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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. Quit

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.
- _ea1k 2y ago
  Because it is bad enough that people really do supervise it. I see people who say that wouldn't happen because the drivers become complacent. Maybe that could be a problem with future versions, but I don't see it happening with 12.3.x. I've also heard that driver attention monitoring is pretty good in the later versions, but I have no first hand experience yet.
  - valval 2y ago
    Very good point. The product that requires supervision and tells the user to keep their hands on the wheel every 10 seconds is not good enough to be used unsupervised. I wonder how things are inside your head. Are you ignorant or affected by some strong bias?
    - _ea1k 2y ago
      Yeah, it definitely isn't good enough to be used unsupervised. TBH, they've switched to eye and head tracking as the primary mechanism of attention monitoring now. It seems to work pretty well, now that I've had a chance to try it. I'm not quite sure what you meant by your second paragraph, but I'm sure I have my blind spots and biases. I do have direct experience with various versions of 12.x though (12.3 and now 12.5).
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Is Tesla required to report system failures or the vehicle damaging itself? How do we know they're not optimizing for the benchmark (what they're legally required to report)?
  - rvnx 2y ago
    If the question is: “was FSD activated at the time of the accident: yes/no”, they can legally claim no, for example if luckily the FSD disconnects half a second before a dangerous situation (eg: glare obstructing cameras), which may coincide exactly with the times of some accidents.
    - diebeforei485 2y ago
      > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. Scroll down to Methodology at https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
      - rvnx 2y ago
        This is for Autopilot, which is the car following system on highways. If you are in cruise control and staying on your lane, not much is supposed to happen. The FSD numbers are much more hidden. The general accident rate is 1 per 400’000 miles driven. FSD has one “critical disengagement” (aka before accident if human or safety braking doesn’t intervene) every 33 miles driven. It means to reach unsupervised with human quality they would need to improve it 10’000 times in few months. Not saying it is impossible, just highly optimistic. In 10 years we will be there, but in 2 months, sounds a bit overpromising.
  - Uzza 2y ago
    All manufacturers have for some time been required by regulators to report any accident where an autonomous or partially autonomous system was active within 30 seconds of an accident.
- timabdulla 2y ago
  > If it is dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the reported numbers show more accidents when FSD is on? Even if it is true that the data show that with FSD (not Autopilot) enabled, drivers are in fewer crashes, I would be worried about other confounding factors. For instance, I would assume that drivers are more likely to engage FSD in situations of lower complexity (less traffic, little construction or other impediments, overall lesser traffic flow control complexity, etc.) I also believe that at least initially, Tesla only released FSD to drivers with high safety scores relative to their total driver base, another obvious confounding factor. Happy to be proven wrong though if you have a link to a recent study that goes through all of this.
  - valval 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - unbrice 2y ago
      > Either the system causes less loss of life than a human driver or it doesn’t. The confounding factors don’t matter. Confounding factors are what allows one to tell appart "the system cause less loss of life" from "the system causes more loss of life yet it is only enabled in situations were fewer lives are lost".
    - kelnos 2y ago
      No, that's absolutely not how this works. Confounding factors are things that make your data not tell you what you are actually trying to understand. You can't just hand-wave that away, sorry. Consider: what I expect is actually true based on the data is that Tesla FSD is as safe or safer than the average human driver, but only if the driver is paying attention and is ready to take over in case FSD does something unsafe, even if FSD doesn't warn the driver it needs to disengage. That's not an autonomous driving system. Which is potentially fine, but the value prop of that system is low to me: I have to pay just as much attention as if I were driving manually, with the added problem that my attention is going to start to wander because the car is doing most of the work, and the longer the car successfully does most of the work, the more I'm going to unconsciously believe I can allow my attention to slip. I do like current common ADAS features because they hit a good sweet spot: I still need to actively hold onto the wheel and handle initiating lane changes, turns, stopping and starting at traffic lights and stop signs, etc. I look at the ADAS as a sort of "backup" to my own driving, and not as what's primarily in control of the car. In contrast, Tesla FSD wants to be primarily in control of the car, but it's not trustworthy enough to do that without constant supervision.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  What numbers? Who’s measuring? What are they measuring?
- rvnx 2y ago
  There is an easy way to know what is really behind the numbers: look who is paying in case of accident. You have a Mercedes, Mercedes takes responsibility. You have a Tesla, you take the responsibility. Says a lot.
  - tensor 2y ago
    You have a Mercedes, and you have a system that works virtually nowhere.
    - therouwboat 2y ago
      Better that way than "Oh it tried to run red light, but otherwise it's great."
      - tensor 2y ago
        "Oh we tried to build it but no one bought it! So we gave up." - Mercedes before Tesla. Perhaps FSD isn't ready for city streets yet, but it's great on the highways and I'd 1000x prefer we make progress rather than settle for the status quo garbage that the legacy makers put out. Also, human drivers are the most dangerous, by far, we need to make progress to eventual phase them out.
        meibo 2y ago
        2-ton blocks of metal that go 80mph next to me on the highway is not the place I would want people to go "fuck it let's just do it" with their new tech. Human drivers might be dangerous but adding more danger and unpredictability on top just because we can skip a few steps in the engineering process is crazy. Maybe you have a deathwish, but I definitely don't. Your choices affect other humans in traffic.
        tensor 2y ago
        It sounds like you are the one with a deathwish, because objectively by the numbers Autopilot on the highway has greatly reduced death. So you are literally advocating for more death. You have two imperfect systems for highway driving: Autopilot with human oversight, and humans. The first has far far less death. Yet you are choosing the second.
- lawn 2y ago
  > The thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers. Oh? Who are presenting the numbers? Is a crash that fails to trigger the airbags still not counted as a crash? What about the car turning off FSD right before a crash? How about adjusting for factors such as age of driver and the type of miles driven? The numbers don't make sense because they're not good comparisons and are made to make Tesla look good.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  The numbers collected by the NHTSA and insurance companies do show that FSD is dangerous...that's why the NHTSA started investigating and its why most insurance companies won't insure Tesla vehicles or charge significantly higher rates. Also, Tesla is known to disable self-driving features right before collisions to give the appearance of driver fault. And the coup de grace: if Tesla's own data showed that FSD was actually safer, they'd be shouting it from the moon, using that data to get self-driving permits in CA, and offering to assume liability if FSD actually caused an accident (like Mercedes does with its self driving system).
- throwaway562if1 2y ago
  AIUI the numbers are for accidents where FSD is in control. Which means if it does a turn into oncoming traffic and the driver yanks the wheel or slams the brakes 500ms before collision, it's not considered a crash during FSD.
  - Uzza 2y ago
    That is not correct. Tesla counts any accident within 5 seconds of Autopilot/FSD turning off as the system being involved. Regulators extend that period to 30 seconds, and Tesla must comply with that when reporting to them.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      How about when it turns into oncoming traffic, the driver yanks the wheel, manages to get back on track, and avoids a crash? Do we know how often things like that happen? Because that's also a failure of the system, and that should affect how reliable and safe we rate these things. I expect we don't have data on that. Also how about: it turns into oncoming traffic, but there isn't much oncoming traffic, and that traffic swerves to get out of the way, before FSD realizes what it's done and pulls back into the correct lane. We certainly don't have data on that.
