[HN Gopher] US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after f...
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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
Author : jjulius
Score : 364 points
Date : 2024-10-18 16:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| By now, most people have probably heard that Tesla's attempt at
| "Full Self Driving" is really anything but --- after a decade of
| promises. The vehicle owners manual spells this out.
|
| As I understand it, the contentious issue is the fact that unlike
| most others, their attempt works mostly from visual feedback.
|
| In low visibility situations, their FSD has limited feedback and
| is essentially driving blind.
|
| It appears that Musk may be seeking a political solution to this
| technical problem.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| It's really weird how much you comment about FSD being fake. My
| Tesla drives me 10+ miles daily and the only time I touch any
| controls is pulling in and out of my garage. Literally daily. I
| maybe disengage once every couple days just to be on the safe
| side in uncertain situations, it I'm sure it'd likely do fine
| there too.
|
| FSD works. It drives itself fine 99.99% of the time. It is
| better than most human drivers. I don't know how you keep
| claiming it doesn't or doesn't exist.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| So you agree with Musk, the main problem with FSD is
| political?
|
| _Tesla says on its website its "Full Self-Driving" software
| in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and
| does not make vehicles autonomous._
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/nhtsa-...
| sottol wrote:
| The claim was about _full_ driving being anything but, ie not
| _fully_ self-driving, not being completely fake. Disengaging
| every 10-110 miles is just not "full", it's partial.
|
| And then the gp went into details in which specific
| situations fsd is especially problematic.
| peutetre wrote:
| The problem is Tesla and Musk have been lying about full
| self-driving for years. They have made specific claims of
| full autonomy with specific timelines and it's been a lie
| every time: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
|
| In 2016 a video purporting to show full self-driving with the
| driver there purely "for legal reasons" was staged and faked:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-
| sel...
|
| In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles
| produced in our factory - including Model 3 - will have the
| hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety
| level substantially greater than that of a human driver."
| That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-
| its-blog-post-s...
|
| Musk claimed there would be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the
| road in 2020. That was a lie:
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-
| promised-1-mil...
|
| Tesla claimed Hardware 3 would be capable of full self-
| driving. When asked about Hardware 3 at Tesla's recent
| robotaxi event, Musk didn't want to "get nuanced". That's
| starting to look like fraud:
| https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-
| abo...
|
| Had Tesla simply called it "driver assistance" that wouldn't
| be a lie. But they didn't do that. They doubled, tripled,
| quadrupled down on the claim that it is "full self-driving"
| making the car "an appreciating asset" that it would be
| "financially insane" not to buy:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/elon-musk-any-other-car-
| than...
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/03/cars/musk-tesla-cars-
| valu...
|
| It's not even bullshit artistry. It's just bullshit.
|
| Lying is part of the company culture at Tesla. Musk keeps
| lying because the lies keep working.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Most of this is extreme hyperbole and it's really hard to
| believe this is a genuine good faith attempt at
| conversation instead of weird astroturfing, bc these tired
| inaccurate talking points are what come up in literally
| every single even remotely associated to Elon. It's like
| there's a dossier of talking points everyone is sharing
|
| The car drives itself. This is literally undeniable. You
| can test it today for free. Yeah it doesn't have the last
| 0.01% done yet and yeah that's probably a lot of work. But
| commenting like the GP is exhausting and just not
| reflective of reality
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _... not reflective of reality_
|
| Kinda like repeated claims of "Full Self Driving" for
| over a decade.
| peutetre wrote:
| > _bc these tired inaccurate talking points are what come
| up in literally every single even remotely associated to
| Elon_
|
| You understand that the false claims, the inaccuracies,
| and the lies come _from_ Elon, right? They 're associated
| with him because he is the source of them.
|
| They're only tired because he's been telling the same lie
| year after year.
| dham wrote:
| It's similar to when DHH said they were not bundling code in
| production and all the Javascript bros said "No you can't do
| that it won't work". DHH was like "yes but I'm doing it"
|
| That's how it feels in FSD land right now. Everyone's saying
| FSD doesn't work and it'll never be here, but I'm literally
| using it every day lol.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| Here's a video of FSD driving the same route as a waymo 42%
| faster with zero interventions. 23 min vs 33. This is my
| everyday. Enjoy.
|
| https://youtu.be/Kswp1DwUAAI?si=rX4L5FhMrPXpGx4V
| ck2 wrote:
| There are also endless videos of teslas driving into
| pedestrians, plowing full speed into emergency vehicles
| parked with flashing lights, veering wildly from strange
| markings on the road, etc. etc.
|
| "works for me" is a very strange response for someone on
| Hacker News if you have any coding background - you should
| realize you are a beta tester unwittingly if not a full blown
| alpha tester in some cases
|
| All it will take is a non-standard event happening on your
| daily drive. Most certainly not wishing it on you, quite the
| opposite, trying to get you to accept that a perfect drive 99
| times out of 100 is not enough.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| Those are Autopilot videos this discussion is about FSD.
| FSD has driven ~2 billion miles at this point and had
| potentially 2 fatal accidents.
|
| The US average is 1.33 deaths/100 million miles. Tesla on
| FSD is easily 10x safer.
|
| Every day it gets safer.
| diggernet wrote:
| How many miles does it have on the latest software?
| Because any miles driven on previous software are no
| longer relevant. Especially with that big change in v12.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| The miles driven are rising exponentially as the versions
| improve according to company filings. If the miles driven
| on previous versions are no longer relevant how can the
| NHTSA investigation of previous versions impact FSD
| regulation today?
|
| Given that the performance has improved dramatically over
| the last 6 months, it is very reasonable to assume that
| the miles driven to fatality ratio also improving.
|
| Using the value of 1.33 deaths per 100 million miles
| driven vs 2 deaths in 2 billion miles driven, FSD has
| saved approximately 24 lives so far.
| hilux wrote:
| Considering HN is mostly technologists, the extent of
| Tesla-hate in here surprises me. My best guess is that it
| is sublimated Elon-hate. (Not a fan of my former neighbor
| myself, but let's separate the man from his creations.)
|
| People seem to be comparing Tesla FSD to perfection, when
| the more fair and relevant comparison is to real-world
| American drivers. Who are, on average, pretty bad.
|
| Sure, I wouldn't trust data coming from Tesla. But we
| have government data.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| That seems an odd take. This is a technologist website,
| and a good number of technologists believe in building
| robust systems that don't fail in production. We don't
| stand for demos, and we have to fight off consultants
| peddling crapware that demos well but dies in production.
| I own a Tesla, despite my dislike of Musk, because it is
| an insanely fun car. I will never enable FSD, did not
| even do so when it was free. I see even the best teams
| have production outages. Until Tesla legally accepts, and
| the laws allows them to, legal responsibility, and until
| it's good enough that it doesn't disengage, ever, then
| I'm never using it and nobody else should.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Can it drive the same route without a human behind the wheel?
|
| Not legally and not according to Tesla either --- because
| Tesla's FSD is not "Fully Self Driving" --- unlike Waymo.
| knob wrote:
| Didn't Uber have something similar happen? Ran over a woman in
| Phoenix?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Yes. And Uber immediately shut down the program in the entire
| state of Arizona, halted all road testing for months, and then
| soon later eliminated their self driving unit entirely.
| leoh wrote:
| Elon is taking the SBF approach of double or nothing -- he
| hopes Trump will win, in which case Elon can continue to do
| as much harm as he likes.
| daghamm wrote:
| While at it, please also investigate why it is sometimes
| impossible to leave a damaged vehicle. This has resulted in
| people dying more than once:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/car-crash-tesla-france-fire-be8ec...
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| The why is pretty well understood, no investigation needed. I
| don't like the design but it's because the doors are electronic
| and people don't know where the manual release is.
|
| In a panic people go on muscle memory, which is push the
| useless button. They don't remember to pull the unmarked
| unobtrusive handle that they may not even know exists.
|
| If it was up to me, sure have your electronic release, but make
| the manual release a big handle that looks like the ejection
| handle on a jet (yellow with black stripes, can't miss it).
|
| * Or even better, have the standard door handle mechanically
| connected to the latch through a spring loaded solenoid that
| disengages the mechanism. Thus when used under normal
| conditions it does the thing electronically but the moment
| power fails the door handle connects to the manual release.
| daghamm wrote:
| There are situations where manual release has not worked
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-manually-open-
| tesla-d...
| willy_k wrote:
| The article you provided does not say that. The only
| failure related to the manual release it mentions is that
| using it breaks the window.
|
| > Exton said he followed the instructions for the manual
| release to open the door, but that this "somehow broke the
| driver's window."
| Clamchop wrote:
| Or just use normal handles, inside and outside, like other
| cars. What they've done is made things worse by any objective
| metric in exchange for a "huh, nifty" that wears off after a
| few weeks.
| nomel wrote:
| I think this is the way. Light pull does the electronic
| thing. Hard pull does the mechanical thing. They could have
| done this with the mechanical handle that's there already
| (that I have pulled almost every time I've used a Tesla,
| getting anger and weather stripping inspection from the
| owner).
| carimura wrote:
| it's worse than that, at least in ours, the backseat latches
| are under some mat, literally hidden. i had no idea it was
| there for the first 6 months.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| That's at the behest of the federal government. Child lock
| rules require they aren't accessible.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The inside trunk release on most cars has a glow-in-the-dark
| fluorescent color handle
| amluto wrote:
| I've seen an innovative car with a single door release. As
| you pull it, it first triggers the electronic mechanism
| (which lowers the window a bit, which is useful in a door
| with no frame above the window) and then, as you pull it
| farther, it mechanically unlatches the door.
|
| Tesla should build their doors like this. Oh, wait, the car
| I'm talking about is an older Tesla. Maybe Tesla should
| _remember_ how to build doors like this.
| crooked-v wrote:
| It's not very 'innovative' these days. My 2012 Mini Cooper
| has it.
| leoh wrote:
| Crazy that with all of NHTSA's regulations, this is still
| legal.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| that's just bad ux
| aanet wrote:
| About damn time NHTSA opened this full scale investigation.
| Tesla's "autonowashing" has gone on for far too long.
|
| Per Reuters [1] "The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X
| vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3,
| 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles. The
| preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could
| seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose
| an unreasonable risk to safety."
|
| Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving"
| software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
|
| NHTSA is reviewing the ability of FSD's engineering controls to
| "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility
| conditions."
|
| Tesla has, of course, rather two-facedly called its FSD as SAE
| Level-2 for regulatory purposes, while selling its "full self
| driving" but also requiring supervision. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| No other company has been so irresponsible to its users, and
| without a care for any negative externalities imposed on non-
| consenting road users.
|
| I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away
| whenever I see them on highways.
|
| [FWIW, yes, I work in automated driving and know a thing or two
| about automotive safety.]
|
| [1]
| https://archive.is/20241018151106/https://www.reuters.com/bu...
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| > Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self
| Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
|
| 45000 people die yearly just in the US in auto accidents. Those
| numbers and timeline you quoted seem insignificant at first
| glance magnified by people with an axe to grind like that guy
| running anti Tesla superbowl ads, who makes self driving
| software like you.
| buzzert wrote:
| > I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away
| whenever I see them on highways.
|
| Would you rather drive near a drunk driver using Tesla's FSD,
| or one without FSD?
| dietsche wrote:
| I would like more details. There are definitely situations where
| neither a car nor a human could respond quickly enough to a
| situation on the road.
|
| for example, I recently hit a deer. The dashcam shows that I had
| less than 100 feet from when the deer became visible due to
| terrain to impact while driving at 60 mph. Keeping in mind that
| stopping a car in 100 feet at 60 mph is impossible. Most vehicles
| need more than triple that without accounting for human reaction
| time.
| ra7 wrote:
| Unfortunately, Tesla requests NHTSA to redact almost all useful
| information from their crash reports. So it's impossible to get
| more details.
|
| Here is the public database of all ADAS crashes:
| https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
| Log_out_ wrote:
| just have a drone fly ahead and have the lidar pointcloud on
| hud. This are very bio-logic excuses :)
| nomel wrote:
| I've had a person, high on drugs, walk out from between bushes
| that were along the road. I screeched to a halt in front of
| them, but 1 second later and physics would have made it
| impossible, regardless of reaction time (or non-negligible
| speed).
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| This is called "overdriving your vision", and it's so common
| that it boggles my mind. (This opinion might have something to
| do with the deer I hit when I first started driving...)
|
| Drive according to the conditions, folks.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| On many roads if a deer jumps across the road at the wrong
| time there's literally nothing you can do. You can't always
| drive at 30mph on back country roads just because a deer
| might hop out at you.
| seadan83 wrote:
| World of difference between, 30, 40, 50 and 60. Feels like
| something I have noticed between west and east coast
| drivers. Latter really send it on country turns and just
| trust the road. West coast, particularly montana, when
| vision is reduced, speed slows down. Just too many animals
| or road obstacles (eg: rocks, planks of wood) to just trust
| the road.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > West coast, particularly montana
|
| Montana is not "West coast".
| seadan83 wrote:
| Yeah, I was a bit glib. My impression is more
| specifically of the greater northwest vs rest. Perhaps
| just "the west" vs "the east".
|
| Indiana drivers for example really do send it (in my
| experience). Which is not east coast of course.
|
| There is a good bit of nuance... I would perhaps say more
| simply east of Mississippi vs west, but Texas varies by
| region and so-Cal drivers vary a lot as well,
| particularly compared to nor-Cal and central+eastern
| california. (I don't have an impression for nevada and
| new mexico drivers - I dont have any experience on
| country roads in those states)
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Road obstacles are static and can be seen by not "out
| driving your headlights". Animals flinging themselves
| into the road cannot, in many instances.
| amenhotep wrote:
| You are responding in a thread about a person saying they
| were driving at 60 when the deer only became visible "due
| to terrain" at 100 feet away, and therefore hitting it is
| no reflection on their skill or choices as a driver.
|
| I suppose we're meant to interpret charitably here, but
| it really seems to me like there is a big difference
| between the scenario described and the one you're talking
| about, where the deer really does fling itself out in
| front of you.
| dietsche wrote:
| op here. you nailed it on the head. also, the car started
| breaking before i could!
|
| incidentally, i've also had the tesla dodge a deer
| successfully!
|
| autopilot has improved in BIG ways over the past 2 years.
| went 700 miles in one day on autopilot thru the
| mountains. no issues at all.
|
| that said expecting perfection from a machine or a human
| is a fools errand.
| Zigurd wrote:
| We will inevitably see "AVs are too cautious! Let me go
| faster!" complaints as AVs drive in more places. But, really
| humans just suck at risk assessment. And at driving. Driving
| like a human is comforting in some contexts, but that should
| not be a goal when it trades away too much safety.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| There is a difference between driving too fast around a
| corner to stop for something stationary on the road and
| driving through countryside where something might jump out.
|
| I live in a country with deer but the number of incidences of
| them interacting with road users is so low that it does not
| factor in to my risk tolerance.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The risks vary with speed. At 30mph a deer will be injured
| and damage your car, and you might have to call animal
| control to find the deer if it was able to get away. At
| 45mph there is a good chance the deer will impact your
| windshield. If it breaks through, that's how people die in
| animal collisions. They get kicked to death by a frantic,
| panicked, injured animal.
| freejazz wrote:
| The article explains the investigation is based upon visibility
| issues... what is your point? I don't think any reasonable
| person doubts there are circumstances where nothing could
| adequately respond in order to prevent a crash. It seems a
| rather odd assumption to reach that these crashes would be in
| one of those scenarios such that we should be explained to
| otherwise, no less so when the report facially explains this to
| not be the case.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| > NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of
| crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility
| like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in
| Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021
| Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said. Another crash under investigation
| involved a reported injury
|
| > The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the
| optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y,
| and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.
|
| This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed
| in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report
| crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8
| years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many
| human drivers.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Did you scale your numbers in proportion of miles driven
| autonomously vs manually?
