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Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy
- dlcarrier 1y agoThis looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were. Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
- standardUser 1y agoWhat does Waymo lack in your opinion to not be considered "full self driving"? The persistent problem seems to be severe weather, but the gap between the weather a human shouldn't drive in and weather a robot can't drive in will only get smaller. In the end, the reason to own a self-driven vehicle may come down to how many severe weather days you have to endure in your locale.
- panick21_ 1y agoPut a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?
- cryptoz 1y agoMany humans couldn't.
- jacquesm 1y agoMost humans that claim they could could. Anyway, this seems like a pretty low quality comment, you got perfectly well what the OP meant.
- cryptoz 1y agoOh gosh sorry, I do try to contribute positively to HN and write quality comments. I'll expand: I've been in circumstances where I've been rented a company car in a foreign country, felt that I was a good driver, but struggled. The road signs are different and can be confusing, the local patterns and habits of drivers can be totally different from what you're accustomed to. I don't doubt that lots of humans could drive most roads - but I think the average driver would struggle, and have a much higher rate of accidents than a local. Germany, Italy, India all stand out as examples to me. The roads and driving culture is very different, and can be dangerous to someone who is used to driving on American suburban streets. I really do stand by my comment, and apologize for the 'low quality' nature of it. I meant to suggest that we set the bar far higher for AI than we do for people, which is in general a good thing. But still - I would say that by this definition of 'full self driving', it wouldn't be met very well by many or most human drivers.
- jacquesm 1y agoI've driven all over the planet except for Asia and Africa. So far, no real problem and I think most drivers would adapt within a day or two. Greece, Panama and Colombia stand out as somewhat more exciting. Switching to left hand driving in the UK also wasn't a big problem but you do have to pay more attention. Of course I may have simply been lucky, but given that my driving license is valid in many countries it seems as though humanity has determined this is mostly a solved problem. When someone says "Put a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?" they mean: I would expect a human to be able to drive on a random road in the world. And they likely could. Can a Waymo do the same? I don't know the answer to that one. But if there is one thing that humans are pretty good at it is adaptation to circumstances previously unseen. I am not sure if a Waymo could do the same but it would be a very interesting experiment to find out. American suburban streets are not representative of driving in most parts of the world. I don't think the bar of 'should be able to drive most places where humans can drive' is all that high and even your average American would adapt pretty quickly to driving in different places. Source: I know plenty of Americans and have seen them drive in lots of countries. Usually it works quite well, though, admittedly, seeing them in Germany was kind of funny. "Am I hallucinating or did we just get passed by an old lady? And we're doing 85 Mph?"
- Kye 1y agoThat's the real issue. If "can navigate roads" is enough then we've had full self-driving for a while. There needs to be some base level of general purpose capability or it's just a neat regional curiosity.
- standardUser 1y agoFor a couple decades you couldn't even bring your cell phone anywhere in the world and use it. Transformational technologies don't have to be available universally and simultaneously to be viable. Even when the gas car was created you couldn't use it anywhere that didn't have gasoline and paved roads, plus a mechanic and access to parts.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoA significant portion of US highways and backroads are uncovered by cell signal. I suppose a self driving car would have starlink these days.
- standardUser 1y agoWe once had no gas stations, now we have 150,000 (in the US). If the commercial need is there, building out connectivity is an unlikely impediment. Starlink et al. can solve this everywhere except when there's severe weather, a problem Waymo shares, which is starting to make me think the Upper Midwest might be waiting a very long time for self-driving cars.
- panick21_ 1y agoI think the bigger problem is mapping every road to the detail they need and keeping that up to date.
- panick21_ 1y agoDid I argue that the technology was not viable? I answered the question 'What does Waymo lack in your opinion to not be considered "full self driving"?'. And clearly its not if it can't drive on literally 99.99% of roads in the world. Any argument to the contrary is just ridiculous.
- standardUser 1y agoAs I said above, "full self driving" is clearly an outdated concept.
- mkl 1y agoWaymo is very restricted on the locations it drives (limit parts of limited cities, I think no freeways still), and uses remote operators to make decisions in unusual situations and when it gets stuck. This article from last year has quite a bit of information: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing-chess-while-tesla-plays-checkers/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...
- panarky 1y agoWaymo never allows a remote human to drive the car. If it gets stuck, a remote operator can assess the situation and tell the car where it should go, but all driving is always handled locally by the onboard system in the vehicle. Interesting that Waymo now operates just fine in SF fog, and is expanding to Seattle (rain) and Denver (snow and ice).
- epcoa 1y agoThe person you're replying to never claimed otherwise. However, while decision support is not directly steering and accelerating/braking the car, I am just going to assert it is still driving the car, at least for how it actually matters in this discussion. And the best estimate is that these interventions are "uncommon" on the order of 10ks miles, but that isn't rare. A system that requires a "higher level" handler is not full self driving.
- panarky 1y agoAgreed! Which is why an autonomous car company that is responsible and prioritizes safety would never call their SAE Level 4 vehicle "full self-driving". And that's why it's so irresponsible and dangerous for Tesla to continue using that marketing hype term for their SAE Level 2 system.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThere's a simple test I find useful to determine who's driving: If the vehicle has a collision, who's ultimately responsible? That person (or computer) is the driver. If a Waymo hits a pole for example, the software has a bug. It wasn't the responsibility of a remote assistant to monitor the environment in real time and prevent the accident, so we call the computer the driver. If we put a safety driver in the seat and run the same software that hits the same pole, it was the human who didn't meet their responsibility to prevent the accident. Therefore, they're the driver.