  - concordDance 2y ago
    Several people in this thread have been saying this or similar. It's incorrect, from Tesla: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact" https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport Situations which inevitably cause a crash more than 5 seconds later seem like they would be extremely rare.
    - rvnx 2y ago
      This is Autopilot, not FSD which is an entirely different product
- johnneville 2y ago
  are there even transparent reported numbers available ? for whatever does exist, it is also easy to imagine how they could be misleading. for instance i've disengaged FSD when i noticed i was about to be in an accident. if i couldn't recover in time, the accident would not be when FSD is on and depending on the metric, would not be reported as a FSD induced accident.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Agree that only the numbers matter, but only if the numbers are comprehensive and useful. How often does an autonomous driving system get the driver into a dicey situation, but the driver notices the bad behavior, takes control, and avoids a crash? I don't think we have publicly-available data on that at all. You admit that you ran into some of these sorts of situations during your trial. Those situations are unacceptable. An autonomous driving system should be safer than a human driver, and should not make mistakes that a human driver would not make. Despite all the YouTube videos out there of people doing unsafe things with Tesla FSD, I expect that most people that use it are pretty responsible, are paying attention, and are ready to take over if they notice FSD doing something wrong. But if people need to do that, it's not a safe, successful autonomous driving system. Safety means everyone can watch TV, mess around on their phone, or even take a nap, and we still end up with a lower crash rate than with human drivers. The numbers that are available can't tell us if that would be the case. My belief is that we're absolutely not there.
- kybernetikos 2y ago
  > But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter. Are these the numbers reported by tesla, or by some third party?
thomastjeffery 2y ago
It's not just about relative safety compared to all human driving. We all know that some humans are sometimes terrible drivers! We also know what that looks like: Driving too fast or slow relative to surroundings. Quickly turning every once in a while to stay in their lane. Aggressively weaving through traffic. Going through an intersection without spending the time to actually look for pedestrians. The list goes on.. Bad human driving can be seen. Bad automated driving is invisible. Do you think the people who were about to be hit by a Tesla even realized that was the case? I sincerely doubt it.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  > Bad automated driving is invisible. I'm literally saying that it is visible, to me, the passenger. And for reasons that aren't just bad vibes. If I'm in an Uber and I feel unsafe, I'll report the driver. Why would I pay for my car to do that to me?
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    GP means that the signs aren't obvious to other drivers. We generally underestimate how important psychological modelling is for communication, because it's transparent to most of us under most circumstances, but AI systems have very different psychology to humans. It is easier to interpret the body language of a fox than a self-driving car.
  - thomastjeffery 2y ago
    We are taking about the same thing: unpredictability. If you and everyone else can't predict what your car will do, then that seems objectively unsafe to me. It also sounds like we agree with each other.
dekhn 2y ago
I don't think you're supposed to merge left when people are merging on the highway into your lane- you have right of way. I find even with the right of way many people merging aren't paying attention, but I deal with that by slightly speeding up (so they can see me in front of them).
- sangnoir 2y ago
  You don't have a right of way over a slow moving vehicle that merged ahead of you. Most ramps are not long enough to allow merging traffic to accelerate to highway speeds before merging, so many drivers free up the right-most lane for this purpose (by merging left)
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Most ramps are more than long enough to accelerate close enough to traffic speed if one wants to, especially in most modern vehicles.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      Unless the driver in front of you didn't.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    If you can safely move left to make room for merging traffic, you should. It’s considerate and reduces the chances of an accident.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Since a number of people are giving pushback, can you point to any (California-oriented) driving instructions consistent with this? I'm not seeing any. I see people saying "it's curteous", but when I'm driving I'm managing hundreds of variables and changing lanes is often risky, given motorcycles lanesplitting at high speed (quite common).
    - 2y ago
modeless 2y ago
Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year. It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who tried it for the first time probably share your opinion. That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly, the rate of improvement in the past two months has been much faster than before. Yesterday I spent an hour in the car over three drives and did not have to turn the steering wheel at all except for parking. That never happened on 12.3. And I don't even have 12.6 yet, this is still 12.5; others report that 12.6 is a noticeable improvement over 12.5. And version 13 is scheduled for release in the next two weeks, and the FSD team has actually hit their last few release milestones. People are right that it is still not ready yet, but if they think it will stay that way forever they are about to be very surprised. At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good within a year and in two or three I could see it actually reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  If this is the case, the calls for heavy regulation in this thread will lead to many more deaths than otherwise.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  I have yet to see a difference. I let it highway drive for an hour and it cut off a semi, coming within 9 to 12 inches of the bumper for no reason. I heard about that one believe me. It got stuck in a side street trying to get to a target parking lot, shaking the wheel back and forth. It's no better so far and this is the first day.
  - modeless 2y ago
    You have 12.6? As I said, it still makes mistakes and it is not ready yet. But 12.3 was much worse. It's the rate of improvement I am impressed with. I will also note that the predicted epidemic of crashes from people abusing FSD never happened. It's been on the road for a long time now. The idea that it is "irresponsible" to deploy it in its current state seems conclusively disproven. You can argue about exactly what the rate of crashes is but it seems clear that it has been at the very least no worse than normal driving.
potato3732842 2y ago
If you were a poorer driver who did these things you wouldn't find these faults so damning because it'd only be say 10% dumber than you rather than 40% or whatever (just making up those numbers).
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  That just implies FSD is as good as a bad driver, which isn't really an endorsement.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    I agree it's not an endorsement but we allow chronically bad drivers on the road as long as they're legally bad and not illegally bad.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      We do that for reasons of practicality: the US is built around cars. If we were to revoke the licenses of the 20% worst drivers, most of those people would be unable to get to work and end up homeless. So we accept that there are some bad drivers on the road because the alternative would be cruel. But we don't have to accept bad software drivers.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        Oh, I'm well aware how things work. But we should look down on them and speak poorly of them same as we look down on and speak poorly of everyone else who's discourteous in public spaces.
dreamcompiler 2y ago
