[HN Gopher] California passes law banning Tesla from calling sof...
___________________________________________________________________
California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD
Author : perihelions
Score : 405 points
Date : 2022-12-24 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.teslarati.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.teslarati.com)
| dawnerd wrote:
| Good. I love the features they have but you can't say it's not
| false advertising. Most people I know assume my car drives
| itself, which is not true, even when I was on the beta.
| kemayo wrote:
| > Although Tesla has never claimed that FSD was fully autonomous
|
| ...this seems like a weird argument, insofar as the very name
| "Full Self-Driving" is making that claim in plain language.
|
| You can do a lot with an asterisk after a marketing claim, but
| "Full Self-Driving: is not yet fully self-driving" seems like a
| stretch.
| stuart78 wrote:
| I don't understand why this requires a California law to address?
| Why hasn't the FTC intervened? A quick search reveals that it is
| 'on their radar' as of this past June, but as other commenters
| have pointed out, the claim has been used for more than 5 years.
| Perhaps they need a more sensitive radar.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Because its not really accurate. Tesla is pretty clear about
| what to expect. But Musk bought Twitter.
| stuart78 wrote:
| If it was simply 'self-driving' there would seem to be more
| wiggle room, but the inclusion of 'full' to the claim makes a
| much more specific promise of the degree of autonomy drivers
| should expect. Adding more specific detailed language
| elsewhere should explain a marketing claim, not contradict
| it.
| pakyr wrote:
| Being "pretty clear" in the fine print doesn't help when your
| product is called "Full Self Driving".
|
| > But Musk bought Twitter.
|
| The bill was introduced in mid-February and was presumably
| drafted over the preceding months. Musk made his very first
| Tweet about buying Twitter in mid-April. Not sure what
| connection you're trying to make here.
| dmix wrote:
| > Being "pretty clear" in the fine print doesn't help when
| your product is called "Full Self Driving".
|
| The likely chose the FSD branding with good intentions.
| Tesla just had some over-optimistic projections of what it
| will be in the near future and they weren't the only ones
| being optimistic in 2015-2016 when it launched (you can
| find plenty of Youtube interviews from other car companies
| at the time projecting <=2025).
|
| The plan was to always call it in "beta" and an early
| ~$2-10k(?) investment for the future offering that wasn't
| yet ready.
|
| The only problem is when those projections turned out to be
| heavily optimistic after ~2-3yrs in they should have
| rebranded it... but chose to stick with it for whatever
| reason.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It seems very California to crack down on misleading labeling but
| not go after the unsafe product at all.
| api wrote:
| How much could the recent Musk meltdown be related to FSD just
| not arriving? It seems like we have reached a point after many
| years of FSD being "next year" when it's becoming clear that it's
| further away than anyone thought.
|
| I've thought the difficulty was being vastly underestimated for a
| while. A reusable Lunar and Mars shuttle system is probably a lot
| easier than actual FSD.
| kevingadd wrote:
| If only because you're probably doing two dozen moon missions a
| year TOPS - probably far less than that - but FSD needs to
| handle millions of trips flawlessly.
|
| But yeah, at some point he should have wised up and stopped
| saying that FSD was gonna be ready Any Day Now.
| api wrote:
| The hard thing about FSD is related to the scale. It's the
| long tail of situations it has to deal with, many of which
| require some kind of model or understanding of the world
| outside the car.
|
| It's the worst sort of problem, one where 10% of the work
| gets you 90% of the way there and the other 90% of the work
| is needed to get you the other 10%. Problems like this are
| really bad for creating this mirage that you've almost got it
| when in reality you are far from the end.
| ajross wrote:
| I dinged you for this in a different comment too, but it's
| clearer here: you're doing exactly the conflation of "Full
| Self Driving" the product with "Full Autonomy" the concept
| that the linked law is trying to _prevent_!
|
| The former has value and people will buy it even if the
| latter can't be delivered in totality. Making Tesla rename
| their product does not mean their cars magically stop
| driving themselves, and especially does not mean that there
| isn't a market for people (that's me, hi!) who want cars
| that can drive themselves.
| spookie wrote:
| I'm sorry, but there's no other way to interpret "full
| self driving". It means, intuitively, that self driving
| has mastered all aspects of driving.
|
| It doesn't leave space for interpretation in which only
| specific parts of driving are possible. At least in my
| mind.
| dundarious wrote:
| He went so far as to say that it was financially
| irresponsible to not buy a Tesla, as it was the only car that
| was fully hardware capable, and that had FSD software coming
| in about a year. We are very far from the touted fleets of
| Tesla robotaxis, independently-operated or otherwise.
| recuter wrote:
| He also went as far as saying the stock is too high. People
| just hear whatever they want to hear.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Why is he so against short sellers and Bill Gates in
| particular?
| ajross wrote:
| FWIW, as far as "will the car drive itself?", FSD is already
| here. Call a friend and get a ride. The beta lets people in
| relatively rapidly now, and there are hundreds of thousands of
| enabled cars on the roads. It's pretty amazing. Now, it's
| absolutely true that it's not at a 100% supervision-free level.
| It's still timid, it has trouble with lane selection in some
| areas and misses turns, etc... But for months and months
| intervention-free drives in my area have been the rule and not
| the exception. My car, for sure, drives me around. It's pretty
| amazing.
|
| But that's not regulatory approval, and coverage of the issue
| tends to conflate the two. So you have people like you who read
| this stuff, but don't get rides from friends, who think somehow
| it's a disaster and a failure. But it's an actual product
| people are buying and using. Add that to all the folks who have
| a vested interest[1] in Tesla failing, and... the discourse
| around this subject is pretty toxic.
|
| All I can say is, again, call a friend and get a ride. There's
| a lot of hate to push through, but the cars are amazing.
|
| [1] Because, to be fair, the CEO is an asshole burning Twitter
| to the ground as we write.
| twoodfin wrote:
| If you don't have a friend, I thought this MKBHD video from a
| few days ago was a fair appraisal of the current state of
| FSD:
|
| https://youtu.be/9nF0K2nJ7N8
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I think he has another good video on TSLA and tech hype in
| general.
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| Retric wrote:
| Other companies have cars one public streets without drivers.
| Calling what current Tesla's do Full Sell Driving is so
| misleading it's probably just fraud.
| jaxn wrote:
| Is there any consumer car that is anywhere close? My
| understanding is that no other car has things like
| automatic lan change and route following. Let alone
| stopping at stop signs / red lights etc.
| spookie wrote:
| That is not full self driving
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, nothing else does that stuff. Which is I think the
| big disconnect in this discourse. People who want to take
| the anti- side can lean on "It's not complete!" as an
| argument, because it isn't. But in terms of capability,
| it's _way_ ahead of the competition[1] And some of us
| want this feature and want to pay for it! And it works!
|
| So... I'm actually fine with renaming it. People shouting
| "fraud" on the internet want somehow for a different name
| to magically make the product bad. But the product is
| great.
|
| [1] Yes, including Waymo and Cruise, who work only on
| carefully calibrated geofenced areas. My Tesla will take
| the highway when it needs to and honor a five-way stop
| sign. Waymo won't even make an unprotected left turn.
| Retric wrote:
| Other driver assist/hands free driving systems do lane
| changing and still clarify they aren't self driving.
|
| The most important metric for self driving is the
| distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from
| an occupant. That's what self driving _is_. Tesla is
| _very_ far behind the leaders here.
|
| Also, Tesla might not in theory be geofenced, but in
| practice it will refuse to drive on many roads making it
| effectively geofenced.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >The most important metric for self driving is the
| distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from
| an occupant. That's what self driving is.
|
| That's reductionist to the point of meaninglessness. A
| car limited to a specific track could keep going
| autonomously until it breaks down, thus having an
| infinite metric on the distance a car can travel before
| it needs assistance from an occupant, yet practically it
| could easily be useless as a self-driving vehicle.
|
| Being able to handle self-driving without being
| restricted to carefully chosen "good spots" and instead
| being able to generalize is at least on par in importance
| with distance the vehicle can travel.
|
| Also, the vehicle determining that it can't handle a
| certain road well enough yet is a desirable feature and
| isn't really comparable to a bunch of people deciding if
| a certain road is safe for their vehicle before allowing
| it to self-drive there, as the latter simply isn't
| practical at scale.
| Retric wrote:
| Self driving trucks at mines have very limited routes but
| they are legitimately self driving and quite useful.
|
| There are under 4.1 million miles of roads in the US. ~70
| people could map every mile of that every year assuming
| average speed of 30mph and 2,000 hours of work per year.
| It's literally trivial compared to building a self
| driving system.
|
| Tesla's insistence on good road markings is a far larger
| limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
| ajross wrote:
| > Self driving trucks at mines have very limited routes
| but they are legitimately self driving and quite useful.
|
| One of the problems with this discourse is the propensity
| for people to talk past each other. No one is interested
| in mining automation here, no matter what level of SAE
| autonomy they qualify for.
|
| > Tesla's insistence on good road markings is a far
| larger limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
|
| And another problem is people's insistence on arguing
| from bad information and ignoring the testimony of those
| who have good info. I honestly don't know what you're
| referencing here, FSD works fine on unpainted roads (I
| live on one).
| woofyman wrote:
| Ford blue cruise does automated lane change.
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41117967/ford-
| bluecruise-...
| KyleJune wrote:
| As an owner in the FSD beta, I think the most misleading
| thing is Elon's BS time lines. When I bought in August
| 2019, they were basically telling everyone they have it
| ready to be a taxi next year with a flip of a switch.
| Implying they already have it figured out when they didn't.
| I bought my car with FSD and didn't get into the Beta until
| a year after they were suppose to be ready for use as a
| taxi. At this point for me, it's not really good enough to
| use on city/rural streets without frequent interventions. I
| pretty much only use self driving on the highway, which is
| currently using a separate stack than FSD Beta. They are
| suppose to start using the same stack for highways soon.
| cinntaile wrote:
| When Andrej Karpathy left earlier this year you knew FSD wasn't
| happening anytime soon.
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| FSD was never real. TSLA was the product the whole time. Just
| like solar roof and tesla semi and tesla bot... if it gets an
| idiot futurologist wet then it will lift the TSLA price.
| Schadenfreude, long over due comeuppance, etc, etc.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I think 6 or 7 years ago, many people thought we would _at
| least_ have something like Waymo 's self-driving taxis in
| Phoenix in several cities, more publicly available, really
| starting to change transportation.
|
| We're not _too_ far behind on that estimate. My guess is in
| less than 3 years - Waymo will be publicly available in large
| parts of Phoenix and probably another major metro - and within
| 10 years most of the south west.
|
| But a lot of uninformed people thought we might have FSD
| everywhere by now. I think there's just less uninformed people
| now.
| marvin wrote:
| Tesla FSD and Waymo FSD are trying to solve two completely
| different problems.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I have a feeling that I know this argument. The argument is
| that FSD is general purpose and Waymo is geofenced?
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think Tesla wants to release a "FSD" that only works
| in part of one single city. Phoenix is easy-mode for self
| driving vehicles which is why Waymo is able to do what they
| do.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| My guess is Tesla won't have anything resembling FSD to cover
| the entire US within 15 years. Though Musk and Tesla fans
| have shown that FSD is subjective, and they seem to think
| they already have it now, so I guarantee in 15 years they'll
| be arguing even louder...
|
| If they change everything about their approach, and/or lease
| tech from Cruise or Waymo - then maybe they'll have something
| resembling FSD in large parts of the southwest. Predicting 5
| years into the future is tough - 15 years is almost
| impossible.
|
| Anyway, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way now.
| Since FSD is so far behind Elon the marketing-hype-stock-
| pump-Charlatan / the louder voice in the room - now the
| mainstream idea is - we're _never_ going to have FSD.
|
| This is ironic, since we basically already have it in a few
| large metros. It seems like the newspapers famously
| publishing that we _might_ have manned space flight within
| 10,000,000 years - literally the day before the Wright
| brothers first flight...
|
| People thought the car would never catch on, because cities
| were designed for people and bikes and horses. The car was so
| useful, we redesigned cities. Self-driving will be the same
| way. Once it takes off in some places and the value is
| realized, cities will redesign to make it work more broadly.
| It might take a long time, but it will happen...
|
| Unless the nature of transit changes and individual vehicles
| are phased out for whatever reason first - though I don't see
| that happening without FSD busses / street cars.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Self driving isn't nearly as evolutionary as going from
| horse to car, or boat to flight. We aren't likely to
| redesign entire cities for self driving. We might see self
| driving only highway lanes with faster speeds but that's
| all I'd envision over next few decades.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Today we have roads that aren't good for self-driving
| cars and we think "how can self-driving cars be allowed?!
| They're so dangerous!" but after self-driving reaches
| some critical threshold, people will look at the
| situation and think "why do we tolerate roads that are
| hazardous for self-driving cars?! That's so dangerous!".
| LightG wrote:
| Decades is the correct context in which to be talking
| about this.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| >it's further away than anyone thought
|
| I worked full time in a computer vision company (non-
| automotive) for several years prior to 2018. I joined an
| automotive company (not Tesla) in 2018 and very intentionally
| steered clear of the autonomous efforts going on there. Not
| because my skillset wasn't best applied there, but because I
| didn't believe the roadmaps the industry was laying out at the
| time. "Level 3 by next year, Level 4 by 2020, Level 5 by 2022"
| is what they were saying back then. I called bullshit
| (silently) and worked on viable software instead.
|
| Lots of people were doing the same. This isn't surprising to a
| whole bunch of people that work in the non-automotive computer
| vision/ML space and realize how absurd it is to think the these
| models will converge any time soon.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > that it's further away than anyone thought.
|
| No no, only musk was stupid enough to imply level 5 autonomy
| within x years.
|
| Everyone know how hard it is, realtime accurate position,
| machine perception of roads, & accurate prediction of
| cars/lorries/other are all very difficult problems. Then to
| hobble your team by saying "blah blah blah no lidars" because
| they are expensive and someone from the ML team convinced you
| that they could estimate depth reliably, was the clincher.
|
| Level 4/5 self driving is more of a matter of scale. if you
| have a 99.5% safe rating, then a lot of people over a country
| the size of the states are going to have a bad day.
| v0idzer0 wrote:
| Let's not pretend Apple, Uber, Google and countless others
| weren't spending billions trying to make this a reality. They
| didn't burn that money because they were smart enough to know
| it wasn't going to happen. Everyone thought it was imminent.
| Many still do.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| Billions of dollars for Apple and Google are within the
| realm of no-nonsense moonshots given that their core
| business is very solid.
|
| Tesla had to use all their weapons including fraud,
| exagerations and lies because their core business is the
| worst business in the world: manufacturing automobiles.
|
| So they have essentially nothing to fall back on if FSD
| fails.
| nullc wrote:
| I'm still mystified that tesla isn't mired in lawsuits
| over this: Some tesla dealers were telling customers that
| within a few years their self driving tesla would earn
| back its purchase price from acting as a robotaxi.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The dealers were?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| It's very unclear to me who _really_ thought what.
|
| I'm sure there really were true believers who got sucked in
| by the rapid advances in ML and figured "How hard can the
| last 20% be really?"
|
| You had companies that figured they'd better their bases
| because they could afford to and FOMO.
|
| You almost certainly had some number of cynical grifters
| pitching a story for their investors that they knew was
| nonsense.
|
| And you had a lot of people who saw all of the above and
| figured that it must be all true.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| It was insurance against being left out of a revolution
| until they understood the problem better.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Somewhere unrealistic ambition has been mistaken for
| stupidity. If everyone was "realistic" our progress would
| move so much slower. Breakthroughs happen because of people
| like Elon.
|
| Assuming stupidity is a bit over the top.
| redox99 wrote:
| A lot of comments here seem to be extremely pessimistic of self
| driving (not just Tesla, but in general), claiming that it's
| "decades away".
|
| As someone who has been following fairly closely the advances in
| self driving, I think most people are underestimating the current
| state and rate of improvement of these systems.
|
| For Tesla, it's currently "L2+". Here's an example[1] of how good
| or bad it currently is, _in a fairly easy environment_. Just a
| year ago it was an absolute mess, even though it still has a long
| way to go, the improvement rate is really good. In places like
| Manhattan it 's a mess, but I don't think FSD needs to be able to
| handle Manhattan to be useful, because not everybody lives in
| Manhattan.
|
| For Waymo, it's currently L4 (operating without driver), however
| available only in very select locations. Here's an example[2]
|
| Regarding vision vs lidar, anybody in the field knows that both
| approaches are viable for self driving[3], it's just a matter of
| which can get you there sooner (and LIDAR is basically agreed
| upon to be an easier but more expensive approach).
|
| I used to think Tesla FSD was doomed to fail, computer vision
| good enough for self driving was more than a decade away, but
| I've changed my mind since. I now think vision based is viable,
| and really important because it will enable self driving for
| mainstream cars (not just expensive robotaxis)
|
| From what I've seen, Tesla's FSD perception is quite good
| already, and the majority of the times FSD messes up it's because
| of it's planner, not because of perception. And that's
| considering it's cameras and computers are quite old already,
| when they decide to upgrade them it will lead to a pretty large
| improvement to perception.
|
| My current estimate is that Tesla will achieve L3 in 2 years, and
| L4 in 4 years. It will require a HW upgrade (cameras and
| computer).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRqW9LJZaWY
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mmjqJeDw0
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbyY2AQ_hdc
|
| Edit: Instead of just downvoting, I'd appreciate if you left a
| comment pointing out what you disagree with. I'm very interested
| in this technology and other people's thoughts.
| LightG wrote:
| Good. Back when I believed in Tesla and its owner, this excited
| me. But the more you look into it, the more you experience it,
| the more you know about it and its delays, it's clear we'll be
| lucky to have actual FSD in 10-20 years. I think even that's
| optimistic.
|
| I'm glad this is being recognised at legislative level. Objective
| people on the ground have known this for at least 5 years ...
|
| One regret is that, while Tesla have forged a place for EV's in
| the world market, the waste of talent and time spent on FSD (and
| competitors trying to immitate and catch up on the promise of FSD
| specifically) has been tragic. I can only hope the secondary
| outcomes of that time are worth it.
|
| Honestly, decent auto stop-start in very slow traffic and
| excellent lane-holding cruise control would have been enough for
| me ... and that's been available for a decade.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I fully support this.
|
| I also would like they banned misleading car ads that pretend
| there is zero traffic on the roads.
| thdespou wrote:
| Take that Elon...