- gerdesj 1y agoNo one does FSD yet - properly. It initially seems mad that a human, inside the box can outperform the "finest" efforts of a multi zillion dollar company. The human has all their sensors inside the box and most of them stymied by the non transparent parts. Bad weather makes it worse. However, look at the sensors and compute being deployed on cars. Its all minimums and cost focused - basically MVP, with deaths as a costed variable in an equation. A car could have cameras with views everywhere for optical, LIDAR, RADAR, even a form of SONAR if it can be useful, microwave and way more. Accellerometers and all sorts too, all feeding into a model. As a driver, I've come up with strategies such as "look left, listen right". I'm British so drive on the left and sit on the right side of my car. When turning right and I have the window wound down, I can watch the left for a gap and listen for cars to the right. I use it as a negative and never a positive - so if I see a gap on the left and I hear a car to my right, I stay put. If I see a gap to the left but hear no sound on my right, I turn my head to confirm that there is a space and do a final quick go/no go (which involves another check left and right). This strategy saves quite a lot of head swings and if done properly is safe. I now drive an EV: One year so far - a Seic MG4, with cameras on all four sides, that I can't record from but can use. It has lane assist (so lateral control, which craps out on many A road sections but is fine on motorway class roads) and cruise control that will keep a safe distance from other vehicles (that works well on most roads and very well on motorways, there are restrictions). Recently I was driving and a really heavy rain shower hit as I was overtaking a lorry. I immediately dived back into lane one, behind the lorry and put cruise on. I could just see the edge white line, so I dealt with left/right and the car sorted out forward/backward. I can easily deal with both but its quite nice to be able carefully abrogate responsibilities.
- jeffbee 1y ago> Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation There is little to suggest that Tesla is any closer to level 4 automation than Nabisco is. The Dojo supercomputer that was going to get them there? Never existed.
- ascorbic 1y agoAnd their H100s were diverted to build MechaHitler instead
- dreamcompiler 1y agoNot gonna happen as long as Musk is CEO. He's hard over on a vision-only approach without lidar or radar, and it won't work. Companies like Waymo that use these sensors and understand sensor fusion are already eating Tesla's lunch. Tesla will never catch up with vision alone.
- formercoder 1y agoHumans drive without LIDAR. Why can’t robots?
- cannonpr 1y agoBecause human vision has very little in common with camera vision and is a far more advanced sensor, on a far more advanced platform (ability to scan and pivot etc), with a lot more compute available to it.
- lstodd 1y agoyeah, try matching a human eye on dynamic range and then on angular speed and then on refocus. okay forget that. try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.
- dmos62 1y agoI'm curious, in what ways is a cat's vision simpler?
- lstodd 1y agoless far sight, dichromatic color vision, over-optimized for low light. a cursory glance did not find studies on cat peripheral vision, but would assume it's worse than human if only because they rely more on audio
- terminalshort 1y agoWho cares? They don't need that. The cameras can have continuous attention on a 360 degree field of vision. That's like saying a car can never match a human at bipedal running speed.
- crooked-v 1y agoSo does anyone who previously bought it on claims that actual full self-driving would be "coming soon" get refunds?
- garbagewoman 1y agoHopefully not. They might learn a lesson from the experience.
- blackoil 1y agoHmm, you want to penalize company and teach a lesson to customers,so give the money to Ford shareholders.
- sschueller 1y agoPremature? Is that what we call this now? It's straight up fraud! Others are in prison for far less.
- tombert 1y agoI was about to say this. Elon would go on stage and say something like “and this is something we can do today”, or “coming next year” in 2018. The crowd goes wild, the stock price shoots up. The first time could be an honest mistake, but after a certain point we have to assume that it’s just a lie to boost the stock price.
- mlindner 1y agoThe stock price hasn't dropped though, the opposite rather.
- tombert 1y agoI know. That’s my point; he just goes on stage and lies, the stock price goes up and it doesn’t appear to correct itself despite the boost being based on a lie.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoI don’t care about the stock price, but I guess I wouldn’t mind a refund for the FSD I purchased in 2018 that wasn’t actually delivered. The high stock price just means the company should have more capital available to issue those refunds?
- dlcarrier 1y agoNot in the US. There's a whole bureaucracy of advertising boards where a false advertising case can heard and appealed before anyone with legal authority would even look at it, which pretty much never happens. Even then, it's a tort, so punishment outside of fines is pretty much non existent.
- tejohnso 1y agoI'm not sure it's fraud because there was always the fine print. But a company selling a car with a feature called Full Self Driving that does not in fact fully self drive, well, that's a company I don't buy from. Unfortunately others don't seem as offended and happily pay for the product, encouraging further b.s. marketing hype culture. Just like politicians, it seems there's no repercussions for CEO's lying as long as it's fleecing the peons and not the elite.
- jojobas 1y ago>false advertising I think you mean "securities fraud", at gargantuan scale at that. Theranos and Nikola were nowhere near that scale.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoIt is strange how Elon and Tesla get a pass on this. Tesla has contributed to the death of more people than Thernos. I guess he didn't rip off rich investors, except maybe the ones who died in their Teslas. Perhaps it's that cars are more sacred than healthcare.