> 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. This is what bugs me about ordinary autopilot. Autopilot doesn't switch lanes, but I like to slow down or speed up as needed to allow merging cars to enter my lane. Autopilot never does that, and I've had some close calls with irate mergers who expected me to work with them. And I don't think they're wrong. Just means that when I'm cruising in the right lane with autopilot I have to take over if a car tries to merge.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Agreed. Automatic lane changes are the only feature of enhanced autopilot that I think I'd be interested in, solely for this reason.
- kelnos 2y ago
  While I certainly wouldn't object to how you handle merging cars (it's a nice, helpful thing to do!), I was always taught that if you want to merge into a lane, you are the sole person responsible for making that possible and making that safe. You need to get your speed and position right, and if you can't do that, you don't merge. (That's for merging onto a highway from an entrance ramp, at least. If you're talking about a zipper merge due to a lane ending or a lane closure, sure, cooperation with other drivers is always the right thing to do.)
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >cooperation with other drivers is always the right thing to do Correct, including when the other driver may not have the strictly interpreted legal right of way. You don't know if their vehicle is malfunctioning, or if the driver is malfunctioning, or if they are being overly aggressive or distracted on their phone. But most of the time, on an onramp to a highway, people on the highway in the lane that is being merged into need to be taking into account the potential conflicts due to people merging in from the acceleration lane. Acceleration lanes can be too short, other cars may not have the capability to accelerate quickly, other drivers may not be as confident, etc. So while technically, the onus is on people merging in, a more realistic rule is to take turns whenever congestion appears, even if you have right of way.
paulcole 2y ago
> Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith that this is a reasonable system This is probably the worst way to evaluate self-driving for society though, right?
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Why would I be supportive of a system that has actively scared me for objectively scary reasons? Even if it's the worst reason, it's not a bad reason.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    How you feel while riding isn’t an objective thing. It’s entirely subjective. You and I can sit side by side and feel differently about the same experience. I don’t see how this is in any way objective besides the fact that you want it to be objective. You can support things for society that scare you and feel unsafe because you can admit your feelings are subjective and the thing is actually safer than it feels to you personally.
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      I also did write about times when the car would have damaged itself or likely caused an accident, and those are indeed objective problems.
      - paulcole 2y ago
        > It failed with a cryptic system error while driving I’ll give you this one. > 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 Subjective. > 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. Since you intervened and don’t know what would’ve happened, subjective. > 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 Subjective. > 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. Objective. You’ve got some fair complaints but the idea that feeling safe is what’s needed remains subjective.
TheCleric 2y ago
> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. There’s a simple answer to this. As soon as it’s good enough for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if Tesla doesn’t trust it, why should I?
- genocidicbunny 2y ago
  I think this is probably both the most concise and most reasonable take. It doesn't require anyone to define some level of autonomy or argue about specific edge cases of how the self driving system behaves. And it's easy to apply this principle to not only Tesla, but to all companies making self driving cars and similar features.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Whats the current total liability cost for all Tesla drivers? The average for all USA cars seems to be around $2000/year, so even if FSD was half as dangerous Tesla would still be paying $1000/year equivalent (not sure how big insurance margins are, assuming nominal) per car. Now, if legally the driver could avoid paying insurance for the few times they want/need to drive themselves (e.g. snow? Dunno what FSD supports atm) then it might make sense economically, but otherwise I don't think it would work out.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Liability alone isn’t nearly that high. Car insurance payments include people stealing your car, uninsured motorists, rental cars, and other issues not the drivers fault. Further insurance payments also include profits for the insurance company, advertising, billing, and other overhead from running a business. Also, if Tesla was taking on these risks you’d expect your insurance costs to drop.
    - TheCleric 2y ago
      Yeah any automaker doing this would just negotiate a flat rate per car in the US and the insurer would average the danger to make a rate. This would be much cheaper than the average individual’s cost for liability on their insurance.
mike_d 2y ago
> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. When I feel as safe as I do sitting in the back of a Waymo.
eric_cc 2y ago
That sucks that you had that negative experience. I’ve driven thousands of miles in FSD and love it. Could not imagine going back. I rarely need to intervene and when I do it’s not because the car did something dangerous. There are just times I’d rather take over due to cyclists, road construction, etc.
- windexh8er 2y ago
  I don't believe this at all. I don't own one but know about a half dozen people that got suckered into paying for FSD. All of them don't use it and 3 of them have stated it's put them in dangerous situations. I've ridden in an X, S and Y with it on. Talk about vomit inducing when letting it drive during "city" driving. I don't doubt it's OK on highway driving, but Ford Blue Cruise and GM's Super Cruise are better there.
  - eric_cc 2y ago
    You can believe what you want to believe. It works fantastic for me whether you believe it or not. I do wonder if people who have wildly different experiences than I have are living in a part of the country that, for one reason or another, Tesla FSD does not yet do as well in.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I think GP is going too far in calling you a liar, but I think for the most part your FSD praise is just kinda... unimportant and irrelevant. GP's aggressive attitude notwithstanding, I think most reasonable people will agree that FSD handles a lot of situations really well, and believe that some people have travel routes where FSD always handles things well. But ok, great, so what? If that wasn't the case, FSD would be an unmitigated disaster with a body count in the tens of thousands. So in a comment thread about someone talking about the problems and unsafe behavior they've seen, a "well it works for me" reply is just annoying noise, and doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
      - eric_cc 2y ago
concordDance 2y ago
This would be more helpful with a date. Was this in 2020 or 2024? I've been told FSD had a complete rearchitecting.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  It was a few months ago
dchichkov 2y ago
> I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year. I'm curious, what is the alternative that you are considering? I've been delaying an upgrade to electric for some time. And now, a car manufacturer that is contributing to the making of another Jan 6th, 2021 is not an option, in my opinion.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  I've got a deposit on the Dodge Charger Daytona EV
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  I also went into car shopping with that opinion, but the options are bleak in terms of other carmakers' software. For some reason, if you want basic software features of a Tesla, the other carmakers want an extra $20k+ (and still don't have some). A big example is why do the other carmakers not yet offer camera recording on their cars? They are all using cameras all around, but only Tesla makes it available to you in case you want the footage? Bizarre. And then they want to charge you an extra $500+ for one dash cam on the windshield. I even had Carplay/Android Auto as a basic requirement, but I was willing to forgo that after trying out the other brands. And not having to spend hours at a dealership doing paperwork was amazing. Literally bought the car on my phone and was out the door within 15 minutes on the day of my appointment.
  - bink 2y ago
