahoe. Even someone like me who loves doing road trips really appreciates the ability to relax and not have to be driving. But here's one observation I've had that I don't see quite sufficiently represented in the comments: The other person in my family with the 2021 Model Y does not like to drive like I do, and they really appreciate that the Tesla is a better driver than they feel themselves to be. And as a passenger in their car, I also really appreciate that when the Tesla is driving, I generally feel much more comfortable in the car. Not always, but often. There's so much variance in us as humans around driving skills and enjoyment. It's easy to lump us together and say "the car isn't as good as the human." And I know there's conflicting data from Tesla and NHTSA about whether in aggregate, Teslas are safer than human drivers or not. But what I definitely know from my experience is that the Tesla is already a better driver than many humans are -- especially those that don't enjoy driving. And as @modeless points out, the rate of improvement is now vastly accelerating.
  • lowbloodsugar 2y ago
    You are a living example of survivorship bias. One day your car will kill you or someone else, and then maybe you’ll be able to come back here and tell us how wrong you were. How, with your new experience, you can see how the car only “seemed” competent, how it was that very seeming competence that got someone killed, because you trusted it.
  • magnetowasright 2y ago
• fortran77 2y ago
  I have FSD in my Plaid. I don't use it. Too scary.
• lrvick 2y ago
  All these self driving car companies are competing to see whose proprietary firmware and sensors kill the fewest people. This is insane. I will -never- own a self driving car unless the firmware is open source, reproducible, remotely attestable, and built/audited by several security research firms and any interested security researchers from the public before all new updates ship. It is the only way to avoid greedy execs from cutting corners to up profit margins like VW did with faking emissions tests. Proprietary safety tech is evil, and must be made illegal. Compete with nicer looking more comfortable cars with better miles-to-charge, not peoples lives.
  • boshalfoshal 2y ago
    You are conflating two seperate problems (security vs functionality). "Firmware" can be open source and secure, but how does this translate to driving performance at all? Why does it matter if the firmware is validated by security researchers, who presumably don't know anything about motion planning, perception, etc? And this is even assuming that the code can be reasonably verified statically. You probably need to to run that code on a car for millions of miles (maybe in simulation) in an uncoutable number of scenarios to run through every edge case. The other main problem with what you're asking is that most of the "alpha" of these self driving companies is in proprietary _models_, not software. No one is giving up their models. That is a business edge. As someone who has been at multiple AV companies, no one is cutting corners on "firmware" or "sensors" (apart from making it reasonably cost effective so normal people can buy their cars). Its just that AV is a really really really difficult problem with no closed form solution. Your normal car has all the same pitfalls of "unverified software running on a safety critical system," except that its easier to verify that straightforward device firmware works vs a very complex engine whose job is to ingest sensor data and output a trajectory.
• rootusrootus 2y ago
  I'm on my second free FSD trial, just started for me today. Gave it another shot, and it seems largely similar to the last free trial they gave. Fun party trick, surprisingly good, right up until it's not. A hallmark of AI everywhere, is how great it is and just how abruptly and catastrophically it fails occasionally. Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel and your foot ready for the brake. When it goes off the rails, it usually does so in surprising ways with little warning and little time to correct. And since it's so good much of the time, you can get lulled into complacence. I never really understand the comments from people who think it's the greatest thing ever and makes their drive less stressful. Does the opposite for me. Entertaining but exhausting to supervise.
  • darknavi 2y ago
    You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.
    • coffeefirst 2y ago
      This feels like the most dangerous possible combination (not for you, just to have on the road in large numbers). Good enough that the average user will stop paying attention, but not actually good enough to be left alone. And when the machine goes to do something lethally dumb, you have 5 seconds to notice and intervene.
      • jvolkman 2y ago
        This is what Waymo realized a decade ago and what helped define their rollout strategy: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=247&si=Twi_fQJC7whg3Oey https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=247&si=Twi_fQJC7whg3Oey
        • nh2 2y ago
          This video is great. It looks like Wayno really understood the problem. It explains concisely why it's a bad idea to roll our incremental progress, how difficult the problem really is, and why you should really throw all sensors you can at it. I also appreciate the "we don't know when it's going to be ready" attitude. It shows they have a better understanding of what their task actually is than anybody who claims "next year" every year.