- epolanski 1y agoThis is fraud he went in front of investors and said multiple times it was around the corner. He said consumers, just buy the car and it will come with an updated. It didn't. This is a scam, end of story. 7 years of it.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoSurprising that there hasn't been a class-action suit yet.
- bradhe 1y ago> This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were. Delusionaly generous take. Perhaps even zealotry.
- gitaarik 1y agoBut, they're changing the meaning of FSD to FSD (Supervised). So that means they don't make any promises for unsupervised FSD in the future anymore. They'll of course say that they keep working on it and that stuff is progressing. But they don't have to deliver anymore. Just like they say to people getting into accidents that they should keep their arms on the wheel or else it's your own responsibility.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoDo Waymos (without safety driver in the car) count as FSD?
- ares623 1y agoMost Honest Company (Sarcasm)
- jacquesm 1y agoFish rots from the head.
- an0malous 1y agoHow have they gotten away with such obvious misadvertising for this long? It’s undeniably misled customers and inflated their stock value
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoWho was going to stop them from lying?
- SequoiaHope 1y agoSEC is one possibility
- greekrich92 1y ago2007 called...
- vlovich123 1y agoSEC and FTC would be obvious candidates who historically would do this. States also have the ability to prosecute this via UDAP (unfair and deceptive practices) laws. Probably Tesla being the only major domestic EV manufacturer + historically Musk not wading into politics + Musk/Tesla being widely popular for a time is probably why no one has gone after him. Not sure how this changes going forward with Musk being a very polarizing figure now.
- 1over137 1y ago>SEC and FTC would be obvious candidates who historically would do this. Yeah, historically, as in: before many people here were born. It's been so long since SEC and FTC did such things.
- rsynnott 1y agoFTC, sure, yeah, mostly, kinda neutered these days. SEC, despite Trump’s efforts to neuter it, is still fairly scary tho.
- pm90 1y ago[flagged]
- lotsofpulp 1y agoIt’s a winning strategy. See who won the presidential election recently.
- rsynnott 1y agoWell, I mean, clearly you did at some point; you bought one of his cars.
- jbm 1y agoI bought one too and he did not factor into it. Electric car + active battery management were what I cared about at the time of purchase. Also, I am biased against GM and Ford due to experiences with their cars in the 80s and 90s. I doubt I'm the only one. (In retrospect, the glass roof was not practical in Canada and I will look elsewhere in the future)
- rogerrogerr 1y agoWhat’s the problem with the glass roof in Canada? Hail?
- jbm 1y agoAh I would have guessed that too but in my case, had a crack that opened up over night — no impact at all. Besides, hot in summer and cold in winter. Just see no benefit, it is just another made for California feature
- cmurf 1y agoIs hope rational? Is life absurd? Is hope a solution to absurdity?
- FireBeyond 1y ago
- yieldcrv 1y agoThe lesson here is to wait for a chill SEC and friendly DOJ before you recant your fraudulent claims, because then they won’t be found to be fraudulent
- RyanShook 1y agoLooking forward to the class action on this one…
- greyface- 1y agoTesla has binding arbitration that prohibits class actions.
- t0mas88 1y agoWon't help them in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws here are stricter.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoBut class action suits are not a thing here. And FSD is not deployed in Europe.
- ranguna 1y agoBut it's promised.
- pavlov 1y agoThey’ve been selling FSD in Europe since 2018. I know because I bought it in March 2019 on a Model 3. (I got it because I thought it would help my elderly parents who mostly used the car.) 7500 euros completely down the drain. It still can’t even read highway speed signs. A five-year-old would be a safer driver than Tesla’s joke FSD. They do have the audacity to send me NPS surveys on the car’s “Teslaversary.” Maybe they could guess by now that it’s a big fat zero.
- hedora 1y agoIf that’s the case I’m guessing a smart-assed lawyer will use grok to open one arbitration case per tesla sold. However, I’m not sure that’s necessary, They lost the Tesla Roof class action suit, so it’s clearly possible to sue them.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- freerobby 1y agoThis is clickbait from a publication that's had it out for Tesla for nearly a decade. Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises. The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
- panarky 1y agoCan you find any statement in the article that is false?
- freerobby 1y agoThe first one. > Tesla has changed the meaning of “Full Self-Driving”, also known as “FSD”, to give up on its original promise of delivering unsupervised autonomy. They have not given up on unsupervised autonomy. They are operating unsupervised autonomy in Austin TX as I type this!
- addaon 1y ago> They have not given up on unsupervised autonomy. They are operating unsupervised autonomy in Austin TX as I type this! Setting aside calling a driver in the driver's seat "unsupervised"... that's exactly the point. People paid for this, and they are revoking their promise of delivering it, instead re-focusing on (attempting) operating it themselves. I'd have no objection to this if they offered buy-backs on the vehicles in the field, but that seems unlikely.
- freerobby 1y agoI haven't closely followed which rides have drivers where, and what is driven by Tesla vs what is regulatory -- but I thought some "drivers" were still in the passenger seat in Austin? At any rate, I don't think they are revoking their prior promises. I expect them to deliver L4 autonomy to owners as previously promised. With that said, I'm glad they are ceasing that promise to new customers and focusing on what the car does today, given how wrong their timelines have been. I agree it's shitty if they don't deliver that, and that they should offer buybacks if they find themselves in that position.
