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When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed
- fabiensanglard 1y agoList of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
- Animats 1y agoThat needs to be adjusted for Tesla putting the Robotaxi "safety driver" back behind the wheel when the self-driving Robotaxi thing didn't really work.
- runako 1y agoI can't believe they are giving credit for "robotaxi" launching with human drivers. Yellow Cab had those in the '50s.
- cerved 1y agoFunnily enough, not an article on grokipedia
- neilv 1y ago> However, at this week’s shareholder meeting, Musk stated that Tesla may allow “texting and driving” within “a month or two.” The family of the first person killed by that will know who to sue for a punitive trillion dollars.
- twostorytower 1y agoWould at least like to use it for stop and go traffic, which is about the only thing I trust FSD for.
- kevincrane 1y agoJust pull over if you have things to text that can’t wait
- SoftTalker 1y agoActually just wait. Pulling over on a busy road creates its own hazards.
- danans 1y ago> Would at least like to use it for stop and go traffic, which is about the only thing I trust FSD for. Depends on the type of stop and go driving. Crawling along at 15mph, sure. But the most dangerous driving scenario - whether human or machine is the driver - is a scenario with large variations in speed between vehicles and also limited visibility. For example suddenly encountering a traffic jam that starts around a blind corner.
- jfoster 1y agoDangerous for some humans. If a self-driving system is taking a blind corner, I would expect it to be approaching it at a more appropriate speed.
- ckocagil 1y agoThat's also the most tiresome part of driving and has the least risk due to low speeds. Easy win for FSD. But for all other cases it becomes a complicated ethical question.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoSorry, but disabling autopilot/FSD to use your phone is much crazier.
- estearum 1y agoThese are, after all, the only options available to a Tesla driver!
- paulbjensen 1y agoOne reason I wouldn't trust Tesla's FSD: Sun glare: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1huzgtu/tesla_fsd_sun_glare/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1huzgtu/tesla_fsd... Drivers have tackled this problem by wearing polaroid sunglasses. I really hope someone asks Tesla how they plan to solve the Sun glare issue.
- simondotau 1y agoAccording to users, that issue appears to be solved as of FSD v13. The solution may be reliant on the higher quality camera modules shipped with hardware 4.
- Gigachad 1y agoWill Tesla recall the old defective cars?
- simondotau 1y agoFor people who paid for FSD, I think they should.
- MBCook 1y agoSo why did it ever ship like that? Why was that OK? Why was it safe to let people use like that without informing them?
- danans 1y agoWhen people are so taken by your brand that they volunteer their money and lives to test your half-baked product, why would you stop them?
- terminalshort 1y agoBecause all cars ship with design flaws. Basically any model of car out there is known for its particular parts that break often.
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- lukax 1y agoKind of similar to Agentic coding. The code works? Yay, well done, AI. It't doesn't? You didn't prompt it correctly.
- ares623 1y agoSaved 20 minutes of your time? Slack goes wild. Wasted 1 hour each of your 5 co-workers who ended up reviewing unusable slop? Silence.
- ben_w 1y agoI hear you, but GenAI also gets the opposite fork from people who hate it: It's good result that used GenAI at any point => your prompting and curation and editing is worthless and deserves no credit; it's not good result => that proves AI isn't real intelligence. As with Marmite, I find it very strange to be surrounded by a very big loud cultural divide where I am firmly in the middle. Unlike Marmite, I wonder if I'm only in "the middle" because of the extremities on both ends…
- coliveira 1y agoThis scam is true for all AI technologies. It only "works" as far as we interpret it as working. LLMs generate text. If it answers our question, we say that the LLM works. If it doesn't, we say that it is "hallucinating".
- adocomplete 1y agoHow is that any different from Googling something and believing any of the highly-SEO optimized results that pollute the front page?
- coliveira 1y agoThat's the point, nobody really believes there is an intelligence generating Google results. It is a best-effort based engine. However, people have this belief that ChatGPT has somehow some intelligent engine generating results, which is incorrect. It is only generating statistically good results; if it is true or false depends on what the person using it will do with the results. If it is poetry, for example, it is always true. If it is how to find the cure for cancer it will with very high probability be false. But if you're writing a novel about a scientist finding a cure for cancer, then that same response will be great.
- blibble 1y agoisn't that the entire "AI" experience, in a nutshell?
- jasonsb 1y agoNo. There's a critical difference between AI as a tool and AI as a product. When you use a tool, the responsibility to verify the output is yours. But when you pay for a product like Tesla's Full Self-Driving, the company assumes liability for its performance. If FSD causes harm, Tesla must be held responsible.