• TheAlchemist 2y ago
  Tesla released a promotional video in 2016 saying that with FSD a human driver is not necessary and that "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons". The video was staged as we've learned in 2022. 2016 folks... Even with today's FSD which is several orders of magnitude better than the one in the video, you would still probably have a serious accident within a week (and I'm being generous here) if you didn't seat in the driver's seat. How Trevor Milton got sentenced for fraud and the people responsible for this were not is a mystery to me.
  • sschueller 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • nemo44x 2y ago
      He’s not doing anything activists haven’t done for years to get out the vote. In college famous rock and hip hop groups would come on campus to play shows that had voter registration tables upon entry and lots of messaging about who to vote for and then being endlessly recruited to volunteer/phone bank/canvas for some group that was supporting the event. Activism cuts both ways.
      • sschueller 2y ago
        That may be but were they required to sign a PAC's pledge to enter such concert? I think this might be over the line but a court has the decide this.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • matwood 2y ago
        Direct payments do seem to be illegal in a way that having a rally or concert or canvassing are not. https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146397 https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146397
        • 2y ago
• sanp 2y ago
  This will go away once Trump wins
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • greenie_beans 2y ago
    why as a consumer would you want that? sounds extremely against your interest. i doubt you're a billionaire who less regulation would benefit
• amelius 2y ago
  Add it to the list ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• InsomniacL 2y ago
  As I come over the top of a crest, there was suddenly a lot of sun glare and the my Model Y violently swerved to the left, fortunately I had just overtaken a car on a two lane, dual carriageway and hadn't moved back to the left hand lane yet. The driver I had just overtaken, although he wasn't very close anymore slowed right down to get away from me and I didn't blame him. That manoeuvre in another car likely would have put it on two wheels. They say FSD crashes less often than a human per mile driven, but I can only use FSD on roads like motorways, so I don't think it's a fair comparison. I don't trust FSD, I still use it occasionally but never in less than ideal conditions. Typically when doing something like changing the music on a motorway. It probably is safer than just me driving alone, when it's in good conditions on a straight road with light traffic with an alert driver.
  • mglz 2y ago
    The underlying problem is that the current FSD architecture doesn't seem to have good guard rails for these outlier situations you describe (sunlight blinding the camera from just the right angle probably?) and it is probably not possible to add such rules without limiting the system enormously. Fundamentally driving consists of a set of fairly clear cut rules with a ridiculous amount of "it depends" cases.
    • iknowstuff 2y ago
      it actually does. he’s in europe, on a 5 year old autopilot, basically. current fsd uses a multiexposure camera feed so its not really much susceptible to sun glare.
  • iknowstuff 2y ago
    what do you mean you can only use fsd on motorways? Just by phrasing I assume you’re referring to the old FSD which is just beefed up autopilot based on heuristics - europe is stuck on a gimped 5 year old autopilot stack due to overzealous regulation. American FSD is a completely different beast, usable on every road and street, so your anecdote is actually not relevant to the thread
• nemo44x 2y ago
  I’m a Tesla fan but I have to say anecdotally that it seems like Teslas represent an outsize number of bad drivers in my observations. Is it the FSD that’s a bit too aggressive and sporadic? Lots of lane changing, etc? They’re up there with Dodge Ram drivers.
• talithatulloch 2y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• FergusArgyll 2y ago
  Are the insurance prices different if you own a Tesla with FSD? if not, why not?
• Fomite 2y ago
  "Driver is mostly disengaged, but then must intervene in a sudden fail state" is also one of the most dangerous types of automation due to how long it takes the driver to reach full control as well.
  • drowsspa 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't drive but I would think it would be worse than actually paying attention all the time
    • pessimizer 2y ago
      It's also a problem that gets worse as the software gets better. Having to intervene once every 5 minutes is a lot easier than having to intervene once every 5 weeks. If lack of intervention causes an accident, I'd bet on the 5 minute car avoiding an accident longer than the 5 week car for any span of time longer than 10 weeks.