- aurizon 1y agoI was a fool's game from the start, with only negative aspects = what could possibly go wrong?
- utyop22 1y agoTesla's share price is all based on the Greater Fool Theory in the short run. In the long run some of those promises might materialise. But who cares! Portfolio managers and retail investors want some juicy returns - share price volatility is welcomed.
- starchild3001 1y agoFeels like Musk should step down from the CEO role. The company hasn’t really delivered on its big promises: no real self-driving, Cybertruck turned into a flop, the affordable Tesla never materialized. Model S was revolutionary, but Model 3 is basically a cheaper version of that design, and in the last decade there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough. Innovation seems stalled. At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.
- DoesntMatter22 1y agoThey went from no revenue to the 9th most valuable company in the world under him. No vehicle sales to having the best selling vehicles in the world. They are still profitable, have very little debt and a ton of money into the bank. Every company has hits and misses. Bezos started before Musk and still hasn't gotten his rockets into orbit.
- starchild3001 1y agoIf I had to guess, I’d say the original Tesla founders had a greater influence than Musk. His track record, frankly, is unimpressive. He’s been promising full self-driving “next year” since 2016, yet it’s still nowhere close. Aside from the Model S and X, there hasn’t been a major innovation under his watch. The real groundbreaking work likely came before him. His reign? Far from remarkable. Each year has been a cycle of overpromising (often outright lying) and underdelivering. As for Tesla’s stock? Well, markets can stay irrational far longer than most people can remain solvent.
- DoesntMatter22 1y agoTarpenning and Eberhard left Tesla in 2008 and 2007 but somehow they had a greater influence? They contributed no money, nearly tanked the company but somehow were more important. "His track record is unimpressive"... I can see why you say that, I mean, took Tesla from almost nothing to a trillion dollar company. Started the most prolific rocket and satellite company in history (but hey, it's only rocket science right?), provides internet to places that it never even had the possibility of getting to, and providing untold millions the chance to get on the internet. Started a company that is giving the paralyzed the ability to use a computer controlling their brain, and is working to restore sight to the blind. Totally unimpressive. There are so many people who have done these things /s
- shadowgovt 1y ago"Full Self Driving (Supervised)." In other words: you can take your mind off the road as long as you keep your mind on the road. Classic. Tesla is kind of a joke in the FSD community these days. People working on this problem a lot longer than Musk's folk have been saying for years that their approach is fundamentally ignoring decades of research on the topic. Sounds like Tesla finally got the memo. I mostly feel sorry for their engineers (both the ones who bought the hype and thought they'd discover the secret sauce that a quarter-century-plus of full-time academic research couldn't find and the old salts who knew this was doomed but soldiered on anyway... but only so sorry, since I'm sure the checks kept clearing).
- arijun 1y agoUntil very recently I worked in the FSD community, and I wouldn’t say I viewed it as a joke. I don’t know if I believed they would get to level 5 without any lidar, it’s pretty good for what’s available in the consumer market.
- shadowgovt 1y agoThat's what I mean. Nobody I know thought there'd be a chance of getting to L4 (much less L5) without LIDAR. They doomed the goal from the gate and basically lied to people for years about the technological possibilities to pad their bottom line. It's two steps from selling snake-oil, basically. Not that L4 or L5 are impossible, but people who knew the problem domain looked at how they were approaching it hardware-wise and went "... uhuh."
- FireBeyond 1y ago> In other words: you can take your mind off the road as long as you keep your mind on the road. They literally did this with Summon. "Have your car come to you while dealing with a fussy child" - buried far further down the page in light grey, "pay full attention to the vehicle at all times" (you know, other than your "fussy child").
- asdff 1y agoWhat I don't understand about this is that to my experience being driven around in friends teslas, its already there. It really seems like legalese vs technical capability. The damn thing can drive with no input and even find a parking spot and park itself. I mean where are we even moving the goalpost at this point? Because there's been some accidents its not valid? The question is how that compares to the accident rate of human drivers not that there should be an expectation of zero accidents ever.
- breve 1y agoTesla set their own goal posts. In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver": https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com... It was a lie then and remains a lie now.
- asdff 1y agoThat recent bloomburg report showed tesla fsd was an order of magnitude safer than human drivers in the U.S. People on reddit tried to discount it because "fsd is not actually fsd because you have to tap the wheel every now and then so those miles don't count" but really that is just a regulatory constraint not some real technical issue. The car drives itself and its drivers don't pay attention at all and its getting these numbers.
- breve 1y ago> The car drives itself and its drivers don't pay attention at all Sure. Does Tesla take responsibility and accept liability for the vehicle's driving?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThe word "driving" has multiple, partially overlapping meanings. You're using it in a very informal sense to mean "I don't have to touch the controls much". Power to you for using whatever definitions you feel like. Other people, most importantly your local driving laws, use driving as a technical term to refer to tasks done by the entity that's ultimately responsible for the safety of the entire system. The human remains the driver in this definition, even if they've engaged FSD. They are not in a Waymo. If you're interested in specific technical verbiage, you should look at SAE J3016 (the infamous "levels" standard), which many vehicle codes incorporate. One of the critical differences between your informal definition is whether you can stop paying attention to the road and remain safe. With your definition, it's possible have a system where you're not "driving", but you still have a responsibility to react instantaneously to dangerous road events after hours of of inaction. Very few humans can reliably do that. It's not a great way to communicate the responsibilities people have in a safety-critical task they do every day.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- guluarte 1y agoI thought we would have almost AGI by now? https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858747684972048695 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858747684972048695
- jesenpaul 1y agoThey made tons of money on the Scam of the Decade™ from Oct 2016 (See their "Driver is just there for legal reasons" video) to Apr 2024 (when they officially changed it to Supervised FSD) and now its not even that.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoEarlier: Tesla’s autonomous driving claims might be coming to an end [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133607
- jaggs 1y agoOne problem might be that American driving is not exactly... well great, is it? Roads are generally too straight and driving tests too soft. And for some weird reason, many US drivers seem to have a poor sense of situational awareness. The result is it looks like many drivers are unaware of the benefits of defensive driving. Take that all into account and safe 'full self driving' may be tricky to achieve?