    Rivian also allows recording drives to an SSD. They also just released a feature where you can view the cameras while it's parked. I'm kinda surprised other manufacturers aren't allowing that.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Rivians start at $30k more than Teslas, and while they may be nice, they don’t have the track record yet that Tesla does, and there is a risk the company goes bust since it is currently losing a lot of money.
pbasista 2y ago
> I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year. I have no illusions about Tesla's ability to deliver an unsupervised self-driving car any time soon. However, as far as I understand, their autosteer system, in spite of all its flaws, is still the best out there. Do you have any reason to believe that there actually is something better?
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  I believe they're fine with losing auto steering capabilities, based on the tone of their comment.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Autopilot has not been good. I have a cabin four hours from my home and I've used autopilot for long stretches on the highway. Some of the problems: - Certain exits are not detected as such and the car violently veers right before returning to the lane. I simply can't believe they don't have telemetry to remedy this. - Sometimes the GPS becomes miscalibrated. This makes the car think I'm taking an exit when I'm not, causing the car to abruptly reduce its speed to the speed of the ramp. It does not readjust. - It frequently slows for "emergency lights" that don't exist. - If traffic comes to a complete stop, the car accelerates way too hard and brakes hard when the car in front moves any substantial amount. At this point, I'd rather have something less good than something which is an active danger. For all intents and purposes, my Tesla doesn't have reliable cruise control, period. Beyond that, though, I simply don't have trust in Tesla software. I've encountered so many problems at this point that I can't possibly expect them to deliver a product that works reliably at any point in the future. What reason do I have to believe things will magically improve?
  - absoflutely 2y ago
    I'll add that it randomly brakes hard on the interstate because it thinks the speed limit drops to 45. There aren't speed limit signs anywhere nearby on different roads that it could be mistakenly reading either.
geoka9 2y ago
> 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. I've been on the receiving end of this with the offender being a Tesla so many times that I figured it must be FSD.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Probably autopilot, honestly.
browningstreet 2y ago
Was this the last version, or the version released today? I’ve been pretty skeptical of FSD and didn’t use the last version much. Today I used the latest test version, enabled yesterday, and rode around SF, to and from GGP, and it did really well. Waymo well? Almost. But whereas I haven’t ridden Waymo on the highway yet, FSD got me from Hunters Point to the east bay with no disruptions. The biggest improvement I noticed was its optimizations on highway progress.. it’ll change lanes, nicely, when the lane you’re in is slower than the surrounding lanes. And when you’re in the fast/passing lane it’ll return to the next closest lane. Definitely better than the last release.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  I'm clearly not using the FSD today because I refused to complete my free trial of it a few months ago. The post of mine that you're responding to doesn't mention my troubles with Autopilot, which I highly doubt are addressed by today's update (see my other comment for a list of problems). They need to really, really prove to me that Autopilot is working reliably before I'd even consider accepting another free trial of FSD, which I doubt they'd do anyway.
mrjin 2y ago
I would not even try. The reason is simple, there is absolutely no ability of understanding in any of current self claimed auto driving approach, no matter how well they market them.
averageRoyalty 2y ago
I'm not disagreeing with your experience. But if it's as bad as you say, why aren't we seeing tens or hundreds of FSD fatalities per day or at least per week? Even if only 1000 people globally have it on, these issues sound like we should be seeing tens per week.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Perhaps having more accidents doesn't mean more fatal accidents.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. May I ask how this initial trust was established?
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  The numbers that are reported aren't abysmal, and people have anecdotally said good things. I was willing to give it a try while being hyper vigilant.
kingkongjaffa 2y ago
> right turns on red This is a idiosyncrasy of the US (maybe other places too?) and I wonder if it's easier to do self driving at junctions, in countries without this rule.
- dboreham 2y ago
  Only some states allow turn on red, and it's also often overridden by a road sign that forbids. But for me the ultimate test of AGI is four-or-perhaps-three-or-perhaps-two way stop intersections. You have to know whether the other drivers have a stop sign or not in order to understand how to proceed, and you can't see that information. As an immigrant to the US this baffles me, but my US-native family members shrug like there's some telepathy way to know. There's also a rule that you yield to vehicles on your right at uncontrolled intersections (if you can determine that it is uncontrolled...) that almost no drivers here seem to have heard of. You have to eye-ball the other driver to determine whether or not they look like they remember road rules. Not sure how a Tesla will do that.
  - bink 2y ago
    If it's all-way stop there will often be a small placard below the stop sign. If there's no placard there then (usually) cross traffic doesn't stop. Sometimes there's a placard that says "two-way" stop or one that says "cross traffic does not stop", but that's not as common in my experience.
herdcall 2y ago
Same here, but I tried the new 12.5.4.1 yesterday and the difference is night and day. It was near flawless except for some unexplained slowdowns and you don't even need to hold the steering anymore (it detects attention by looking at your face), they clearly are improving rapidly.
- lolinder 2y ago
  How many miles have you driven since the update yesterday? OP described a half dozen different failure modes in a variety of situations that seem to indicate quite extensive testing before they turned it off. How far did you drive the new version and in what circumstances?
  - AndroidKitKat 2y ago
    I recently took a 3000 mile road trip on 12.5.4.1 on a mix of interstate, country roads, and city streets and there were only a small handful of instances where I felt like FSD completely failed. It's certainly not perfect, but I have never had the same failures that the original thread poster had.
anonu 2y ago
My experience has been directionally the same as yours but not of the same magnitude. There's a lot of room from improvement but it's still very good. I'm in a slightly suburban setting... I suspect you're in a fender denser location that me, in which case your experience may be different.
- amelius 2y ago
  Their irresponsible behavior says enough. Even if they fix all their technical issues, they are not driven by a safety culture. The first question that comes to their minds is not "how can we prevent this accident?" but it's "how can we further inflate this bubble?"
deleted 2y ago
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rainsford 2y ago
Arguably the problem with Tesla self-driving is that it's stuck in an uncanny valley of performance where it's worse than better performing systems but also worse from a user experience perspective than even less capable systems. Less capable driver assistance type systems might help the driver out (e.g. adaptive cruise control), but leave no doubt that the human is still driving. Tesla though goes far enough that it takes over driving from the human but it isn't reliable enough that the human can stop paying attention and be ready to take over at a moment's notice. This seems like the worst of all possible worlds since you are both disengaged by having to maintain alertness. Autopilots in airplanes are much the same way, pilots can't just turn it on and take a nap. But the difference is that nothing an autopilot is going to do will instantly crash the plane, while Tesla screwing up will require split second reactions from the driver to correct for. I feel like the real answer to your question is that having reasonable confidence in self-driving cars beyond "driver assistance" type features will ultimately require a car that will literally get from A to B reliably even if you're taking a nap. Anything close to that but not quite there is in my mind almost worse than something more basic.
suggeststrongid 2y ago
> I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver This is puzzling. It’s as if it was said without apology. How about not endangering others on the road with manual driving before trying out self driving?