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah, that'd be the interesting figure: How many deaths per
| million miles driven? How does Tesla's full self driving
| stack up against human drivers?
| gostsamo wrote:
| Even that is not good enough, because the "autopilot"
| usually is not engaged in challenging conditions making any
| direct comparisons not really reliable. You need similar
| roads in simila weather and similar time of the day for
| approximating good comparison.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| How many of the 45,000 deaths on US roads( and an order
| of magnitude more injuries) occur due to 'challenging
| conditions' ?
| dekhn wrote:
| Those numbers aren't all the fatalities associated with tesla
| cars; IE, you can't compare the 45K/year (roughly 1 per 100M
| miles driven) to the limited number of reports.
|
| What they are looking for is whether there are systematic
| issues with the design and implementation that make it unsafe.
| moduspol wrote:
| Unsafe relative to what?
|
| Certainly not to normal human drivers in normal cars. Those
| are killing people left and right.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal human
| drivers, although having some level of estimate of
| accident/injury/death rates (to both the driver, passenger,
| and people outside the car) with FSD enabled/disabled would
| be very interesting.
| moduspol wrote:
| > I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal
| human drivers
|
| I think our intent should be focused on where the
| fatalities are happening. To keep things comparable, we
| could maybe do 40,000 studies on distracted driving in
| normal cars for every one or two caused by Autopilot /
| FSD.
|
| Alas, that's not where our priorities are.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Those are good questions. We should investigate to find
| out. (It'd be different from this one but it raises a good
| question. What _is_ FSD safe compared to?)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| No they're not. And if you do look at human drivers you're
| likely to see a Pareto distribution where 20% of drivers
| cause most of the accidents. This is completely unlike
| something like FSD where accidents would be more evenly
| distributed. It's entirely possible that FSD would make 20%
| of the drivers safer and ~80% less safe even if the overall
| accident rate was lower.
| Veserv wrote:
| What? Humans are excellent drivers. Humans go ~70 years
| between injury-causing accidents and ~5,000 years between
| fatal accidents even if we count the drunk drivers. If you
| started driving when the Pyramids were still new, you would
| still have half a millennium until you reach the expected
| value between fatalities.
|
| The only people pumping the line that human drivers are bad
| are the people trying to sell a dream that they can make a
| self-driving car in a weekend, or "next year", if you just
| give them a pile of money and ignore all the red flags and
| warning signs that they are clueless. The problem is
| shockingly hard and underestimating it is the first step to
| failure. Reckless development will not get you there safely
| with known technology.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> The agency is asking if other similar FSD crashes have
| occurred in reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if Tesla
| has updated or modified the FSD system in a way that may affect
| it in such conditions._
|
| Those four crashes are just the ones that sparked the
| investigation.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I don't agree with this comparison. The drivers are licensed,
| they have met a specific set of criteria to drive on public
| roads. The software is not.
|
| We are not sure when FSD is engaged with all of these miles
| driven, and if FSD is making mistakes a licensed human driver
| would not. I would at the very least expect radical
| transparency.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I too care more about bureaucratic compliance than what the
| actual chances of something killing me are. When I am on that
| ambulance I will be thinking "at least that guy met the
| specific set of criteria to be licensed to drive on public
| roads."
| tapoxi wrote:
| Are we really relegating drivers licenses to "bureaucratic
| compliance"?
|
| If FSD is being used in a public road, it impacts everyone
| on that road, not just the person who opted-in to using
| FSD. I absolutely want an independent agency to ensure it's
| safe and armed with the data that proves it.
| fallingknife wrote:
| What else are they? You jump through hoops to get a piece
| of plastic from the government that declares you "safe."
| And then holders of those licenses go out and kill 40,000
| people every year just in the US.
| tapoxi wrote:
| And you're comparing that against what? That's 40,000
| with regulation in place. Imagine if we let anyone drive
| without training.
| fallingknife wrote:
| We do. Nobody crazy enough to drive without knowing how
| is going to not be crazy enough to drive without a piece
| of plastic from the government.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4
| million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison,
|
| that's the wrong comparison
|
| the correct comparison is the number of report crashes and
| fatalities for __unsupervised FSD__ miles driven (not counting
| Tesla pilot tests, but actual customers)
| jandrese wrote:
| That seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem where the
| software is not allowed to go unsupervised until it racks up
| a few million miles of successful unsupervised driving.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There's a number of state programs to solve this problem
| with testing permits. The manufacturer puts up a bond and
| does testing in a limited area, sending reports on any
| incidents to the state regulator. The largest of these,
| California's, has several dozen companies with testing
| permits.
|
| Tesla currently does not participate in any of these
| programs.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Similar to a Phase 3 clinical trial (and for similar
| reasons).
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4
| million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or
| even better than many human drivers.
|
| This is exactly what people were saying about the NHTSA
| Autopilot investigation when it started back in 2021 with 11
| reported incidents. When that investigation wrapped earlier
| this year it had identified 956 Autopilot related crashes
| between early 2018 and August 2023, 467 of which were confirmed
| the fault of autopilot and an inattentive driver.
| fallingknife wrote:
| So what? How many miles were driven and what is the record vs
| human drivers? Also Autopilot is a standard feature that is
| much less sophisticated than and has nothing to do with FSD.
| graeme wrote:
| Will the review assess overall mortality of the vehicles compared
| to similar cars, and overall mortality while FSD is in use?
| dekhn wrote:
| No, that is not part of a review. They may use some reference
| aggregated industry data, but it's out of scope to answwer the
| question I think you're trying to imply.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Lawyers are not known for their prowess in mathematics, let
| alone statistics.
|
| Making these arguments from the standpoint of an engineer is
| counterproductive.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Which is why they are the wrong people to run the country
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Whom? Because math is important and so is law, among a
| variety of other things.
|
| s/ Thankfully the US presidential choices are at least
| rational, of sound mind, and well rounded people. Certainly
| no spoiled man children among them. /s
| johnthebaptist wrote:
| Yes, if tesla complies and provides that data
| bbor wrote:
| I get where you're coming from and would also be interested to
| see, but based on the clips I've seen that wouldn't be enough
| in this case. Of course the bias is inherent in what people
| choose to post (not normal _and_ not terrible /litigable), but
| I think there's enough at this point to perceive a stable
| pattern.
|
| Long story short, my argument is this: it doesn't matter if you
| reduce serious crashes from 100PPM to 50PPM if 25PPM of those
| are _new_ crash sources, speaking from a psychological and
| sociological perspective. Everyone should know that driving
| drunk, driving distracted, driving in bad weather, and in rural
| areas at dawn or dusk is dangerous, and takes appropriate
| precautions. But what do you do if your car might crash because
| someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was
| reflecting off another car in an unusual way? Could you really
| load up your kids and take your hands off the wheel knowing
| that at any moment you might hit an unexpected edge condition?
|
| Self driving cars are (presumably!) hard enough to trust
| already, since you're giving away so much control. There's a
| reason planes have to be way more than "better, statistically
| speaking" -- we expect them to be nearly flawless, safety-wise.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But what do you do if your car might crash because someone
| ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was
| reflecting off another car in an unusual way?
|
| These are -- like drunk driving, driving distract, and
| driving in bad weather -- things that actually do cause
| accidents with human drivers.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| The point is the choice of taking precaution part that you
| left out of the quote. The other day I was taking my kid to
| school, and when we turned east the sun was in my eyes and
| I couldn't see anything, so I pulled over as fast as I
| could and changed my route. Had I chosen to press forward
| and been in an accident, it is explainable (albeit still
| unfortunate and often unnecessary!). However, if I'm under
| the impression that my robot car can handle such
| circumstances because it does most of the time and then it
| glitches, that is harder to explain.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| This language is a bit of a sticking point for me. If
| you're drunk driving or driving distracted, there's no
| "accident". You're _intentionally_ doing something wrong
| and _committing a crime_.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Indeed, yet humans can anticipate such things and rely on
| their experience to reason about what's happening and how
| to react. Like slow down or shift lanes or just move ones
| head for a different perfective. A Tesla with only two
| cameras ("because that's all humans need") is unlikely to
| provably match that performance for a long time.
|
| Tesla could also change its software without telling the
| driver at any point.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| If you're trying to hint at Tesla's own stats, then at this
| point those are hopelessly, and knowingly, misleading.
|
| All they compare is "On the subsets of driving on only the
| roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not
| turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other
| conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all
| weather, all traffic, all conditions".
|
| There's a reason Tesla doesn't release the raw data.
| rblatz wrote:
| I have to disengage FSD multiple times a day and I'm only
| driving 16 miles round trip. And routinely have to stop it
| from doing dumb things like stopping at green traffic lights,
| attempting to do a u turn from the wrong turn lane, or
| switching to the wrong lane right before a turn.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Why would you even turn it on at this point...
| akira2501 wrote:
| Fatalities per passenger mile driven is the only statistic that
| would matter. I actually doubt this figure differs much, either
| way, from the overall fleet of vehicles.
|
| This is because "inattentive driving" is _rarely_ the cause of
| fatalities on the road. The winner there is, and probably
| always will be, Alcohol.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > The winner there is, and probably always will be, Alcohol.
|
| I'd imagine mobile device use will overtake alcohol soon
| enough
| akira2501 wrote:
| Mobile devices have been here for 40 years. The volume of
| alcohol sold every year suggests this overtake point will
| never occur.
| porphyra wrote:
| Distracted driving cost 3308 lives in 2022 [1].
|
| Alcohol is at 13384 in 2021 [2].
|
| Although you're right that alcohol does claim more lives,
| distracted driving is still highly dangerous and isn't all
| that rare.
|
| [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
|
| [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-
| work/alcohol...
| akira2501 wrote:
| They do a disservice by not further breaking down
| distracted driving by age. Once you see it that way it's
| hard to accept that distracted driving on it's own is the
| appropriate target.
|
| Anyways.. NHTSA publishes the FARS. This is the definitive
| source if you want to understand the demographics of
| fatalities in the USA.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-
| report...
| xvector wrote:
| My Tesla routinely tries to kill me on absolutely normal
| California roads in normal sunny conditions, especially when
| there are cars parked on the side of the road (it often brakes
| thinking I'm about to crash into them, or even swerves into them
| thinking that's the "real" lane).
|
| Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they
| happen though.
| delichon wrote:
| Why do you drive a car that routinely tries to kill you? That
| would put me right off. Can't you just turn off the autopilot?
| ddingus wrote:
| My guess is the driver tests it regularly.
|
| How does it do X, Y, ooh Z works, etc...
| xvector wrote:
| It's a pretty nice car when it's not trying to kill me
| jrflowers wrote:
| > My Tesla routinely tries to kill me
|
| > Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope
| they happen though.
|
| It is very generous that you would selflessly sacrifice your
| own life so that others might one day enjoy Elon's dream of
| robot taxis without steering wheels
| massysett wrote:
| Even more generous to selflessly sacrifice the lives and
| property of others that the vehicle "self-drives" itself
| into.
| judge2020 wrote:
| If the data sharing checkboxes are clicked, OP can still help
| send in training data while driving on his own.
| Renaud wrote:
| And what if the car swerves, and you aren't able to correct in
| time and end up killing someone?
|
| Is that your fault or the car's?
|
| I would bet that since it's your car, and you're using a
| knowingly unproven technology, it would be your fault?
| ra7 wrote:
| The driver's fault. Tesla never accepts liability.
| LunicLynx wrote:
| And they have been very clear about that
| bogantech wrote:
| > My Tesla routinely tries to kill me
|
| Why on earth would you continue to use it? If it does succeed
| someday that's on you
| newdee wrote:
| > that's on you
|
| They'd be dead, doubt it's a concern at that point.
| left-struck wrote:
| That's hilariously ironic because I have a pretty standard
| newish Japanese petrol car (I'm not mentioning the brand
| because my point isn't that brand x is better than brand y),
| and it has no ai self driving functions just pretty basic radar
| adaptive cruise control and emergency brake assist where it
| will stop if there's a car brake hard in front of you... and it
| does a remarkable job at rejecting cars which are slowing down
| or stopped in other lanes, even when you're going around a
| corner and the car is pointing straight towards the other cars
| but not actually heading towards them since it's turning. I
| assume they are using the steering input to help reject other
| vehicles and dopler effects to detect differences in speed, but
| it's remarkable how accurate it is at matching the speed of the
| car in front of you and only the car in front of you, even when
| that car is over 15 seconds in front of you. If teslas can't
| beat that, it's sad
| gitaarik wrote:
| I wonder, how are you "driving"? Are you sitting behind the
| wheel doing nothing except watch really good everything the car
| does so you can take over when needed? Isn't that a stressful
| experience? Wouldn't it be more comfortable to just do
| everything yourself so you know nothing weird can happen?
|
| Also, if the car does something crazy, how much time do you
| have to react? I can imagine in some situations you might have
| too little time to prevent the accident the car is creating.
| xvector wrote:
| > Isn't that a stressful experience?