- ciconia 1y agoWar Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. FSD is... whatever Elon says it is.
- keeda 1y agoI strongly believe LIDAR is the way to go and that Elon's vision-only move was extremely "short-sighted" (heheh). There are many reasons but that drives it home for me multiple times a week is that my Tesla's wipers will randomly sweep the windshield for absolutely no reason. This is because the vision system thinks there is something obstructing its view when in reality it is usually bright sunlight -- and sometimes, absolutely nothing that I can see. The wipers are, of course, the most harmless way this goes wrong. The more dangerous type is when it phantom-brakes at highway speeds with no warning on a clear road and a clear day. I've had multiple other scary incidents of different types (swerving back and forth at exits is a fun one), but phantom braking is the one that happens quasi-regularly. Twice when another car was right behind me. As an engineer, this tells me volumes about what's going on in the computer vision system, and it's pretty scary. Basically, the system detects patterns that are inferred as its vision being obstructed, and so it is programmed to brush away some (non-existent) debris. Like, it thinks there could be a physical object where there is none. If this was an LLM you would call it a hallucination. But if it's hallucinating crud on a windshield, it can also hallucinate objects on the road. And it could be doing it every so often! So maybe there are filters to disregard unlikely objects as irrelevant, which act as guardrails against random braking. And those filters are pretty damn good -- I mean, the technology is impressive -- but they can probabistically fail, resulting in things that we've already seen, such as phantom-braking, or worse, driving through actual things. This raises so many questions: What other things is it hallucinating? And how many hardcoded guardrails are in place against these edge cases? And what else can it hallucinate against which there are no guardrails yet? And why not just use LIDAR that can literally see around corners in 3D?
- jillesvangurp 1y agoLidar is great for object detection. But it's not great for interpreting the objects. It will stop you crashing into a traffic light. But it won't be able to tell the color of the light. It won't see the stripes on the road. It won't be able to tell signs apart. It won't enable AIs to make sense of the complex traffic situations. And those complex traffic situations are the main challenge for autonomous driving. Getting the AIs to do the right things before they get themselves into trouble is key. Lidar is not a silver bullet. It helps a little bit, but not a whole lot. It's great when the car has to respond quickly to get it out of a situation that it shouldn't have been in to begin with. Avoiding that requires seeing and understanding and planning accordingly.
- mettamage 1y agoI’m not surprised. As a former Elon fan, it never struck me that he thought about this from first principles, whereas for SpaceX he did. For as long as we can’t understand AI systems as well as we understand normal code, first principles thinking is out of reach. It may be possible to get FSD another way but Elon’s edge is gone here.
- fsmv 1y agoSpaceX is a success despite Elon. Maybe setting an extremely lofty goal helped somewhat but Gwynne Shotwell and all the actual engineers at SpaceX deserve the credit for their success.
- mettamage 1y agoHow is it despite Elon? I don't know the history too well. I agree that the team deserves most of the success. I think that's the case in general. At best, a CEO puts down good framing/structure, that's it. ICs do the actual innovative work.
- johnthewise 1y agoNapoleon didn't fight much at all in battles, too.
- tim333 1y agoWikipedia says Gwynne Shotwell joined after the first successful launch. Elon founding it and getting a rocket up must count for something.
- rlt 1y agoI used to think engineers should get all the credit for the successes of big engineering projects, and they should probably get more credit than they do, but over time I’ve realized how important good leadership is. SpaceX and Tesla absolutely would not be where they are today without Elon. Anyone who claims otherwise either hasn’t paid attention or is being disingenuous because they don’t like him.
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- moomin 1y agoMy 1993 Nissan has FSD. I can fully drive myself anywhere.
- dvh 1y agoAnd stock is up $15
- hedora 1y agoGotta keep juicing it to get that $1T payout. Am I the only one that noticed most of the targets are in nominal dollars, not inflation adjusted? Trump’s already prosecuting Fed leadership because they’re refusing to print money for him. Elon’s worked with him enough to understand where our monetary policy is headed.
- goloroden 1y agoI think I’d call what Tesla did fraud. Or scam. Or both.
- jgalt212 1y agoGiven this move, like the rest of TSLA's inane investor base, I wholeheartedly support the potential $1 trillion pay package for Musk
- IgorPartola 1y agoI don’t need self driving cars that can navigate alleys in Florence, Italy and also parkways in New England. Here is what we really need: put transponders into the roadway on freeways and use those for navigation and lane positioning. Then you would be responsible for getting onto the freeway and getting off the exit but can take a nap between. This would be something that would be do e by the DOT, supported by all car makers, and benefit everyone. LIDAR could be used for obstacle detection but not for navigation. And whoever figures out how to do the transponders and land a government contract and get at least one major car manufacturer on board would make bank.