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.
_ea1k 2y ago
Because it is bad enough that people really do supervise it. I see people who say that wouldn't happen because the drivers become complacent. Maybe that could be a problem with future versions, but I don't see it happening with 12.3.x. I've also heard that driver attention monitoring is pretty good in the later versions, but I have no first hand experience yet.
- valval 2y ago
  Very good point. The product that requires supervision and tells the user to keep their hands on the wheel every 10 seconds is not good enough to be used unsupervised. I wonder how things are inside your head. Are you ignorant or affected by some strong bias?
  - _ea1k 2y ago
    Yeah, it definitely isn't good enough to be used unsupervised. TBH, they've switched to eye and head tracking as the primary mechanism of attention monitoring now. It seems to work pretty well, now that I've had a chance to try it. I'm not quite sure what you meant by your second paragraph, but I'm sure I have my blind spots and biases. I do have direct experience with various versions of 12.x though (12.3 and now 12.5).
bastawhiz 2y ago
Is Tesla required to report system failures or the vehicle damaging itself? How do we know they're not optimizing for the benchmark (what they're legally required to report)?
- rvnx 2y ago
  If the question is: “was FSD activated at the time of the accident: yes/no”, they can legally claim no, for example if luckily the FSD disconnects half a second before a dangerous situation (eg: glare obstructing cameras), which may coincide exactly with the times of some accidents.
  - diebeforei485 2y ago
    > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. Scroll down to Methodology at https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
    - rvnx 2y ago
      This is for Autopilot, which is the car following system on highways. If you are in cruise control and staying on your lane, not much is supposed to happen. The FSD numbers are much more hidden. The general accident rate is 1 per 400’000 miles driven. FSD has one “critical disengagement” (aka before accident if human or safety braking doesn’t intervene) every 33 miles driven. It means to reach unsupervised with human quality they would need to improve it 10’000 times in few months. Not saying it is impossible, just highly optimistic. In 10 years we will be there, but in 2 months, sounds a bit overpromising.
- Uzza 2y ago
  All manufacturers have for some time been required by regulators to report any accident where an autonomous or partially autonomous system was active within 30 seconds of an accident.
timabdulla 2y ago
> If it is dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the reported numbers show more accidents when FSD is on? Even if it is true that the data show that with FSD (not Autopilot) enabled, drivers are in fewer crashes, I would be worried about other confounding factors. For instance, I would assume that drivers are more likely to engage FSD in situations of lower complexity (less traffic, little construction or other impediments, overall lesser traffic flow control complexity, etc.) I also believe that at least initially, Tesla only released FSD to drivers with high safety scores relative to their total driver base, another obvious confounding factor. Happy to be proven wrong though if you have a link to a recent study that goes through all of this.
- valval 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - unbrice 2y ago
    > Either the system causes less loss of life than a human driver or it doesn’t. The confounding factors don’t matter. Confounding factors are what allows one to tell appart "the system cause less loss of life" from "the system causes more loss of life yet it is only enabled in situations were fewer lives are lost".
  - kelnos 2y ago
    No, that's absolutely not how this works. Confounding factors are things that make your data not tell you what you are actually trying to understand. You can't just hand-wave that away, sorry. Consider: what I expect is actually true based on the data is that Tesla FSD is as safe or safer than the average human driver, but only if the driver is paying attention and is ready to take over in case FSD does something unsafe, even if FSD doesn't warn the driver it needs to disengage. That's not an autonomous driving system. Which is potentially fine, but the value prop of that system is low to me: I have to pay just as much attention as if I were driving manually, with the added problem that my attention is going to start to wander because the car is doing most of the work, and the longer the car successfully does most of the work, the more I'm going to unconsciously believe I can allow my attention to slip. I do like current common ADAS features because they hit a good sweet spot: I still need to actively hold onto the wheel and handle initiating lane changes, turns, stopping and starting at traffic lights and stop signs, etc. I look at the ADAS as a sort of "backup" to my own driving, and not as what's primarily in control of the car. In contrast, Tesla FSD wants to be primarily in control of the car, but it's not trustworthy enough to do that without constant supervision.
nkrisc 2y ago
What numbers? Who’s measuring? What are they measuring?
rvnx 2y ago
There is an easy way to know what is really behind the numbers: look who is paying in case of accident. You have a Mercedes, Mercedes takes responsibility. You have a Tesla, you take the responsibility. Says a lot.
- tensor 2y ago
  You have a Mercedes, and you have a system that works virtually nowhere.
  - therouwboat 2y ago
    Better that way than "Oh it tried to run red light, but otherwise it's great."
    - tensor 2y ago
      "Oh we tried to build it but no one bought it! So we gave up." - Mercedes before Tesla. Perhaps FSD isn't ready for city streets yet, but it's great on the highways and I'd 1000x prefer we make progress rather than settle for the status quo garbage that the legacy makers put out. Also, human drivers are the most dangerous, by far, we need to make progress to eventual phase them out.
      - meibo 2y ago
        2-ton blocks of metal that go 80mph next to me on the highway is not the place I would want people to go "fuck it let's just do it" with their new tech. Human drivers might be dangerous but adding more danger and unpredictability on top just because we can skip a few steps in the engineering process is crazy. Maybe you have a deathwish, but I definitely don't. Your choices affect other humans in traffic.
        tensor 2y ago
        It sounds like you are the one with a deathwish, because objectively by the numbers Autopilot on the highway has greatly reduced death. So you are literally advocating for more death. You have two imperfect systems for highway driving: Autopilot with human oversight, and humans. The first has far far less death. Yet you are choosing the second.
lawn 2y ago
> The thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers. Oh? Who are presenting the numbers? Is a crash that fails to trigger the airbags still not counted as a crash? What about the car turning off FSD right before a crash? How about adjusting for factors such as age of driver and the type of miles driven? The numbers don't make sense because they're not good comparisons and are made to make Tesla look good.
gamblor956 2y ago
The numbers collected by the NHTSA and insurance companies do show that FSD is dangerous...that's why the NHTSA started investigating and its why most insurance companies won't insure Tesla vehicles or charge significantly higher rates. Also, Tesla is known to disable self-driving features right before collisions to give the appearance of driver fault. And the coup de grace: if Tesla's own data showed that FSD was actually safer, they'd be shouting it from the moon, using that data to get self-driving permits in CA, and offering to assume liability if FSD actually caused an accident (like Mercedes does with its self driving system).
throwaway562if1 2y ago
AIUI the numbers are for accidents where FSD is in control. Which means if it does a turn into oncoming traffic and the driver yanks the wheel or slams the brakes 500ms before collision, it's not considered a crash during FSD.
- Uzza 2y ago
  That is not correct. Tesla counts any accident within 5 seconds of Autopilot/FSD turning off as the system being involved. Regulators extend that period to 30 seconds, and Tesla must comply with that when reporting to them.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    How about when it turns into oncoming traffic, the driver yanks the wheel, manages to get back on track, and avoids a crash? Do we know how often things like that happen? Because that's also a failure of the system, and that should affect how reliable and safe we rate these things. I expect we don't have data on that. Also how about: it turns into oncoming traffic, but there isn't much oncoming traffic, and that traffic swerves to get out of the way, before FSD realizes what it's done and pulls back into the correct lane. We certainly don't have data on that.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Several people in this thread have been saying this or similar. It's incorrect, from Tesla: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact" https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport Situations which inevitably cause a crash more than 5 seconds later seem like they would be extremely rare.
  - rvnx 2y ago
    This is Autopilot, not FSD which is an entirely different product
johnneville 2y ago
are there even transparent reported numbers available ? for whatever does exist, it is also easy to imagine how they could be misleading. for instance i've disengaged FSD when i noticed i was about to be in an accident. if i couldn't recover in time, the accident would not be when FSD is on and depending on the metric, would not be reported as a FSD induced accident.
kelnos 2y ago
Agree that only the numbers matter, but only if the numbers are comprehensive and useful. How often does an autonomous driving system get the driver into a dicey situation, but the driver notices the bad behavior, takes control, and avoids a crash? I don't think we have publicly-available data on that at all. You admit that you ran into some of these sorts of situations during your trial. Those situations are unacceptable. An autonomous driving system should be safer than a human driver, and should not make mistakes that a human driver would not make. Despite all the YouTube videos out there of people doing unsafe things with Tesla FSD, I expect that most people that use it are pretty responsible, are paying attention, and are ready to take over if they notice FSD doing something wrong. But if people need to do that, it's not a safe, successful autonomous driving system. Safety means everyone can watch TV, mess around on their phone, or even take a nap, and we still end up with a lower crash rate than with human drivers. The numbers that are available can't tell us if that would be the case. My belief is that we're absolutely not there.
kybernetikos 2y ago
> But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter. Are these the numbers reported by tesla, or by some third party?