|
| It's actually really easy and kind of relaxing. For long
| drives, it dramatically reduces cognitive load leading to
| less fatigue and more alertness on the road.
|
| My hand is always on the wheel so I can react as soon as I
| feel the car doing something weird.
| botanical wrote:
| Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test
| unproven technology on the public.
|
| Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-
| driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars
| without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be
| on roads carrying passengers.
| krasin wrote:
| > Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test
| unproven technology on the public.
|
| China and Russia do it too. It's not an excuse, but definitely
| not just the US.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Meh. Happens all around the world. Even if the product works
| there is no guarantee that it will be safe.
|
| Asbestos products are a good example of this. A more recent one
| is Teflon made with PFOAs or engineered stone like Caesarstone.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| If it takes 3 months to approve where steel rocket falls you
| might as well give up iterating something as complex as FSD.
| bckr wrote:
| Drive it in larger and larger closed courses. Expand to
| neighboring areas with consent of the communities involved.
| Agree on limited conditions until enough data has been
| gathered to expand those conditions.
| romon wrote:
| While controlled conditions promote safety, they do not
| yield effective training data.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's how all autonomous testing programs currently work
| around the world. That is, every driverless vehicle
| system on roads today was developed this way. You're
| going to have to be more specific when you say that it
| doesn't work.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There _are_ industry standards for this stuff. ISO 21448,
| UL-4600, UNECE R157 for example, and even commercial
| certification programs like the one run by TUV Sud for
| European homologation. It 's a deliberate series of decisions
| on Tesla's part to make their regulatory life as difficult as
| possible.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Only the US government
|
| Any Legislative body can do so. There's no reason to limit this
| strictly to the federal government. States and municipalities
| should have a say in this as well. The _citizens_ are the only
| entity that _decide_ if beta technology can be used or not.
|
| > comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed
| capabilities.
|
| This presupposes the government is naturally capable of
| performing an adequate job at this task or that the automakers
| won't sue the government to interfere with the testing regime
| and efficacy of it's standards.
|
| > aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
|
| According to Wikipedia Euro NCAP is a _voluntary_ organization
| and describes the situation thusly "legislation sets a minimum
| compulsory standard whilst Euro NCAP is concerned with best
| possible current practice." Which effectively highlights the
| above problems perfectly.
| dham wrote:
| Uhh, have you heard of the FDA? It's approved hundreds of
| chemicals that are put in all of food. And we're not talking
| about a few deaths, we're talking hundreds of thousands if not
| millions.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| What is FSD uptake rate. I bet it's less than 1% since in most
| countries it's not even available...
| massysett wrote:
| "Tesla says on its website its FSD software in on-road vehicles
| requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles
| autonomous."
|
| Despite it being called "Full Self-Driving."
|
| Tesla should be sued out of existence.
| bagels wrote:
| It didn't always say that. It used to be more misleading, and
| claim that the cars have "Full Self Driving Hardware", with an
| exercise for the reader to deduce that it didn't come with
| "Full Self Driving Software" too.
| peutetre wrote:
| And Musk doesn't want to "get nuanced" about the hardware:
|
| https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-
| abo...
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| "Sixty percent of the time, it works every time"
| hedora wrote:
| Our non-Tesla has steering assist. In my 500 miles of driving
| before I found the buried setting that let me completely
| disable it, the active safety systems never made it more than
| 10-20 miles without attempting to actively steer the car left-
| of-center or into another vehicle, even when it was "turned
| off" via the steering wheel controls.
|
| When it was turned on according to the dashboard UI, things
| were even worse. It'd disengage less than every ten miles.
| However, there wasn't an alarm when it disengaged, just a tiny
| gray blinking icon on the dash. A second or so after the
| blinking, it'd beep once and then pull crap like attempt a
| sharp left on an exit ramp that curved to the right.
|
| I can't imagine this model kills fewer people per mile than
| Tesla FSD.
|
| I think there should be a recall, but it should hit pretty much
| all manufacturers shipping stuff in this space.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| My Hyundai has a similar feature and it's excellent. I don't
| think you should be painting with such a broad brush.
| noapologies wrote:
| I'm not sure how any of this is related to the article. Does
| this non-Tesla manufacturer claim that their steering assist
| is "full self driving"?
|
| If you believe their steering assist kills more people than
| Tesla FSD then you're welcome, encouraged even, to file a
| report with the NHTSA here [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If what you say is true, name the car model and file a report
| with the NHTSA.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| Ive had similar experience with a Hyundai with steering
| assist. It would get confused by messed road lining all the
| time. Meanwhile it had no problem climbing a road curb that
| was unmarked. And it would try to constantly nudge the
| steering wheel meaning I had to put force into holding it in
| place all the time since it which was extra fatigue.
|
| Oh and it was on by default, meaning I had to disable it
| every time I turned the car on.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| What model year? I'm guessing it's an older one?
|
| My Hyundai is a 2021 and I have to turn on the steering
| assist every time which I find annoying. My guess is that
| you had an earlier model where the steering assist was more
| liability than asset.
|
| It's understandable that earlier versions of this kind of
| thing wouldn't function as well, but it is very strange
| that they would have it on by default.
| m463 wrote:
| I believe it's called "Full Self Driving (Supervised)"
| maeil wrote:
| The part in parentheses has only recently been added.
| rsynnott wrote:
| And is, well, entirely contradictory. An absolute
| absurdity; what happens when the irresistible force of the
| legal department meets the immovable object of marketing.
| tharant wrote:
| Prior to that, FSD was labeled 'Full Self Driving (Beta)'
| and enabling it triggered a modal that required two
| confirmations explaining that the human driver must always
| pay attention and is ultimately responsible for the
| vehicle. The feature also had/has active driver monitoring
| (via both vision and steering-torque sensors) that would
| disengage FSD if the driver ignored the loud audible alarm
| to "Pay attention". Since changing the label to
| '(Supervised)', the audible nag is significantly reduced.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The problem is not so much the lack of disclaimers, it is
| the adberitising. Tesla is asking for something like 15
| 000 dollars for access to this "beta", and you don't get
| two modal dialogs before you sign up for that.
|
| This is called "false advertising", and even worse -
| recognizing revenue on a feature you are not delivering
| (a beta is not a delivered feature) is not GAAP.
| rty32 wrote:
| Do they have warnings as big as "full self driving" texts
| in advertisements? And if it is NOT actually full self
| driving, why call it full self driving?
|
| That's just false advertising. You can't get around that.
|
| I can't believe our current laws let Tesla get away like
| that.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The correct name would be "Not Self Driving". Or, at least,
| Partial Self Driving.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| It's called "Full Self-Driving (Supervised) Beta" and you agree
| that you understand that you have to pay attention and are
| responsible for the safety of the car before you turn it on.
| kelnos wrote:
| So the name of it is a contradiction, and the fine print
| contradicts the name. "Full self driving" (the concept, not
| the Tesla product) does not need to be supervised.
| rty32 wrote:
| Come on, you know it's an oxymoron. "full" and "supervised"
| don't belong to the same sentence. Ask any 10 year old or a
| non native English speaker who only learned the language from
| textbooks for 5 years can tell you that. Just... stop
| defending Tesla.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I love how the image in the article has a caption that says it
| tells you to pay attention to the road, but I had to zoom in all
| the way to figure out where that message actually was.
|
| I'd expect something big and red with a warning triangle or
| something, but it's a tiny white message in the center of the
| screen.
| valine wrote:
| It gets progressively bigger and louder the longer you ignore
| it. After 30ish seconds it sounds an alarm and kicks you out.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > After 30ish seconds it sounds an alarm and kicks you out.
|
| That's much better. When AP functionality was introduced, the
| alarm was _fifteen MINUTES_.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Ah yes, red with a warning like "WARNING: ERROR: THE SITUATION
| IS NORMAL!"
|
| Some cars that have cruise control but an analog gauge cluster
| that can't display WARNING ERRORs even hide stuff like "you
| still have to drive the car" in a manual you have to read yet
| nobody cares about that.
|
| Honestly driving a car should require some sort of license for
| a bare minimum of competence.
| 23B1 wrote:
| "Move fast and kill people"
|
| Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop
| supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when
| you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you
| don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable
| places to invest.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Move slow and kill peo
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Move slow and kill people...
|
| GM ignition switch deaths 124
|
| https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ig...
| 23B1 wrote:
| And?
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| Nobody needs to hear your nonsense rants. A 50k model 3 makes
| almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from
| legacy automakers look like garbage.
| leoh wrote:
| I read their "nonsense rant" and I appreciated it.
|
| >A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k
| (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like
| garbage.
|
| This is a nonsense rant in my opinion.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Found the guy who bought $TSLA at its ATH
| wg0 wrote:
| In all the hype of AI etc, if you think about it then the
| foundational problem is that even Computer Vision is not a solved
| problem at the human level of accuracy and that's at the heart of
| the issue of both Tesla and that Amazon checkout.
|
| Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall
| person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each
| shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated
| checkout".
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch
| tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on
| each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for
| "automated checkout".
|
| I don't think this would actually work, as silly a thought
| experiment as it is.
|
| The problem isn't the vision, it's state management and cost.
| It was very easy (but expensive) to see and classify via CV if
| a person picked something up, it just requires hundreds of
| concurrent high resolution streams and a way to stitch the
| global state from all the videos.
|
| A little 1 inch person on each shelf needs a good way to
| communicate to every other tiny person what they say, and come
| to consensus. If 5 people/cameras detect person A picking
| something up, you need to differentiate between every
| permutation within 5 discrete actions and 1 seen 5 times.
|
| In case you didn't know, Amazon actually hired hundreds of
| people in India to review the footage and correct mistakes (for
| training the models). They literally had a human on each shelf.
| And they still had issues with the state management. With
| people.
| wg0 wrote:
| Yeah - that's exactly is my point that humans were required
| to recognize and computer vision is NOT a solved problem
| regardless of tech bros misleading techno optimism.
|
| Distributed communication and state management on the other
| hand is a solved problem already mostly with known
| parameters. How else do you think thousand and thousands of
| Kubernetes work in the wild.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| I think you're missing the point GP made: humans couldn't
| do it. They tried to get humans to do it, and humans had an
| unacceptable error rate.
|
| This is important. The autonomous driving problem and the
| grocery store problem are both about trade-offs, one isn't
| clearly better than the other.
| gnuser wrote:
| I worked in 18 a wheeler automation unicorn.
|
| Never rode in one once for a reason.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Automate the transfer yards, shipping docks, and trucking
| terminals. Make movement of cargo across these limited use
| areas entirely automated and as smooth as butter. Queue drivers
| up and have their loads automatically placed up front so they
| can drop and hook in a few minutes and get back on the road.
|
| I honestly think that's the _easier_ problem to solve by at
| least two orders of magnitude.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Did you miss the news about the recent strike by the very
| people you are suggesting to eliminate? This automation was
| one of the points of contention.
|
| Solving the problem might not be as easy as you suggest as
| long as their are powerful unions involved
| akira2501 wrote:
| This automation is inevitable. The ports are a choke point
| created by unnatural monopoly and a labor union is the
| incorrect solution. Particularly because their labor
| actions have massive collateral damage to other labor
| interests.
|
| I believe that if trucking were properly unionized the port
| unions would be crushed. They're not that powerful they've
| just outlived this particular modernization the longest out
| of their former contemporaries.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So a union is okay for the trucking industry, but not for
| the dock workers?
|
| And what exactly will the truckers be trucking if the
| ports are crushed?
| porphyra wrote:
| There are a bunch of companies working on that. So far off
| the top of my head I know of:
|
| * Outrider: https://www.outrider.ai/
|
| * Cyngn: https://www.cyngn.com/
|
| * Fernride: https://www.fernride.com/
|
| Any ideas what other ones are out there?
| akira2501 wrote:
| Promising. I'm actually more familiar with the actual
| transportation and logistics side of the operation and
| strictly within the USA. I haven't seen anything new put
| into serious operation out here yet but I'll definitely be
| watching for them.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Asking genuinely: is FSD enabled/accessible in EU?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| FSD is currently neither legal nor enabled in the EU. That may
| change in the future.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I'm astonished at how long Musk has been able to keep his
| autonomous driving con going. He has been lying about it to
| inflate Tesla shares for 10 years now.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Without consequences, there is no reason to stop.
| UltraSane wrote:
| When is the market going to realize Tesla is NEVER going to
| have real level 4 autonomy where Tesla takes legal liability
| for crashes the way Waymo has?
| tstrimple wrote:
| Market cares far more about money than lives. Until the
| lives lost cost more than their profit, they give less than
| zero fucks. Capitalism. Yay!
| porphyra wrote:
| Just because it has taken 10 years longer than promised doesn't
| mean that it will never happen. FSD has made huge improvements
| this year and is on track to keep up the current pace so it
| actually does seem closer than ever.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The current vision-only system is a clear technological dead-
| end that can't go much more than 10 miles between
| "disengagements". To be clear, "disengagements" would be
| crashes if a human wasn't ready to take over. And not needing
| a human driver is THE ENTIRE POINT! I will admit Musk isn't a
| liar when Tesla has FSD at least as good as Waymo's system
| and Tesla accepts legal liability for any crashes.
| valval wrote:
| You're wrong. Nothing about this is clear, and you'd be
| silly to claim otherwise.
|
| You should explore your bias and where it's coming from.
| UltraSane wrote:
| No Tesla vehicle has legally driven even a single mile
| with no driver in the driver's seat. They aren't even
| trying to play Waymo's game. The latest FSD software's
| failure rate is at least 100 times higher than it needs
| to be.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That's a stupid point. I've been in a Tesla that's driven
| a mile by itself. It makes no difference if a person is
| in the seat.
| UltraSane wrote:
| "It makes no difference if a person is in the seat." It
| does when Musk is claiming that Tesla is going to sell a
| car with no steering wheel!
|
| The current Tesla FSD fails so often that a human HAS to
| be in the driver seat ready to take over at any moment.
|
| You really don't understand the enormous difference
| between the current crappy level 2 Tesla FSD and Waymo's
| level 4 system?
| valval wrote:
| The difference is that Tesla has a general algorithm,
| while Waymo is hard coding scenarios.
|
| I never really got why people bring Waymo up every time
| Tesla's FSD is mentioned. Waymo isn't competing with
| Tesla's vision.
| porphyra wrote:
| Waymo uses a learned planner and is far from "hardcoded".