- weirdindiankid 1y agoI’m still perplexed by the utter lack of regulatory action in both the U.S. and Canada with FSD. Its inconsistency and Tesla’s “seat of the pants” approach to safety have gotten enough people injured to where I’d have expected someone to take notice by now. Don’t get me wrong, when it works, it’s amazing but there’s no way to reliably establish that it works on the same route twice.
- jonway 1y agoThis is a fairly weak shower thought, but it was interesting to note (anecdotally) people's propensity to rigidly prioritize safety in some, but not all circumstances. For example, I've had numerous conversations where people will point to safety rating in vehicles to defend their purchasing decisions. Its simple to understand really, I want the safest car for my family/child etc, that is why I refuse to buy an older, used vehicle or prefer a sedan over SUV. Safety becomes cover for preference and defending trends like expanding pickup truck sizes since the 2000s while there is no safety rating or even objective measure of the efficacy of these self-driving systems. Hopefully I haven't wasted your time, its just a psychological trend that I think exists.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoShame they don't reduce safety ratings for the bigger vehicles with worse visibility that are more likely to kill pedestrians/bicyclists and cause more respiratory problems than smaller vehicles.
- jonway 1y agoYes, its maybe an "internal" safety rating? Since the ratings are from a standardized test usually conducted on a powered rail trolley, I've often wondered if the safety rating would be different if the testing considered those other factors, like crashing into a Civic vs a Chevy truck, or vice versa. I have training and a great deal of experience with vehicle emissions systems, but not medical training beyond first aid and CPR. I think that mostly the respiration problems are caused by particulates volatile organic compounds, oxides of nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide(which is quite nasty), mostly from diesel emissions. The catalytic converters and emission controls prevent nearly all VoC and like %90 of NOx, so the effect from passenger vehicles seems pretty small there. They do nothing to eliminate SO2, which is why we mandate DEF (diesel emissions fluid) on some diesels. Brake dust and tire wear is another smaller contributor, though
- Animats 1y agoAs time goes on, Tesla's fiasco becomes more and more embarrassing. Waymos are all over the place in the cities they serve, doing pretty much what they're supposed to do. Nuro has some fully autonomous vehicles running around. Baidu's Apollo Go is deployed in 16 cities in China, although they use remote driving as a backup. Tesla, though, is still hyping a technology that seems to have maxed out years ago.
- brianwawok 1y agoAnd yet it drives me on 2000 mile car trips without touching anything. If you ignore the hype and look at the actual product, it’s fine.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoAncedotes are nice. Miles per disengagement stats would be better.
- buran77 1y agoThat's not an anecdote, it sounds like an exaggeration bordering flat out lying. A 2000 miles trip "without touching anything" to drive the car is statistically impossible for any reasonable drive (e.g. not endless straight lines on an Australian highway), especially for a Tesla famously known for needing interventions often. Even more advanced autonomous driving systems are far too limited to take arbitrary 2000 miles trip with zero human assistance.
- madamelic 1y ago13 is quite good. 14 is even better. 2,000 may be stretching it but it is possible if the driver is trusting enough. Personally many of my disengagements isn't because it is being dangerous, but just sub-optimal such as not driving as aggressive as I want to, not getting into off-ramp lane as early as I like, or just picking weird navigational choices. Trying to recall but I haven't had a safety involved disengagement in probably a few months across late 13 and 14. I am just one data point and the main criticism I've seen from 14 is: 1) getting rid of fine speed controls in favor of driving style profiles 2) its car and obstacle avoidance being overtuned so it will tap the brakes if, for instance, an upcoming perpendicular car suddenly appears and starts to roll its stop sign. Personally, I prefer it to be overly protective albeit turn it down slightly and fix issues where it hilariously thinks large clouds of leaves blowing across are obstacles to brake for.
- whatever1 1y agoIt's like being a loan guarantor. If the loan gets paid off, the lender/borrower get the benefits. You get 0. If the loan goes delinquent, you are on the hook.
- CalChris 1y agoI love TACC. I occasionally use AutoSteer. But I tried FSD and it was much more stressful than driving.
- pmarreck 1y agoSounds like a problem with all of AI. Having driven Tesla FSD and coded with Claude/Codex, it suffers from the exact same issues- Stellar performance in most common contexts, but bizarrely nonsensical behavior sometimes when not. Which is why I call it "thunking" (clunky thinking) instead of "thinking". And also why it STILL needs constant monitoring by an expert.
- neuroelectron 1y agoI mean, obviously. A significant part entire economy runs on plausible deniability. Amazon is a great example of this, by keeping similar products or different vendors in the same bin. Regulations are to keep out competitors, etc.