thomastjeffery 2y ago

It's not just about relative safety compared to all human driving. We all know that some humans are sometimes terrible drivers! We also know what that looks like: Driving too fast or slow relative to surroundings. Quickly turning every once in a while to stay in their lane. Aggressively weaving through traffic. Going through an intersection without spending the time to actually look for pedestrians. The list goes on.. Bad human driving can be seen. Bad automated driving is invisible. Do you think the people who were about to be hit by a Tesla even realized that was the case? I sincerely doubt it.

bastawhiz 2y ago
> Bad automated driving is invisible. I'm literally saying that it is visible, to me, the passenger. And for reasons that aren't just bad vibes. If I'm in an Uber and I feel unsafe, I'll report the driver. Why would I pay for my car to do that to me?
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  GP means that the signs aren't obvious to other drivers. We generally underestimate how important psychological modelling is for communication, because it's transparent to most of us under most circumstances, but AI systems have very different psychology to humans. It is easier to interpret the body language of a fox than a self-driving car.
- thomastjeffery 2y ago
  We are taking about the same thing: unpredictability. If you and everyone else can't predict what your car will do, then that seems objectively unsafe to me. It also sounds like we agree with each other.

dekhn 2y ago

I don't think you're supposed to merge left when people are merging on the highway into your lane- you have right of way. I find even with the right of way many people merging aren't paying attention, but I deal with that by slightly speeding up (so they can see me in front of them).

sangnoir 2y ago
You don't have a right of way over a slow moving vehicle that merged ahead of you. Most ramps are not long enough to allow merging traffic to accelerate to highway speeds before merging, so many drivers free up the right-most lane for this purpose (by merging left)
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Most ramps are more than long enough to accelerate close enough to traffic speed if one wants to, especially in most modern vehicles.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Unless the driver in front of you didn't.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  If you can safely move left to make room for merging traffic, you should. It’s considerate and reduces the chances of an accident.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Since a number of people are giving pushback, can you point to any (California-oriented) driving instructions consistent with this? I'm not seeing any. I see people saying "it's curteous", but when I'm driving I'm managing hundreds of variables and changing lanes is often risky, given motorcycles lanesplitting at high speed (quite common).
  - 2y ago

modeless 2y ago

Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year. It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who tried it for the first time probably share your opinion. That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly, the rate of improvement in the past two months has been much faster than before. Yesterday I spent an hour in the car over three drives and did not have to turn the steering wheel at all except for parking. That never happened on 12.3. And I don't even have 12.6 yet, this is still 12.5; others report that 12.6 is a noticeable improvement over 12.5. And version 13 is scheduled for release in the next two weeks, and the FSD team has actually hit their last few release milestones. People are right that it is still not ready yet, but if they think it will stay that way forever they are about to be very surprised. At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good within a year and in two or three I could see it actually reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.

seizethecheese 2y ago
If this is the case, the calls for heavy regulation in this thread will lead to many more deaths than otherwise.
jvanderbot 2y ago
I have yet to see a difference. I let it highway drive for an hour and it cut off a semi, coming within 9 to 12 inches of the bumper for no reason. I heard about that one believe me. It got stuck in a side street trying to get to a target parking lot, shaking the wheel back and forth. It's no better so far and this is the first day.
- modeless 2y ago
  You have 12.6? As I said, it still makes mistakes and it is not ready yet. But 12.3 was much worse. It's the rate of improvement I am impressed with. I will also note that the predicted epidemic of crashes from people abusing FSD never happened. It's been on the road for a long time now. The idea that it is "irresponsible" to deploy it in its current state seems conclusively disproven. You can argue about exactly what the rate of crashes is but it seems clear that it has been at the very least no worse than normal driving.

potato3732842 2y ago

If you were a poorer driver who did these things you wouldn't find these faults so damning because it'd only be say 10% dumber than you rather than 40% or whatever (just making up those numbers).

bastawhiz 2y ago
That just implies FSD is as good as a bad driver, which isn't really an endorsement.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I agree it's not an endorsement but we allow chronically bad drivers on the road as long as they're legally bad and not illegally bad.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    We do that for reasons of practicality: the US is built around cars. If we were to revoke the licenses of the 20% worst drivers, most of those people would be unable to get to work and end up homeless. So we accept that there are some bad drivers on the road because the alternative would be cruel. But we don't have to accept bad software drivers.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      Oh, I'm well aware how things work. But we should look down on them and speak poorly of them same as we look down on and speak poorly of everyone else who's discourteous in public spaces.

dreamcompiler 2y ago

> 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. This is what bugs me about ordinary autopilot. Autopilot doesn't switch lanes, but I like to slow down or speed up as needed to allow merging cars to enter my lane. Autopilot never does that, and I've had some close calls with irate mergers who expected me to work with them. And I don't think they're wrong. Just means that when I'm cruising in the right lane with autopilot I have to take over if a car tries to merge.