| In any case, imo both of these can be true:
|
| * Tesla FSD works surprisingly well and improving
| capabilities to hands free actual autonomy isn't as far
| fetched as one might think.
|
| * Waymo beat them to robotaxi deployment and scaling up
| to multiple cities may not be as hard as people say.
|
| It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal
| and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and
| is guaranteed to fail. In reality, it is very unclear as
| both strategies have their merits and only time will tell
| in the long run.
| UltraSane wrote:
| " Tesla FSD works surprisingly well and improving
| capabilities to hands free actual autonomy isn't as far
| fetched as one might think"
|
| Except FSD doesn't work surprisingly well and there is no
| way it will get as good as Waymo using vision-only.
|
| "It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal
| and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and
| is guaranteed to fail."
|
| I'm not being tribal, I'm being realistic based on the
| very public performance of both systems.
|
| If Musk was serious about his Robotaxi claims then Tesla
| would be operating very differently. Instead it is pretty
| obvious it all a con to inflate Tesla shares beyond all
| reason.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The difference is that Waymo has a very well engineered
| system using vision, LIDAR, and millimeter wave RADAR
| that works well enough in limited areas to provide tens
| of thousands of actual driver-less rides. Tesla has a
| vision only system that sucks so bad a human has to be
| ready to take over for it at any time like a parent
| monitoring a toddler near stairs.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Who said anything about Waymo? Waymo is building a very
| high cost commercial grade system intended for use on
| revenue generating vehicles. Tesla is building a low cost
| system intended for personal vehicles where Waymo's
| system would be cost prohibitive. Obviously Waymo's
| system is massively more capable. But that is about as
| surprising as the fact that a Ferrari is faster than a
| Ford Ranger.
|
| But this is all irrelevant to my point. You said a Tesla
| is not capable of driving itself for a mile. I have
| personally seen one do it. Whether a person is sitting in
| the driver's seat, or the regulators will allow it, has
| nothing to do with the fact that the vehicle does, in
| fact, have that capability.
| gitaarik wrote:
| Just like AGI and the year of the Linux desktop ;P
| porphyra wrote:
| Honestly LLMs were a big step towards AGI, and gaming on
| Linux is practically flawless now. Just played through
| Black Myth Wukong with no issues out of the box.
| UltraSane wrote:
| LLMs are to AGI
|
| as
|
| A ladder is to getting to orbit.
|
| I can seem LLMs serving as a kind of memory for an AGI
| but something fundamentally different will be needed for
| true reasoning and continues self-improvement.
| heisenbit wrote:
| "I'm a technologist, I know a lot about computers," Musk told
| the crowd during the event. "And I'm like, the last thing I
| would do is trust a computer program, because it's just too
| easy to hack."
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Each version has improved. FSD is realistically the hardest thing
| humanity as ever tried to do. It involves an enormous amount of
| manpower, compute power and human discoveries, and has to work
| right in billions of scenarios.
|
| Building a self flying plane is comically easy by comparison.
| Building Starship is easier by comparison.
| gitaarik wrote:
| Ah ok, first it is possible within 2 years, and now it is
| humanity's hardest problem? If it's really that hard I think we
| better put our resources into something more useful, like new
| energy solutions, seems we have an energy crisis.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| It's the hardest thing humans have ever tried to do yes. It
| took less time to go to the moon.
|
| There are tons of companies and governments working on energy
| solutions, there is ample time for Tesla to work on self
| driving.
|
| Also, do we really have an energy crisis? Are you
| experiencing rolling blackouts?
| Animats wrote:
| If Trump is elected, this probe will be stopped.
| leoh wrote:
| Almost certainly would happen and very depressing.
| gitaarik wrote:
| It concerns me that these Tesla's can suddenly start acting
| differently after a software update. Seems like a great target
| for a cyber attack. Or just a fail from the company. A little bug
| that is accidentally spread to millions of cars all over the
| world.
|
| And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that
| we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on
| the road, and then Tesla adds a new fancy feature to their
| software and rolls out an update. How are we to be confident that
| it's safe?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Imagine all Teslas doing a full left right now. And full right
| in left steer countries.
|
| OTA updates and auto updates in general is just a thing that
| should not be in vehicles. The ecu:s should have to be air
| gaped to the internet to be considered road worthy.
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| > how are we to be confident that its safe?
|
| I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates
| to your car like vscode does.
|
| Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested
| in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet
| (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent
| out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback
| comes back, they start sending it out wider.
|
| Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above
| catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown
| unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that.
| Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case,
| yes they should be held accountable.
|
| These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things,
| there is an actual process to this.
| madeforhnyo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760
| soerxpso wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, Teslas with Autopilot enabled crash
| about once every 4.5M miles driven, whereas the overall rate in
| the US is roughly one crash every 70K miles driven. Of course,
| the selection effects around that stat can be debated (people
| probably enable autopilot in situations that are safer than
| average, the average tesla owner might be driving more carefully
| or in safer areas than the average driver, etc), but it is a
| pretty significant difference. (Those numbers are what I could
| find at a glance; DYOR if you'd like more rigor).
|
| We have a lot of traffic fatalities in the US (in some states, an
| entire order of magnitude worse than in some EU countries), but
| it's generally not considered an issue. Nobody asks, "These
| agents are crashing a lot; are they really competent to drive?"
| when the agent is human, but when the agent is digital it becomes
| a popular question even with a much lower crash rate.
| deely3 wrote:
| > Gaps in Tesla's telematic data create uncertainty regarding
| the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot
| engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every
| crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of
| gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from
| its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and
| the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both
| crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage.
| Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic
| deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes.3 A
| review of NHTSA's 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System
| (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes
| include airbag deployments.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla
| driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul
| Garcia, public information officer for the department.
|
| Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of
| justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k
| vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is
| negligence.
| theossuary wrote:
| You know what they say, if you want to kill someone in the US,
| do it in a car.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| _Crash Course: If You Want to Get Away With Murder Buy a Car_
| Woodrow Phoenix
| immibis wrote:
| In the US it seems you'd do it with a gun, but in Germany
| it's cars.
|
| There was this elderly driver who mowed down a family in a
| bike lane waiting to cross the road in Berlin, driving over
| the barriers between the bike lane and the car lane because
| the cars in the car lane were too slow. Released without
| conviction - it was an unforeseeable accident.
| macintux wrote:
| I have no idea what the conditions were like for this incident,
| but I've blown through a 4-way stop sign when the sun was
| setting. There's only so much sunglasses can do.
| eptcyka wrote:
| If environmental factors incapacitate you, should you not
| slow down or stop?
| vortegne wrote:
| You shouldn't be on the road then? If you can't see, you
| should slow down. If you can't handle driving in given
| conditions safely for everyone involved, you should slow down
| or stop. If everybody would drive like you, there'd be a
| whole lot more death on the roads.
| alexjplant wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/- If I can't see because of rain, hail, intense
| sun reflections, frost re-forming on my windshield, etc. then
| I pull over and put my flashers on until the problem
| subsides. Should I have kept the 4700 lb vehicle in fifth
| gear at 55 mph without the ability to see in front of me in
| each of these instances? I submit that I should not have and
| that I did the right thing.
| ablation wrote:
| Yet so much more YOU could have done, don't you think?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Yes, officer, this one right here.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > There's only so much sunglasses can do.
|
| For everything else, you have brakes.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I know right? Once I got something in my eye so I couldn't
| see at all, but I decided that since I couldn't do anything
| about it the best thing was to keep driving. I killed a few
| pedestrians but... eh, what was I going to do?
| kelnos wrote:
| Your license should be suspended. If conditions don't allow
| you to see things like that, you slow down until you can. If
| you still can't, then you need to pull over and wait until
| conditions make it safe to drive again.
|
| Gross.
| smdyc1 wrote:
| Not to mention that when you can't see, you slow down? Does the
| self-driving system do that sufficiently in low visibility?
| Clearly not if it hit a pedestrian with enough force to kill
| them.
|
| The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their
| system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only
| use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving
| systems to be _better_ than humans? Secondly, humans don 't
| just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear
| and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or
| fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.
| pmorici wrote:
| The Tesla knows when it's cameras and blinded by sun and act
| accordingly or tells the human to take over.
| kelnos wrote:
| Expect when it doesn't actually do that, I guess? Like when
| this pedestrian was killed?
| eptcyka wrote:
| If we were able to know when a neural net is failing to
| categorize something, wouldn't we get AGI for free?
| plorg wrote:
| I would think one relevant factor is that human vision is
| different than and in some ways significantly better than
| cameras.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| I think one of the reasons they focus only on vision is
| basically the entire transportation infra is designed using
| human eyes a primary way to channel information.
|
| Useful information for driving are communicated through
| images in form of road signs, traffic signals etc.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I dunno, knowing the exact relative velocity of the car in
| front of you seems like it could be useful and is something
| humans can't do very well.
|
| I've always wanted a car that shows my speed and the
| relative speed (+/-) of the car in front of me. My car's
| cruise control can maintain a set distance so obviously
| it's capable of it but it doesn't show it.
| dham wrote:
| If your car is maintaining speed of the car in front then
| the car in front is going speed that is showing on your
| speedometer.
| SahAssar wrote:
| We are "designed" (via evolution) to perceive and
| understand the environment around us. The signage is
| designed to be easily readable for us.
|
| The models that drive these cars clearly either have some
| more evolution to do or for us to design the world more to
| their liking.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Yes. I was talking why Tesla choose to use vision. Since
| they can't control designing the transport infra to their
| liking at least for now.
| jsight wrote:
| Unfortunately there is also an AI training problem embedded
| in this. As Mobileye says, there are a lot of driver
| decisions that are common, but wrong. The famous example is
| rolling stops, but also failing to slow down for conditions
| is really common.
|
| It wouldn't shock me if they don't have nearly enough
| training samples of people slowing appropriately for
| visibility with eyes, much less slowing for the somewhat
| different limitations of cameras.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Negligence is negligence but people tend to view vehicle
| collisions as "accidents", as in random occurrences dealt by
| the hand of fate completely outside of anyone's control. As
| such, there is a chronic failure to charge motorists with
| negligence, even when they have killed someone.
|
| If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay.
| I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it
| got prosecutor's discretion.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Negligence is the failure to act with the level of care that
| a reasonable person would exercise in a similar situation; if
| a reasonable person likely would have done the things that
| led to that person's death, they're not guilty of negligence.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That sounds like the justice system living up to its ideals.
| If the 12 jurors know they would have done the same in your
| situation, as would their family and friends, then they can't
| in good conscience convict you for negligence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It sounds like the kind of narcissism that perverts
| justice. People understand things they could see themselves
| doing, don't understand things that they can't see
| themselves doing, and disregard the law entirely. It makes
| non-doctors and non-engineers incapable of judging doctors
| and engineers, rich people incapable of judging poor
| people, and poor people incapable of judging rich people.
|
| It's just a variation of letting off the defendant that
| looks like your kid, or brutalizing someone whose victim
| looks like your kid, it's no ideal of justice.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, I have a couple of mirrors placed around my car that
| reflect light into my face so that I can get out of running
| into someone. Tbh I understand why they do this. Someone on HN
| explained it to me: Yield to gross tonnage. So I just drive
| where I want. If other people die, that's on them: the
| graveyards are full of people with the right of way, as people
| say.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm genuinely not sure what the answer is.
|
| When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun,
| polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun
| visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and
| can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.
|
| The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the
| road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never
| seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck
| traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| No, polarized sunglasses work fine. I drive into a setting
| sun probably once a week to no incident.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense to me.
|
| First of all, polarization is irrelevant when looking at
| the sun. It only affects light that is _reflected_ off
| things like other cars ' windows, or water on the street.
| In fact, it's often recommended _not_ to use polarized
| sunglasses while driving because you can miss wet or icy
| patches on the road.
|
| Secondly, standard sunglasses don't let you look directly
| at the sun, even a setting one. The sun is still
| dangerously bright.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'm not looking directly at the sun I am looking at the
| road. Either way it makes a big difference and you don't
| get much black ice here in sunny southern california.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But the scenario we're talking about is when the sun is
| just a few degrees away from the road. It's still
| entering your eyeball directly. It's still literally
| blinding, so I just... don't understand how you can do
| that? Like, I certainly can't. Sunglasses -- polarized or
| otherwise -- don't make the slightest difference. It's
| why sun visors exist.
|
| Also, I'm assuming you get rain in SoCal at least
| sometimes, that then mostly dries up but not completely?
| Or leaking fire hydrants and so forth? It's the
| unexpected wet patches.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| 'Pedestrian' in this context seems pretty misleading
|
| "Two vehicles collided on the freeway, blocking the left lane. A
| Toyota 4Runner stopped, and two people got out to help with
| traffic control. A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one
| of the people who exited from it. "
|
| edit: Parent article was changed... I was referring to the title
| of the NPR article.
| Retric wrote:
| More clarity may change people's opinion of the accident, but
| IMO pedestrian meaningfully represents someone who is limited
| to human locomotion and lacks any sort of protection in a
| collision.
|
| Which seems like a reasonable description of the type of
| failure involved in the final few seconds before impact.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| Omitting that the pedestrian was on a freeway meaningfully
| mis-represents the situation.
| Retric wrote:
| People walking on freeways may be rare from the perspective
| of an individual driver but not a self driving system
| operating on millions of vehicles.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| What does that have to do with the original article's
| misleading title?
| Retric wrote:
| I don't think it's misleading. It's a tile not some
| hundred word description of what exactly happened.
|
| Calling them motorists would definitely be misleading by
| comparison. Using the simple "fatal crash" of the linked
| title implies the other people might in be responsible
| which is misleading.
|
| Using accident but saying Tesla was at fault could open
| them up to liability and therefore isn't an option.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| > I don't think it's misleading. It's a tile not some
| hundred word description of what exactly happened.
|
| "Pedestrian killed on freeway" instead of "pedestrian
| killed" doesn't take 100 words and doesn't give the
| impression Tesla's are mowing people down on crosswalks
| (although that's a feature to get clicks, not a bug).
| Retric wrote:
| Without context that implies the pedestrians shouldn't
| have been on the freeway.
|
| It's not an issue for Tesla, but it does imply bad things
| about the victims.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| A title of "U.S. to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving'
| system after pedestrian killed on freeway" would in no
| way imply bad things about the pedestrian who was killed.
| Retric wrote:
| It was my first assumption when I was read pedestrian on
| freeway in someone's comment without context. Possibly
| due to Uber self driving fatality.
|
| Stranded motorists who exit their vehicle, construction
| workers, first responders, tow truck drivers, etc are the
| most common victims but that's not the association I had.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Why? I would hope we all expect pedestrian detection (and
| object detection in general) to be just as good on a
| freeway as on a city street? It seems the Tesla barreled
| full-speed into an accident ahead of it. I would call it
| insane but that would be anthropomorphizing it.
| nkrisc wrote:
| No, you're not allowed to hit pedestrians on the freeway
| either.
|
| There are many reasons why a pedestrian might be on the
| freeway. It's not common but I see it at least once a month
| and I drive extra carefully when I do, moving over if I can
| and slowing down.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This sort of framing you're engaging in is exactly what the
| person you're replying to is complaining about.
|
| Yeah, the person who got hit was technically a pedestrian but
| just using that word with no other context doesn't covey that
| it was a pedestrian on a limited access highway vs somewhere
| pedestrians are allowed and expected. Without additional
| explanation people assume normalcy and think that the
| pedestrian was crossing a city street or something
| pedestrians do all the time and are expected to do all the
| time when that is very much not what happened here.
| Retric wrote:
| Dealing with people on freeways is the kind of edge case
| humans aren't good at but self driving cars have zero
| excuses. It's a common enough situation that someone will
| exit a vehicle after a collision to make it a very
| predictable edge case.
|
| Remember all of the bad press Uber got when a pedestrian
| was struck and killed walking their bike across the middle
| of a street at night? People are going to be on limited
| access freeways and these systems need to be able to deal
| with it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I'd make the argument that people are very good at
| dealing with random things that shouldn't be on freeways
| as long as they don't coincide with blinding sun or other
| visual impairment.
|
| Tesla had a long standing issue detecting partial lane
| obstructions. I wonder if the logic around that has
| anything to do with this.
| Retric wrote:
| 17 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on freeways.
| Considering how rarely pedestrians are on freeways that
| suggests to me people aren't very good at noticing them
| in time to stop / avoid them.
|
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/06/09/why-20-of-
| pedestrians...