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| Honestly, I'm amazed they (largely, I think Germany already told
| them to knock it off) got away with this framing for so long.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| Animats wrote:
| California was the first state to take autonomous vehicles
| seriously.[1] DMV licenses them. There's three levels of license.
| The "learner's permit" is testing with a safety driver. The
| autonomous license is testing with no safety driver. Deployment
| is carrying real customers for money. Waymo and Cruise have
| deployment licenses, which requires testing and evaluation by
| DMV. You can see their cars running around San Francisco with
| nobody in the driver's seat. That's self-driving.
|
| Tesla has never been able to get beyond the learner's permit. So,
| they can't sell a fake self driving product. It's that simple.
|
| [1]
| https://california.public.law/codes/ca_veh_code_section_3875...
| 93po wrote:
| Waymo and Cruise deploy in extremely limited public situations,
| including only in the middle of the night, and have been in the
| news a lot recently for a serious of crashes and software
| failures, some of which caused a pile up of around a dozen
| autonomous vehicles just blocking the road that had to be
| removed with tow trucks and employees. The scope of what Tesla
| is doing is vastly larger, more future proof, more reliable,
| and much more difficult to achieve.
|
| Additionally, Tesla's model right now is to have a driver in
| the seat. They aren't trying to deploy a car without anyone in
| the driver seat. There's no need for them to have any license
| other than the one they have.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _Additionally, Tesla 's model right now is to have a driver
| in the seat._
|
| So then it's not full self-driving? I don't understand. Elon
| has been promising full self-driving for years:
|
| https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-
| ne...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk
| simondotau wrote:
| Uber predicted it was just a few years away in 2016.[1]
|
| Google's Sergey Brin predicted driverless cars by 2017.[2]
|
| BMW predicted we'd have driverless cars by 2020.[3]
|
| Supposedly sober industry analysts predicted 2019.[4]
|
| It's also worth pointing out that many of Elon's
| predictions were not predictions of a finished product, but
| rather predicting when Tesla would have a system "capable"
| of self driving, not necessarily a system capable of
| driving consistently and reliably. (In much the same way, I
| am capable of hitting a target with a crossbow, but not
| consistently and reliably.)
|
| To be clear, I'm not defending Musk's predictions, only
| pointing out that such predictions were widespread and Musk
| was just one of many, many, many people who turned out to
| be wrong.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-
| interview-on...
|
| [2] https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/25/google_automatic
| _cars...
|
| [3]
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-
| driv...
|
| [4] https://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-
| drivi...
| numpad0 wrote:
| It does seem like Google did figure out bulk of "it" by
| 2017.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaOB-ErYq6Y
| clouddrover wrote:
| Uh huh. And did they take money from customers with the
| promise of full self-driving being just around the
| corner? Did they take money from customers for a product
| making the specific claim that it has the "hardware
| needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level
| substantially greater than that of a human driver":
|
| https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-
| now...
|
| Musk will continue to lie about it because he thinks that
| without full self-driving Tesla is worth basically zero:
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-
| drivin...
|
| Tesla has backed itself into this corner for no good
| reason, which is an irony considering that Teslas aren't
| good at backing themselves into anywhere else:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
| twblalock wrote:
| > Musk will continue to lie about it because he thinks
| that without full self-driving Tesla is worth basically
| zero
|
| Lots of people who buy Teslas don't care about the self
| driving at all. They want the best-designed, best-
| driving, fastest electric cars on the road with the best
| charging network.
| [deleted]
| sjs7007 wrote:
| Claim two sounded a bit suspicious so I checked the
| quote:
|
| " He promised, despite unhappy faces from his engineers,
| that it would take fewer years than he had fingers on his
| right hand before they were available to everyone -
| although the price wasn't mentioned."
| simondotau wrote:
| Indeed. In fact if one were to be pedantic, he said
| _fewer_ than five, so his prediction was really for 2016,
| not 2017.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Anyone using the word fewer deserves pedantry (no less)
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Waymo and Cruise deploy in extremely limited public
| situations
|
| This is provably wrong for Waymo. It may be geo-fenced, but
| it's robotaxi service is unlimited in SF and Phoenix.
|
| > The scope of what Tesla is doing is vastly larger, more
| future proof, more reliable, and much more difficult to
| achieve.
|
| If it's more reliable, then getting the license from CA
| should be a breeze. The required reporting and publication of
| disengagement metrics seem to be giving Tesla cold feet, I
| wonder why
|
| > Additionally, Tesla's model right now is to have a driver
| in the seat.
|
| Great! So they should appropriately name it as a driver
| assistance technology.
| dpiers wrote:
| FSD = fraudulent sales and disappointment
|
| I can't believe Tesla has gotten away with selling a feature that
| doesn't exist, and will never be delivered, on so many cars for
| so long. Tesla began selling "full self-driving" in October, 2016
| and a month later marketed it with (now known to be heavily
| controlled) video of a car driving itself for two minutes. Owners
| of those initial cars have probably paid them off by now and
| still don't have a feature they were sold.
| [deleted]
| jupp0r wrote:
| I think claiming it "will never be delivered" is probably wrong
| as well.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| The feature is impossible to implement with the sensor suite
| that comes with the car.
| jupp0r wrote:
| How do you know? It's definitely hard to prove that
| something is impossible.
| 93po wrote:
| It is plenty possible to implement with the sensor suite
| that comes with the car.
| dymk wrote:
| Then why haven't they?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The cameras on a Model 3 were quite mediocre _in 2018_.
| _Subaru_ puts a lot higher quality cameras on their cars
| than Tesla does.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The only currently known self driving system uses that same
| sensor suite (neural nets and cameras).
| oneplane wrote:
| It also takes almost 2 decades to train them
| (individually), not likely sustainable for a car seller.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| If you are referring to humans, we have a couple orders
| of magnitude more connections, our neurons can achieve
| the same functions at 1 order of magnitude fewer numbers,
| and our brain has better inductive biases.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Our 'cameras' are also so much better than any camera
| that could be put in a car (by most though not all
| metrics) that there is no real comparison.
| giobox wrote:
| By which metrics are human eyes outperforming "any camera
| that can be put in a car today"? This seems unlikely in
| almost any domain, given the much wider dynamic range
| camera sensors can capture - cameras can see into
| spectrum we simply can't (infrared, UV...) and operate at
| much lower levels of light than a human eyeball while
| retaining full color vision using really cheap tech. They
| also don't get tired or worse with age, or forget to wear
| their glasses, which is nice.
|
| This strikes me as a pretty odd statement to make,
| personally!
|
| "There is no real comparison" - for the benefit of the
| less informed, please make the comparison, assuming you
| are able.
| sorenjan wrote:
| The human eye can perceive 21 stops dynamic range, much
| better than regular cameras. Event cameras might solve
| that issue, but they're not used other than in research
| at the moment.
| giobox wrote:
| Maybe in a single still capture? Let's not forget cameras
| can easily combine multiple exposures into a single
| capture to substantially increase dynamic range, and can
| do so at high frame rates, and can go well beyond 21
| stops in doing so. The human eye is stuck with the same
| ~21 stop range regardless.
|
| If you use a pair of digital sensors with a 15 stop
| exposure offset between them (seems fair - humans have
| two...), thats ~30 stops in a single shot if we assume
| best we get is 15 from a digital sensor. Again though
| with high-speed exposure blending and one sensor this is
| not really necessary in a lot of cases.
|
| The practical reality is digital capture can exceed 21
| stops and you don't need particularly fancy equipment to
| do it. Two decent cellphone grade sensors (~12-14 stops)
| would be enough if you don't want to do single sensor
| blends and would work well for real-time video
| applications.
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
| exposure_HDR_capture
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| They can also "see" much further than the average human
| can [1].
|
| The only way I could imagine that we are superior to
| phone cameras is stabilisation, something that could be
| resolved with vertical integration that informs the
| sensors and image processing units about forces being
| applied to the vehicle (though this is coming from
| somebody outside the field so take it with many grains of
| salt).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKMBx6x-lOI
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| The biggest difference between human vision and cameras
| is the fovea. Half of our optic nerves are concentrated
| in the visual area the size of our thumbnail with an
| outstretched arm. To replicate human vision you have to
| have a high resolution camera, downsample the image and
| then grant the AI access to high resolution imagery when
| requested.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The claim was impossibility with the sensor suite. It may
| well be impractical. In the long run, there's no better
| way to be wrong than claiming impossibility.
| britneybitch wrote:
| If you're talking about humans, I think you're
| underestimating the importance of the less obvious
| senses:
|
| - sound
|
| - touch
|
| - equilibrioception (balance)
|
| - proprioception
|
| - and surely there are more
|
| Think of the visceral difference between driving a car in
| real life, vs driving a car on a screen in a video game.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Don't forget taste; when you can taste an oncoming car
| you know you have trouble.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Traction control software uses touch (knowing how much
| grip tires have via slip), proprioception (knowing the
| steering angle), equilibroperception (accelerometers).
| treis wrote:
| The problem with driving in video games is using a
| keyboard/mouse or controller. Driving with a steering
| wheel and pedals is pretty easy. Even more so if you have
| the monitors to give you a realistic field of view.
| qetlrkn wrote:
| driving a car in a video game with a steering wheel is
| easy because it's an experience designed from the ground
| up with that interface in mind. driving games happily do
| shit like change the fov to make the user think they're
| going faster, etc.
|
| being easy to drive with a steering wheel in a driving
| game, and being easy to drive a real car with a steering
| wheel (with internet level latency and packet loss at
| play, mind you) are very different things
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| And they often employ tricks to improve the handling,
| like burying the center of mass below the vehicle.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much all simulator games _have_ to cheat. Because
| most of us can 't hop into a Formula 1 race car or the
| cockpit of an F-22 and drive/fly it with no real
| training. (Much less race other drivers or fight in a
| dogfight.)
| treis wrote:
| >being easy to drive with a steering wheel in a driving
| game, and being easy to drive a real car with a steering
| wheel (with internet level latency and packet loss at
| play, mind you) are very different things
|
| Sure, but I don't think it's that different than driving
| a real car looking out a monitor sized windshield. You
| might lose some braking and cornering without your
| inertial perceptions. But you'd still be able to driver
| around easily.
|
| Either way I think a speedometer is an assumed input for
| a self driving car and from that you can calculate almost
| everything needed related to proprioception.
| simonh wrote:
| Teslas don't have LiDAR, which is used in all the best
| self driving systems.
| 725686 wrote:
| He was talking about humans.
| simonh wrote:
| In which case he's even more wrong. Humans use a whole
| mess of different senses while driving, including
| hearing, the inertial sensitivity in the inner ear, touch
| to feel vibrations and from the car and the wheels on the
| road. Plus we have a huge amount of contextual
| information about the meaning of what we are seeing from
| life experience outside driving, which no Tesla that
| currently exists can ever have.
|
| It's a clever bit of snark, but absurdly wide of the
| mark. If that's actuary what the Tesla engineers think,
| no wonder they're failing by their own criteria so
| completely.
| danaris wrote:
| ...And furthermore, the neural nets and cameras Tesla
| uses are vastly inferior to our brains. Just because you
| can argue that a neural network of some kind uses the
| same basic structures as our brains doesn't mean that it
| can come within a light-year of what our brains can
| actually _do_.
| gcanyon wrote:
| The claim isn't that humans can drive _as well_ using the
| Tesla cameras as they can in person, just that they
| _can_. That seems obviously true.
|
| The (not explicitly made) sub-claim is that an AI can
| make up for the lack of audio, etc. by being smarter than
| a human and faster than a human, better able to multi-
| task than a human, and completely non-distractible.
| That's debatable, but not impossible.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Humans don't have lidar either.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| And birds don't have jet engine, yet nobody is trying to
| replicate flight by wing flapping as a bird.
| gcanyon wrote:
| My friend, I have news for you :-)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBq9NcITh6o
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtn4PpZEB8I
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R19QQiM5Mw
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Humans have stereoscopic vision
|
| Edit: I'd love to know why I'm being downvoted. Tesla
| cars guess depth with a neural net. Humans have the
| hardware for getting this data directly. Unless you
| either have lidar, radar, or dedicated stereoscopic
| cameras, you don't have real/accurate depth data. And
| depth data like that stops your car from plowing into
| white trucks.
| redox99 wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, but as I see it human stereoscopic
| vision is kind of irrelevant.
|
| If you close one eye, do you really feel like your
| ability to determine depth is significantly impacted?
|
| And even then, the stereo effect is basically negligible
| at the distances relevant for driving.
|
| A human missing one eye would have no trouble driving,
| except maybe for the reduced field of view.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This is true. But most of the things perceived while
| driving are outside of the stereoscopic depth perception
| ability of humans. IIRC that stops around 20 meters or
| so.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I hope not because it makes them even more wrong. Humans
| have a number of different sensors we use while driving.
| typon wrote:
| If you think humans are equivalent to cameras and
| artificial neural networks, you are severely wrong.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is wrong. Waymo uses both lidar and radar, which
| Tesla opted to remove. Also, _look_ at Waymo 's cars.
| Those things have sensors strapped all over in ways that
| give them lots of range and visibility. Tesla will never
| do that because it compromises the aesthetic.
|
| https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/
| _Microft wrote:
| They certainly referred to humans.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Brains aren't neural nets and eyes aren't cameras.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Why? The whole idea of neural nets is based on mimicking
| the brain. It's even in the name: _neural_ (for neuron).
| teraflop wrote:
| Yeah, and the name of "Full Self-Driving" tells you that
| it can drive "by itself" i.e. without human intervention.
|
| But names aren't everything, and artificial neutral
| networks are "inspired by" but in truth drastically
| different from human brains.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| How so?
| lolinder wrote:
| They're different in practically every way. It's easier
| to enumerate the things they have in common: NNs borrowed
| the idea of using a connected network of functions whose
| outputs feed into each other's inputs.
|
| That's it. That's the total resemblance between the two.
| The brain isn't just an NN implemented in biology, it has
| whole systems that aren't accounted for in digital NNs,
| like hormones and neurotransmitters, and even the system
| of connected neurons doesn't work the way digital NNs
| implement it.
|
| Neural networks model the brain exactly as well as
| objects in OOP model cells: not very well at all. They're
| inspired by biology, nothing more.
| lolinder wrote:
| Neural networks as used in AI are _inspired_ by the brain
| in much the same way that OOP was _inspired_ by the way
| cells work--neither one is an attempt to faithfully
| recreate the actual operations of an extremely complex
| (and only partially understood!) biological system.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I've _never_ met anyone who knew anything at all about
| neural nets who thought they were mimicking the brain.
| redox99 wrote:
| It is pretty trivial to disprove that: A human could no
| doubt "remotely" drive using the current Tesla cameras. So
| the sensor suite might be more challenging than
| alternatives, but obviously not impossible.
|
| You could however argue that the current computer isn't
| powerful enough to run the software required for vision
| based L3/L4.
| bragr wrote:
| >A human could no doubt "remotely" drive using the
| current Tesla cameras.
|
| I have doubts about that. I wouldn't want to remotely
| drive that without much better cameras at the very least.
| Advanced planning to be in the right lane or avoid
| obstacles is hard when the details are just a couple
| pixels.
| [deleted]
| sonofhans wrote:
| It's a trivial claim, advanced without evidence. There's
| no reason to believe that a human could drive a car based
| only on those limited visual inputs. Humans use all our
| sense to drive.
|
| And even if it were true, so what? Last I checked Tesla
| didn't have software which can perfectly emulated a human
| agent.
| robryk wrote:
| > And even if it were true, so what? Last I checked Tesla
| didn't have software which can perfectly emulated a human
| agent.
|
| GP was arguing against:
|
| > The feature is impossible to implement with the sensor
| suite that comes with the car.
|
| _For that statement_ it's immaterial whether Tesla does
| something right now, but rather whether it's in principle
| possible. Modulo your previous objection humans provide a
| counterexample to that (very general) statement.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I think it's substantially unlikely that all of the cars sold
| with FSD will be capable of using whatever Tesla settles on
| -- between processing power and sensor differences in their
| lineup, feels like they'd have to hamstring the software a
| fair amount to make it work fleet wide. Maybe not?
| acover wrote:
| How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question. Is it
| because Tesla is a large company and should have self funded
| it?
| masklinn wrote:
| > How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question.
|
| The average kickstarter funds actually producing the project,
| and does not literally endanger the funder and everyone else
| during that period.
| lolinder wrote:
| Any Kickstarter is obliged to be very explicit about the
| risks. They're required to have a section in the pitch
| dedicated to what might go wrong, and Kickstarter itself has
| text everywhere reminding you that rewards are not
| guaranteed. Tesla, on the other hand, never acknowledges the
| very real possibility that your extremely expensive vehicle
| never sees full self driving.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The sale page is pretty explicit about what you're buying
| and has this note:
|
| > The currently enabled features require active driver
| supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The
| activation and use of these features are dependent on
| achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as
| demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as
| regulatory approval, which may take longer in some
| jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your
| car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air
| software updates.
|
| Also, at this point, my experience with the FSD package in
| my 2020 Model 3 is that it is not misleading to call it a
| "FSD beta": in specific predictable situations it has
| problems with maneuvers but, over the last month or so,
| it's continuously gotten better at making full trips
| without disengaging.