- randunel 1y agoHow would you know which signals to trust and which to ignore?
- uoaei 1y agoPhysics prevents detected objects from jumping unrealistically. Current systems seem not to account for that at all, reacting to objects which appear and disappear spontaneously. Sensor fusion is exactly the solution to this: use a variety of sensors as input to reliably identify actual obstacles. To fake all the sensors at once you'd need to fake vision, lidar, and transponder locations simultaneously.
- jijijijij 1y agoBlockchain. Just kidding. Wait, no! Please. No! How do I delete this???
- hedora 1y agoWe live in an area with sort of challenging roads, and I strongly disagree. There’s an increasing number of drivers that can barely drive on the freeways. When they hit our area they cannot even stay on their side of the road, slow down for blind curves (when they’re on the wrong side of the road!), maintain 50% the normal speed of other drivers, etc. I won’t order uber or lyft anymore because I inevitably get one of these people as my driver (and then watch them struggle on straight stretches of freeway). Imagine how much worse this will get when they start exclusively using lane keeping on easy roads. It’ll go from “oh my god I have to work the round wheel thingy and the foot levers at the same time!” to “I’ve never steered this car at speeds above 11”. I’d much rather self driving focused on driving safely on challenging roads so that these people don’t immediately flip their cars (not an exaggeration; this is a regular occurrence!) when the driver assistance disables itself on our residential street. I don’t think addressing this use case is particularly hard (basically no pedestrians, there’s a double yellow line, the computer should be able to compute stopping distance and visibility distance around blind curves, typical speeds are 25mph, suicidal deer aren’t going to be the computer’s fault anyway), but there’s not much money in it. However, if you can’t drive our road, you certainly cannot handle unexpected stuff in the city.
- gcanyon 1y agoHonest question: did Tesla in the past promise that FSD would be unsupervised? My based-on-nothing memory is that they weren't promising that you wouldn't have to sit in the driver's seat, or that your steering wheel would collect dust. Arguing against myself: they did talk about Teslas going off to park themselves and returning, but that's a fairly limited use case. Maybe in the robotaxi descriptions? My memory was more that you'd be able to get into (the driver's seat of) your Tesla in downtown Los Angeles, tell it you want to go to the Paris hotel in Vegas, and expect generally not to have to do anything to get there. But not guaranteed nothing.
- abduhl 1y agoThe [2016 Tesla promotional] video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” 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...
- gcanyon 1y agoWell there you go. It seems clear that most of what Tesla has said is compatible with the application of the word "supervised" without really changing the meaning much. But a few statements, and the overall implication, very much contradict that.
- scoopertrooper 1y agoMusk promised unsupervised driving being right around the corner so many times it became a joke. https://youtu.be/B4rdISpXigM https://youtu.be/B4rdISpXigM
- gcanyon 1y agoThx for this! The one that stands out is the guy who says "my grandmother who doesn't speak the language and doesn't drive" -- that speaks to unsupervised. That said, most of rest don't seem incompatible with "supervised" To be clear, this is obviously a reframing from the implications Musk has made. But I still don't see adding "supervised" to the description as that big a shift for most of the use cases that have been presented in the past.
- d_sem 1y agoMy experience working in an automotive supplier suggest that Tesla engineers must have always knowns this and the real strategy was to provide the best ADAS experience with the cheapest sensor architecture. They certainly did achieved that goal. There were aspirations that the bottom up approach would work with enough data, but as I learned about the kind of long tail cases that we solved with radar/camera fusion, camera-only seemed categorically less safe. easy edge case: A self driving system cannot be inoperable due to sunlight or fog. a more hackernew worthy consideration: calculate the angular pixel resolution required to accurately range and classify an object 100 meters away. (roughly the distance needed to safely stop if you're traveling 80mph) Now add a second camera for stereo and calculate the camera-to-camera extrinsic sensitivity you'd need to stay within to keep error sufficiently low in all temperature/road condition scenarios. The answer is: screw that, I should just add a long range radar. there are just so many considerations that show you need a multi-modality solution, and using human biology as a what-about-ism, doesn't translate to currently available technology.
- brandonagr2 1y agoTesla does not use stereo/binocular vision, that's not how humans perceive relative motion at that distance either, we would depend on perspective and parallax
- jqpabc123 1y ago[flagged]
- bmitc 1y ago> Musk is not an engineer. You have been voted down, but this is proven. He has lied about his education. Henever even enrolled at Stanford, and his undergraduate degree was basically a general studies business degree.
- asadotzler 1y agoThe National Academy of Engineers disagrees with both of you. https://www.nae.edu/?id=270224 https://www.nae.edu/?id=270224
- bmitc 1y agoIt disagrees, yes, but it does not correct what was stated. And that appointment couldn't possibly be political could it? Musk has lied, time and time again, about his education. He has never worked as an engineer. People have commented that he barely understands how to run simple Python scripts.
- iammjm 1y agoThis nazi-saluting manchild has been purposefully lying about self-driving for close to 10 years now, each year self-driving coming "next year". How is this legal and not false advertisement?
- mlindner 1y agoThe title is rather misleading. They haven't given up on promise of autonomy...