bastawhiz 2y ago
Agreed. Automatic lane changes are the only feature of enhanced autopilot that I think I'd be interested in, solely for this reason.
kelnos 2y ago
While I certainly wouldn't object to how you handle merging cars (it's a nice, helpful thing to do!), I was always taught that if you want to merge into a lane, you are the sole person responsible for making that possible and making that safe. You need to get your speed and position right, and if you can't do that, you don't merge. (That's for merging onto a highway from an entrance ramp, at least. If you're talking about a zipper merge due to a lane ending or a lane closure, sure, cooperation with other drivers is always the right thing to do.)
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  >cooperation with other drivers is always the right thing to do Correct, including when the other driver may not have the strictly interpreted legal right of way. You don't know if their vehicle is malfunctioning, or if the driver is malfunctioning, or if they are being overly aggressive or distracted on their phone. But most of the time, on an onramp to a highway, people on the highway in the lane that is being merged into need to be taking into account the potential conflicts due to people merging in from the acceleration lane. Acceleration lanes can be too short, other cars may not have the capability to accelerate quickly, other drivers may not be as confident, etc. So while technically, the onus is on people merging in, a more realistic rule is to take turns whenever congestion appears, even if you have right of way.

paulcole 2y ago

> Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith that this is a reasonable system This is probably the worst way to evaluate self-driving for society though, right?

bastawhiz 2y ago
Why would I be supportive of a system that has actively scared me for objectively scary reasons? Even if it's the worst reason, it's not a bad reason.
- paulcole 2y ago
  How you feel while riding isn’t an objective thing. It’s entirely subjective. You and I can sit side by side and feel differently about the same experience. I don’t see how this is in any way objective besides the fact that you want it to be objective. You can support things for society that scare you and feel unsafe because you can admit your feelings are subjective and the thing is actually safer than it feels to you personally.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    I also did write about times when the car would have damaged itself or likely caused an accident, and those are indeed objective problems.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      > It failed with a cryptic system error while driving I’ll give you this one. > 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 Subjective. > 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. Since you intervened and don’t know what would’ve happened, subjective. > 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 Subjective. > 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. Objective. You’ve got some fair complaints but the idea that feeling safe is what’s needed remains subjective.

TheCleric 2y ago

> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. There’s a simple answer to this. As soon as it’s good enough for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if Tesla doesn’t trust it, why should I?

genocidicbunny 2y ago
I think this is probably both the most concise and most reasonable take. It doesn't require anyone to define some level of autonomy or argue about specific edge cases of how the self driving system behaves. And it's easy to apply this principle to not only Tesla, but to all companies making self driving cars and similar features.
concordDance 2y ago
Whats the current total liability cost for all Tesla drivers? The average for all USA cars seems to be around $2000/year, so even if FSD was half as dangerous Tesla would still be paying $1000/year equivalent (not sure how big insurance margins are, assuming nominal) per car. Now, if legally the driver could avoid paying insurance for the few times they want/need to drive themselves (e.g. snow? Dunno what FSD supports atm) then it might make sense economically, but otherwise I don't think it would work out.
- Retric 2y ago
  Liability alone isn’t nearly that high. Car insurance payments include people stealing your car, uninsured motorists, rental cars, and other issues not the drivers fault. Further insurance payments also include profits for the insurance company, advertising, billing, and other overhead from running a business. Also, if Tesla was taking on these risks you’d expect your insurance costs to drop.
  - TheCleric 2y ago
    Yeah any automaker doing this would just negotiate a flat rate per car in the US and the insurer would average the danger to make a rate. This would be much cheaper than the average individual’s cost for liability on their insurance.

mike_d 2y ago

> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. When I feel as safe as I do sitting in the back of a Waymo.

eric_cc 2y ago

That sucks that you had that negative experience. I’ve driven thousands of miles in FSD and love it. Could not imagine going back. I rarely need to intervene and when I do it’s not because the car did something dangerous. There are just times I’d rather take over due to cyclists, road construction, etc.

windexh8er 2y ago
I don't believe this at all. I don't own one but know about a half dozen people that got suckered into paying for FSD. All of them don't use it and 3 of them have stated it's put them in dangerous situations. I've ridden in an X, S and Y with it on. Talk about vomit inducing when letting it drive during "city" driving. I don't doubt it's OK on highway driving, but Ford Blue Cruise and GM's Super Cruise are better there.
- eric_cc 2y ago
  You can believe what you want to believe. It works fantastic for me whether you believe it or not. I do wonder if people who have wildly different experiences than I have are living in a part of the country that, for one reason or another, Tesla FSD does not yet do as well in.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I think GP is going too far in calling you a liar, but I think for the most part your FSD praise is just kinda... unimportant and irrelevant. GP's aggressive attitude notwithstanding, I think most reasonable people will agree that FSD handles a lot of situations really well, and believe that some people have travel routes where FSD always handles things well. But ok, great, so what? If that wasn't the case, FSD would be an unmitigated disaster with a body count in the tens of thousands. So in a comment thread about someone talking about the problems and unsafe behavior they've seen, a "well it works for me" reply is just annoying noise, and doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
    - eric_cc 2y ago

concordDance 2y ago

This would be more helpful with a date. Was this in 2020 or 2024? I've been told FSD had a complete rearchitecting.

bastawhiz 2y ago
It was a few months ago

dchichkov 2y ago

> I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year. I'm curious, what is the alternative that you are considering? I've been delaying an upgrade to electric for some time. And now, a car manufacturer that is contributing to the making of another Jan 6th, 2021 is not an option, in my opinion.

bastawhiz 2y ago
I've got a deposit on the Dodge Charger Daytona EV
lotsofpulp 2y ago
I also went into car shopping with that opinion, but the options are bleak in terms of other carmakers' software. For some reason, if you want basic software features of a Tesla, the other carmakers want an extra $20k+ (and still don't have some). A big example is why do the other carmakers not yet offer camera recording on their cars? They are all using cameras all around, but only Tesla makes it available to you in case you want the footage? Bizarre. And then they want to charge you an extra $500+ for one dash cam on the windshield. I even had Carplay/Android Auto as a basic requirement, but I was willing to forgo that after trying out the other brands. And not having to spend hours at a dealership doing paperwork was amazing. Literally bought the car on my phone and was out the door within 15 minutes on the day of my appointment.
- bink 2y ago
  Rivian also allows recording drives to an SSD. They also just released a feature where you can view the cameras while it's parked. I'm kinda surprised other manufacturers aren't allowing that.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Rivians start at $30k more than Teslas, and while they may be nice, they don’t have the track record yet that Tesla does, and there is a risk the company goes bust since it is currently losing a lot of money.