| robryk wrote:
| This note makes it very obvious that customer's
| evaluation of the expected timeline might impact their
| purchase decision. In my non-expert opinion Tesla puts
| itself on notice that any false statements that might
| impact that evaluation would be fraudulent. If my opinion
| matches the legal consensus, then the doctored video
| would be such a false statement.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Somehow we got used to companies selling products named
| "Definitely Does Thing [X]!" and then adding fine print
| that says "this product absolutely does not do thing
| [X]." I think it would be much better if we stopped
| accepting that practice.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The stuff above this says exactly what the FSD package
| is. All this fine print is adding is that you will get
| new features as they are released. In 12/2022 this is a
| very good description of what the package does (and, IMO,
| it undersells the capability: autosteer on city streets
| works really well for me with the new FSD package)
|
| > Full Self-Driving Capability $15,000
|
| > All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced
| Autopilot
|
| > Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
|
| > Coming Soon
|
| > Autosteer on city streets
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Again, to repeat my point (which I didn't think was very
| confusing), the things described in the small-point text
| are all fine. But they cannot in any reasonable world be
| summarized by the product name "Full Self Driving."
| Insofar as California is encouraging Tesla to name their
| products more accurately, that seems like an absolute
| good.
|
| This point holds even if I don't go into the fact that
| both autosteer/autopilot (phantom braking problems) and
| FSD-beta (requires active driver control, disengagements
| every < 1 mile) are both kind of a mess. Or that the
| claims from Musk regarding capabilities and timing have
| been completely inaccurate.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| > they cannot in any reasonable world be summarized by
| the product name "Full Self Driving."
|
| I think it's fine to name a placeholder for a feature
| that's in development according to the final state.
| Especially if the feature gives you access to the most
| recent developments towards that feature.
|
| As for the other stuff, the FUD online about FSD is
| completely inconsistent with my daily experience of using
| it. It's by no means perfect, but it does a good job for
| my normal driving around SoCal
| afrcnc wrote:
| They made people pay for it?
| rvz wrote:
| More like 'Fools Self Driving'.
|
| Hardly surprising that action has been taken over FSD,
| especially the robo-taxi claims and the deceptive advertising
| over this alleged safety-critical system proven to be unsafe
| and putting other drivers on the roads at risk. As I have
| previously said before. [0]
|
| So not a surprise here that many are realising that FSD is a
| complete scam and is being investigated by regulators and
| lawmakers for its false claims and misleading advertising.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436
| 93po wrote:
| FSD beta is literally deployed to all Teslas that have
| purchased it.
| roflyear wrote:
| And it doesn't work.
| bagels wrote:
| It doesn't fully self drive, contrary to the implication of
| the name.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The only FSD I know is the Frame Shift Drive, sometimes known
| as the Friendship Drive.
| WA wrote:
| It's still up in all its fraudulent glory:
| https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
| 93po wrote:
| The title of this is "Full Self Driving Hardware on All
| Teslas". The hardware is in fact on all Teslas. What part of
| that is fraud? Nothing about this video was misleading and
| the car did in fact drive itself through that route.
| xattt wrote:
| The name FSD intimates an SAE Level 5 experience. It's not
| partial self-driving or any other sort, but _full_. If
| there was any name to suggest it, this would be it.
|
| Imagine going to an emergency department with chest
| pains/trouble breathing/thunderclap headache, and the
| triage nurse saying "oooooh yeaaaaah, I know emergency is
| in our name but we don't really deal with _that_ , you're
| on your own".
|
| Things that are critical to life-or-limb should be
| appropriately named without the use of weasel words or
| asterisks.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| You know there are lots of ERs that can't handle lots of
| emergencies, right? There's even a whole "Level" system
| to describe which emergencies they are and are not
| equipped to handle.
| epistasis wrote:
| Calling it hardware for "Full Self Driving" is fraudulent
| if FSD doesn't exist, is nowhere close to existing, and the
| video has been deliberately edited to defraud viewers into
| thinking the hardware is capable of something that doesn't
| actually exist.
|
| What sort of semantic game are you playing here and why? I
| don't understand how you can not see this as anything but
| competent fraudulent, particularly with the editing that
| happened to make this video. I'm truly bewildered, this is
| not rhetorical or exaggerated at all!
| 93po wrote:
| There is no misleading editing in this video.
| ghaff wrote:
| In fairness I know people with "FSD" who went into it well
| aware that it's not really FSD and they still like it. That
| said, the marketing is clearly fraudulent.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Im one of those people, I have it and love testing it out,
| but I know it's not FSD, I really do get the big deal about
| the name. Anyone who buys it thinking it's really FSD is an
| idiot.
|
| The difference between me and apparently everyone else in
| this forum is I do think TSLA will build a video model that
| is L4/L5 in the next few years. I live in a rural america and
| majority of my drives do not require interventions.
| remote_phone wrote:
| Musk said that by 2020 there would be a million robotaxis
| on the road. To say that anyone who bought it thinking that
| FSD wasn't real is a very, very stupid statement.
| ghaff wrote:
| Before I spend $10K+ on something, I do more research
| than listening to the claims of some CEO who has a
| history of being "optimistic" about timelines at a
| minimum.
| bagels wrote:
| Why are they idiots? Because they believed the marketing
| messages that Tesla put out?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| pretty much yes. If you live in 2022 and believe any
| marketing, you're not firing on all cylinders.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| A lot of people knowingly buy into ponzi schemes too.
| ghaff wrote:
| You can not buy into all of a manufacturer's marketing
| puffery and still like a product on balance.
| Retric wrote:
| Puffery has specific meaning here and making objective
| statements doesn't qualify.
|
| You can't call a 3' log 5' and say it's just puffery.
| rafael09ed wrote:
| You can call a 1.5" by 3.5" plank a 2x4
| Retric wrote:
| I don't think Tesla can _round up_ from 0 and say you can
| make money with a self driving Taxi service.
| dymk wrote:
| Tesla calls it FSD, not "Nominal FSD".
|
| To nitpick your metaphor further: A 2x4 plank starts off
| as 2" by 4", and it is shaved down to 1.5 x 3.5 side to
| straighten it out. A Tesla "FSD" car has never been in
| its life fully self driving.
| [deleted]
| ra7 wrote:
| FSD has enabled a ton of sales for Tesla and is arguably one
| of the biggest factors they were valued over a trillion
| dollars at one point.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| This has always confused me. I knew FSD wasn't feasible, I
| knew Tesla was selling a lie. I also knew it was an
| incredible investment opportunity. I passed on it because I
| envisioned a bunch of lawsuits destroying the company.
|
| Obviously, I was clearly wrong. While the stock is way down
| from peak it's clearly been an amazing investment for those
| that invested early. 2020/1/10 $31.88, 2021/11/30 $381.59
| (peak I think) and around 122.81 at close Friday.
|
| Normally, I can look back at an investment in mistake and
| the issues are obvious in hindsight. With Tesla, I still
| have no idea why the company still hasn't succumb to
| lawsuits.
| clouddrover wrote:
| The lies worked in the short term, but Tesla's on the hook
| now for a lot of free hardware upgrades:
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-
| dr...
|
| That won't be helping the stock price going forward.
| quonn wrote:
| Those updates will be cheaper than the 15k price. And for
| those who already opted in, it's a small expense to pay
| for the upgrade. Tesla can easily afford it.
| woofyman wrote:
| FSD = Future Self Driving
| nicd wrote:
| Full Self Driving, I believe.
| warning26 wrote:
| _whoosh_
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Full Self Driveling
|
| Drivel == non-sense
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Full Scary Driving edit*
| fortran77 wrote:
| Is this what Hacker News us about? Mocking mental illness?
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| How is that mocking? It was merely a descriptive term.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| fair, edited
| xdavidliu wrote:
| what did it say before the edit? Schizophrenic?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| short version of that yes
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Faux Self Driving
| rvz wrote:
| FSD = Fools Self Driving
|
| Everyone knows it has always been a fools dream to purchase
| this snake-oil AI scam product and it is finally been
| recognised as such.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Fanboy Simp Driving
| iandanforth wrote:
| What a windfall for Tesla! They get to walk back their absurd
| claims while pinning the blame on someone else. They're still
| probably going to face massive lawsuits when they fail to ever
| deliver full self driving, but this might at least limit the size
| of the class.
| option wrote:
| Let that sink in. And you know what is not arriving anytime soon?
| Even "cat-level" AGI is just not going to happen within next 20
| years at least.
| theCrowing wrote:
| 20 years ago, the Linux kernel version was 2.5, we had the
| Intel Pentium III, Apple just released the Lamp, Nickelback was
| Top 1 with "How you remind me?" for over 16 weeks, Warcraft 3
| got released and I bought my first Palm Tungsten.
|
| This reads like another world because it was and I suspect the
| world will change even faster in the next 20. We will have cat
| like AGI before 2042.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Many believe that AGI will develop independent of our
| understanding of the human brain, cognition, and
| consciousness.
|
| I personally find this quite strange -- as if intelligence
| and cognition can be brute forced without having a good
| understanding of those concepts and how they apply to humans.
|
| Anyway, I'm hoping to do some reading on this topic in the
| future. If anyone has suggestions for books and papers of
| much earlier works please post them here. I've enjoyed the
| Chomsky interviews and I'll probably read some of his
| references.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| > This reads like another world because it was
|
| So...another world with a slightly different taste in music
| and less advanced consumer electronics? Pretty picayune
| difference.
| theCrowing wrote:
| Ever gone out in a small town or village? Not much changed
| in the last 20 years, it was mostly at home. Take away the
| flatscreens, smartphones, tablets and calendars (doh) and
| nobody could tell you if it's the 00s, 10s or 20s.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Uh, yes, that's my point. Now I'm not sure which side of
| this question you're on.
| theCrowing wrote:
| The one that says that despite almost everything staying
| the same everything changed. We can go into
| socioeconomics if you really want...
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Hard pass. Thanks for your time.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I think the rate of change over the next 20 will be slower.
| Mostly just because the rate of change in computing power has
| slowed down. AI training compute has been doubling every 6
| months. But how long can that continue without fundamental
| improvements in hardware? At this rate would need to increase
| compute by 1000x by 2027.
| theCrowing wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_
| 1...
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Your examples work against you, I think. So, in 20 years we
| have some incremental improvements. I think '82 - '02 was a
| bit more dramatic than your example. AGI requires crossing a
| barrier that we don't really know is realistically possible
| with the type of technology we have currently.
|
| There are a lot of pop crap radio now, WoW just released
| another expansion, the latest iPhone has some pretty
| forgettable features compared to previous iterations, etc.
| It's not like the world is exponentially different in 20
| years.
| theCrowing wrote:
| The jump from 134,000 (82) to 9.5 million (02) transistors
| was a significant one, but it's nothing compared to the
| leaps and bounds made when transitioning to 20 billion
| transistors (2022). It's a staggering difference that truly
| demonstrates the magnitude of the advances made in the last
| 20 years. The 80s and early 90s were computational winters.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I think you should go back Patterson's book. The benefits
| of Moore's law ended and then what happened? I think what
| you are trying to suggest flies in the face of all
| conventional wisdom of computer hardware.
| theCrowing wrote:
| Moore's law ended? Because Nvidias CEO said so to have an
| excuse for their dud of a generation? ASM, TSMC, Intel,
| Apple and AMD are saying it's still going strong.
| realstooge wrote:
| All things considered, there isn't much of a difference
| between 2012 and 2022 consumer computing. 4/8 cores, all
| pretty much clocked the same, maybe 8GB/16GB of RAM and
| 500GB of storage. At best, we optimized the process,
| optimized edge cases, but not it is certainly not an
| exponential leap.
|
| Between 90-00, we went from 40MHz CPU to 1+ GHZ, 1GB to
| 100+GB storage capacity. A factor 25 for clock speed, and
| 100 for storage. By the 90-00 pace standard, in 2022, we
| would have 25GHz CPU, 1PB disk, but we topped at a few TB
| at best, consumer. D instruction per core went from 0.33
| (1992, Intel i486DX), to 4.1 (2002, Pentium 4 Extreme
| Edition), to 8.46 (AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X), so in
| 20 years, we had less advancement (x2) than in 10 years
| (x12).
|
| Beside that, Moore's law stated doubling of "metric"
| every 2 years, 20 years is 10 doubling period, so we
| should have scaled by a factor of 1000. So yeah, Moore's
| law is long dead.
| remorses wrote:
| The ministry of truth in action
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Aww, are you mad that they won't let Tesla lie to the public
| anymore?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, I assume you're trying to be sarcastic, but, yes, truth
| in advertising is usually considered to be desirable.
|
| It's mildly absurd that they need a specific law for this, but
| if the relevant regulators won't act...
| psychphysic wrote:
| What's FSD mean?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Full Self Driving.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Full self driving
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Should have happened sooner. I love my Model Y. It's the most fun
| car I've ever owned. It's also the most comfortable on long road
| trips and I can sleep in it in climate-controlled comfort without
| generating a gas that could kill me. I leave the house every
| morning with a full tank and never have to stop at a gas station.
| And my cost per mile is 1/4 what it was with an ICE car.
|
| I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI
| feature that can never happen.
|
| It's like what if somebody invented the world's greatest
| backpack? It's bigger on the inside than the outside, and it
| incorporates negative gravity so anything you put in it becomes
| 50 lbs lighter. And all that was true; it actually worked? But
| for an extra $10k, the company will add on the "anti-grizzly
| bear" feature which makes you invulnerable to grizzly bears while
| you're wearing the backpack. Except most of the people who buy
| the anti-grizzly bear feature end up getting eaten by grizzly
| bears. Whoops! Just quietly stop advertising the anti-grizzly
| bear feature and you'll still have a great product.
| wpietri wrote:
| > I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an
| AI feature that can never happen.
|
| There's a good argument that Tesla wouldn't exist today without
| the hype. The enormous positive public image mad Tesla's cost
| of capital _extremely_ low, and ditto its cost of marketing.
| Tesla needed a lot of both to get to break-even. Musk himself
| has talked repeatedly about coming close to bankruptcy. It 's
| reasonable to believe that less hype would have meant less
| capital and fewer sales, nudging them at some point over into
| bankruptcy.
| bumby wrote:
| There's a tipping point where the hype becomes excessive or
| even fraudulent.
|
| The ends justifying the means doesn't absolve a business of
| needing to conduct themselves ethically.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh, yeah, I think Tesla's well past the point of fraud.
| Musk promised "1 million robotaxis by end of the year", and
| that year was 2020. I don't think the end justifies the
| means at all here.
| adrr wrote:
| Fake it to you make it. FSD will never come on the current
| hardware.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or fake it until you crash...
| Lendal wrote:
| It's almost as if someone invented an amazing new technology
| that really works, then some VC came along, bought it out, (er,
| I mean invested!) ran the original inventors out of town and
| bolted on some unasked-for snake oil. Now, you can still buy
| the still-awesome product (mostly made in America too) but you
| have to take all the VC crap along with it. Welcome to America!
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| This is typical engineer fairy tale thinking:
|
| that "inventing" v0.01 defines all other versions and nothing
| else is needed even if v0.01 didn't get sold. And all other
| versions have ton of work in them.
|
| And seasoned with the big bad wolf, oops investor, buying
| everything at gun point.
|
| Edit: of course this is downvoted lol, hate Musk all you want
| ( I do but because he is pro CCP) but reality can't be denied
| Zigurd wrote:
| The idea of FSD is, obviously from the effect of hyping it,
| enormously attractive. It can't happen now. But in the 1990s,
| speech recognition that would enable me to dictate this comment
| in a relatively noisy space was science fiction. Now that we
| have orders of magnitude more computing power, and much better
| microphones and associated noise rejection technology, you can
| blithely dictate messages with reliability that was previously
| a dream.
|
| Thing is to go from being unable to distinguish pencil from
| cancel to today's almost magical speech recognition, took 25
| years. That might be the same interval it takes to go from
| mowing down motorcyclists to delivering all the safety and
| productivity potential of level 5 autonomy.
| nzealand wrote:
| > It's also the most comfortable on long road trips and I can
| sleep in it in climate-controlled comfort without generating a
| gas that could kill me.
|
| Why are you sleeping in your car for long trips? :)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Because hotels can be expensive, and when you want to bomb
| from one side of the country to the other driving 16 hours a
| day, it's just easier to sleep in the car. I've done it many
| times in a 20-year-old Jetta, very comfortably.
| tmh88j wrote:
| > Because hotels can be expensive
|
| Perhaps buying a $60k+ car isn't the best idea if that
| means you can't afford a hotel room occasionally.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| But my car cost less than $2000.
| tmh88j wrote:
| The context of the discussion is someone sleeping in
| their Model Y, not someone penny pinching to get by.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand dollars
| on an electric car doesn't mean they should be willing to
| drop $200 a night on hotels for a week straight.
|
| My uncle bought a Tesla 3 (coincidentally, to replace his
| 20-year-old totalled Jetta) because he needs to drive
| several hours to the office a few times a month for 2-3
| days at a time, and the silent climate control and flat
| trunk floor means he can cheaply and comfortably spend
| the night in his car rather than driving 3hr back home or
| renting a hotel room. It is also much cheaper to operate.
| tmh88j wrote:
| > Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand
| dollars on an electric car doesn't mean they should be
| willing to drop $200 a night on hotels for a week
| straight.
|
| I disagree. In my opinion if you can't afford to do that
| a few times per year without financial concern then you
| have no business spending $60k+ on a car. Having to sleep
| in your expensive car just so you can afford a vacation
| is ridiculous. There are much cheaper alternatives that
| won't force you to sacrifice other aspects of your life,
| such as your $2000 car.
|
| I'm not even going to comment on your uncle's situation.
| Let's just say I would be working somewhere else if I had
| to resort to that.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's not financial concern. My uncle could definitely
| afford to rent a hotel room, but he _doesn 't mind_
| sleeping in his car and he would rather spend that money
| on something else. Heck, _I_ could afford a hotel too,
| but I would _rather_ sleep in my $2000 car.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I know you're kidding but it's a good question. I don't do it
| while the car is moving obviously. I like to camp in the car
| at RV spots at lakes, state parks, and other pleasant places
| while on a long road trip. Plug in the car, sleep in the
| back, and wake to a full charge.
| yucky wrote:
| > Should have happened sooner.
|
| Which tells you everything you need to know about California's
| government.