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| That, and/or freeway speeds make the situation inherently
| more dangerous. When the traffic flows freeway speeds are
| fine but if a freeway-speed car has to handle a
| stationary object...problem.
| neom wrote:
| That is the correct use of pedestrian as a noun.
| echoangle wrote:
| Sometimes using a word correctly is still confusing because
| it's used in a different context 90% of the time.
| szundi wrote:
| I think parent commenter emphasized the context.
|
| Leaving out context that would otherwise change the
| interpretation of most or targeted people is the main way to
| misled those people without technically lying.
| neom wrote:
| I mean it's the literal language they use in the report[1].
| Personally, would much prefer a publication to be
| technically correct, a person on foot on a motorway is
| referred to as a pedestrian, that is the name for that.
|
| [1]https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2024/INOA-
| PE24031-23232.pdf
| varenc wrote:
| By a stricter definition, a pedestrian is one who _travels_
| by foot. Of course, they are walking, but they're traveling
| via their car, so by some interpretations you wouldn't call
| them a pedestrian. You could call them a "motorist" or a
| "stranded vehicle occupant".
|
| For understanding the accident it does seem meaningful that
| they were motorists that got out of their car on a highway
| and not pedestrians at a street crossing. (Still inexcusable
| of course, but changes the context)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Cars and drivers ideally shouldn't hit people who exited
| their vehicles after an accident on a highway. Identifying
| and avoiding hazards is part of driving.
| neom wrote:
| As far as I am aware, pes doesn't carry an inherent meaning
| of travel. Pedestrian just means foot on, they don't need
| to be moving, they're just not in carriage. As an aside,
| distinguishing a person's mode of presence is precisely
| what reports aim to capture.
|
| (I also do tend to avoid this level of pedantry, the points
| here are all well taken to be clear. I do think the
| original poster was fine in their comment, I was just
| sayin' - but this isn't a cross I would die on :))
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| That's why he said misleading rather than an outright lie. He
| is not disputing that it is techincally correct to refer to
| the deceased as a pedestrian, but this scenario (someone out
| of their car on a freeway) is not what is going to spring to
| the mind of someone just reading the headline.
| danans wrote:
| > Pedestrian' in this context seems pretty misleading
|
| What's misleading? The full quote:
|
| "A red Tesla Model Y then _hit the 4Runner and one of the
| people who exited from it_. A 71-year-old woman from Mesa,
| Arizona, was pronounced dead at the scene. "
|
| If you exit a vehicle, and are on foot, you are a pedestrian.
|
| I wouldn't expect FSD's object recognition system to treat a
| human who has just exited a car differently than a human
| walking across a crosswalk. A human on foot is a human on foot.
|
| However, from the sound of it, the object recognition system
| didn't even see the 4Runner, much less a person, so perhaps
| there's a more fundamental problem with it?
|
| Perhaps this is something that lidar or radar, if the car had
| them, would have helped the OR system to see.
| jfoster wrote:
| The description has me wondering if this was definitely a
| case where FSD was being used. There have been other cases in
| the past where drivers had an accident and claimed they were
| using autopilot when they actually were not.
|
| I don't know for sure, but I would think that the car could
| detect a collision. I also don't know for sure, but I would
| think that FSD would stop once a collision has been detected.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Did the article say the Tesla didn't stop after the
| collision?
| jfoster wrote:
| If it hit the vehicle and then hit one of the people who
| had exited the vehicle with enough force for it to result
| in a fatality, it sounds like it might not have applied
| any braking.
|
| Of course, that depends on the speed it was traveling at
| to begin with.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > FSD would stop once a collision has been detected.
|
| Fun fact, at least until very recently, if not even to this
| moment, AEB (emergency braking) is not a part of FSD.
| modeless wrote:
| I believe AEB can trigger even while FSD is active.
| Certainly I have seen the forward collision warning
| trigger during FSD.
| pell wrote:
| > There have been other cases in the past where drivers had
| an accident and claimed they were using autopilot when they
| actually were not.
|
| Wouldn't this be protocoled by the event data recorder?
| danans wrote:
| > There have been other cases in the past where drivers had
| an accident and claimed they were using autopilot when they
| actually were not.
|
| If that were the case here, there wouldn't be a government
| probe, right? It would be a normal "multi car pileup with a
| fatality" and added to statistics.
|
| With the strong incentive on the part of both the driver
| and Tesla to lie about this, there should strong
| regulations around event data recorders [1] for self
| driving systems, and huge penalties for violating those. A
| search across that site doesn't return a hit for the word
| "retention" but it's gotta be expressed in some way there.
|
| 1. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter
| -V/p...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Tesla's were famously poor at detecting partial lane
| obstructions for a long time. I wonder if that's what
| happened here.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be
| before people tolerate it.
|
| It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance
| traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a
| quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of
| the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not
| newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is.
| It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die
| needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated
| into a greatly reduced role.
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| at least 10x better than a human
| becquerel wrote:
| I believe Waymo has already beaten this metric.
| szundi wrote:
| Waymo is limited to cities that their engineers has to map
| and this map maintained.
|
| You cannot put a waymo in a new city before that. With
| Tesla, what you get is universal.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Waymo is robust to removing the map / lidars / radars /
| cameras or adding inaccuracies to any of these 4 inputs.
|
| (Not sure if this is true for the production system or
| the one they're still working on.)
| dageshi wrote:
| I think the Waymo approach is the one that will actually
| deliver some measure of self driving cars that people
| will be comfortable to use.
|
| It won't operate everywhere, but it will gradually expand
| to cover large areas and it will keep expanding till it's
| near ubiquitous.
|
| I'm dubious that the Tesla approach will actually ever
| work.
| kelnos wrote:
| Waymo is safe where they've mapped and trained and
| tested, because they track when their test drivers have
| to take control.
|
| Tesla FSD is just everywhere, without any accountability
| or trained testing on all the roads people use them on.
| We have no idea how often Tesla FSD users have to take
| control from FSD due to a safety issue.
|
| Waymo is objectively safer, and their entire approach is
| objectively safer, and is actually measurable, whereas
| Tesla FSD's safety cannot actually be accurately
| measured.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Hesitation around self-driving technology is not just about the
| raw accident rate, but the nature of the accidents. Self-
| driving failures often involve highly visible, preventable
| mistakes that seem avoidable by a human (e.g., failing to stop
| for an obvious obstacle). Humans find such incidents harder to
| tolerate because they can seem fundamentally different from
| human error.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly -- it's not just the overall accident rate, but the
| rate _per accident type_.
|
| Imagine if self-driving is 10x safer on freeways, but on the
| other hand is 3x more likely to run over your dog in the
| driveway.
|
| Or it's 5x safer on city streets overall, but actually 2x
| _worse_ in rain and ice.
|
| We're fundamentally wired for loss aversion. So I'd say it's
| less about what the total improvement rate is, and more about
| whether it has categorizable scenarios where it's still worse
| than a human.
| becquerel wrote:
| My dream is of a future where humans are banned from driving
| without special licenses.
| gambiting wrote:
| So.........like right now you mean? You need a special
| licence to drive on a public road right now.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Geez, clearly they mean like a CDL
| nkrisc wrote:
| The problem is it's obviously too easy to get one and keep
| one, based on some of the drivers I see on the road.
| gambiting wrote:
| That sounds like a legislative problem where you live,
| sure it can be fixed by overbearing technology but we
| already have all the tools we need to fix it, we are just
| choosing not to for some reason.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, you need an entirely common, unspecial license drive on
| a public road right now.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And yet Tesla's FSD never passed a driving test.
| grecy wrote:
| And it can't legally drive a vehicle
| Arainach wrote:
| This is about lying to the public and stoking false
| expectations for years.
|
| If it's "fully self driving" Tesla should be liable for when
| its vehicles kill people. If it's not fully self driving and
| Tesla keeps using that name in all its marketing, regardless of
| any fine print, then Tesla should be liable for people acting
| as though their cars could FULLY self drive and be sued
| accordingly.
|
| You don't get to lie just because you're allegedly safer than a
| human.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think this is the answer: the company takes on full
| liability. If a Tesla is Fully Self Driving then Tesla is
| driving it. The insurance market will ensure that dodgy
| software/hardware developers exit the industry.
| blagie wrote:
| This is very much what I would like to see.
|
| The price of insurance is baked into the price of a car. If
| the car is as safe as I am, I pay the same price in the
| end. If it's safer, I pay less.
|
| From my perspective:
|
| 1) I would *much* rather have Honda kill someone than
| myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on
| myself would be horrible. In the city I live in, I dread
| ageing; as my reflexes get slower, I'm more and more likely
| to kill someone.
|
| 2) As a pedestrian, most of the risk seems to come from
| outliers -- people who drive hyper-aggressively. Replacing
| all cars with a median driver would make me much safer (and
| traffic, much more predictable).
|
| If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance
| payouts, and vice-versa. The market works everything else
| out.
|
| But my stress levels go way down, whether in a car, on a
| bike, or on foot.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> I would _much_ rather have Honda kill someone than
| myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on
| myself would be horrible.
|
| Except that we know that it doesn't work like that. Train
| drivers are ridden with extreme guilt every time "their"
| train runs over someone, even though they know that
| logically there was absolutely nothing they could have
| done to prevent it. Don't see why it would be any
| different here.
|
| >>If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance
| payouts, and vice-versa
|
| In what way? In the EU the minimum covered amount for any
| car insurance is 5 million euro, it has had no impact on
| the safety of cars. And of course the recent increase in
| payouts(due to the general increase in labour and parts
| cost) has led to a dramatic increase in insurance
| premiums which in turn has lead to a drastic increase in
| the number of people driving without insurance. So now
| that needs increased policing and enforcement, which we
| pay for through taxes. So no, market doesn't "work
| everything out".
| blagie wrote:
| > Except that we know that it doesn't work like that.
| Train drivers are ridden with extreme guilt every time
| "their" train runs over someone, even though they know
| that logically there was absolutely nothing they could
| have done to prevent it. Don't see why it would be any
| different here.
|
| It's not binary. Someone dying -- even with no
| involvement -- can be traumatic. I've been in a position
| where I could have taken actions to prevent someone from
| being harmed. Rationally not my fault, but in retrospect,
| I can describe the exact set of steps needed to prevent
| it. I feel guilty about it, even though I know rationally
| it's not my fault (there's no way I could have known
| ahead of time).
|
| However, it's a manageable guilt. I don't think it would
| be if I knew rationally that it was my fault.
|
| > So no, market doesn't "work everything out".
|
| Whether or not a market works things out depends on
| issues like transparency and information. Parties will
| offload costs wherever possible. In the model you gave,
| there is no direct cost to a car maker making less safe
| cars or vice-versa. It assumes the car buyer will even
| look at insurance premiums, and a whole chain of events
| beyond that.
|
| That's different if it's the same party making cars,
| paying money, and doing so at scale.
|
| If Tesla pays for everyone damaged in any accident a
| Tesla car has, then Tesla has a very, very strong
| incentive to make safe cars to whatever optimum is set by
| the damages. Scales are big enough -- millions of cars
| and billions of dollars -- where Tesla can afford to hire
| actuaries and a team of analysts to make sure they're at
| the optimum.
|
| As an individual car buyer, I have no chance of doing
| that.
|
| Ergo, in one case, the market will work it out. In the
| other, it won't.
| kelnos wrote:
| Being in a vehicle that collides with someone and kills
| them is going to be traumatic regardless of whether or
| not you're driving.
|
| But it's almost certainly going to be more traumatic and
| more guilt-inducing if you _are_ driving.
|
| If I only had two choices, I would much rather my car
| kill someone than I kill someone with my car. I'm gonna
| feel bad about it either way, but one is much worse than
| the other.
| tensor wrote:
| I'm for this as long as the company also takes on liability
| for human errors they could prevent. I'd want to see cars
| enforcing speed limits and similar things. Humans are too
| dangerous to drive.
| stormfather wrote:
| That would be good because it would incentivize all FSD
| cars communicating with each other. Imagine how safe
| driving would be if they are all broadcasting their speed
| and position to each other. And each vehicle
| sending/receiving gets cheaper insurance.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It goes kinda dsytopic if access to the network becomes a
| monopolistic barrier.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Not to mention the possibility of requiring pedestrians
| and cyclists to also be connected to the same network.