      • jakub_g 2y ago
        I feel like the full self driving cars should have a "budget". Every time you drive, say, 1000 km in FSD, you then need to drive 100 km in "normal" mode to keep sharp. Or whatever the ratio / exact numbers TBD. You can reset the counter upfront by driving smaller mileage more regularly.
        • Dylan16807 2y ago
          Just as driving practice? It's not going to help the problem of keeping up vigilance when monitoring a level 3 system.
        • krisoft 2y ago
          That's not solving the right problem. That keeps you sharp driving, but does not keep you sharp supervising. If the car did drive you 1000 km flawlessly, but can still kill you with a random erratic bug on the 1001th km (or on the 1234th). That is where people will zone out. Keeping people driving will keep them able to drive, but won't make them less zoned out when they are not driving.
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  Traffic jams and long monotonous roads are really where these features, getting to level 3 on those should be the focus over trying to maintain a fiction of level 5 everywhere. (And like other comments, >2 should automatically mean liability)
• Yeul 2y ago
  Now we know why Musk wants Trump to win. To completely subjugate the state to the whims of it's billionaire class. Going back to the 19th century's gilded age. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg78ljxn8g7o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg78ljxn8g7o
• JTbane 2y ago
  How can you possibly have a reliable self-driving car without LIDAR?
  • dham 2y ago
    Returning to this post in 5 years when FSD has been solved with just vision.
• masto 2y ago
  I have such a love-hate relationship with this thing. I don't think Tesla's approach will ever be truly autonomous, and they do a lot of things to push it into unsafe territory (thanks to you know who at the helm). I am a tech enthusiast and part of the reason I bought this car (before you know who revealed himself to be you know what) is that they were the furthest ahead and I wanted to experience it. If they had continued on the path I'd hoped, they'd have put in more sensors, not taken them out for cost-cutting and then tried to gaslight people about it. And all this hype about turning your car into a robotaxi while you're not using it is just stupid. On the other hand, I'd hate for the result of all this to be to throw the ADAS out with the bathwater. The first thing I noticed even with the early "autopilot" is that it made long road trips much more bearable. I would arrive at my destination without feeling exhausted, and I attribute a lot of that to not having to spend hours actively making micro adjustments to speed and steering. I know everyone thinks they're a better driver than they are, and it's those other people who can't be trusted, but I do feel that when I have autopilot/FSD engaged, I am paying attention, less fatigued, and actually have more cognitive capacity freed up to watch for dangerous situations. I had to pick someone up at LaGuardia Airport yesterday, a long annoying drive in heavy NYC-area traffic. I engaged autosteer for most of the trip both ways (and disengaged it when I didn't feel it was appropriate), and it made it much more bearable. I'm neither fanboying nor apologizing for Tesla's despicable behavior. But I would be sad if, in the process of regulating this tech, it got pushed back too far.
• TeslaCoils 2y ago
  Works most of the time, Fails at the worst time - Supervision absolutely necessary...
• deergomoo 2y ago
  This is an opinion almost certainly based more in emotion than logic, but I don't think I could trust any sort of fully autonomous driving system that didn't involve communication with transmitters along the road itself (like a glideslope and localiser for aircraft approaches) and with other cars on the road. Motorway driving sure, there it's closer to fancy cruise control. But around town, no thank you. I regularly drive through some really crappily designed bits of road, like unlabelled approaches to multi-lane roundabouts where the lane you need to be in for a particular exit sorta just depends on what the people in front and to the side of you happen to have chosen. If it's difficult as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to work it out. The roads here are also in a terrible state, and the lines on them even moreso. There's one particular patch of road where the lane keep assist in my car regularly tries to steer me into the central reservation, because repair work has left what looks a bit like lane markings diagonally across the lane.
  • michaelt 2y ago
    > If it's difficult as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to work it out. Most likely, every self-driving car company will send drivers down every road in the country, recording everything they see. Then they'll have human labellers figure out any junctions where the road markings are ambiguous. They've had sat nav maps covering every road for decades, and the likes of Google Street View, so to have a detailed map of every junction is totally possible.