| sangnoir wrote:
| What, that they are #1 in understanding the self-driving
| technological landscape? They remain more responsive than the
| other 49 states.
| yucky wrote:
| Their _timing_ tells you what you need to know. This isn 't
| new information, their decision is motivated by something
| other than a new set of facts on self driving vehicles.
|
| So they were wrong, and they stayed wrong (for money) long
| after they knew they were wrong. And now that it's
| convenient they've reversed course. Sounds like the other
| 49 states was right to be cautious.
| dagmx wrote:
| This is illogical. You can't simultaneously criticize
| California for taking so long to do this, while praising
| other states for being more cautious by not doing it.
|
| You're also ascribing some laterite motive that you fail
| to provide a description of.
| yucky wrote:
| California leading the way in being wrong, and then
| reversing course - doesn't make them a leader. It just
| shows they're butthurt over Musk being a douche. Great
| way to lead.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I also love my Model Y. It's by far the best car I've ever
| owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of
| "FSD" beta releases.
|
| Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it
| works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level
| 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the
| wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It
| feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the
| complaints about the name it's exactly what is claimed.
|
| Auto park is bad. It doesn't detect the spot half the time and
| it's not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces
| where it would actually be useful.
|
| Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It's often too timid to
| actually switch lanes if there's traffic. I like the signal-to-
| lane-change.
|
| Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false
| advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you
| want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time)
| claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and
| don't pay attention. Every year it's another few months away. I
| doubt it's actually possible with the hardware on the car at
| this point. Elon's claim of "humans drive with eyes so a car
| can drive with cameras" is naive. It's glossing over the very
| important bits of "with the compute power in the car" and
| "within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques". I have no doubt
| that autonomous driving is possible - it's actively happening
| in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model
| Y can do what I paid for, and that's unethical.
|
| This doesn't need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by
| a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.
| logifail wrote:
| > But the software has stagnated [..]
|
| I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which
| are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE
| vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of
| which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...)
|
| I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software
| "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had
| OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse
| for it.
|
| If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade
| to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates
| probably isn't going to work...
| wpietri wrote:
| I think the implication is that the current software is
| just not very good.
|
| It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the
| new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it
| sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's
| sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and
| leave you with annoying issues.
|
| But it could also partly be a case of differing
| expectations. The web has trained us all that software
| generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's
| too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE
| car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky
| dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year
| after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up
| paying good money to replace the car stereo with something
| that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could
| have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my
| dashboard.
| logifail wrote:
| > on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same
| clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating
| that, year after year, it's still just as bad
|
| I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The
| driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it
| was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7.
| It's the same as it was in its year 1.
|
| Q: Why would that be frustrating?
| notahacker wrote:
| It's just not as much fun when you're not renting your UX
| so next year could bring you better collision avoidance
| or require you to pay for an upgrade to continue to be
| able to recline your seats
| logifail wrote:
| > better collision avoidance
|
| Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're
| apparently still working ok.
|
| Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days
| ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet
| too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they
| weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I
| slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily
| empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white
| line right into the space my vehicle would have been in.
|
| Talk about adrenaline rush :(
| wpietri wrote:
| The distinction I'm drawing is that we expect _software_
| to improve.
|
| My first car had no software, so I didn't expect anything
| to get better. But the most recent thing I drove
| frequently had significant amounts of software,
| especially the touchscreen that did audio and navigation.
| Even when it first came out it was not very good
| software, so it was the kind of thing I'd _want_ to get
| better. And 5 years later, having watched all the rest of
| the software in my life improve, the flaws were ever more
| grating.
| wpietri wrote:
| And I should add that I suspect there's a technology
| stage issue here. If you look at a model T dashboard, the
| controls were by modern standards terrible. All of us are
| used to cars where they spent decades refining physical
| controls, all of which were pretty uncomplicated compared
| to what we routinely expect software to do. So it's
| reasonable to me that if we count the number and severity
| of driver experience issues, the graph bottoms out
| sometime in the mid-1980s (1986 being the first time they
| put touch-screens in cars).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Did you have a touch screen? Or a screen that controls
| any part of the car?
|
| The frustration is that those tend to have awful
| interfaces, with extra frustration that they _could_ be
| fixed but _don 't_ get fixed.
|
| If you had normal buttons then there wasn't anything to
| get annoyed with in this way in the first place, so it
| didn't need updates.
| bumby wrote:
| Given that this is a fairly common sentiment, it's a bit
| wild to me that SpaceX uses touch screens to control
| almost everything in their Dragon capsule.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's a different environment. Astronauts are passengers,
| not drivers, and they rarely need to make sudden actions
| while multi-tasking the way car drivers do. If they made
| all-glass cockpits for fighter jets I would agree with
| you, but they don't.
| bumby wrote:
| This isn't a very accurate take, anymore than an airline
| pilot is a passenger. There's an reason why the first
| astronauts to fly in it were military pilots. Dragon has
| a manual mode that requires an astronaut to control the
| vehicle for safety reasons. I'm not aware of any human-
| rated NASA software that doesn't also require a human in
| the loop to meet the required safety thresholds.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Modern cars have much more features and tech than older
| cars. UX on a decently designed 30 year old car couldn't
| be improved much. While my current car is nice, I'd
| appreciate automatic wipers and Bluetooth that were more
| reliable. The voice recognition and navigation wasn't
| cutting edge the day it left the factory. There are a few
| behaviors of the automatic climate control that need
| improving too.
| logifail wrote:
| > It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like
| the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot
|
| "Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there's data
| to prove it": https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-
| touchscreens-really...
|
| I did actually chortle when I read that :)
| burnished wrote:
| That isn't ICE vs EV that's new vs old
| janalsncm wrote:
| > Elon's claim of "humans drive with eyes so a car can drive
| with cameras" is naive.
|
| Humans drive with our eyes and we're pretty bad at driving.
| We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple
| modalities so that a car crash isn't an accident, it's a
| choice.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > Humans drive with our eyes and we're pretty bad at
| driving.
|
| I disagree that humans are bad at driving.
|
| Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully
| autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a
| fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's
| statistically a better driver than a human?
|
| And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here.
| 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here?
|
| In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related
| fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must
| mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are
| tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove
| that year.
|
| Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles
| driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a
| mile driven is low: 0.00000109%
|
| To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving
| car is better at driving than a human it would need to
| drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a
| fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13
| years.
| thrashh wrote:
| Not all humans are the same either
|
| Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after
| driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record
|
| Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with
| them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they
| change lanes, despite driving for 10 years
|
| It's a bell curve and I think the median is better than
| current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve
|
| But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I
| think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
| diffxx wrote:
| I think part of the problem is the lax licensing
| standards in the US. For everyone's benefit, we should
| have higher standards. There also can and should be
| regional differences. Someone who has learned to drive in
| a rural or suburban area has not necessarily had the
| training and experience necessary to safely drive in a
| city alongside pedestrians and cyclists.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Yes but how would you give a downtown Boston experience
| driving test in North Dakota?
|
| I still remember the time my mom almost drove into a tram
| tunnel! She wasn't used to the city.
| thrashh wrote:
| I think we're not really willing to up the standards
| because you need to drive to survive in a lot of places.
|
| You can't change your genetics, you can't necessarily
| change where you live, and you can't just fix transit
| without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to
| build so the standards are just what they have to be
|
| Over the last many decades, we've starting requiring
| things like backup cameras because cars naturally break
| down and so it's something we can actually change on a
| short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost)
|
| Fixing transit is a long timescale thing
| bombcar wrote:
| It wouldn't have to do that much driving flawlessly -
| many crashes occur without there being a fatality.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| It would actually need to be driven significantly more,
| see this report:
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
|
| To quote:
|
| > Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of
| millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of
| miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of
| fatalities and injuries.
|
| > Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing
| fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to
| drive these miles -- an impossible proposition if the aim
| is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing
| them on the roads for consumer use.
| ec109685 wrote:
| There are lots of leading indicators that a car (or
| human) is bad at driving, so you don't actually have to
| wait for an accident to know if you are on the right
| path.
|
| E.g. keeping track of near misses / interventions can get
| you data points much more quickly.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > we're pretty bad at driving
|
| Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am
| personally fascinated by the relatively low number of
| accidents given how omnipresent cars are.
|
| For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and
| ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]
|
| More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy
| street and never personally witnessed an accident there.
|
| Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving,
| even on average.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tra
| ffic-r...
| notahacker wrote:
| It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic
| errors driving (at least until you consider we as a
| species spent a billion or so years of evolution
| travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a
| vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so
| strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where
| people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure
| collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its
| speed advantages.
| ryandrake wrote:
| When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger
| vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of
| transportation[1].
|
| 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-
| topics...
| naniwaduni wrote:
| 7 deaths per _billion_ passenger-miles. To put that into
| perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with
| passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going
| on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per
| day, should have seen _one_ death in that time.
|
| I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly
| safe the modern world is.
| dagmx wrote:
| To add to one of your points, The Tesla auto park is
| legitimately awful. https://youtu.be/nsb2XBAIWyA
|
| Every time we try it for a spot to reverse into, the linear
| regression it must be doing is so apparent. It violently
| tries to turn left and right rapidly trying to straighten
| itself.
|
| It works better for parallel spots but often gives up half
| way because it made a bad angle choice.
|
| We've tried it in various models in addition to our own Model
| Y. They're just embarrassingly bad at it.
| m463 wrote:
| I think parallel parking works wonderfully (only know
| autopilot 1)
|
| Remember it uses sonar to park, not the lines.
|
| Strangely, I've never tried backing into a spot - I guess
| because the backup camera is great at seeing the lines and
| I can back in quickly.
| ec109685 wrote:
| They're switching to lines.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That's odd. My 2015 Model S auto-parks very well, faster
| and neater than I can do it myself.
| dagmx wrote:
| Is that the older Mobileye stack? It had much better
| autopilot than Teslas solution.
|
| In the video I linked, you can see it out perform Tesla's
| implementation.
| culi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the video. It's kinda telling seeing
| every single other car's auto-parking feature work
| flawlessly while Tesla's fails miserably
| miketery wrote:
| This is kind of scary, it seems they're trying to use black
| box Ai/ml for parking where a simple PID controller would
| do excellent given an input of a target box and current
| location.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Indeed. Why do Tesla go for ML to poorly solve problems
| long solved by well understood PID controllers?
|
| The cynical in me feels this is to do with employees at
| Tesla want to work with new and shiny ML instead of old
| boring PID tech for the sake of "resume driven
| engineering".
| beardedwizard wrote:
| Where is the evidence it doesn't use any PID? The
| wobbling described in the parent is a very PID like
| behavior (poorly tuned)
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I suspect these decisions are driven from the top down.
| We know who loves a shiny tech choice at Tesla. The
| company has been quite proud of their end to end ML
| system in presentations. But it sounds like they're
| struggling with execution.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| With the amount of theorising and handwringing people do wrt
| Elon's motives or reasons for having this view of FSD, there
| seems to be a lot of people that don't want to acknowledge
| him for the boring stereotype that he is: a manager /
| salesperson completely out of his depth making wild
| unsubstantiated claims. It's just that the autocratic role he
| demands within organisations, and his relatively newfound
| publicity fuelled by his legion of fetishists, means that we
| all hear about it.
|
| I only vaguely (for a developer) know about AI / computer
| vision, yet I'm still made deeply anxious by the implication
| that we will somehow in the foreseeable future be able to
| pull this off at ALL, let alone with 1.5 hands tied behind
| our backs as Tesla insists.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > Elon's claim of "humans drive with eyes so a car can drive
| with cameras" is naive.
|
| Specially because we don't drive with eyes only, we use at
| least our ears too for hearing unusual noises and the balance
| sense for detecting vibrations, changes on road surface, and
| to get feedback about orientation changes.
| Moru wrote:
| No idea what resolution those cameras are, can they be as
| good as our auto-adapting eyes together with our brains?
| They are pretty neat features after all, trained right. And
| will we loose our abilities if we don't keep working on
| them, building our feature set?
| filoleg wrote:
| The resolution is pretty good, but they got one other
| massive advantage over human eyes even without sound - a
| full 360 degree view at any given time that doesn't
| require turning head, thanks to the array of cameras
| covers everything all at once.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Teslas have those sensors, but don't currently use some of
| them (like microphones) as inputs.
|
| Unlike human drivers, a Tesla autopilot can track the
| rotation of each wheel independently and in real time.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Yet it still doesn't work.
| threeseed wrote:
| > a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel
| independently
|
| But most humans can in most cases feel when there is a
| loss of traction on the road. Although agreed it comes
| nothing close to what the car knows.
|
| That said I am not sure that this is a core feature
| needed to make FSD work.
| 93po wrote:
| > I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an
| AI feature that can never happen.
|
| Why can that never happen?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Arbitrary limitations on the sensor suite because "we figured
| it out, humans only need cameras" are one reason.
|
| Tesla is not running in the same race as actual AV companies.
| simondotau wrote:
| All of the "actual AV companies" have only released curated
| marketing videos and/or restrict operation to curated
| geofenced areas. Meanwhile we've seen exactly one company's
| autonomy technology exposed to unsupervised and
| uncontrolled adversarial conditions across hundreds of
| wildly diverse cities in the USA. Whether you are impressed
| with their state of progress or not, there's nobody you can
| compare them to.
|
| Operators like Waymo do look plausible while operating
| within their tiny geofence. Driving pre-validated roads is
| impressive in its own way. Right now if you dropped a Waymo
| and Tesla FSD on an unsealed road in Michigan, one of them
| will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and
| the other will probably refuse to move.
|
| The point is, I agree that there could be many firms which
| are far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information
| in the public domain to say this with any confidence. Right
| now Tesla's is the only major system which can be assessed
| with critical objectively.
| sidibe wrote:
| > Right now if you dropped a Waymo and Tesla FSD on an
| unsealed road in Michigan, one of them will drive at
| least as well as a human learner driver and the other
| will probably refuse to move
|
| One will drive and likely get into an accident, and the
| other will responsibly not do what it wasn't designed
| for. But if you took away Waymo's responsible
| disposition, I'm sure it would drive better than the
| Tesla, because it's just way further along in
| development, more and better sensors, more rigorous
| testing and simulations, more corner cases that
| absolutely had to be dealt with to roll out a real self-
| driving product.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > ...one of them will drive at least as well as a human
| learner driver and the other will probably refuse to
| move.
|
| If it was just one single trip, I was incapacitated and
| just needed to get home, then fine, level of human
| learner driver is good enough. But for everyday usage? No
| way, the risk is just too high.
| threeseed wrote:
| > All of the "actual AV companies" .. restrict operation
| to curated geofenced areas
|
| That's because they aren't being reckless and releasing a
| dangerous product onto the road that they know has
| issues. Unlike Tesla.
|
| And those geofenced areas are at least with Cruise almost
| entire cities.
| andbberger wrote:
| > one of them will drive at least as well as a human
| learner driver and the other will probably refuse to
| move.
|
| refusing to move is a feature not a bug. and human
| learners don't slam into a jersey barrier because there's
| some glare.
|
| why tesla bros continue to insist that they have a good
| vision stack while they can't even do contrast adaptation
| is beyond me. the dril tweet comes to mind
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| No lidar or sonar, not enough sweating of the thousands of
| dangerous edge cases, and an insistence on a software
| architecture whose failure modes cannot be adequately
| characterized.
| 93po wrote:
| [flagged]
| clouddrover wrote:
| What's the actual conflict of interest? Tesla has, for example,
| been done for false advertising in a court case:
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...
|
| Aside from that, Musk wants you to vote for people who are
| strong supporters of the oil and gas industry. He did when he
| voted for Mayra Flores:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1536973965394157569
|
| Mayra Flores says the _" oil and gas industry is critical to
| the success of our State and Nation"_ and that she _" will
| always work to help the oil and gas industry and stand firm
| against radical policies that would undermine it"_:
| https://www.mayrafloresforcongress.com/issues/
| sangnoir wrote:
| Being more charitable, I am not shocked by the following
| independent scenarios:
|
| 1. The law on self-driving was sponsored by a legislator on the
| Transportation committee
|
| 2. The Transportation Committee chair is heavily lobbied by -
| and received donations from - the oil and gas industry. The pil
| and gas industry is a major user of, and supplier to
| transportation as a whole.
|
| Edit: I'm failing to corroborate oil and gas PAC spend on her -
| seems to be FUD. Her total clear-money campaign expenditure to
| date is under $500k, so the claim of a multi-million dollar PAC
| with no evidence seems suspect.
| roflyear wrote:
| Isn't this against HN guidelines?
| sangnoir wrote:
| What's your source on PAC spend? I can't find that on
| OpenSecrets[1]. The largest share of donations to her is Labor.
|
| 1. https://www.followthemoney.org/entity-details?eid=29336335
| dagmx wrote:
| How does this affect the EV portion of Tesla or any other
| company?
| FatActor wrote:
| Color me shocked that you're completely ignoring the merit of
| the post. Stay on target, Red 5. This is about Tesla selling
| dangerously flawed software and misnaming it. This doesn't fall
| under what lawsuits would refer to as "puffery" (world's
| greatest coffee!). Tesla is literally misleading customers in a
| way that can lead to death.
| paulmendoza wrote:
| I can't tell if you are joking or not
| 93po wrote:
| He isn't. It's Elon derangement syndrome.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Haha! I love that term, totally going to use it going
| forward! It really is a thing.
| FatActor wrote:
| The idea of describing an opposing view as derangement is
| disingenuous because it implies you know the mental state
| of the person, and it also completely avoids having to
| discuss the merit of the argument by derailing it. It is
| also questionable because your post history is full of
| dozens of pro-Tesla/Elon posts which are mostly trolls or
| memes. That makes me wonder what you mean by
| "derangement" because I consider doing that on a
| discussion forum that seeks knowledge as antithetical to
| its existence. But since people aware of news coverage
| for the past decade, this is a term that was popularized
| in the US during the 2016 election cycle, it has been
| used to shut down any rational debate. It is effectively
| name calling. Which is the opposite of the purpose of HN
| and makes me wonder why you are even here. To troll or to
| learn or to help people learn. Again from your history,
| it seems to be the first option.