- AbrahamParangi 1y agoI use self-driving every single day in Boston and I haven’t needed to intervene in about 8 months. Most interventions are due to me wanting to go a different route. Based on the rate of progress alone I would expect functional vision-only self-driving to be very close. I expect people will continue to say LIDAR is required right up until the moment that Tesla is shipping level 4/5 self-driving.
- FollowingTheDao 1y agoSelf driving is not the same as "autonomy". Musk lied to everyone with the Tesla self driving, the Boring Company, DOGE...wake up people...
- globular-toast 1y agoEvery company that does marketing lies to you.
- FollowingTheDao 1y agoI agree, but no one is more obvious with Musk yet people still keep falling for it. Specifically his “investors”.
- globular-toast 1y agoHe's just very good at it, like Steve Jobs was.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoSame experience in a mix of city/suburban/rural driving, on a HW3 car. Seeing my car drive itself through complex scenarios without intervention, and then reading smart people saying it can’t without hardware it doesn’t have, gives major mental whiplash.
- herbturbo 1y ago> Based on the rate of progress alone I would expect functional vision-only self-driving to be very close. So close yet so far, which is ironically the problem vision based self-driving has. No concrete information just a guess based on the simplest surface data.
- briandw 1y agoLidar is the first thing brought up in these discussions. Lidar isn’t that great of a sensor. It does one thing well and that’s measure distance. A visual sensor can be measured along the axis of spatial resolution (x,y,z) temporal resolution(fps) and dynamic range(bit depth). You could add things like light frequency and phase etc. Lidar is quite poor in all of these except the spatial z dimension, measuring distance as mentioned before. Compared to a cheep camera the fps is very low, the spatial resolution in x and y is pathetic 128. in the vertical, higher horizontal but its not mega pixels. Finally the dynamic range is 1 bit(something is there or not). Lidars use near infrared and are just as susceptible to problems with natural fog (not the theatrical fog like in that Roper video) and rain. Multiple cameras can do good enough depth estimation with modern neural networks. But cameras are vastly better at making sense of the world. You can’t read a sign with lidar.
- smilekzs 1y agoLidars have been reporting per-point intensity values for quite a while. The dynamic range is definitely not 1 bit. Many Lidar visualization software will happily pseudocolor the intensity channel for you. Even with a mechanically scanning 64-line Lidar you can often read a typical US speed limit sign at ~50 meter in this view.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoThere needs to be a class-action against Tesla. It’s blatant fraud.
- luis_cho 1y agoFir a long time, I don’t think full self driving makes economic sense. Would this hurt car sells at long term?
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoKarpathy should be held liable for this (maybe less than Musk) but he should at least be considered persona non grata for pushing it. It was his idea, his decision to build the architecture and he led the entire vision team during this. Yet, he remains free from any of this fallout and still widely considered an ML god https://youtu.be/3SypMvnQT_s?si=FDmyA6amWnDpMPEj https://youtu.be/3SypMvnQT_s?si=FDmyA6amWnDpMPEj
- bmitc 1y agoSilicon Valley tech workers and companies are not known for their morals.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoI wonder if this change came from the legal department after their loss in the lawsuit over that poor woman that was killed.
- _23sd 1y agoI don't read the article (besides the clickbait headline and the author's "take") as Tesla "giving up". No marketing is changing, no plans for taxi services are changing. This is about the company's famously captured board giving their beloved CEO flexibility on how to meet their ambitious-sounding targets, by using vague language in the definitions. This way if Tesla fails to hit 10 million $100/month FSD subscriptions, they could conceivably come up with a cheaper more limited subscription and get Elon his pay.
- olyellybelly 1y agoShock! Horror!
- AdmiralAsshat 1y agoKinda wish we as consumers had some way to fight back against this obvious bullshit, since lord knows the government won't do anything. Like if a company comes out with a new transportation technology and calls it "teleportation", but in fact is just a glorified trebuchet, they shouldn't be allowed to use a generic term with a well-understood meaning fraudulently. But no, they'll just call it "Teleportation™" with a patented definition of their glorified trebuchet, and apparently that's fine and dandy. I am still bitter about the hoverboard.
- aamargulies 1y agoI knew that FSD was nonsense when I tried to use Tesla's autopark feature under optimal conditions and it failed to park the car satisfactorily.
- maxlin 1y agoNeeds to be known that Fred Lambert pushes out so much negative Tesla press that its reasonable to say that he's on a crusade. And not a too fact-based one. Like with this. No, Tesla hasn't communicated any as such. Everyone knows FSD is late. But Robotaxi shows it is very meaningfully progressing towards true autonomy. And for example crushed the competition (not literally) in a recent very high-effort test in avoiding crashes on a highway with obstacles that were hard to read for almost all the other systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI
- FireBeyond 1y ago> But Robotaxi shows it is very meaningfully progressing towards true autonomy. What? They literally just moved the in car supervisor from the passenger seat to the driver seat. That's not a vote of confidence. And I don't think you can glean anything. There are less than 20 Robotaxis in Austin, that spend their time giving rides to influencers so they can make YT videos where even they have scary moments.
- maxlin 1y ago>They literally just moved the in car supervisor from the passenger seat to the driver seat They didn't "move" anything. They decided to have that for a new expansion, driving on highways. The system is progressing at a good rate, considering it's comparing well to Waymo well even though Waymo has been there for years. >where even they have scary moments. More FUD. There's hours long streams. And as I said, it compares well to Waymo. That alone should make their boardroom eerie.