- sciencesama 1y agoWhen stock goes up musk gets money, when it goes down people who short will be the reason !
- whoisthemachine 1y agoTesla's FSD will be good enough when you get an insurance discount for using it.
- sabareesh 1y agoTechnically you kind of get this in Nevada when using Tesla insurance and if you drive 100 % FSD. If you drive manually you are pretty much doxed for random Front collision Warning which is super sensitive
- whoisthemachine 1y agoThat does sound like a punishment for not using it. My statement was more whether they actively sell you a discount for using it.
- romaaeterna 1y ago> So, for example, when a Florida driver on Autopilot drops his phone and blows through a stop sign, hitting a car which then hits two pedestrians, killing one, Tesla will claim “this driver was solely at fault.” In that case, a judge agreed that the driver was mostly at fault, but still assigned 33% of blame to Tesla, resulting in a $243 million judgment against the company. His foot was on the gas though Looking at this author's other articles, he seems more than a bit unhinged when it comes to Tesla: https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ Has Hacker News fallen for clickbait? (Don't answer)
- johnnyApplePRNG 1y agoA couple of facts on the Florida case: it was a jury verdict, not a judge. The jury found Tesla 33% at fault for a 2019 Key Largo crash. Damages were $129M compensatory (Tesla responsible for 33% of that) plus $200M punitive, for $243M total. The driver admitted he looked down after dropping his phone and blew a stop sign; Tesla argues his foot was on the accelerator, but the jury still assigned partial fault because Autopilot was allowed to operate off limited-access highways and the company didn’t do enough to prevent foreseeable misuse. The driver had already settled separately.
- rtpg 1y agois there any blame to be associated to Tesla for its feature? what's the right percent for you? 20%? 10%? 5%? 0%? If the wheels of the car fell off, whould Tesla have any blame for that? If we had laid wires all along the road to allow for automatic driving, and Tesla's software misread that and caused a crash, would it be to blame? When is Autopilot safe to use? Is it ever safe to use? Is the fact that people seem to be able to entirely trick the Autopilot to ignore safety attention mechanisms relevant at all? If we have percentage-based blame then it feels perfectly fine to share the blame here. People buy cars assuming that the features of the car are safe to use to some extent or another. Maybe it is just 0%. Like cruise control is a thing that exists, right? But I'm not activating cruise control anywhere near any intersection. Tesla calls their thing autopilot, and their other thing FSD, right? Is there nothing there? Maybe there is no blame, but it feels like there's something there.
- RajT88 1y agoThe modern, "you're holding it wrong" approach to product flaws. And by the way - I have heard big tech folks repeat that phrase, not really understanding the moral of that Steve Jobs story.
- tippytippytango 1y agoUltimately, anecdotes and testimonials of a product like this are irrelevant. But the public discourse hasn't caught up with it. People talk about it like it's a new game console or app, giving their positive or negative testimonials, as if this is the correct way to validate the product. Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment. This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?" 10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis. We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.
- irjustin 1y ago> Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment. 100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal. The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in as much as it can get away with, to be on the driver, effectively level 2.
- atlex2 1y agoThey're building on a false premise that human equivalent performance using cameras is acceptable. That's the whole point of AI - when you can think really fast, the world is really slow. You simulate things. Even with lifetimes of data, the cars still will fail in visual scenarios where error bars on ground truth shoot through the roof. Elon seems to believe his cars will fail in similar ways to humans because they use cameras. False premise. As Waymo scales, human just isn't good enough, except for humans.
- julianlam 1y agoSounds a lot like chickenization.
- tonyhart7 1y agothankless works and againts all odds wonder what driving force behind this, because at somepoint money didnt matters
- cduzz 1y agoMy question about the safety of "FSD" or whatever autonomous cars is -- how much safety reputation can you burn in a new market that offers huge convenience? Which is more important, being first or being best? Apple's famous for not being first, but being best to a well established market and cleaning up. People certainly don't remember de havilland, who was first to the market of "passenger jet airliner". I certainly won't be putting my kids in any of these, and especially not in a vehicle operated by a company with a "devil may care" approach to safety. Sure, it works fine in Arizona or Texas; let's see it work okay with a snow storm in Boston.
- torginus 1y agoThis is a bit of an off topic but I'm sorta interested in a general survey of how other manufacturers stack up compared to big 2, particularly Mercedes from Europe, who're said to have a pretty good solution and all the Chinese brands - it's not uncommon to see even mid-range Chinese cars with lidar integrated, wonder how good they are.