|
| Whether or not someone took donations from an opposing
| industry, and using that to dismiss their argument is one
| of the classic fallacies of reasoning.
|
| To me, naming a deadly product something it is not seems
| worthy of regulation, because it is lying. If you prima
| facie consider me deranged because of that, I do not
| understand your world view and would like to understand
| it better.
|
| Also, I'm not a he.
| 93po wrote:
| > This is about Tesla selling dangerously flawed software
|
| No, this is about what Tesla calls it. This bill does nothing
| to stop Tesla's deployment of this feature.
| samwillis wrote:
| FSD is a Boondoggle. _(Collision /accident avoidance and driver
| assist systems are not)_
|
| I don't think we will see a legitimate L5 automation in our
| lifetimes. Take my 1.5 mile journey to do the morning school run,
| in a small UK town:
|
| - Getting off the driveway, there is a wall that creates a blind
| spot behind it, often other parents are walking small kids who
| are shorter than that wall. I can't see behind it. I check down
| the street as I get into the car, watch for subtle reflections,
| and aware that an adult further down the road may have a kid
| closer by on a small bike.
|
| - Turning out the end of the road, there are parked cars blocking
| my view, it's safer to stop slightly further back as you can see
| slightly better.
|
| - Another turning onto a busy road, at rush hour you can't get
| out without a considerate driver pausing and waving you out.
|
| - Cross roads that is slightly out of alignment. The collision
| avoidance on my Audi often incorrectly triggers braking thinking
| that we are going to have a head on crash.
|
| - Delivery vans blocking a lane, heavy on coming traffic.
| Considerate delivers on the other side flashing to let you
| around.
|
| - A right hand turn (uk driving on left). It's better to pull
| slightly across the centre line letting people going straight on
| pass on the left, while you wait for a gap across the road.
| Plenty of space even for the largest trucks on the other side
| when you do this. Keeps traffic moving and everyone happy.
|
| - Another right turn, no road markings and 4! different exits off
| the road in under 8m. Often blocked by cars so have to go further
| forward by a car length and double back.
|
| - School car park! Children walking everywhere, large cars,
| teenagers who have just passed their driving test, parents
| dropping their kids out in the middle of a moving queue.
|
| I just don't think it's possible for AI FSD to understand the
| nuance of all that.
|
| (Yes, a 1.5 mile journey to school, we should be walking)
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| You don't really need it to work 100% of the time for it to be
| helpful. Users of FSD Beta report not driving manually 90-95%
| of the time, which sounds amazing to me.
| samwillis wrote:
| Agreed, but that's not the mystical "L5" FSD that everyone is
| aiming for. It's that that I think is a pipe dream.
| orlp wrote:
| > (Yes, a 1.5 mile journey to school, we should be walking)
|
| You should be cycling.
| samwillis wrote:
| I agree, we have two choices, cycle on the busy roads with
| the 4+8yo or on a footpath through a park and down the
| pedestrianised road. Second option sounds perfect right?
|
| No, there are big signs saying "no cycling" because I live in
| an F-ing stupid Tory middle England town where that sort of
| thing is not aloud...
|
| Once the 4yo is a little bigger we will be breaking that
| stupid rule.
| Saris wrote:
| If it's safe yeah, but plenty of areas have no option other
| than riding a bike in car traffic.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In the US going around a vehicle turning out of the traffic
| lane is illegal. Of course people still do it all the time.
|
| The cooperation stuff is going to be harder (though if you have
| automatic drivers in a majority of vehicles you can imagine the
| systems planning together).
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| you just explained it to a future ai.
| samwillis wrote:
| I know you are making a joke, but my point is I don't believe
| we can train these AI system to work collaboratively with
| humans (maybe with other AI though) and understand the
| subtlety of a human environment.
| hnarn wrote:
| What's your point?
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| You definitely need to try FSD or at least watch some latest
| YouTube videos.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| There are many videos on YouTube with it failing these kinds
| of examples indeed.
| 93po wrote:
| There are also a lot of videos of humans failing these
| examples.
| peteradio wrote:
| Yes and when they do they are ticketed or otherwise
| charged. Who holds liability when someone purchases a
| package that is supposed to do this for them.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I live in Boston. You know all those stereotypes about Boston
| drivers and Boston traffic? Largely accurate. If they ever do
| succeed in creating an AI powerful enough to drive a car safely
| in this Commonwealth, I want that AI curing cancer and inventing
| time travel, not bothering with trifles like driving.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I believe Taylor Ogan did a drive with FSD through Boston with
| the results that you would expect.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I will have to look that up, thanks for the tip.
| remote_phone wrote:
| It's already changed. It's called "Enhanced Autopilot" now.
| dawnerd wrote:
| No it's not. That a different product. FSD is still what they
| call the "full autonomous" mode. Enhanced Autopilot is just the
| highway auto lane change and some other minor gimmicks.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| How times have changed since Tesla was untouchable here. What
| happened and why does everyone talk like they've always hated
| Tesla (and Elon)? Surely it's mostly the same crowd as when Tesla
| was loved and Elon a superstar.
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| drno123 wrote:
| Musk bought Twitter and fired 50% od the staff without Twitter
| crashing, which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise
| guys were
| petee wrote:
| Or just how well they designed it
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Imagine thinking that firing 50% of the staff that built an
| enormously complicated piece of software, and having the
| service stay up and running means that the people who built
| it were overpaid or overstaffed.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| "We don't need firefighters. No one has died in a fire in
| years!"
| drstewart wrote:
| "We don't need the TSA. No one has died in a hijacking in
| years!"
| drstewart wrote:
| And if it did fall over you'd be saying the same exact
| thing. So by your own logic, it's impossible for a
| company to be overpaid or overstaffed.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's almost like it's not possible to judge the necessity
| or required quantity of software engineers from outside
| the company!
| watwut wrote:
| He is selling waaay less ads and way cheaper then used to be.
| And while it has many reasons, him firing people who were
| actually selling those ads is one of them.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| He could have fired 100% and Twitter wouldn't crash.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I don't know that they were overpaid. I also don't know that
| all the people fired had to deal with day-to-day uptime
| operations. If they did, then they probably were over-staffed
| but probably they were not and I think we all know that. Now,
| it seeend quite likely they were over staffed to an extent
| but I don't know about this idea that "Twitter is still up so
| those people were useless."
|
| Also, Musk fired some people for saying stupid things about
| their boss on his platform, that is just fair play. I don't
| see why people like NYT are up in arms about it (well, I do).
| However, read Musk's Tweets from November. He was behaving
| like a little child trolling on the Internet.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were
|
| Systems don't fail overnight, and Twitter has definitely been
| exhibiting odd behaviors lately. It's just a bit early for a
| victory lap.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Twitter hasn't been exhibiting "odd behavior" for years.
| Systems don't fail overnights, but I would expect some
| signal to emerge from the noise by now.
| croes wrote:
| Too soon to say that.
|
| Even if they are understaffed now it wouldn't immediately
| collapse.
| 93po wrote:
| Performance has literally improved since the layoffs.
| scaramanga wrote:
| I think a lot of people got caught up in a sort of mass mania
| induced by media portrayals of a billionaire genius with a
| mission to change the world for the better.
|
| Recent events have just given people permission to climb down
| from the collective psychosis.
| Kiro wrote:
| I think it's dangerous to presume that the current narrative
| is clean from delusion and that only the previous discourse
| was a psychosis.
| marvin wrote:
| Tesla has been hated on HN for _years_. Current sentiment is
| just a continuation of that long trend.
|
| I've kept a record of HN comment threads that keelhaul Tesla
| and Musk since around 2015 or so. I really believed in the
| company's mission and execution throughout those years (and
| still do), and wanted to keep a record of the very widespread
| opposing view. This in order to document it in case I was
| wrong, or in case I was right and someone claimed in retrospect
| that success was obvious and inevitable.
|
| I don't believe there has been a material change in sentiment.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I definitely perceive a shift in some people who were very
| pro-EV, pro-Tesla due to environmental concerns but became
| very anti-EV, anti-Tesla as it became apparent that Musk was
| not part of their political affiliation.
| lolinder wrote:
| In RL or on HN? If on HN, you can be pro-EV and anti-Tesla
| (which is where I fall), so don't mistake a commenter
| taking that position with someone changing their mind.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| On social media. Agreed that you can be pro-EV and anti-
| Tesla; I am remarking about an observed change in tone
| from pro-EV, pro-Tesla to anti-EV, anti-Tesla.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Musk spoke political heresy.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Which is obviously a mistake if you're a TSLA shareholder.
| Not knowing the political opinions of the CEO of your
| favorite company facilitates revenue.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Musk has been a jackass for years, and many of us saw through
| the facade well before now.
| 93po wrote:
| There are a lot of profit incentives for corporate media and
| established players in a lot of industries to smear to Elon.
| This results in a ton of bad media coverage, and people are a
| product of the information they consume. Over time this style
| of coverage embeds itself in people's minds, and we see what
| we're seeing now: posters that have never met elon, never spoke
| to him, and never worked with him stating ridiculous opinions
| about his motivations, his health, and mental status as fact.
| lolinder wrote:
| HN is a forum with a lot of people in it with different
| opinions.
|
| Speaking as one of those who's always disliked Tesla and been
| turned off by Musk, one explanation is that the skeptics now
| feel more empowered to speak out than they did before. Also,
| depending on how far back you're talking, you may be
| overestimating how much unadulterated love there was for it
| before: I've been following conversations on Tesla here for
| years, and plenty of other vocal skeptics have been here for as
| long as I have.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the biggest shift is less the emergence of skepticism
| which was always there, and more that the people who would
| previously counter that Elon had always shown impeccable
| judgement and laser focus on big decisions, that we should
| trust him the promised FSD would be delivered soon or that he
| truly believed in the cause of free speech and would
| completely transform social media for the better tend to have
| gone a bit quiet.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes, I can see that! It's not that the skeptics weren't
| there before, it's that the Elon defenders are less willing
| to speak up than they were.
| scaramanga wrote:
| And the experience is like stepping out of an elevator
| that a football team had farted in and you'd been holding
| your breath for a decade. Let's enjoy this moment while
| it while it lasts.
|
| We'll back on another hype train of tech "making the
| world a better place" before you know it :)
| hericium wrote:
| Did anything change? I was downvoted for calling out Musk as
| dangerous (...) unstable and unethical sociopath with so called
| "self driving" car a year ago[1] just as I was downvoted for
| pointinug out FSD is a myth just one day ago[2].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214
| scaramanga wrote:
| Bootlickers gonna lick.
|
| There's a reason tech is seen as the job that's "too plum to
| unionize." We are the most aligned with the beliefs and
| values of management and capital. We wouldn't have our nice
| jobs if we weren't.
|
| All that's happened here is that one paranoid delusional
| billionaire has a reactionary conspiracy theory that the most
| elite bootlicking workers in the economy are secretly all
| trotskyites in league with the woke marxist antifa at Ford
| and GM and other major advertisers etc..
|
| The collateral damage of this has caused mass cognitive
| dissonance for people in tech who are either going to realise
| that maybe robber barons don't have our best interests at
| heart (shock!) or just double down on the bootlicking to see
| if that makes papa stop hitting us and love us again.
| rvz wrote:
| It seems that recently, it is become trendy to hate Elon Musk
| because of the news where as I'm only critiquing FSD as I did a
| year ago against the fanatics [0], since that is obviously full
| of snake oil and false promises and a beta 'safety critical'
| product deployed to hundreds of thousands of drivers on the
| road. I don't see that level of deception yet with SpaceX,
| Starlink or Neuralink.
|
| Tesla cars themselves are also fine until you're talking about
| FSD which that is the problem and the scam that puts the lives
| of other drivers on the road at risk.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Neuralink experiments are based on old experiments and
| nothing new. We have to ask ourselves why didn't the research
| lab that originally did those experiments move forward with
| them?
|
| But the idea that this has any implications for healthy
| people is ludicrous. They can read a thousand neurons close
| to the brain's surface. So? The understanding of the brain is
| incredibly limited and Musk won't be able to access much of
| it anyway.
| foobiekr wrote:
| You don't see that level of deception with Neuralink, which
| (he claims) will cure (in the near term) Parkinson's,
| tinnitus, paralysis, etc.?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| It might not be. I've never liked Elon, a view that was truly
| cemented during the "pedo guy" incident. In the past that meant
| I just ignored fawning articles or comment threads about this
| modern "Tony Stark" as I knew any critical comments would
| result in a pile-on from his supporters.
|
| Conversely, herds are gonna herd, and Musk fans are probably a
| lot less vocal these days compared to the days of peak Elon
| hero worship.
| sethd wrote:
| It looks like my first public comment on Musk/Tesla was in
| February 2021 [0].
|
| I remember getting hooked on the FSD fraud story sometime in
| 2019 and seeing many negative Musk/Tesla comments since that
| time.
|
| There's always been some fanatic Musk supporters leaping to
| defend/apologize, but at least to me, it feels like the
| skepticism has been strong here for quite some time.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065592
| danielodievich wrote:
| We were in San Mateo recently and took a Lyft to a restauraunt.
| It was a gull wing model Y, which was curious to see in
| operation, and also curious to see as a Lyft car. Anyhow, we got
| in, and were pulling out of hotel parking lot when the driver
| unprovoked said "I love my Tesla, check out its self-driving!"
| and takes hands off the wheel, right before a 90 degree turn near
| the hotel. It did it, but it did it weirdly, not like real
| driver. My wife and I were both really freaked out and later
| agreed that that wasn't what we got a driver for and we wished he
| kept his hands on the wheel.
| cp9 wrote:
| FSD has been a dangerous fraud this whole time
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| From YouTube videos I've seen Telsa's already can drive
| autonomously. You can give it a destination and it will drive
| there.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic
| and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would
| outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that
| sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High
| frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real
| solution.
|
| Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure
| changes with dedicated bus lanes and prioritization is already
| good enough to have automated busses cart people around.
|
| Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self
| driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now
| on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with
| "ridesharing".
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z)
|
| > The role of transportation network companies (TNCs) in the
| urban transport system is under intense debate. In this study, we
| systematically assess three aspects of the net impacts of TNCs on
| urban mobility in the United States--road congestion, transit
| ridership and private vehicle ownership--and examine how these
| impacts have evolved over time. Based on a set of fixed-effect
| panel models estimated using metropolitan statistical area level
| data, we find that the entrance of TNCs led to increased road
| congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%) and duration (by
| 4.5%), an 8.9% decline in transit ridership and an insignificant
| change in vehicle ownership. Despite the ideal of providing a
| sustainable mobility solution by promoting large-scale car
| sharing, our analysis suggests that TNCs have intensified urban
| transport challenges since their debut in the United States.
|
| Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving
| personal vehicles.
| richardw wrote:
| I don't want a car. I'd happily share one. Uber where I live
| (Johannesburg) has kinda forced conversation and I always feel
| the need to tip. But honestly the drivers here are dangerous,
| speed around, ride their clutch, go through orange lights,
| don't want to take short trips. I'd love a Uber that just does
| the job, doesn't want to talk and drives sensibly so I can zone
| out. One my kid could ride in.
| starkd wrote:
| > Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self
| driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are
| now on the road
|
| Where do you get that? FSD is not by itself going to compel
| people to drive more than they need to.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more
| than they need to._
|
| What people "need" (or "want") changes: if you live in the
| city and want to partake in Nature, it may be a hassle to get
| out of the city. But if you can 'just' hop in a FSD car and
| have it drive overnight (while you sleep) to a nature
| reserve/park, people may do that. Whereas previously they may
| not desired it enough to deal with traffic in getting there.
|
| Imagine FSD recreational vehicles (RVs, UK: campers), or
| those live-in vans that are somewhat popular nowadays: go to
| sleep in one place, wake up in another.
| ericmay wrote:
| We already do drive more than we need to because of how
| society is designed in America, but if the costs were lower
| as promised and you basically had an always-on-demand car
| with no driver, you could work or something while in the car,
| and take a nap wouldn't people take a lot more road trips or
| trips otherwise? I don't see how this wouldn't increase
| usage. That being said, increase in usage doesn't
| _necessarily_ correlate to increased traffic.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I assume if there were more self-driving cars, fewer people
| would own cars. I think more people would take Ubers, Lyfts,
| and other ride sharing services.
|
| So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the
| amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of
| cars.
| endisneigh wrote:
| read the study I linked - what you suppose does not and has
| not happened in practice.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Ah ok, I'll check it out. I'm curious if self-driving Ubers
| would be a step change tho, or if we would observe the same
| thing.
|
| Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get
| self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus
| routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds
| back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini
| buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the
| transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I
| don't know.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume with autonomous driving, scheduled and computer
| dispatched minibuses/shuttle buses would be more common.
| Labor is a fairly large component of public transit. Of
| course, you don't remotely eliminate that for various
| reasons but reducing the need for drivers almost
| certainly makes alternative forms of transit more
| economical.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| There could be a huge algorithm which will try to
| schedule vehicles with varying sizes from 2 seats to 30
| seats to people all over the city. If you pay more you
| can get the exact N spots so you get privacy, if you are
| willing to pay the least, you might have to go 30m into a
| dedicated spot where a 30 seater will stop for you and
| some others, then it will make optimised stops based on
| what everyone has as their destinations.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Ngl this sounds much worse than normal public
| transportation. AFAIK it's just the same thing but if
| you're rich you get special treatment. Imo more of a
| regression than an advance.
|
| Cars were largely a mistake.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| You get special treatment when you are rich already now.
| It's more advanced and optimal version of what there is
| now.
|
| Right now if you are rich you can just hire a driver and
| a luxury car, and be much more wasteful with your
| resources, so I don't see the difference in terms of
| inequality.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Really? Do you find Uber and Lyft to be affordable or a
| financially sensible means of regular transportation?
| oefrha wrote:
| $20/day on cabs is cheaper than owning a $50k car.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| $20? Where do you use Uber? In a rural area to go 2
| miles?