| Anyone with access to the automotive network could track
| any pedestrian who passes by the vicinity of a road.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's hard to think of a good blend of traffic safety,
| privacy guarantees, and resistance to bad-actors.
| Having/avoiding persistent identification is certainly a
| factor.
|
| Perhaps one approach would be to declare that automated
| systems are responsible for determining the
| position/speed of everything around them using regular
| sensors, but may elect to take hints from anonymous
| "notice me" marks or beacons.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| That's just reducing the value of a life to a number. It
| can be gamed to a situation where it's just more profitable
| to mow down people.
|
| What's an acceptable number/financial cost is also just an
| indirect approximated way of implementing a more
| direct/scientific regulation. Not everything needs to be
| reduced to money.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| There is no way to game it successfully; if your
| insurance costs are much higher than your competitors you
| will lose in the long run. That doesn't mean there can't
| be other penalties when there is gross negligence.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Who said management and shareholders are in it for the
| long run. Plenty of examples where businesses are purely
| run in the short term. Bonuses and stock pumps.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's your car, so ultimately the liability is yours. That's
| why you have insurance. If Tesla retains ownership, and just
| lets you drive it, then they have (more) liability.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It's your car, so ultimately the liability is yours_
|
| No, that's not how it works. The driver and the driver's
| insurer are on the hook when something bad happens. The
| owner is not, except when the owner is also the one
| driving, or if the owner has been negligent with
| maintenance, and the crash was caused by mechanical failure
| related to that negligence.
|
| If someone else is driving my car and I'm a passenger, and
| they hurt someone with it, the driver is liable, not me. If
| that "someone else" is a piece of software, and that piece
| of software has been licensed/certified/whatever to drive a
| car, why should I be liable for its failures? That piece of
| software needs to be insured, certainly. It doesn't matter
| if I'm required to insure it, or if the manufacturer is
| required to insure it.
|
| Tesla FSD doesn't fit into this scenario because it's not
| the driver. You are still the driver when you engage FSD,
| because despite its name, FSD is not capable of filling
| that role.
| mrpippy wrote:
| Tesla officially renamed it to "Full Self Driving
| (supervised)" a few months ago, previously it was "Full Self
| Driving (beta)"
|
| Both names are ridiculous, for different reasons. Nothing
| called a "beta" should be tested on public roads without a
| trained employee supervising it (i.e. being paid to pay
| attention). And of course it was not "full", it always
| required supervision.
|
| And "Full Self Driving (supervised)" is an absurd oxymoron.
| Given the deaths and crashes that we've already seen, I'm
| skeptical of the entire concept of a system that works 98% of
| the time, but also needs to be closely supervised for the 2%
| of the time when it tries to kill you or others (with no
| alerts).
|
| It's an abdication of duty that NHTSA has let this continue
| for so long, they've picked up the pace recently and I
| wouldn't be surprised if they come down hard on Tesla (unless
| Trump wins, in which case Elon will be put in charge of
| NHTSA, the SEC, and FAA)
| ilyagr wrote:
| I hope they soon rename it into "Fully Supervised Driving".
| awongh wrote:
| Also force other auto makers to be liable when their over-
| tall SUVs cause more deaths than sedan type cars.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth?
|
| The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the
| overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude
| compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its
| operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The
| exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated
| machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in
| any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide
| until the root cause is found and eliminated.
|
| >> It's all too easy to see a potential future where many
| people die needlessly because technology that could save lives
| is regulated into a greatly reduced role.
|
| I really don't like this argument, because we could already
| prevent literally all automotive deaths tomorrow through
| existing technology and legislation and yet we are choosing not
| to do this for economic and social reasons.
| esaym wrote:
| You can't equate airplane safety with automotive safety. I
| worked at an aircraft repair facility doing government
| contracts for a number of years. In one instance, somebody
| lost the toilet paper holder for one of the aircraft. This
| holder was simply a piece of 10 gauge wire that was bent in a
| way to hold it and supported by wire clamps screwed to the
| wall. Making a new one was easy but since it was a new part
| going on the aircraft we had to send it to a lab to be
| certified to hold a roll of toilet paper to 9 g's. In case
| the airplane crashed you wouldn't want a roll of toilet paper
| flying around I guess. And that cost $1,200.
| gambiting wrote:
| No, I'm pretty sure I can in this regard - any automotive
| "autopilot" has to be held to the same standard. It's
| either zero accidents or nothing.
| murderfs wrote:
| This only works for aerospace because everything and
| everyone is held to that standard. It's stupid to hold
| automotive autopilots to the same standard as a plane's
| autopilot when a third of fatalities in cars are caused
| by the pilots being drunk.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think that's a useful argument.
|
| I think we should start allowing autonomous driving when
| the "driver" is at least as safe as the median driver
| when the software is unsupervised. (Teslas may or may not
| be that safe when supervised, but they absolutely are not
| when unsupervised.)
|
| But once we get to that point, we should absolutely
| ratchet those standards so automobile safety over time
| becomes just as safe as airline safety. Safer, if
| possible.
|
| > _It 's stupid to hold automotive autopilots to the same
| standard as a plane's autopilot when a third of
| fatalities in cars are caused by the pilots being drunk._
|
| That's a weird argument, because both pilots and drivers
| get thrown in jail if they fly/drive drunk. The standard
| is the same.
| travem wrote:
| > The answer is zero
|
| If autopilot is 10x safer then preventing its use would lead
| to more preventable deaths and injuries than allowing it.
|
| I agree that it should be regulated and incidents thoroughly
| investigated, however letting perfect be the enemy of good
| leads to stagnation and lack of practical improvement and
| greater injury to the population as a whole.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>If autopilot is 10x safer then preventing its use would
| lead to more preventable deaths and injuries than allowing
| it.
|
| And yet whenever there is a problem with any plane
| autopilot it's preemptively disabled fleet wide and pilots
| have to fly manually even though we absolutely beyond a
| shadow of a doubt know that it's less safe.
|
| If an automated system makes a wrong decision and it
| contributes to harm/death then it cannot be allowed on
| public roads full stop, no matter how many lives it saves
| otherwise.
| exe34 wrote:
| > And yet whenever there is a problem with any plane
| autopilot it's preemptively disabled fleet wide and
| pilots have to fly manually even though we absolutely
| beyond a shadow of a doubt know that it's less safe.
|
| just because we do something dumb in one scenario isn't a
| very persuasive reason to do the same in another.
|
| > then it cannot be allowed on public roads full stop, no
| matter how many lives it saves otherwise.
|
| ambulances sometimes get into accidents - we should ban
| all ambulances, no matter how many lives they save
| otherwise.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| So your only concern is, when something goes wrong, need
| someone to blame. Who cares about lives saved. Vaccines
| can cause adverse effects. Let's ban all of them.
|
| If people like you were in charge of anything, we'd still
| be hitting rocks for fire in caves.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Depends on what one considers a "problem." As long as the
| autopilot's failures conditions and mitigation procedures
| are documented, the burden is largely shifted to the
| operator.
|
| Autopilot didn't prevent slamming into a mountain? Not a
| problem as long as it wasn't designed to.
|
| Crashed on landing? No problem, the manual says not to
| operate it below 500 feet.
|
| Runaway pitch trim? The manual says you must constantly
| be monitoring the autopilot and disengage it when it's
| not operating as expected and to pull the autopilot and
| pitch trim circuit breakers. Clearly insufficient
| operator training is to blame.
| penjelly wrote:
| I'd challenge the legitimacy of the claim that it's 10x
| safer, or even safer at all. The safety data provided isn't
| compelling to me, it can be games or misrepresented in
| various ways, as pointed out by others.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| That claim wasn't made. It was a hypothetical, what if it
| was 10x safer? Then would people tolerate it.
| penjelly wrote:
| yes people would, if we had a reliable metric for safety
| of these systems besides engaged/disengaged. We don't,
| and 10x safer with the current metrics is not
| satisfactory.
| V99 wrote:
| Airplane autopilots follow a lateral & sometimes vertical
| path through the sky prescribed by the pilot(s). They are
| good at doing that. This does increase safety, because it
| frees up the pilot(s) from having to carefully maintain a
| straight 3d line through the sky for hours at a time.
|
| But they do not listen to ATC. They do not know where other
| planes are. They do not keep themselves away from other
| planes. Or the ground. Or a flock of birds. They do not
| handle emergencies. They make only the most basic control-
| loop decisions about the control surface and power (if even
| autothrottle equipped, otherwise that's still the meatbag's
| job) changes needed to follow the magenta line drawn by the
| pilot given a very small set of input data (position,
| airspeed, current control positions, etc).
|
| The next nearest airplane is typically at least 3 miles
| laterally and/or 500' vertically away, because the errors
| allowed with all these components are measured in hundreds of
| feet.
|
| None of this is even remotely comparable to a car using a
| dozen cameras (or lidar) to make real-time decisions to drive
| itself around imperfect public streets full of erratic
| drivers and other pedestrians a few feet away.
|
| What it is a lot like is what Tesla actually sells (despite
| the marketing name). Yes it's "flying" the plane, but you're
| still responsible for making sure it's doing the right thing,
| the right way, and not and not going to hit anything or kill
| anybody.
| kelnos wrote:
| Thank you for this. The number of people conflating Tesla's
| Autopilot with an airliner's autopilot, and expecting that
| use and policies and situations surrounding the two should
| be directly comparable, is staggering. You'd think people
| would be better at critical thinking with this, but... here
| we are.
| Animats wrote:
| Ah. Few people realize how dumb aircraft autopilots
| really are. Even the fanciest ones just follow a series
| of waypoints.
|
| There is one exception - Garmin Safe Return. That's
| strictly an emergency system. If it activates, the plane
| is squawking emergency to ATC and and demanding that
| airspace and a runway be cleared for it.[1] This has been
| available since 2019 and does not seem to have yet been
| activated in an emergency.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/PiGkzgfR_c0?t=87
| V99 wrote:
| It does do that and it's pretty neat, if you have one of
| the very few modern turboprops or small jets that have
| G3000s & auto throttle to support it.
|
| Airliners don't have this, but they have a 2nd pilot. A
| real-world activation needs a single-pilot operation
| where they're incapacitated, in one of the maybe few
| hundred nice-but-not-too-nice private planes it's
| equipped in, and a passenger is there to push it.
|
| But this is all still largely using the current magenta
| line AP system, and that's how it's verifiable and
| certifiable. There's still no cameras or vision or AI
| deciding things, there are a few new bits of relatively
| simple standalone steps combined to get a good result.
|
| - Pick a new magenta line to an airport (like pressing
| NRST Enter Enter if you have filtering set to only
| suitable fields)
|
| - Pick a vertical path that intersects with the runway
| (Load a straight-in visual approach from the database)
|
| - Ensure that line doesn't hit anything in the
| terrain/obstacle database. (Terrain warning system has
| all this info, not sure how it changes the plan if there
| is a conflict. This is probably the hardest part, with an
| actual decision to make).
|
| - Look up the tower frequency in DB and broadcast
| messages. As you said it's telling and not
| asking/listening.
|
| - Other humans know to get out of the way because this IS
| what's going to happen. This is normal, an emergency
| aircraft gets whatever it wants.
|
| - Standard AP and autothrottle flies the newly prescribed
| path.
|
| - The radio altimeter lets it know when to flare.
|
| - Wheel weight sensors let it know to apply the brakes.
|
| - The airport helps people out and tows the plane away,
| because it doesn't know how to taxi.
|
| There's also "auto glide" on the more accessible G3x
| suite for planes that aren't necessarily $3m+. That will
| do most of the same stuff and get you almost, but not all
| the way, to the ground in front of a runway
| automatically.
| Animats wrote:
| > and a passenger is there to push it.
|
| I think it will also activate if the pilot is
| unconscious, for solo flights. It has something like a
| driver alertness detection system that will alarm if the
| pilot does nothing for too long. The pilot can reset the
| alarm, but if they do nothing, the auto return system
| takes over and lands the plane someplace.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > They do not know where other planes are.
|
| Yes they do. It's called TCAS.
|
| > Or the ground.
|
| Yes they do. It's called Auto-GCAS.
| V99 wrote:
| Yes those are optional systems that exist, but they are
| unrelated to the autopilot (in at least the vast majority
| of avionics).
|
| They are warning systems that humans respond to. For a
| TCAS RA the first thing you're doing is disengaging the
| autopilot.
|
| If you tell the autopilot to fly straight into the path
| of a mountain, it will happily comply and kill you while
| the ground proximity warnings blare.
|
| Humans make the decisions in planes. Autopilots are a
| useful but very basic tool, much more akin to cruise
| control in a 1998 Civic than a self-driving
| Tesla/Waymo/erc.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Autopilots aren't held to a zero error standard let alone a
| zero accident standard.
| peterdsharpe wrote:
| > literally no errors in its operation are tolerated
|
| Aircraft designer here, this is not true. We typically
| certify to <1 catastrophic failure per 1e9 flight hours. Not
| zero.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > _"The answer is zero..."_
|
| > _"If there is any issue discovered in any car with this
| tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root
| cause is found and eliminated."_
|
| This would literally cost millions of needless deaths in a
| situation where AI drivers had 1/10th the accident injury
| rate of human drivers.
| croes wrote:
| > It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance
| traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable.
|
| Were the Teslas driving under all weather conditions at any
| location like humans do or is it just cherry picked from the
| easy travelling conditions?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I think we should not be satisfied with merely "better than a
| human". Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any
| casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles
| _at least_ that safe.
| aantix wrote:
| Before FSD is allowed on public roads?
|
| It's a net positive, saving lives right now.
| cubefox wrote:
| > I think we should not be satisfied with merely "better than
| a human".
|
| The question is whether you want to outlaw automatic driving
| just because the system is, say, "only" 50% safer than us.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think the question was what we should be satisfied
| with or what we should aspire to. I absolutely agree with you
| that we should strive to make autonomous driving as safe as
| airline travel.
|
| But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving
| on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe
| as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold.
|
| (The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised --
| would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to
| be supervised to be safer than the median human driver,
| assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver
| is going to be equally good at supervising it.)
| josephcsible wrote:
| Aspire to, yes. But if we say "we're going to ban FSD until
| it's perfect, even though it already saves lives relative to
| the average human driver", you're making automobiles _less_
| safe.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable.
|
| It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than
| they have been since we've started driving.
|
| > Accidents caused by human drivers
|
| Are there any other types of drivers?