- paradox460 1y agoOne of the shower thoughts I've had is why don't we start equipping cars with UWB tech. UWB can identify itself, two UWB nodes can measure short range distances between each other (around 30m) with fairly decent accuracy and directionality. Sure, it wouldn't replace any other sensing tech, but if my car has UWB and another car has UWB, they can telegraph where they are and what their intentions are a lot faster and in a "cleaner" manner than using a camera to watch the rear indicator for illumination
- Animats 1y agoSo what does it mean for Tesla's "Robotaxi"? Is that being shut down? It's pathetic. The Austin Robotaxi demo had a "safety monitor" in the front passenger seat, with an emergency stop button. But there were failures where the safety driver had to stop the vehicle, get out, walk around the car, get into the drivers's seat, and drive manually. So now the "safety monitor" sits in the driver's seat.[1] It's just Uber now. Do you have to tip the "safety monitor"? And for this, Musk wants the biggest pay package in history? [1] https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-monitor-passenger-drivers-seat/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
- diebeforei485 1y agoThe article is wrong. What happened is that they added some highway-capable ridehail vehicles, and only those vehicles have the safety person in the drivers seat. Frederic (the author) lives in Canada, he doesn't have access to any recent version of FSD.
- Animats 1y agoSee this article in Gizmodo.[1] "In a visible sign of its shifting posture from daredevil innovation to cautious compliance, Tesla this week relocated its robotaxi safety monitors, employees who supervise the autonomous software’s performance and can take over the vehicle’s operation at any moment, from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat." And this one in Electrek.[2] The state of Texas recently enacted regulations for self-driving cars that require more reporting. Tesla's Robotaxi with a driver is not a self-driving car under Texas law. Musk claims Tesla will remove the safety driver by the end of the year. Is there a prediction market on that? [1] https://gizmodo.com/tesla-robotaxi-2000653821 https://gizmodo.com/tesla-robotaxi-2000653821 [2] https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-monitor-passenger-drivers-seat/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
- diebeforei485 1y agoBoth Gizmodo and Electrek are wrong.
- GUNHED_158 1y agoThe link contains malicious scripts.
- Nitsua007 1y agoSmall correction: LiDAR can’t literally see around corners — it’s still a line-of-sight sensor. What it can do is build an extremely precise 3D point cloud of what it can see, in all lighting conditions, and with far less susceptibility to “hallucinations” from things like glare, shadows, or visual artifacts that trip up purely vision-based systems. The problem you’re describing — phantom braking, random wiper sweeps — is exactly what happens when the perception system’s “eyes” (cameras) feed imperfect data into a “brain” (compute + AI) that has no independent cross-check from another modality. Cameras are amazing at recognizing texture and color but they’re passive sensors, easily fooled by lighting, contrast, weather, or optical illusions. LiDAR adds active depth sensing, which directly measures distance and object geometry rather than inferring it. But LiDAR alone isn’t the endgame either. The real magic happens in sensor fusion — combining LiDAR, radar, cameras, GNSS, and ultrasonic so each sensor covers the others’ blind spots, and then fusing data at the perception level. This reduces false positives, filters out improbable hazards before they trigger braking, and keeps the system robust in edge cases. And there’s another piece that rarely gets mentioned in these debates: connected infrastructure. If the vehicle can also receive data from roadside units, traffic signals, and other connected objects (V2X), it doesn’t have to rely solely on its onboard sensors. You’re effectively extending the vehicle’s situational awareness beyond its physical line of sight. Vision-only autonomy is like trying to navigate with one sense while ignoring the others. LiDAR + fusion + connectivity is like having multiple senses and a heads-up from the world around you.
- moomoo11 1y agoHonestly at that point of complexity I hope automakers just quit chasing FSD and go back to making actually good cars again. Let the automated trucks figure it out if it’s an actual problem worth solving or we can just use trains or let truck driving be a decent middle class job.
- rickdg 1y agoI guess you can either go full waymo or full comma. The rest is just hype.
- yencabulator 1y agoFull (Limited)
- tempodox 1y agoIf you can’t reach the goal, move the goal posts!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- diebeforei485 1y agoThis article makes no sense to me. They aren't changing the meaning of anything for consumers, it's only defining it for the purpose of the compensation milestone.
- Ancalagon 1y agoGuess living and working in the factory ain’t working out so well
- mensetmanusman 1y agoOur current infrastructure isn’t compatible with lidar. We were consulted to fix it, but governments have no idea how to approach this problem so it won’t happen for years.
- sidcool 1y agoElectrek has been anti Tesla for a long time now.
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoBad angle shot: This thing where advertisers exploit the need to clarify ambiguity in order to smuggle in custom, private definitions of words that mean the opposite of the agreed-upon definitions of those same words is a problem. Calling something "full self-driving" when it doesn't drive by itself fully is lying even if you put in the fine print that "full" means "not full" and "self-driving" means "not driving by itself"
- smoovb 1y agoHere's what Claude has to say about electrek.co: Tesla Headlines Sentiment Analysis - Electrek.co Bottom Line: Strongly Negative Sentiment Based on analysis of Tesla headlines and articles from Electrek over the past few months, the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative (approximately 85% negative, 10% neutral, 5% positive). The coverage reveals a company in decline across multiple fronts.