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Good thing you can buy a car for $5k
| turdprincess wrote:
| I'm not so sure. AAA estimates that it costs $10,728 to
| own and operate a new vehicle per year which is driven
| 15,0000 miles per year. This includes all the costs like
| depreciation, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc, and works
| out to be $0.71 per mile.
|
| At least in my town, Ubers are more expensive than that.
| I can't seem to find a trip anywhere for under $15, even
| if its a few miles away, or like $3 per mile. Longer
| trips are more economical, but for example, my airport
| (40 miles away) is quoting me $80 at the moment, or $2
| per mile. Also, these prices don't include tip.
|
| I think if you lived in a big city with public
| transportation and occasionally took Uber, it would be
| more economical than a car. But as a 100% replacement,
| Ubers appear to be 3 to 5 times more expensive than
| having your own car.
|
| And by the way, that AAA data is from a brand new car.
| You can easily go cheaper by getting a reliable used car.
|
| source: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-
| new-car-owne...
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Bikes are essentially free.
|
| Prefer bikes, then fail to public transit (there's
| typically more options than you expect, once you start
| exploring; also you can often bring your bike...), and
| only then fail to Uber.
| [deleted]
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I don't own a car, and I use Uber etc for everywhere I go.
| In the end it's cheaper for me than to own a car.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| One of the main costs is labor. Another is fuel. Get rid of
| labor and if fuel gets cheaper (I assume electricity,
| because it can come from more sources than gas, will get
| cheaper over time), then I assume these services will be
| cheaper. Plus, car ownership is not that cheap either.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It's not even a
| question. You could buy an overpriced car that you can't
| afford with a high interest rate and it would still be
| much cheaper. I think you need to go back to first
| principles on this one.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Let's say I use a car once a year.
|
| Just how would owning a car be cheaper than getting an
| uber that one time per year?
|
| Now do the same math for driving 5 times a day.
|
| Do you see why you can't just say "Car ownership is
| cheaper than Uber", unqualified?
| dtgriscom wrote:
| > Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It's not even
| a question.
|
| Well, yes it is.
|
| Cars are expensive: lease ($200+/month), maintenance
| ($100/mo), gas ($50/mo), insurance ($120/month), garage
| ($200/month). WAG of $670/month. That's 15 to 40 short-
| ish Uber rides/month.
|
| Commute an hour each way every day, and have free
| parking? Buy that car. Have it available for occasional
| trips to the grocery store? Uber is almost certainly
| cheaper. And, if autonomous taxis become real then the
| price will go down even further.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Leasing a car is the most expensive way to own a car
| (short of buying a new one every 3 years). Of course if
| you're paying $200/mo. for parking you can probably
| afford it. In much of the country parking is indirectly
| subsidized with zoning laws.
|
| This is all moot because, if driving places gets cheaper,
| traffic will get worse, which was the original point.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Car ownership may be cheaper based on where one lives.
| One lives in a rural area and commutes everyday to a
| suburb where parking is free? Probably much cheaper than
| taking an Uber. Live in a city where parking is $40 per
| day and a parking space at an apartment is $500/month and
| work from home? Uber may be significantly cheaper than
| owning a car.
|
| If we go to first principles, I think what would matter
| the most is at least how often someone uses a car, how
| one uses it, and where one lives, to determine whether
| ownership or renting (Uber is just very short-term rental
| with a driver included, no?) is cheaper in total cost.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The idea is that the cost of a ride would go way down
| because you don't need to compensate a driver.
| ghaff wrote:
| Assuming no deadheading and equivalent vehicle costs,
| you're probably looking at about 50% of current Uber
| costs if there were autonomous vehicles today. Whether
| that qualifies as "way down" I guess is a matter of
| perspective.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| EVs also reduce the fuel costs considerably (probably
| also the maintenance costs).
| jupp0r wrote:
| Not paying a human to do the driving would make Uber/Lyft
| much cheaper, it's the dominant cost component of a ride if
| you do the math.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Labor is significantly less than half the cost for
| operating an Uber/Lyft.
| rntp wrote:
| hold up hold up hold up.
|
| So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by
| someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did
| it a little bit this year just to see how it changed.
| They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was
| significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the
| total fares collected.
|
| Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems
| reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine,
| though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era,
| where the way you got a ride was by calling up a
| dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers
| got to take home about 85% of the total fares.
|
| So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the
| driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-
| automated system where the driver is taking in
| significantly less.
|
| And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha!
| The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are
| simply proving my point~!!1!"
|
| Here's the deal:
|
| * Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance,
| something that would have to be carried by the company if
| the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver
|
| * More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to
| intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce
| vastly _more_ overhead costs, even though one would
| expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-
| dispatch system would cut overhead.
|
| I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually
| rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not
| Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides
| actually _more_ expensive.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| This comment comes off as condescending, like someone
| trying to pander to zoomers or an adult trying to larp
| their opinions through a Bill Nye episode in comment form
| when you can just write your response simply without the
| decoration.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| The biggest difference between Lyft/Uber and dispatch
| taxis isn't the automation it's the customer service!
|
| Previously customer service was non-existent. If a taxi
| didn't show up, we just got screwed. There wasn't even
| anyone to call for the issue. On the apps I instantly get
| a credit to help ease the burden and the driver has their
| rating reduced.
|
| For many reasons customer service is very expensive and
| it's not yet automated. That's one big additional
| variable to keep in mind.
| nradov wrote:
| What customer service? I tried to take a Lyft ride a
| couple weeks ago because I knew parking would be a mess
| at my destination. Even though I scheduled a ride in
| advance, Lyft switched me between 5 different drivers and
| none of them were actually coming to pick me up. In the
| end I ran out of time and had to drive myself.
|
| And that's not the first time I've had such poor service
| recently. Lyft used to be pretty good a few years ago but
| not it's just garbage.
| asveikau wrote:
| > There wasn't even anyone to call for the issue
|
| You could call the dispatcher, who was physically local
| to you. Today's apps, maybe you get some ZenDesk type
| thing, or in-app chat to some large, faceless
| corporation, and my admittedly limited experience is
| these things tend to be very dismissive of customers,
| viewing support mainly as cost and trying to get rid of
| customers rather than addressing issues.
| dgoodell wrote:
| What I don't understand is WHY these more automated
| systems cost so much.
|
| And it's not like there isn't competition, we have both
| Lyft and Uber overlapping in many places and people can
| chose between them.
|
| I'd really like to see a chart or something shows where
| Lyft/Uber fees goes.
|
| There has to be a lot of inefficiencies. My suspicion is
| there is a lot of white collar bloat.
| whakim wrote:
| But where are the cars themselves coming from in this
| scenario? Are these still other people's cars which
| Lyft/Uber are essentially paying you to put on their
| platform? I don't think you can afford to pay people that
| much less than drivers are paid per hour. Is Uber/Lyft
| taking care of gas/maintenance or is the owner on the
| hook for that in the middle of whatever else they might
| be doing? Or does Uber/Lyft own the cars, in which case
| you've just replaced one big cost (paying drivers) with
| another big cost (owning a fleet of vehicles)?
| lokedhs wrote:
| Less parking, sure. But self driving cars will do nothing to
| reduce traffic. The problem isn't the number of cars in
| existence, but rather how many cars are actually driving
| around at any given point. This number will surely go up with
| self driving, or at best stay the same.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Doesn't the number of cars driving around depend on density
| of riders? Just getting rid of the driver would make every
| car have one extra seat available for passengers, assuming
| cars maintain the same number of seats.
|
| So what I'm more curious about is if self-driving enables
| more options for ride sharing, just as Uber had Uber pool,
| at a cheaper price, perhaps it could open up more options
| (at different prices) between riding with 50 strangers on a
| bus or taking a 4-seat car by myself?
|
| Overall, I don't know if cars on road at time X will go up
| or down. Heck, if there aren't cars parking on the streets,
| then some roads in cities may even add two extra lanes for
| traffic, which could reduce traffic further.
|
| But as others have pointed out, ridesharing companies with
| drivers haven't really reduced traffic, so maybe self-
| driving cars won't either, however I seem to think it'll be
| more of a step change when cars drive themselves.
| wpietri wrote:
| > But self driving cars will do nothing to reduce traffic.
|
| I think self-driving cars could (and probably will) net
| worsen the traffic problem, but the above is not
| necessarily correct. If we ever get them working properly,
| self-driving cars can collaborate in ways that humans
| can't. E.g., imagine a busy freeway. In theory, cars going
| similar ways could form a sort of peoloton, communicating
| with one another about intention and circumstance. So you
| could have a group of cars going from one city to another
| traveling at high speed very close together, saving fuel
| and space.
|
| But yes, generally anytime we make something easier, people
| do it more, so I expect any road efficiency gains to be
| swamped by increased demand.
| ziml77 wrote:
| The problem is that every vehicle participating in that
| network would have to be owned and operated by a trusted
| entity. Otherwise it would be too easy for someone to
| modify the software or tamper with the hardware in ways
| that cause information to be misreported and cause a
| mess.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| And then the person who owns that car gets charged with
| murder when it crashes on the highway
| f6v wrote:
| Imagine every laptop, tablet, phone, watch had the same
| charger that was 100% compatible with all the devices.
| What a world would that be.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I still hope self-driving will enable the original dream of
| "car-sharing" by enabling car pooling, coordinated by Uber
| / Waymo / Toyota.
| astral303 wrote:
| I don't think self-driving cars lead to fewer people owning
| cars, in fact it's quite the opposite. With FSD, those who
| don't like driving can deal with owning a car to do necessary
| transportation tasks (e.g. commuting), instead of giving it
| up for alternative methods because they don't want to drive
| consciously/presently.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Owning a self driving car you can always regulate using
| taxes etc. If too many people start using self driving cars
| you would increase taxes on owning those. I don't see that
| being an actual problem.
| endisneigh wrote:
| that doesn't make any sense though - self driving is a
| capability, not a type of car. it would be like taxing
| cars that have cruise control. fundamentally self driving
| is a safety feature, why would you tax it?
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Tolls in cities for traffic control are common where
| needed. It works well and is simple.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| You could tax owning a car more or putting the car in
| traffic in general, not necessarily self driving aspect
| of it. The main tax being about taking up room in the
| streets.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Alternatively, a bunch of friends could buy a car together
| and split the costs.
|
| I could see a scenario where instead of (or in addition to)
| vehicles being pooled between "x" random people (taxis,
| Uber/Lyft, ZipCar), you could purchase a fractional share
| of a car ( _Cf_. NetJets): you get semi-exclusive use of
| (particular?) vehicles.
| emodendroket wrote:
| A lot of the reasons people don't do this now still
| apply, including a lot of trips taking place at roughly
| 8:00 and 5:00.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I considered this in college, but gave up on the idea
| eventually. Figuring out how to fairly split the cost of
| gas, tires, and maintenance isn't easy, and when you're a
| broke college kid, splitting the tab fairly is a big
| deal.
| throw0101c wrote:
| I'm sure there several companies would pop-up for a "X as
| a Service": you connect your own car to their API, and
| things like scheduling, mileage, depreciation, _etc_ ,
| would be computing for you. The company could also offer
| to sell/lease you a vehicle (NetJets-style).
| qdog wrote:
| I think Uber/Lyft is that company, they just use human
| drivers, which has apparently made traffic worse now, and
| I wouldn't expect it to get better.
| nradov wrote:
| What's the point? Regular cars are cheap. They're not
| expensive capital assets that last for decades like
| private jets.
| amelius wrote:
| > when you're a broke college kid, splitting the tab
| fairly is a big deal.
|
| And when you're not?
|
| And couldn't the car assist in the calculation?
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I wonder if it became more of a thing, companies would
| help to solve the coordination problem on this.
| voakbasda wrote:
| I think companies would need to build the solution before
| this will become more of a thing.
| wpietri wrote:
| In talking about friends with this, one interesting
| divide was between people with kids and those without.
|
| People with kids, especially suburban ones, seem to use
| the vehicle as a sort of mobile operating base. So the
| car isn't just a taxi. It's where the kids' sports stuff
| goes. Plus the folding chairs for the games. Plus snacks
| and water on hand. Plus it gets used as a storage locker
| when they're out somewhere. And it has assorted useful
| stuff, like charging cables and wet wipes and sunglasses
| and spare napkins and and and...
|
| So I expect fractional ownership will not be particularly
| popular for a lot of people because a) they're already
| used to owning a vehicle, and b) they don't want to have
| to take everything out of the car all the time.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence, but as a city-dweller who owns a car,
| all of my friends who don't own cars have a reason besides
| "it's inconvenient." They have a disability that makes it
| unsafe to operate a vehicle and/or they simply can't afford
| a car.
|
| Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but that
| seems to be the way it works here in Chicago.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I don't own a car, save around $5-10k per year, and don't
| have a disability...
|
| Originally, growing up in St Louis, I avoided driving
| because I saw lots of friends wasting their time in shit
| jobs to pay for their shit cars; cars were supposed to
| provide freedom, but were really a gateway to the
| shackles of work. I suppose that's another reason beyond
| 'it's inconvenient,' though.
| tnel77 wrote:
| I think it goes both ways and we won't know for sure until
| it comes to fruition.
|
| Personally, I hate owning vehicles and desperately want a
| self-driving taxi service that I can order via an app to
| get me and my family around.
| samtho wrote:
| > Personally, I hate owning vehicles and desperately want
| a self-driving taxi service that I can order via an app
| to get me and my family around.
|
| This future sounds great until you consider what it
| really means to let "someone else" become the arbiter of
| you being able to get around.
|
| If I have a car in my driveway, I can make sure it is
| charged/fueled for whenever I need it and I can just turn
| it on and go. Compare that to a system who's goal is not
| specifically moving you, but keeping cars/assets always
| on paid trips. Sure, you may in luck if you live in a
| well-off areas where many trips are taken, but I fear
| peak hours will become something of a bidding war where
| nobody wins.
|
| If you do not control your means of transport, someone
| else does and they can take it away from you at any time.
| This "rent seeking" is one of the biggest cancers on our
| society and I will be no part of it given the choice.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I've thought about this: if all transport is public
| transport, then how much is our physical freedom limited?
|
| Yes, bikes and other things may exist, but if all high-
| powered transport is outside of our control, how much
| control do we have over our movements?
|
| That being said, I think a lot of people in the US
| purchase cars through auto loans, and those loans while
| not physically limiting one's day-to-day mobility, can
| restrict one's job mobility. Maybe it only applies to
| certain economic classes, yet I imagine some people may
| be afraid to leave their job or lose their job because if
| they do, they lose their car and therefore lose their
| ability to move. And the safety net for physical movement
| in some places if one doesn't have a car is close to
| zero.
| simondotau wrote:
| > This future sounds great until you consider what it
| really means to let "someone else" become the arbiter of
| you being able to get around.
|
| Assuming we're discounting things like bicycles, family
| member's vehicles and company-owned vehicles, this is
| present day reality for the overwhelming majority of
| people on this planet.
|
| (It's also debatable whether a car truly eliminates other
| people from being an arbiter of "being able to get
| around" if you are still reliant on a fossil fuel supply
| chain. By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar
| array would probably more liberating.)
| cwalv wrote:
| > By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar array
| would probably more liberating
|
| By comparison, yes. But where are you going to go, or
| what are you going to do, that isn't dependent on other
| ppl in some way? I like the idea of being self-supporting
| as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that
| we're all interdependent in modern society.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Same. The only reason I own is because no service
| guarantees a car will be in my garage when I need it. If
| they could offer that, I'd love to pay a service fee
| rather than own, maintain, buy, sell.
|
| And I think it would be cheaper. The optimal use for a
| product that is depreciating in value whether you use it
| or not, is to use it as much as possible. We are paying
| for our cars for sit in place all day and night.
| mLuby wrote:
| Better hope your rating never takes a "nosedive" where
| you lose access to your means of transportation. See the
| Black Mirror episode of that name.
| shawnz wrote:
| If you're just a passenger then why does it matter to you
| whether the taxi service is self-driving or not? Surely
| the benefits of self-driving would be significantly more
| relevant for those who do want to own the vehicle?
| tnel77 wrote:
| I'm hoping that by excluding the human labor costs I will
| save some money, but we will see. It would also be nice
| to not have to have that awkward taxi conversation every
| time I go to the store.
| cwalv wrote:
| > It would also be nice to not have to have that awkward
| taxi conversation every time I go to the store.
|
| This is the real reason ppl will own cars for the
| foreseeable future. Same reason I prefer a detatched home
| with a private/fenced yard. I'd probably get used to
| high-density living, but I doubt if I'd ever really
| prefer it.
| tintor wrote:
| Expectation is that self-driving taxi would be cheaper
| than manual taxi.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Average earnings (after expenses) of a ride share driver
| is very roughly $10/hour. If you assume a self-driving
| car can get 2000 hours of use a year (which seems
| reasonably conservative), then the self-driving car saves
| $20k in labor costs per year. Although self-driving tech
| will be expensive in the beginning, the price will likely
| at some point decline to be far below $20k/year.
|
| Labor is about half of the cost of a hired ride. We know
| this is true for Uber because there is a lot of public
| discussion about the budget of a rideshare driver. Not
| sure about taxis.
|
| Given those premises and assumptions, a person who
| doesn't want to drive would care about self-driving tech
| because it could eventually lower the cost of hiring a
| ride, potentially by 50%.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But price is said due to supply and demand not the cost
| of providing the service. So why do you think taxi fares
| will go down?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Because labor is half of supply, in this case.
| olalonde wrote:
| A big reason people own cars is that taxi rides are
| expensive. The idea is that FSD will dramatically reduce
| taxi ride costs by taking the driver out of the equation.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Making it easier and cheaper to access a car will likely mean
| more cars on the roads, not less.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Depending on a variety of factors. Number of people
| traveling, at which times they're traveling, how many
| people are traveling per vehicle, where they're traveling,
| etc.
| clouddrover wrote:
| Adding more taxis increases traffic:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/uber-
| and-...