|
| > are one of the largest causes of injury and death
|
| More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused
| by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear
| on this. Impaired people cannot drive well. Non impaired people
| drive orders of magnitude better.
|
| > technology that could save lives
|
| There is absolutely zero evidence this is true. Everyone is
| basing this off of a total misunderstanding of the source of
| fatalities and a willful misapprehension of the technology.
| blargey wrote:
| > Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better.
|
| That raises the question - how many _impaired_ driver-miles
| are being baked into the collision statistics for "median
| human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving
| as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with
| drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people
| N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the
| drunk driver population, after all.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Motorcycles account for a further 15% of all fatalities in
| a typical year. Weather is often a factor. Road design is
| sometimes a factor, remembering several rollover crashes
| that ended in a body of water and no one in the vehicle
| surviving. Likewise ejections during fatalities due to lack
| of seatbelt use is also noticeable.
|
| Once you dig into the data you see that almost every crash,
| at this point in history, is really a mini-story detailing
| the confluence of several factors that turned a basic
| accident into something fatal.
|
| Also, and I only saw this once, but if you literally have a
| heart attack behind the wheel, you are technically a
| roadway fatality. The driver was 99. He just died while
| sitting in slow moving traffic.
|
| Which brings me to my final point which is the rear seats
| in automobiles are less safe than the front seats. This is
| true for almost every vehicle on the road. You see _a lot_
| of accidents where two 40 to 50 year old passengers are up
| front and two 70 to 80 year old passengers are in back. The
| ones up front survive. One or both passengers in the back
| typically die.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, that makes no sense, because we can't ensure that human
| drivers aren't impaired. We test and compare against the
| reality, not the ideal we'd prefer.
| akira2501 wrote:
| We can sample rate of impairment. We do this quite often
| actually. It turns out the rate depends on the time of
| day.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Are there any other types of drivers [than human
| drivers]?_
|
| Waymo says yes, there are.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Many people don't (and shouldn't) take the "half the casualty
| rate" at face value. My biggest concern is that Waymo and Tesla
| are juking the stats to make self-driving cars seem safer than
| they really are. I believe this is largely an unintentional
| consequence of bad actuary science coming from bad qualitative
| statistics; the worst kind of lying with numbers is lying to
| yourself.
|
| The biggest gap in these studies: I have yet to see a
| comparison with human drivers that filters out DUIs, reckless
| speeding, or mechanical failures. Without doing this it is
| simply not a fair comparison, because:
|
| 1) Self-driving cars won't end drunk driving unless it's made
| mandatory by outlawing manual driving or ignition is tied to a
| breathalyzer. Many people will continue to make the dumb
| decision to drive themselves home because they are drunk and
| driving is fun. This needs regulation, not technology. And DUIs
| need to be filtered from the crash statistics when comparing
| with Waymo.
|
| 2) A self-driving car which speeds and runs red lights might
| well be more dangerous than a similar human, but the data says
| nothing about this since Waymo is currently on their best
| behavior. Yet Tesla's own behavior and customers prove that
| there is demand for reckless self-driving cars, and
| manufacturers will meet the demand unless the law steps in.
| Imagine a Waymo competitor that promises Uber-level ETAs for
| people in a hurry. Technology could in theory solve this but in
| practice the market could make things worse for several decades
| until the next research breakthrough. Human accidents coming
| from distraction are a fair comparison to Waymo, but speeding
| or aggressiveness should be filtered out. The difficulty of
| doing so is one of the many reasons I am so skeptical of these
| stats.
|
| 3) Mechanical failures are a hornets' nest of ML edge cases
| that might work in the lab but fail miserably on the road.
| Currently it's not a big deal because the cars are shiny and
| new. Eventually we'll have self-driving clunkers owned by
| drivers who don't want to pay for the maintenance.
|
| And that's not even mentioning that Waymos are not self-
| driving, they rely on close remote oversight to guide AI
| through the many billions of common-sense problems that
| computets will not able to solve for at least the next decade,
| probably much longer. True self-driving cars will continue to
| make inexplicably stupid decisions: these machines are still
| much dumber than lizards. Stories like "the Tesla slammed into
| an overturned tractor trailer because the AI wasn't trained on
| overturned trucks" are a huge problem and society will not let
| Tesla try to launder it away with statistics.
|
| Self-driving cars might end up saving lives. But would they
| save more lives than adding mandatory breathalyzers and GPS-
| based speed limits? And if market competition overtakes
| business ethics, would they cost more lives than they save? The
| stats say very little about this.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _My biggest concern is that Waymo and Tesla are juking the
| stats to make self-driving cars seem safer than they really
| are_
|
| Even intentional juking aside, you can't really compare the
| two.
|
| Waymo cars drive completely autonomously, without a
| supervising driver in the car. If it does something unsafe,
| there's no one there to correct it, and it may get into a
| crash, in the same way a human driver doing that same unsafe
| thing might.
|
| With Tesla FSD, we have no idea how good it really is. We
| know that a human is supervising it, and despite all the
| reports we see of people doing super irresponsible things
| while "driving" a Tesla (like taking a nap), I imagine most
| Tesla FSD users are actually attentively supervising for the
| most part. If all FSD users stopped supervising and started
| taking naps, I suspect the crash rate and fatality rate would
| start looking like the rate for the worst drivers on the
| road... or even worse than that.
|
| So it's not that they're juking their stats (although they
| may be), it's that they don't actually have all the stats
| that matter. Waymo has and had those stats, because their
| trained human test drivers were reporting when the car did
| something unsafe and they had to take over. Tesla FSD users
| don't report when they have to do that. The data is just not
| there.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| There's two things going on here with there average person that
| you need to overcome: That when Tesla dodges responsibility all
| anyone sees is a liar, and that people amalgamate all the FSD
| crashes and treat the system like a dangerous local driver that
| nobody can get off the road.
|
| Tesla markets FSD like it's a silver bullet, and the name is
| truly misleading. The fine print says you need attention and
| all that. But again, people read "Full Self Driving" and all
| the marketing copy and think the system is assuming
| responsibility for the outcomes. Then a crash happens, Tesla
| throws the driver under the bus, and everyone gets a bit more
| skeptical of the system. Plus, doing that to a person rubs
| people the wrong way, and is in some respects a barrier to
| sales.
|
| Which leads to the other point: People are tallying up all the
| accidents and treating the system like a person, and wondering
| why this dangerous driver is still on the road. Most accidents
| with dead pedestrian start with someone doing something stupid,
| which is when they assume all responsibility, legally speaking.
| Drunk, speeding, etc. Normal drivers in poor conditions slow
| down and drive carefully. People see this accident, and treat
| FSD like a serial drunk driver. It's to the point that I know
| people that openly say they treat teslas on roads like they're
| erratic drivers just for existing.
|
| Until Elon figures out how to fix his perception problem, the
| calls for investigations and to keep his robotaxis is off the
| road will only grow.
| danans wrote:
| > The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be
| before people tolerate it.
|
| It's pretty simple: as good as it can be given available
| technologies and techniques, without sacrificing safety for
| cost or style.
|
| With AVs, function and safety should obviate concerns of style,
| cost, and marketing. If that doesn't work with your business
| model, well tough luck.
|
| Airplanes are far safer than cars yet we subject their
| manufacturers to rigorous standards, or seemingly did until
| recently, as the 737 max saga has revealed. Even still the
| rigor is very high compared to road vehicles.
|
| And AVs do have to be way better than people at driving because
| they are machines that have no sense of human judgement, though
| they operate in a human physical context.
|
| Machines run by corporations are less accountable than human
| drivers, not at the least because of the wealth and legal
| armies of those corporations who may have interests other than
| making the safest possible AV.
| mavhc wrote:
| Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price, also
| matters, unless you're going to ban private cars
| danans wrote:
| > Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price,
| also matters, unless you're going to ban private cars
|
| Indeed, like this: the more cars sold that claim fully
| autonomous capability, and the more affordable they get,
| the higher the standards should be compared to their _AV_
| predecessors, even if they have long eclipsed human driver
| 's safety record.
|
| If this is unpalatable, then let's assign 100% liability
| with steep monetary penalties to the AV manufacturer for
| any crash that happens under autonomous driving mode.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance
| traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable.
|
| Even if we optimistically assume no "gotchas" in the statistics
| [0], distilling performance down to a casualty/injury/accident-
| rate can still be dangerously reductive, when the have a
| different _distribution_ of failure-modes which do /don't mesh
| with our other systems and defenses.
|
| A quick thought experiment to prove the point: Imagine a system
| which compared to human drivers had only half the rate of
| accidents... But many of those are because it unpredictably
| decides to jump the sidewalk curb and kill a targeted
| pedestrian.
|
| The raw numbers are encouraging, but it represents a risk
| profile that clashes horribly with our other systems of road
| design, car design, and what incidents humans are expecting and
| capable of preventing or recovering-from.
|
| [0] Ex: Automation is only being used on certain _subsets_ of
| all travel which are the "easier" miles or circumstances than
| the whole gamut a human would handle.
| kelnos wrote:
| Re: gotchas: an even easier one is that the Tesla FSD
| statistics don't include when the car does something unsafe
| and the driver intervenes and takes control, averting a
| crash.
|
| How often does that happen? We have no idea. Tesla can
| certainly tell when a driver intervenes, but they can't count
| every occurrence as safety-related, because a driver might
| take control for all sorts of reasons.
|
| This is why we can make stronger statements about the safety
| of Waymo. Their software was only tested by people trained
| and paid to test it, who were also recording every time they
| had to intervene because of safety, even if there was no
| crash. That's a metric they could track and improve.
| __loam wrote:
| The problem is that Tesla is way behind the industry standards
| here and it's misrepresenting how good their tech is.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > How about a quarter? Or a tenth?
|
| Probably closer to the latter. The "skin in the game"
| (physically) argument makes me more willing to accept drunk
| drivers than greedy manufacturers when it comes to making
| mistakes or being negligent.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance
| traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable.
|
| Are you sure? Right now FSD is active with no one actually
| knowing its casualty rate, and the for the most part the only
| people upset about it are terminally online people on twitter
| or luddites on HN.
| moogly wrote:
| > Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest
| causes of injury and death
|
| In some parts of the world. Perhaps some countries should look
| deeper into why and why self-driving cars might not be the No.
| 1 answer to reduce traffic accidents.
| kelnos wrote:
| If Tesla's FSD was actually self-driving, maybe half the
| casualty rate of the median human driver would be fine.
|
| But it's not. It requires constant supervision, and drivers
| sometimes have to take control (without the system disengaging
| on its own) in order to correct it from doing something unsafe.
|
| If we had stats for what the casualty rate would be if every
| driver using it never took control back unless the car signaled
| it was going to disengage, I suspect that casualty rate would
| be much worse than the median human driver. But we don't have
| those stats, so we shouldn't trust it until we do.
|
| This is why Waymo is safe and tolerated and Tesla FSD is not.
| Waymo test drivers record every time they have to take over
| control of the car for safety reasons. That was a metric they
| had to track and improve, or it would have been impossible to
| offer people rides without someone in the driver's seat.
| fma wrote:
| Flying is safer than driving but Boeing isn't getting a free
| pass on quality issues. Why would Tesla?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The key here is insurers. Because they pick up the bill when
| things go wrong. As soon as self driving becomes clearly better
| than humans, they'll be insisting we stop risking their money
| by driving ourselves whenever that is feasible. And they'll do
| that with price incentives. They'll happily insure you if you
| want to drive yourself. But you'll pay a premium. And a
| discount if you are happy to let the car do the driving.
|
| Eventually, manual driving should come with a lot more
| scrutiny. Because once it becomes a choice rather than an
| economic necessity, other people on the road will want to be
| sure that you are not needlessly endangering them. So, stricter
| requirements for getting a drivers license with more training
| and fitness/health requirements. This too will be driven by
| insurers. They'll want to make sure you are fit to drive.
|
| And of course when manual driving people get into trouble,
| taking away their driving license is always a possibility. The
| main argument against doing that right now is that a lot of
| people depend economically on being able to drive. But if that
| argument goes away, there's no reason to not be a lot stricter
| for e.g. driving under influence, or routinely breaking laws
| for speeding and other traffic violations. Think higher fines
| and driving license suspensions.
| frabjoused wrote:
| I don't understand why this debate/probing is not just data
| driven. Driving is all big data.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
|
| This report does not include fatalities, which seems to be the
| key point in question. Unless the above report has some bias or
| is false, Teslas in autopilot appear 10 times safer than the US
| average.
|
| Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
|
| And otherwise, if the stats say it is safer, why is there any
| debate at all?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Autopilot is not FSD.
| frabjoused wrote:
| That's a good point. Are there no published numbers on FSD?
| JTatters wrote:
| Those statistics are incredibly misleading.
|
| - It is safe to assume that the vast majority of autopilot
| miles are on highways (although Tesla don't release this
| information).
|
| - By far the safest roads per mile driven are highways.
|
| - Autopilot will engage least during the most dangerous
| conditions (heavy rain, snow, fog, nighttime).
| notshift wrote:
| Without opening the link, the problem with every piece of data
| I've seen from Tesla is they're comparing apples to oranges.
| FSD won't activate in adverse driving conditions, aka when
| accidents are much more likely to occur. And/or drivers are
| choosing not to use it in those conditions.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Unless the above report has some bias or is false
|
| Welcome to Tesla.
|
| The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to FSD
| mode: the conditions, weather, road, location, traffic all have
| to meet a certain quality threshold before the system will be
| enabled (or not disable itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear
| spring day to Pittsburgh December nights.
|
| There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers, all
| conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all traffic.
|
| It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are not
| that stupid, so it's willfully misleading.
|
| > This report does not include fatalities
|
| It also doesn't consider any incident where there was not
| airbag deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially
| reasonable until you consider:
|
| - first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision exceeds
| threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety systems consider
| duration of impact, speeds, G-forces, amount of intrusion,
| angle of collision, and a multitude of other factors before
| deciding what, if any, systems to fire (seatbelt tensioners,
| airbags, etc.) So hit something at 30mph with the right
| variables? Tesla: "this is not an accident".
|
| - Tesla also does not consider "incident was so catastrophic
| that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an accident, because
| "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella could also include
| egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and
| including poor assembly line quality control", as also not an
| accident and also "not counted".
|
| > Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
|
| They do not.