    • deergomoo 2y ago
      In that case I hope they're prepared to work with local authorities to immediately update the map every time road layouts change, temporarily or permanently. Google Maps gets lane guidance wrong very often in my experience, so that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
      • tjpnz 2y ago
        And the contractors employed by the local authorities to do roadworks big and small.
• Teknomancer 2y ago
  This is just an opinion. The only way forward with automated and autonomous vehicles is through industry cooperation and standardization. The Tesla approach to the problem is inadequate, lacking means for interoperability, and relying on inferior detection mechanisms. Somebody who solves these problems and does it by offering interoperability and standards applied to all automakers wins. Sold Tesla investments. The company is on an unprofitable downward spiral trajectory. The CEO is a total clown. Reinvested on advise in Diamler, after Mercedes-Benz and Diamler Trucks North America demonstrated their research and work into creating true autonomous technology and safe global industry standardizations.
• lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  > NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021 Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said. This is going to be another extremely biased investigation. 1. A 2021 Model Y is not on HW4. 2. FSD in November 2023 is not FSD 12.5, the current version. Any assessment of FSD on such outdated software is not going to be representative of the current experience.
  • sashank_1509 2y ago
    HW4 is a ridiculous requirement, it’s only post 2023 and even then except Model Y, there’s no HW4. FSD in Nov 2023 is not latest but it’s not that old, I guess it’s not in the 12 series which is much better but no need to not investigate this.
    • lopkeny12ko 2y ago
      That is literally the entire point. The whole investigation is moot because both the hardware and software are out of date, and no longer used for any current Model Ys off the production line.
  • ra7 2y ago
    The perfect setup. By the time an incident in the “current” software is investigated, it will be outdated. All Tesla has to do is a rev a software version and ignore all incidents that occurred prior to it.
    • lopkeny12ko 2y ago
      You are welcome to conjure whatever conspiracy theories you like but the reality is FSD 12.5 is exponentially better than previous versions. Don't just take it from me, this is what all Tesla owners are saying too.
      • ra7 2y ago
• kjkjadksj 2y ago
  One thing thats a little weird with the constant tesla framing of fsd being better than the average driver, is this assumption that a tesla owner might be an average driver. The “average” driver includes people who total their cars, who kill pedestrians, who drive drunk, who go 40 over. Meanwhile I’ve never been in an accident. For me and probably for many other drivers, their own individual average performance is much better than the average of all drivers. And given that its a possibility that relying on fsd is much worse for you than not in terms of rate of risk.
• metabagel 2y ago
  Cruise control with automatic following distance and lane-keeping are such game changers, that autonomous driving isn’t necessary for able drivers. OK, the lane-keeping isn’t quite there, but I feel like that’s solvable.
• gacklecackle 2y ago
  [dead]
• lowbloodsugar 2y ago
  I'm not turning FSD on until it is a genuine autonomous vehicle that requires no input from me and never disengages. Until Tesla is, under the law, the legal driver of the vehicle, and suffers all the legal impact, you'd have to be mental to let it drive for you. It's like asking, "Hey, here's a chauffeur who has killed several people so far, all over the world. You want him to drive?" Or "Hey, here's a chauffeur. You're fine, you can read a book. But at some point, right when something super dangerous is about to happen, he's going to just panic and stop driving, and then you have to stop whatever you're doing and take over." That's fucking mental.
• kvgr 2y ago
  I don't understand how it is possible to be used on public roads...
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mcintyre1994 2y ago
  Something I find weird about riding in a Tesla is that they have a mode that a bunch of Uber drivers seem to use where it shows a sort of diagram on the screen of what the car perceives to be its surroundings. This seems to be mostly bad - cars jump in and out, things appear from nowhere right next to the car, things randomly disappear. If that's produced using the same inputs the car uses for self driving then I'm not surprised it has all these issues.
  • jdblair 2y ago
    Here in Amsterdam, this view is constantly bicycles approaching from the sides, flickering and disappearing, but most of the time the bicycles are parked, completely stationary, without riders.
• roydivision 2y ago
  I'm still baffled as to how this is allowed anywhere near public roads. The only reason I can think of is that the US values trade above risk of killing people.