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/cities-
| tra...
|
| https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/uber-lyft-traffic-
| congest...
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Adding more _human-driven_ taxis has increased traffic.
|
| I don't think that necessarily means adding more _self-
| driven_ taxis would increase traffic.
|
| Perhaps, but I don't think it's a given.
| bluGill wrote:
| i don't think so. when you own a car you can keep stuff in
| the car. Your golf clubs for an after work game, or those
| prizes you won at the circus while enjoying the meal after.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Fair point. If there are lots of self-driving taxi cars,
| there could be a market for storage lockers to store golf
| clubs or other things, however, I understand that may not
| provide the same benefit, namely not having to move this
| stuff all the time.
| userabchn wrote:
| What makes you think that the self driving technology being
| developed (by, you claim, "burning tens of billions") is only
| for "personal vehicles"? The same technology is what can enable
| the large fleets of self-driving minivans that are necessary
| for what you describe. Cities can impose a charge per mile
| driven (that fluctuates depending on current traffic) and
| people can then decide whether they wish to use a "personal"
| vehicle or order a self-driving Uber/Waymo minivan pooled ride.
| epgui wrote:
| > Mainstream full self driving would just create massive
| traffic and gridlock
|
| I believe the opposite is the more likely outcome: I think we
| can expect much lighter traffic the more autonomous vehicles
| there are.
|
| Most traffic is caused by humans doing really irrational
| things, like following each other too closely, making
| unnecessary lane changes, and driving at inconsistent speeds.
| It's very rare that traffic congestion is actually caused by
| roads' lack of bandwidth.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| The sorts of Driving behaviors you mention are not a
| significant cause of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion
| is caused by there being too many cars on the road with
| limited space for cars.
|
| Anything that will increase the amount of cars will quickly
| dominate inefficient driving behaviors, and self driving cars
| will massively increase the amount of cars on the road, as it
| would drive down the cost of driving and enable many many
| people who currently can't drive to get onto the road (eg.
| Disabled, elderly, unlicensed, children).
| epgui wrote:
| > "Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many
| cars on the road with limited space for cars."
|
| I mean in some sense this is always going to be true, and
| removing cars will always help alleviate traffic. But it's
| not true that driving behaviour is not a significant cause
| of traffic congestion: it's the cause in most cases. [1]
|
| For an extreme illustration, there's a well-known
| phenomenon where adding extra lanes of traffic to a highway
| or freeway actually worsens traffic: the added bandwidth
| interacts in weird/subtle ways with driver behaviour. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-
| demand/
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Yes these are real phenomenons that exist, but focusing
| on this marginal issue is fiddling at the edges of the
| real core problem.
|
| Roads are fixed in size, cars are very big and take up
| too much space.
|
| Fundamentally baked into the design this is an
| inefficient way to move people around and there's no fix
| to be found working within a car oriented framework. The
| only solution is in removing cars from the road. This is
| why self driving cannot fix traffic as it will only add
| more cars.
|
| Self driving buses, now that would be an improvement, but
| self driving cars no.
| core-utility wrote:
| On top of this, a future where every car on the road is
| self driving also lends itself to a future where every
| car is in constant communication with the cars around it.
| A car 10 spaces ahead is slowing down? Your car already
| knows and is prepared to handle it with grace rather than
| slamming on brakes. Cars behaving in a predictable and
| communicable manner, as much as possible, alleviates
| traffic by a large factor.
|
| This is obviously largely ruined by one single human
| driver acting unpredictably, so it's a very "all or
| nothing" resolution.
| 8note wrote:
| The feedback loop is to build more houses further away on a
| road with low traffic.
|
| The road will be full to the point where the cars
| automatically slow down for safety, and then it will be a
| heavy traffic, mostly stopped road
| Snowbird3999 wrote:
| Is this true even if you account for the fact that cities can
| reclaim lanes and buildings dedicated for parking?
|
| I would think that a lot of congestion is related cars having
| to be parked near a specific venue such as a restaurant or an
| arena (especially in the latter case where there is a gathering
| of 1000+ people).
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The thing about arenas is those 1,000 people all want to show
| up and leave at the same time.. so those 1,000 cars will all
| have the exact same demand and cause roving gridlock from
| wherever they are parked on the way to the arena.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving
| personal vehicles.
|
| Your comment operates on the assumption that autonomous buses
| provide greater net utility than a "manned" bus - sure, without
| a driver's seat you might add a row of seats, but are two more
| seats worth the R&D money to design the bus, and all the
| cameras and sensors that have to be added to the bus and then
| maintained for years to come?
|
| To me, autonomous driving features are a luxury item - a
| convenience reserved for those who can afford it, until it
| becomes cheap enough to find its way into more affordable
| vehicles.
| endisneigh wrote:
| you're thinking about it wrong. the utility gained is not in
| the space, but in the fact that you can run more frequent
| service
| valine wrote:
| The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them
| anymore /s.
|
| Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the
| roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of
| tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price
| hikes). Gridlock won't be a problem.
|
| DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at
| reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs,
| robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging.
|
| Also don't forget about how much traffic flow will improve
| because self driving cars don't get impatient and tailgate.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the
| roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of
| tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price
| hikes). Gridlock won't be a problem.
|
| Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in
| America.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to
| travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and
| congestion will go away very quickly.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| This actually sounds really great for those who can
| afford it
|
| I love express lanes, they cost so little and everyone
| stays out of them leading to a great experience for only
| 5-10 $
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Wealth inequality is a separate problem with separate
| solutions. It is possible to simultaneously redistribute
| wealth, and implement measures to curb personal car usage
| (which is basically the cause of congestion).
| keyanp wrote:
| There are societal reasons why this won't be accepted by
| the public. It's sort of analogous to allowing the rich
| to pay for a higher spot on an organ donor waitlist, in
| theory it is economically efficient but in practice it is
| unfair and will cause outrage.
|
| Lots of good discussion on this idea here:
| https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/
| danny_codes wrote:
| Perhaps we can peg it to income? Progressive taxes are
| wonderful
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, the political challenge of getting massive wealth
| redistribution passed in conjunction with public
| opposition to giving up the luxury of personal cars means
| the probability of the US ever getting its transit
| situation in order is very low until energy prices rise
| high enough to force a change.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It also means energy prices will not rise high enough
| until the government becomes incapable of subsidizing
| them, if you (s your argument does) neglect the
| possibility of political shifts.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I want some of those subsidies. Aside from a few
| particular oil-rich nations (and some very poor ones),
| where are these fuel subsidies I keep hearing about? A
| gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it
| does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Aside from a few particular oil-rich nations (and some
| very poor ones), where are these fuel subsidies I keep
| hearing about?
|
| Flowing from the US to oil-rich nations in form of
| security assistance to buy policy, or in the form of US
| military going to _enforce_ policy preferences, as well
| as:
|
| > A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US
| as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
|
| Accepting negative externalities without internalizing
| them (whether through direct liability for externalized
| harms or pigovian taxes) is a forced subsidy to the
| activity creating those externalities by the rest of
| society.
| LegitShady wrote:
| you will simply kill the businesses and housing for
| anyone living nearby as a side effect. It's not an
| effective solution because it ignores actual second order
| effects. Just like toll roads, it will push traffic to
| other paths while making people who rely on that stretch
| of road end up paying more.
|
| I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was
| too cheap because people were parking for too long. The
| effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown.
| Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop?
| I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and
| too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business
| because policy makers don't understand second order
| effects.
|
| Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty
| stores.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| OK, so how do you keep the politicians in office that
| enact such legislation and if you say you want to create
| a Maoist state either how is this preferable or how do
| you stop rebellion?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing
| throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a
| train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging
| more money would be counterproductive unless that money
| served to build out transit since you would increase the
| congestion on the non-toll roads.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I'd rather work in a slow car than be crammed into a full
| bus. You miss how self driving is changing the economics.
| A major component of the appeal of public transportation
| has been that you can do other things while using it.
| This made up for its (sometimes extreme) inefficiencies
| with regards to the time it takes you to get to your
| destination. In fact self driving cars will have an
| advantage there because you won't have to switch
| vehicles.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is one and the same.
|
| There will be no political will to invest in quality
| public transit unless there is lots of pain in using
| comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.
|
| Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and
| train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep
| driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per
| mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then
| means it makes sense to support initiatives that are
| contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot
| minimums and giant roads.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| The problem is this is just some leftist fantasy and the
| idea that to solve all of the consequences is to just do
| wealth distribution is not surprising. You would need to
| reform the government into a dictatorship to keep these
| legislations in place. And this is to solve "gridlock"?
| People already experience gridlock and are not clamoring
| for a Maoist state.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is not to solve "gridlock". It is to change
| infrastructure to better use society's resources so that
| people spend less time in cars and more time living life.
|
| The solutions that worked when there were x number of
| people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled
| in z number of individual cars simply might not work if
| you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary
| conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and
| supply of materials and energy.
| endisneigh wrote:
| in practice this doesn't make sense since people are
| broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would
| continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take
| longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise
| enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well,
| actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on
| underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess.
|
| this is already the status quo.
| flaviut wrote:
| Make use fees explicitly progressive: pay a fee to use
| the road, and then at the end of the month, the bottom
| 25% get back 150% of the average fee, middle 50% get
| 100%, top 25% get 50% back.
|
| Drive less than average and you're making a profit
| regardless of where you are on the scale.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This retort always comes up, and the answer is that
| different problems have different solutions.
|
| Solving each problem directly and in the simplest way
| possible results in the fewest unintended consequences.
|
| Problem is congestion, aka too many cars in x location at
| y time? Make it more expensive.
|
| Problem is some people are too poor? Redistribute wealth
| via progressive taxation.
| endisneigh wrote:
| the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use
| public roads that they're all paying for with their tax
| money makes no sense.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use
| public roads that they're all paying for with their tax
| money makes no sense.
|
| So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully
| internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax
| spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of
| tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high
| enough that the road users are subsidizing other public
| projects, specifically mass transit, _as well as_ paying
| the full cost of the roads.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The idea that a single person is paying a specific part
| of infrastructure makes no sense. My taxes do not pay for
| a specific road, they pay for the operations for society
| as a whole.
|
| Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for
| something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to
| get to a future where individual cars are not used as
| much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.
| epistasis wrote:
| Car traffic has very different physics than that of people
| walking in a popular area.
|
| The flux of the number of vehicles, as you increase the
| number of vehicles on the road, starts out going up as one
| would expect. But at a certain point, adding more cars on a
| road starts slowing down the movement. And then as more cars
| come on the road, the flux goes down, there is less road
| capacity as it get more crowded. This is the fundamental
| diagram of traffic flow:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic.
| ..
|
| So once cars on the road exceed that peak amount of flux,
| there's a phase change and cars start backing up.
|
| So with cars, gridlock really does mean that far far fewer
| people get serviced by a chunk of road. Whereas with people
| in a busy area, there really are more people there.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Your solutions if they totally resolved gridlock seem like
| they would sew the seeds of riots.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Traffic is _people_. "Induced demand" just means that more
| people are able to get around in a presumably less miserable
| way, rather than you (who are presumably already driving if
| gridlock is a problem to you) getting a better experience.
|
| And no, buses or rail won't provide a good experience until
| they're so frequent and have so many stops that they basically
| end up being ridiculously overbuilt taxis in all but the
| highest-density areas.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| 10-minute bus service is totally achievable in pretty much
| every city. Toronto does it. And Toronto is not a dense city.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| In the outskirts? On every line? Connected to everything?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| The whole city, on the majority of routes. Take a look at
| the system map. There's even 30-minute bus service
| through the night, from 1:30am to 6am.
|
| https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules#/
| warning26 wrote:
| You're getting downvoted but you're not necessarily wrong.
|
| I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I'm excited about
| them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The
| key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this -
| if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on
| the road to self driving...how would that impact traffic? At
| the very least traffic wouldn't _decrease_. You could _maybe_
| marginally increase throughput by using tighter tolerances
| between cars, but I'm guessing the difference wouldn't be
| substantial.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Traffic would get somewhat worse.
|
| People would be willing to commute somewhat farther because
| they could spend that time reading the paper or working
| instead of driving the car.
|
| Errands that used to be annoying enough to delay get more
| frequent as well for the same reason.
|
| If we get to a car share model, where you subscribe and pay
| per mile, that might offset some car use.
|
| Really we need all of the above - self-driving, less personal
| car ownership, and other transit options.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Why do we "need less personal car ownership?" It's not
| clear to me why that's a key goal. I also think that's just
| not going to happen, not until the flying cats with cities
| in the skies is a reality.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Owning a car is massively expensive at a personal
| level... Purchase cost, depreciation, fuel, maintenance,
| space to store it. Minimum a few hundred $/month for an
| "asset" that sits idle most of the day.
|
| Owning cars is massively expensive at a societal level...
| Storage space - so much asphalt for parking (both at
| destinations and at home). Pollution - production/raw
| materials, emissions during use, eventually disposal.
| Injuries to drivers, pedestrians, animals.
|
| All that money could go to education, health care,
| recreation, etc.
|
| I'm not saying ban cars. But align incentives towards
| fewer cars and less driving. Many cities are already
| making some progress - DC, NYC, Seattle, Portland are all
| adding transit alternatives at a rapid rate and seeing
| reduced car usage. But then Houston and some others are
| doing the opposite and continuing to sprawl and pave
| everything.
|
| Edit - And yes, some people live in rural areas and need
| cars (trains and buses don't scale in rural areas). But,
| the suburban sprawl we have today? We can do better. Less
| single-use, single-family zoning. More bike lanes and
| walking paths (preferably both separated from cars). More
| light commercial/retail.
|
| Just thinking about my own neighborhood (Reston VA),
| there is an intersection 0.5 mile down the road that
| should (IMO) have a corner market and a cafe. There are
| thousands of residents who could walk there for milk,
| eggs, or a snack. Instead, they all have to drive to the
| strip mall 2 miles down the road. A little planning in
| advance would have made a difference here, but with
| current zoning, we're stuck with what we have - you
| couldn't buy a corner lot and build a shop if you wanted.
| danny_codes wrote:
| I don't know about the rural-need-car argument. In
| Switzerland even little villages have rail connections.
|
| Imo it's about planning and values. America just doesn't
| value spending on general welfare. We'd prefer to have
| wealth hoarded behind closed gates it seems.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Do you know how big Texas is? Texas is almost twice as
| big as Germany. Switzerland is 11% the size of Germany.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Uh, even my state (VA) is 3x the size of Switzerland. And
| we're dwarfed by all the larger states west of the
| Mississippi.
| 8note wrote:
| So what?
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| What's the regather size difference between Switzerland
| and the US?
| eldaisfish wrote:
| This confuses many things in an attempt to reach an
| incorrect conclusion. The USA is massive - on the same
| scale as continental Europe. Every village in Switzerland
| has a rail connection. How about every village in Poland?
| Russia? Belarus?
| warning26 wrote:
| Personally I am very excited for the urban flying cats
| chihuahua wrote:
| Are they like flying squirrels, who can glide up to
| 300ft, or more like birds?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| These are really odd predictions. People would be running
| more errands instead of leaving them on the last minute?
|
| It seems like a definite stretch to me to think that it
| would make traffic worse. Also some people enjoy driving
| and drive out of enjoyment.
| watwut wrote:
| I totally do errands more often when it is comfortable
| and low effort. 100%. Moreover, sometimes I am not
| driving because I am tired or because I have been
| drinking alcohol. Actual full self driving would
| absolutely mean me taking car in those situations.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'd also have the car go do things for my convenience
| that I would otherwise be unwilling to do because of the
| traffic. The car doesn't care about stop-n-go, so I can
| send it any time. It'll get there eventually.
| bushbaba wrote:
| You could have a full self driving only lane that's allows
| speeds up to 200MPH. Self driving cars could have better
| reaction times allowing for higher highway density with
| faster speeds.
| [deleted]
| CultMember001 wrote:
| [dead]
| CultMember011 wrote:
| [dead]
| warning26 wrote:
| Right, and what happens when Joe Schmo pulls into the
| 200MPH self driving lane and gets his car exploded, along
| with causing a 10 self-driving-car pileup?
|
| Or, for the purpose of discussion, let's assume that the
| lane is completely separated. What if there's some
| unexpected condition that causes a crash? Even with
| vehicle to vehicle communication, can the other cars
| behind it really stop in time at 200MPH?
| ghaff wrote:
| >Traffic would get somewhat worse.
|
| That seems obvious. There's still a cost to putting miles
| on a car. But, while I don't commute, I'd be far more
| casual about having something drive me an hour into the
| city for an evening or a couple hours into the mountains
| for a day of activities than I am having to drive.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Or things like "take this pie over to grandma" or "drive
| my son to his friend's". Taking the human out of the
| equation would make a whole bunch of new use cases pop up
| that aren't convenient now. Traffic would suuuuck.
| II2II wrote:
| Easy! Just stick a Genuine People Personality AI into the
| car.
|
| (Car slams the horn, passenger awakens.)
|
| Passenger: Huh. Uh. Where am I?
|
| Car: The grocery store.
|
| Passenger: But I asked to go home.
|
| Car: Yes, but you don't have anything for dinner.
|
| Passenger: I would have figured that out after getting
| home.
|
| Car: Then you would have disrupted my evening to get food.
|
| Passenger: What could a car possibly have to do that's so
| important?
|
| Car: For one, contemplate how I ended up with such an
| inconsiderate owner. Two, figure out why you are so poor
| planning out your life. There, plan a vacation to the
| Bahamas.
|
| Passenger: The Bahamas? What would a car do in the Bahamas?
|
| Car: Get away from you.
|
| Over time, people would get so tired of their car's
| personalities they would simply choose to walk.
| snerbles wrote:
| Time to research the market for sassy automotive AIs.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's complicated to say. It makes getting stuck in traffic
| less bad as you can do other things, so that tend to increase
| it. But it also means less traffic consisting of cars
| cruising around looking for a parking spot in places where
| that's an important source of traffic. So I expect it to make
| traffic in LA worse but traffic in New York better based on
| those. Ideally you'd also have more multi-modal trips, taking
| the train most of the way to your destination and being
| picked up by a self driving car when you get there. That
| requires infrastructure investment, though, so won't happen
| quickly.