pbasista 2y ago

> I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year. I have no illusions about Tesla's ability to deliver an unsupervised self-driving car any time soon. However, as far as I understand, their autosteer system, in spite of all its flaws, is still the best out there. Do you have any reason to believe that there actually is something better?

throwaway314155 2y ago
I believe they're fine with losing auto steering capabilities, based on the tone of their comment.
bastawhiz 2y ago
Autopilot has not been good. I have a cabin four hours from my home and I've used autopilot for long stretches on the highway. Some of the problems: - Certain exits are not detected as such and the car violently veers right before returning to the lane. I simply can't believe they don't have telemetry to remedy this. - Sometimes the GPS becomes miscalibrated. This makes the car think I'm taking an exit when I'm not, causing the car to abruptly reduce its speed to the speed of the ramp. It does not readjust. - It frequently slows for "emergency lights" that don't exist. - If traffic comes to a complete stop, the car accelerates way too hard and brakes hard when the car in front moves any substantial amount. At this point, I'd rather have something less good than something which is an active danger. For all intents and purposes, my Tesla doesn't have reliable cruise control, period. Beyond that, though, I simply don't have trust in Tesla software. I've encountered so many problems at this point that I can't possibly expect them to deliver a product that works reliably at any point in the future. What reason do I have to believe things will magically improve?
- absoflutely 2y ago
  I'll add that it randomly brakes hard on the interstate because it thinks the speed limit drops to 45. There aren't speed limit signs anywhere nearby on different roads that it could be mistakenly reading either.

geoka9 2y ago

bastawhiz 2y ago
Probably autopilot, honestly.

browningstreet 2y ago

Was this the last version, or the version released today? I’ve been pretty skeptical of FSD and didn’t use the last version much. Today I used the latest test version, enabled yesterday, and rode around SF, to and from GGP, and it did really well. Waymo well? Almost. But whereas I haven’t ridden Waymo on the highway yet, FSD got me from Hunters Point to the east bay with no disruptions. The biggest improvement I noticed was its optimizations on highway progress.. it’ll change lanes, nicely, when the lane you’re in is slower than the surrounding lanes. And when you’re in the fast/passing lane it’ll return to the next closest lane. Definitely better than the last release.

bastawhiz 2y ago
I'm clearly not using the FSD today because I refused to complete my free trial of it a few months ago. The post of mine that you're responding to doesn't mention my troubles with Autopilot, which I highly doubt are addressed by today's update (see my other comment for a list of problems). They need to really, really prove to me that Autopilot is working reliably before I'd even consider accepting another free trial of FSD, which I doubt they'd do anyway.

mrjin 2y ago

I would not even try. The reason is simple, there is absolutely no ability of understanding in any of current self claimed auto driving approach, no matter how well they market them.

averageRoyalty 2y ago

I'm not disagreeing with your experience. But if it's as bad as you say, why aren't we seeing tens or hundreds of FSD fatalities per day or at least per week? Even if only 1000 people globally have it on, these issues sound like we should be seeing tens per week.

bastawhiz 2y ago
Perhaps having more accidents doesn't mean more fatal accidents.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

> After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. May I ask how this initial trust was established?

bastawhiz 2y ago
The numbers that are reported aren't abysmal, and people have anecdotally said good things. I was willing to give it a try while being hyper vigilant.

kingkongjaffa 2y ago

> right turns on red This is a idiosyncrasy of the US (maybe other places too?) and I wonder if it's easier to do self driving at junctions, in countries without this rule.

dboreham 2y ago
Only some states allow turn on red, and it's also often overridden by a road sign that forbids. But for me the ultimate test of AGI is four-or-perhaps-three-or-perhaps-two way stop intersections. You have to know whether the other drivers have a stop sign or not in order to understand how to proceed, and you can't see that information. As an immigrant to the US this baffles me, but my US-native family members shrug like there's some telepathy way to know. There's also a rule that you yield to vehicles on your right at uncontrolled intersections (if you can determine that it is uncontrolled...) that almost no drivers here seem to have heard of. You have to eye-ball the other driver to determine whether or not they look like they remember road rules. Not sure how a Tesla will do that.
- bink 2y ago
  If it's all-way stop there will often be a small placard below the stop sign. If there's no placard there then (usually) cross traffic doesn't stop. Sometimes there's a placard that says "two-way" stop or one that says "cross traffic does not stop", but that's not as common in my experience.

herdcall 2y ago

Same here, but I tried the new 12.5.4.1 yesterday and the difference is night and day. It was near flawless except for some unexplained slowdowns and you don't even need to hold the steering anymore (it detects attention by looking at your face), they clearly are improving rapidly.

lolinder 2y ago
How many miles have you driven since the update yesterday? OP described a half dozen different failure modes in a variety of situations that seem to indicate quite extensive testing before they turned it off. How far did you drive the new version and in what circumstances?
- AndroidKitKat 2y ago
  I recently took a 3000 mile road trip on 12.5.4.1 on a mix of interstate, country roads, and city streets and there were only a small handful of instances where I felt like FSD completely failed. It's certainly not perfect, but I have never had the same failures that the original thread poster had.

anonu 2y ago

My experience has been directionally the same as yours but not of the same magnitude. There's a lot of room from improvement but it's still very good. I'm in a slightly suburban setting... I suspect you're in a fender denser location that me, in which case your experience may be different.

amelius 2y ago
Their irresponsible behavior says enough. Even if they fix all their technical issues, they are not driven by a safety culture. The first question that comes to their minds is not "how can we prevent this accident?" but it's "how can we further inflate this bubble?"

deleted 2y ago

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rainsford 2y ago

Arguably the problem with Tesla self-driving is that it's stuck in an uncanny valley of performance where it's worse than better performing systems but also worse from a user experience perspective than even less capable systems. Less capable driver assistance type systems might help the driver out (e.g. adaptive cruise control), but leave no doubt that the human is still driving. Tesla though goes far enough that it takes over driving from the human but it isn't reliable enough that the human can stop paying attention and be ready to take over at a moment's notice. This seems like the worst of all possible worlds since you are both disengaged by having to maintain alertness. Autopilots in airplanes are much the same way, pilots can't just turn it on and take a nap. But the difference is that nothing an autopilot is going to do will instantly crash the plane, while Tesla screwing up will require split second reactions from the driver to correct for. I feel like the real answer to your question is that having reasonable confidence in self-driving cars beyond "driver assistance" type features will ultimately require a car that will literally get from A to B reliably even if you're taking a nap. Anything close to that but not quite there is in my mind almost worse than something more basic.

suggeststrongid 2y ago

> I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver This is puzzling. It’s as if it was said without apology. How about not endangering others on the road with manual driving before trying out self driving?