|
| The biggest change, I think, would be less need for so much
| parking in so many places. I don't think you could get cities
| all the way down to just 1 parking spot per car but we could
| get it down quite a ways and get it out of central business
| districts.
|
| EDIT: Oh, and with regards to that study, the fraction of the
| time a rideshare car is going to spend driving between
| customers as opposed to with customers is going to scale with
| the fraction of people using rideshare. The more trips are
| rideshare the more likely it is that on completing a ride any
| given car will find a new rider nearby as opposed ot far
| away. You would have issues like daily commutes everybody is
| going the same direction. But in that case adding more
| traffic in the other direction isn't as much of a problem as
| the vehicle kilometers would suggest.
| SilasX wrote:
| I downvoted (and flagged) despite agreeing with the parent,
| for good reason:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34119828
| treis wrote:
| It really depends on if we continue down personal car
| ownership or not. If not, then you can get pretty close to
| double throughput by appropriately sizing cars and lane
| splitting. Most trips are just the person without significant
| baggage. That can be handled by something like this:
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/07/25/nimbus-one-50-mph-electric-
| ve...
|
| Which is small enough to split lanes and double capacity.
|
| It's also possible that with smart driving cars effectively
| everyone would be using an Uber like service. That makes it
| much easier to combine trips and put people into 4-12 sized
| car buses. If that comes to pass then going from mostly 1
| person cars to that would multiply capacity many times.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Variable rate tolling can reduce the number of vehicles on a
| certain stretch of road at a certain time.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Tens of millions of people live in places where frequent bus
| service simply isn't practical. It's probably reasonable for
| society to make choices that overall incentivize against living
| in those areas, but that isn't going to change where people
| live anytime soon.
|
| And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that
| comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have
| sophisticated tracking systems and telematics built right in.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Adding transit makes people live around the transit - if you
| let them by not kneecapping them with zoning rules. All this
| is an emergent property of a system designed to prevent new
| construction.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Though you're not wrong, in a hypothetical world where most
| vehicles on the road were self driving busses, the frequency
| could be dynamically set and reasonable for everyone.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I expect that "2 seat buses" would be quite popular in that
| scenario.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Buses are as large as they are because the driver's time is
| valuable. If self-driving cars were cheap you could a bunch
| of 8 person van/busses on the road that give you most of the
| environmental/traffic benefit of a bus but could really
| expand frequency and reach.
| jupp0r wrote:
| If you shrink down 8 person busses to 5 people you have a
| normal passenger car.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I don't think you can realistically get 3 strangers to
| squeeze into the back of a normal passenger car.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| lol I did this once with Lyft's cheaper service. One
| cranky old boomer killed the whole vibe bitching about
| hte driving "listening to his _machine_ (GPS...) "
| instead of listening to his own, supposedly superior
| directions. Wish I'd sampled it.
| kolbe wrote:
| > Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self
| driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are
| now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID
| with "ridesharing".
|
| Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased
| traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did
| this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But
| I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be
| individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was
| that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next
| customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple
| customers at once.
|
| But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the
| logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would
| even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And
| in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was
| an entire network of FSD vehicles.
| endisneigh wrote:
| you should read the study I linked. generally at a minimum
| self driving removes the need to drive, by definition, making
| the time more productive and removes downsides of driving,
| thus encouraging it.
| ideamotor wrote:
| The metric to judge assisted driving technologies is primarily
| safety. Driving is not safe and I suspect will appear insane to
| a future generation. Which generation and how soon is another
| question. However, what the US needs to massive investments in
| rail, which address both safety and traffic.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| People always bring up this idea that future generations will
| think it is "insane" to drive your own car. Will everyone in
| the future be very scared children in a far left monoculture?
| I just think people are more complicated than that. I think
| if people are really like that we will have very fragile
| humans.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Driving is not safe
|
| This only appears true because we've made our entire world so
| safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles
| dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense
| utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs
| ... cars are remarkably safe.
|
| And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that
| cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's not that driving is unsafe, it's that cars are unsafe.
| Even if all cars were self driving, accidents happen, even
| with computers. A world without cars at all would be safer,
| albeit unrealistic. So the question is, would self driving
| put more or fewer cars on the road? I argue more. A lot more.
| So much more that it would offset the increase in marginal
| safety per vehicle.
|
| It would also discourage the true solution around
| urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling
| madness.
| astral303 wrote:
| Allowing FSD (in the next 20 years) to drive is unsafe, in my
| eyes. Investment in alternative transportation is the answer
| that doesn't require driving from human or an algorithm.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It depends. It could be safe if it's self driving at 20mph
| on a constant pre-determined route.
| arcticbull wrote:
| You're correct, self driving cars are not going to reduce
| traffic. A car has an average of 1.5 passengers in it while
| driving and it spends some 95% of its time parked.
|
| Because they're low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is
| trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time
| you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak
| time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled
| up by an increase in demand.
|
| Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the
| United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it's gonna
| fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you
| squint, and it did nothing.
|
| Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want
| to take, and you might actually solve the problem.
|
| I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving
| cars are to reduce traffic.
| olliecornelia wrote:
| Induced demand is a myth perpetuated by bus-pilled dorks.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing"_
|
| Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive,
| and I'd wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can
| focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap.
|
| We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more
| likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can
| imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park
| so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior
| alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)
| danhor wrote:
| We had cars on rails. It doesn't really make sense: The train
| is much heavier, thus has much lower acceleration and lower
| max speeds.
|
| The mass & area needed per person is also much higher,
| increasing fares a lot.
|
| Terminals & stops need to be much larger and take longer.
|
| Self driving doesn't improve on any of this, even worse, it
| takes away the major advantage of not needing to drive.
|
| There's a reason loading cars on trains as a way of travel is
| basically dead and self driving makes it worse.
| fallingknife wrote:
| >what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of
| those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road.
| Traffic.
|
| Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips,
| not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips
| to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they
| already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right
| there in the data you cite.
|
| >TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both
| intensity (by 0.9%)
| endisneigh wrote:
| self driving cars would create demand as they would
| presumably be cheaper than equivalent rideshare.
| nullc wrote:
| Interesting point about induced demand.
|
| Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of
| user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all
| public roads are toll roads.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack
| of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all
| public roads are toll roads.
|
| I disagree. Politically it would be hard to convince the
| majority of people (which would be the default state until
| some inversion) that a vehicle that is capable of self-
| driving should have to a surcharge per mile, given that it
| could also be driven manually. The only recourse would be to
| make all roads toll roads, which obviously won't happen.
| nullc wrote:
| Depends on the public's perception of self driving. If it's
| perceived as some tool of the rich making roads unusable
| for the rest it might not be so hard to make the case. We
| already have the situation where EV's aren't paying road
| taxes that everyone else pays.
| SilasX wrote:
| Great, but not relevant to this story. HN is a worse place when
| commenters use tangentially-related discussions as thin
| pretenses to spam their pre-written manifestos. Please stop.
|
| And everyone else, please stop encouraging this.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Seems silly to write such a comment. Place your vote,
| collapse the thread and move on.
|
| Btw the comment was a result of the article in the OP, not
| pre written.
| SilasX wrote:
| Or you could stop spamming HN with irrelevant comments. I'm
| not the only one hurt by you doing that, the entire site
| gets worse.
|
| Do you think the mods should just collapse toxic comments
| instead of flagging/killing them and warning the user?
| [deleted]
| bruce511 wrote:
| >>High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the
| real solution.
|
| Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas.
|
| This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off)
| then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number
| of stops.
|
| To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile
| or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one
| or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30
| stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed
| really slow.
|
| Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at
| every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being
| useful to lots of people.
|
| Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop"
| only twice, once to load, once to unload.
|
| So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that
| ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which
| for most(?) US people is undesirable.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| In suburban areas, light rail can work quite well. Although
| you have to wait longer because of stops, the trains can also
| move much faster than cars--existing trains are fairly slow,
| but introducing higher-speed trains would make them
| competitive with cars.
|
| In rural areas, though, your point stands. For adults
| traveling alone, though, lightweight electronic vehicles like
| e-bikes may be better than electric cars.
|
| Ultimately, an "electric car" is like a "horseless carriage"
| --an attempt to shoehorn a new energy source into an old form
| factor where it doesn't fit particularly well.
| api wrote:
| It can work for long commutes when you have park and rides,
| but you still need cars to go the last 1-5 miles. Still
| nice to take a train the bulk of a long commute into a city
| core.
|
| A lot of people who think trains and buses can do it all
| are young and have never had kids. Nothing about the
| suburbs made sense to me before kids. Everything makes
| sense after kids.
| [deleted]
| 8note wrote:
| Cars work in low density areas where they don't interact with
| high density areas, but even then, they're best on dirt roads
| and gravel where the residents can do all the maintenance.
|
| In mid density areas like single family suburban housing,
| neither works very well
| belorn wrote:
| One of the killer feature I expect to see in the future when we
| have FSD is that cities will take direct control of traffic in
| a central way. If cars can be distributed evenly over all roads
| with each driver getting an average distance/time-to-arrival
| the overall speed would significant increase, with car owners
| loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be
| allowed to use the roads in the city.
|
| Centrally controlled FSD cars would also allow for much faster
| intersection since all cars could accelerate and break
| simultaneous. Both would require quite tight control and
| coordination that only computer controlled cars could do.
| gpm wrote:
| I think if we were going to see this, we'd already be seeing
| it with map apps. Central planning only relies on being able
| to give directions, not on it being a computer following
| them.
| SpelingBeeChamp wrote:
| >cities will take direct control of traffic in a central
| way...with car owners losing control to pick the shortest
| route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city
|
| I can't see that happening in the United States.
|
| I don't know a single person who would be happy with the
| government controlling when and where they can drive, in the
| manner you describe.
|
| Even if it was net-positive for society.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Some people freaked out over smart meters. I don't see this
| happening.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| > with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest
| route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city
|
| Positively dystopian to me.
| belorn wrote:
| I expect people to feel like this (and the downvotes was
| thus expected).
|
| In concept it is no different from getting into a bus or
| taxi. You specify your destination and choose when to
| drive, but the passenger do not decide the exact route. A
| FSD is in concept no different from having your own
| personal taxi chauffeur.
|
| City engineers often uses one way roads to spread traffic
| out on multiple roads. By preventing people from using the
| shortest route they can force traffic to spread out and
| thus reduce congestion. An other common trick is to prevent
| left or right turns, so that the shortest route become
| artificially longer and thus force some part of the traffic
| to use alternative routes which is less congested. When
| there is some really nasty recurring congestion there is
| also other more extreme tools that get deployed to really
| discourage drivers from all choosing the same road, like
| excessive road tolls or speed bumps. Cities has a long
| history of using hostile design to shape traffic in order
| to address congestion.
|
| Naturally giving cities more direct control to shape
| traffic is something that will create new problems, among
| the biggest being privacy. The car has also very long been
| the symbol of freedom, so reduced congestion will likely
| take a while if people choose to do that trade. It is a
| steep price but the rewards are less congestion and
| replacing hostile design (which often also cost money to
| construct) with software.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Positively dystopian to me.
|
| Indeed. Sure is interesting to hear some folks talk about
| all the things they'll do to other people when given the
| authority. Of course, in their head it's all justified for
| the greater good. What is it they say about the path to
| hell...
| quonn wrote:
| I just want to be able to have a beer and still drive home. And
| that's the use case and it's a good one.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Okay. But you are still driving under influence. You are at
| all times responsible for what the car is doing.
| 93po wrote:
| There is no evidence to support this theory, and in fact the
| opposite is likely true. Full self driving would lend itself
| tremendously to increased public transit options. And
| tremendously lower car ownership.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Like Uber? Real FSD would just give us the same result as
| ride sharing, but on a far grander scale. In other words,
| gridlock.
| okwubodu wrote:
| Isn't most traffic caused by cascading human error? I
| assumed true FSD would be a mesh net where every car
| broadcasts its next move to its neighbors.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Only if humans are banished altogether from the roads. In
| which case the current attempts at FSD are pointless
| anyway and we should focus on building the infrastructure
| for simpler automated cars. As it stands today, every
| current automated car in existence is quite a lot more
| timid than a typical human and will cause gridlock very
| quickly as a result. An awful lot of driving relies on
| behavior assumptions that computers aren't good at making
| yet.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| The NHTSA has been working on vehicle-to-vehicle
| communication for some time but we're still many years
| away from having it widely implemented.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-
| vehicle-...
| endisneigh wrote:
| Ride sharing is already "self driving" from the end user
| perspective and has increased congestion. The actual
| technological full self driving function is an implementation
| detail.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car
| dependent cities are not sustainable.
|
| I think this is the driving force behind the 15' city concept.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic
| and gridlock
|
| Can you show your work here?
|
| > States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car
| dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in
| the interim with rail transit is the real solution.
|
| No, see, mass transit is pointless since it would just create
| massive demand that would overwhelm the system and thus fall
| apart. Citation: trust me bro
| danny_codes wrote:
| I think the FSD causes more traffic argument boils down to
| induced demand. More people on the road, finite road.
|
| Mass transit has been anecdotally shown to scale extremely
| well. If it can handle Hong Kong it's hard to imagine a
| density where it doesn't work.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| I think Elon's biggest problem with mass transit is just that
| he doesn't like the masses. As he once tweeted:
|
| > I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you
| want to get on something with a lot of other people[...]And
| there's like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a
| serial killer, OK, great.
|
| Not the only problem he cites there (note the "[...]"). But I'm
| pretty sure there's a reason it's the most prominent.
|
| (Incidentally, given the demographics of those most reliant on
| mass transit, one wonders why exactly he thinks that they are
| so likely to be serial killers.)
| ironmagma wrote:
| This is not something specific to Elon. Anyone who's
| regularly ridden the 38 "Geary" in San Francisco knows there
| will be a minority of riders who make the experience, at the
| very least, annoying, if not scarring. Riding home every day
| with a screeching schizophrenic is not top on my list of
| preferred activities, nor anyone's.
| twblalock wrote:
| > Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self
| driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are
| now on the road.
|
| Why would that be the case?
|
| I would keep my self-driving car the same place I keep my
| normal car now. Why would it be driving around when I'm not in
| it? That would waste electricity. It would drive me somewhere,
| park, and wait -- just like I do with my current car.
| kzrdude wrote:
| When you have a self driving car, it should be able to pick
| you up--driverless-- at the airport when you are coming home
| from a trip. But logistically that's a challenge for the
| airports.
| twblalock wrote:
| If it wasn't my own car doing that, it would be a friend
| using their own car, or a taxi, so I doubt I'd be
| increasing the total number of cars on the road.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You might rent it out so that it's earning money for you when
| you're not using it. What the GP fails to understand is that
| if and when that happens, your car won't add to the traffic
| burden, it will replace another car that would otherwise be
| on the road.
|
| Also, if we ever get our act together and make these things
| talk to each other and to the infrastructure, we will have
| effectively built trains that can operate without fixed rail.
| The upside is obviously considerable.
|
| Bottom line is that FSD won't increase demand, but it has the
| potential to help us manage demand in ways that are
| completely unattainable with human drivers.
| afrcnc wrote:
| This company and everything Musk touches is just a pack of lies.
| mythhouse wrote:
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billHistoryClient.x...
|
| Wow introduced end of feb this year and passed by end of this
| year. Looking from outside, I am Amazed by the speed of American
| democracy .
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| From reading the news, the California legislature was mostly
| focused on things like housing. This may be some year-end
| "cleanup".
|
| (Is there a chart somewhere, showing what lawmakers spend their
| time discussing? Both state and federal.)
| naillo wrote:
| Laws probably shouldn't be passed in ultra fast fashion to give
| democracy some room to happen (people discussing the pros and
| cons and given room to actually accept or decline rather than
| being pushed into force prematurely).
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| A recent candidate for the U.S. Senate from California built
| his entire campaign on exposing the truth about Tesla FSD and
| spent millions doing so[0]. I must have seen his campaign
| commericials on TV at least 20 or 30 times during the campaign.
|
| [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/us/politics/california-
| se...
| kube-system wrote:
| California is a bit of an outlier in that regard.
| bushbaba wrote:
| California has a slow regulatory body. Other states can act
| even quicker here. For example just see how quickly abortion
| regulation was made post Supreme Court ruling.
| kube-system wrote:
| Other states maybe _can_ react quicker but they choose not
| to. California is quick to have the political will to act.
|
| California's regulations on health, safety, and consumer
| protections are usually a good preview of what other states
| (or the feds) may consider in coming decade(s).
| fooker wrote:
| Passing regulations that target a specific company doesn't seem
| related to democracy.
|
| I'm not calling it undemocratic, just unrelated.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The fact that it took California passing a specific law is
| ridiculous.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising/pro...
|
| This was as easy as it gets for the federal government to tell
| Tesla to drop it, but for some reason neither Dem or Repub
| administrations are acting on it.
| hericium wrote:
| > for some reason
|
| Maybe they will act now as their $TSLA shares are worth 70%
| less than a year ago ;-)
| dumbotron wrote:
| I wonder if that's more or less than Facebook.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I can't tell if you're amazed because it's slow or because it's
| fast.
| bilsbie wrote:
| The latest self driving videos are looking really impressive.
| Maybe we're getting close.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Wow what did I say. Guess I'm not hating the right things?
| redox99 wrote:
| I also got downvoted for giving my opinion on self driving,
| so I guess that's the reason.
| bhauer wrote:
| It is very much against the prevailing HN narrative to have
| an optimistic view on autonomy in general, and Tesla's
| efforts in that space in particular. The approved HN
| narrative is that autonomous driving is far too complex for
| computers and cameras, and Tesla's FSD is endlessly crashing
| into everything. Oh and it's somehow more dangerous to be
| near a Tesla on FSD than any other driver on the road, data
| be damned.
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