|
| They also refuse to give the public much of any data beyond
| these carefully curated numbers. Hell, NHTSA/NTSB also mostly
| have to drag heavily redacted data kicking and screaming out of
| Tesla's hands.
| jsight wrote:
| The report from Tesla is very biased. It doesn't normalize for
| the difficulty of the conditions involved, and is basically for
| marketing purposes.
|
| IMO, the challenge for NHTSA is that they can get tremendous
| detail from Tesla but not from other makes. This will make it
| very difficult for them to get a solid baseline for collisions
| due to glare in non-FSD equipped vehicles.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I was in a Model 3 Uber yesterday and my driver had to serve onto
| and up a curb to avoid an (idiot) who was trying to turn into
| traffic going in the other direction.
|
| The Model 3 had every opportunity in the world to brake and it
| didn't, we were probably only going 25mph. I know this is about
| FSD here, but that moment 100% made me realize Tesla has awful
| obstacle avoidance.
|
| I just happen to be looking forward and it was a very plain and
| clear T-Bone avoidance, and at no point did the car handle or
| trigger anything.
|
| Thankfully everyone was ok, but the front lip got pretty beat up
| from driving up the curb. Of course the driver at fault that
| caused the whole incident drove off.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Was the Uber driver using FSD or autopilot?
|
| Obstacle avoidance and automatic braking can easily be switched
| on or off by the driver.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be
| before we tolerate it. I got a one month free trial of FSD and
| turned it off after two weeks. Quite simply: it's dangerous.
|
| - It failed with a cryptic system error while driving
|
| - It started making a left turn far too early that would have
| scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually
| intervene.
|
| - In my opinion, the default setting accelerates way too
| aggressively. I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver and it
| is too aggressive for my taste.
|
| - It tried to make way too many right turns on red when it wasn't
| safe to. It would creep into the road, almost into the path of
| oncoming vehicles.
|
| - It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto the
| highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system should
| have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first place.
|
| - It would switch lanes to go faster on the highway, but then
| missed an exit on at least one occasion because it couldn't make
| it back into the right lane in time. Stupid.
|
| After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. Until
| I ride in one and _feel_ safe, I can 't have any faith that this
| is a reasonable system. Hell, even autopilot does dumb shit on a
| regular basis. I'm grateful to be getting a car from another
| manufacturer this year.
| frabjoused wrote:
| The thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers. If it is
| dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the reported numbers
| show more accidents when FSD is on?
|
| When I did the trial on my Tesla, I also noted these kinds of
| things and felt like I had to take control.
|
| But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter.
| akira2501 wrote:
| You can measure risks without having to witness disaster.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Maybe other human drivers are reacting quickly and avoiding
| potential accidents from dangerous computer driving? That
| would be ironic, but I'm sure it's possible in some
| situations.
| jsight wrote:
| Because it is bad enough that people really do supervise it.
| I see people who say that wouldn't happen because the drivers
| become complacent.
|
| Maybe that could be a problem with future versions, but I
| don't see it happening with 12.3.x. I've also heard that
| driver attention monitoring is pretty good in the later
| versions, but I have no first hand experience yet.
| valval wrote:
| Very good point. The product that requires supervision and
| tells the user to keep their hands on the wheel every 10
| seconds is not good enough to be used unsupervised.
|
| I wonder how things are inside your head. Are you ignorant
| or affected by some strong bias?
| jsight wrote:
| Yeah, it definitely isn't good enough to be used
| unsupervised. TBH, they've switched to eye and head
| tracking as the primary mechanism of attention monitoring
| now. It seems to work pretty well, now that I've had a
| chance to try it.
|
| I'm not quite sure what you meant by your second
| paragraph, but I'm sure I have my blind spots and biases.
| I do have direct experience with various versions of 12.x
| though (12.3 and now 12.5).
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Is Tesla required to report system failures or the vehicle
| damaging itself? How do we know they're not optimizing for
| the benchmark (what they're legally required to report)?
| rvnx wrote:
| If the question is: "was FSD activated at the time of the
| accident: yes/no", they can legally claim no, for example
| if luckily the FSD disconnects half a second before a
| dangerous situation (eg: glare obstructing cameras), which
| may coincide exactly with the times of some accidents.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any
| crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds
| before impact, and we count all crashes in which the
| incident alert indicated an airbag or other active
| restraint deployed.
|
| Scroll down to Methodology at
| https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
| rvnx wrote:
| This is for Autopilot, which is the car following system
| on highways. If you are in cruise control and staying on
| your lane, not much is supposed to happen.
|
| The FSD numbers are much more hidden.
|
| The general accident rate is 1 per 400'000 miles driven.
|
| FSD has one "critical disengagement" (aka before accident
| if human or safety braking doesn't intervene) every 33
| miles driven.
|
| It means to reach unsupervised with human quality they
| would need to improve it 10'000 times in few months. Not
| saying it is impossible, just highly optimistic. In 10
| years we will be there, but in 2 months, sounds a bit
| overpromising.
| Uzza wrote:
| All manufacturers have for some time been required by
| regulators to report any accident where an autonomous or
| partially autonomous system was active within 30 seconds of
| an accident.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| My question is better rephrased as "what is legally
| considered an accident that needs to be reported?" If the
| car scrapes a barricade or curbs it hard but the airbags
| don't deploy and the car doesn't sense the damage,
| clearly they don't. There's a wide spectrum of issues up
| to the point where someone is injured or another car is
| damaged.
| kelnos wrote:
| And not to move the goalposts, but I think we should also
| be tracking any time the human driver feels they need to
| take control because the autonomous system did something
| they didn't believe was safe.
|
| That's not a crash (fortunately!), but it _is_ a failure
| of the autonomous system.
|
| This is hard to track, though, of course: people might
| take over control for reasons unrelated to safety, or
| people may misinterpret something that's safe as unsafe.
| So you can't just track this from a simple "human driver
| took control".
| timabdulla wrote:
| > If it is dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the
| reported numbers show more accidents when FSD is on?
|
| Even if it is true that the data show that with FSD (not
| Autopilot) enabled, drivers are in fewer crashes, I would be
| worried about other confounding factors.
|
| For instance, I would assume that drivers are more likely to
| engage FSD in situations of lower complexity (less traffic,
| little construction or other impediments, overall lesser
| traffic flow control complexity, etc.) I also believe that at
| least initially, Tesla only released FSD to drivers with high
| safety scores relative to their total driver base, another
| obvious confounding factor.
|
| Happy to be proven wrong though if you have a link to a
| recent study that goes through all of this.
| valval wrote:
| Either the system causes less loss of life than a human
| driver or it doesn't. The confounding factors don't matter,
| as Tesla hasn't presented a study on the subject. That's in
| the future, and all stats that are being gathered right now
| are just that.
| unbrice wrote:
| > Either the system causes less loss of life than a human
| driver or it doesn't. The confounding factors don't
| matter.
|
| Confounding factors are what allows one to tell appart
| "the system cause less loss of life" from "the system
| causes more loss of life yet it is only enabled in
| situations were fewer lives are lost".
| kelnos wrote:
| No, that's absolutely not how this works. Confounding
| factors are things that make your data not tell you what
| you are actually trying to understand. You can't just
| hand-wave that away, sorry.
|
| Consider: what I expect is _actually_ true based on the
| data is that Tesla FSD is as safe or safer than the
| average human driver, but only if the driver is paying
| attention and is ready to take over in case FSD does
| something unsafe, even if FSD doesn 't warn the driver it
| needs to disengage.
|
| That's not an autonomous driving system. Which is
| potentially fine, but the value prop of that system is
| low to me: I have to pay just as much attention as if I
| were driving manually, with the added problem that my
| attention is going to start to wander because the car is
| doing most of the work, and the longer the car
| successfully does most of the work, the more I'm going to
| unconsciously believe I can allow my attention to slip.
|
| I do like current common ADAS features because they hit a
| good sweet spot: I still need to actively hold onto the
| wheel and handle initiating lane changes, turns, stopping
| and starting at traffic lights and stop signs, etc. I
| look at the ADAS as a sort of "backup" to my own driving,
| and not as what's primarily in control of the car. In
| contrast, Tesla FSD wants to be primarily in control of
| the car, but it's not trustworthy enough to do that
| without constant supervision.
| nkrisc wrote:
| What numbers? Who's measuring? What are they measuring?
| rvnx wrote:
| There is an easy way to know what is really behind the
| numbers: look who is paying in case of accident.
|
| You have a Mercedes, Mercedes takes responsibility.
|
| You have a Tesla, you take the responsibility.
|
| Says a lot.
| tensor wrote:
| You have a Mercedes, and you have a system that works
| virtually nowhere.
| therouwboat wrote:
| Better that way than "Oh it tried to run red light, but
| otherwise it's great."
| tensor wrote:
| "Oh we tried to build it but no one bought it! So we gave
| up." - Mercedes before Tesla.
|
| Perhaps FSD isn't ready for city streets yet, but it's
| great on the highways and I'd 1000x prefer we make
| progress rather than settle for the status quo garbage
| that the legacy makers put out. Also, human drivers are
| the most dangerous, by far, we need to make progress to
| eventual phase them out.
| meibo wrote:
| 2-ton blocks of metal that go 80mph next to me on the
| highway is not the place I would want people to go "fuck
| it let's just do it" with their new tech. Human drivers
| might be dangerous but adding more danger and
| unpredictability on top just because we can skip a few
| steps in the engineering process is crazy.
|
| Maybe you have a deathwish, but I definitely don't. Your
| choices affect other humans in traffic.
| tensor wrote:
| It sounds like you are the one with a deathwish, because
| objectively by the numbers Autopilot on the highway has
| greatly reduced death. So you are literally advocating
| for more death.
|
| You have two imperfect systems for highway driving:
| Autopilot with human oversight, and humans. The first has
| far far less death. Yet you are choosing the second.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Mercedes had the insight that if no one is able to actually
| use the system then it can't cause any crashes.
|
| Technically, that is the easiest way to get a perfect
| safety record and journalists will seemingly just go along
| with the charade.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| While I don't disagree with your point in general, it
| should be noted that there is more to taking responsibility
| than just paying. Even if Mercedes Drive Pilot was enabled,
| anything that involves court appearances and criminal
| liability is still your problem if you're in the driver's
| seat.
| lawn wrote:
| > The thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers.
|
| Oh? Who are presenting the numbers?
|
| Is a crash that fails to trigger the airbags still not
| counted as a crash?
|
| What about the car turning off FSD right before a crash?
|
| How about adjusting for factors such as age of driver and the
| type of miles driven?
|
| The numbers don't make sense because they're not good
| comparisons and are made to make Tesla look good.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The numbers collected by the NHTSA and insurance companies do
| show that FSD is dangerous...that's why the NHTSA started
| investigating and its why most insurance companies won't
| insure Tesla vehicles or charge significantly higher rates.
|
| Also, Tesla is known to disable self-driving features right
| before collisions to give the appearance of driver fault.
|
| And the coup de grace: if Tesla's own data showed that FSD
| was actually safer, they'd be shouting it from the moon,
| using that data to get self-driving permits in CA, and
| offering to assume liability if FSD actually caused an
| accident (like Mercedes does with its self driving system).
| throwaway562if1 wrote:
| AIUI the numbers are for accidents where FSD is in control.
| Which means if it does a turn into oncoming traffic and the
| driver yanks the wheel or slams the brakes 500ms before
| collision, it's not considered a crash during FSD.
| Uzza wrote:
| That is not correct. Tesla counts any accident within 5
| seconds of Autopilot/FSD turning off as the system being
| involved. Regulators extend that period to 30 seconds, and
| Tesla must comply with that when reporting to them.
| kelnos wrote:
| How about when it turns into oncoming traffic, the driver
| yanks the wheel, manages to get back on track, and avoids
| a crash? Do we know how often things like that happen?
| Because that's also a failure of the system, and that
| should affect how reliable and safe we rate these things.
| I expect we don't have data on that.
|
| Also how about: it turns into oncoming traffic, but there
| isn't much oncoming traffic, and that traffic swerves to
| get out of the way, before FSD realizes what it's done
| and pulls back into the correct lane. We _certainly_ don
| 't have data on that.
| concordDance wrote:
| Several people in this thread have been saying this or
| similar. It's incorrect, from Tesla:
|
| "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any
| crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds
| before impact"
|
| https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport
|
| Situations which inevitably cause a crash more than 5
| seconds later seem like they would be extremely rare.
| rvnx wrote:
| This is Autopilot, not FSD which is an entirely different
| product
| johnneville wrote:
| are there even transparent reported numbers available ?
|
| for whatever does exist, it is also easy to imagine how they
| could be misleading. for instance i've disengaged FSD when i
| noticed i was about to be in an accident. if i couldn't
| recover in time, the accident would not be when FSD is on and
| depending on the metric, would not be reported as a FSD
| induced accident.
| kelnos wrote:
| Agree that only the numbers matter, but only if the numbers
| are comprehensive and useful.
|
| How often does an autonomous driving system get the driver
| into a dicey situation, but the driver notices the bad
| behavior, takes control, and avoids a crash? I don't think we
| have publicly-available data on that at all.
|
| You admit that you ran into some of these sorts of situations
| during your trial. Those situations are unacceptable. An
| autonomous driving system should be safer than a human
| driver, and should not make mistakes that a human driver
| would not make.
|
| Despite all the YouTube videos out there of people doing
| unsafe things with Tesla FSD, I expect that most people that
| use it are pretty responsible, are paying attention, and are
| ready to take over if they notice FSD doing something wrong.
| But if people need to do that, it's not a safe, successful
| autonomous driving system. Safety means everyone can watch
| TV, mess around on their phone, or even take a nap, and we
| _still_ end up with a lower crash rate than with human
| drivers.
|
| The numbers that are available can't tell us if that would be
| the case. My belief is that we're absolutely not there.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter.
|
| Are these the numbers reported by tesla, or by some third
| party?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's not just about relative safety compared to all human
| driving.
|
| We all know that some humans are sometimes terrible drivers!
|
| We also know what that looks like: Driving too fast or slow
| relative to surroundings. Quickly turning every once in a while
| to stay in their lane. Aggressively weaving through traffic.
| Going through an intersection without spending the time to
| actually look for pedestrians. The list goes on..
|
| Bad human driving can be seen. Bad automated driving _is
| invisible_. Do you think the people who were about to be hit by
| a Tesla even realized that was the case? I sincerely doubt it.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Bad automated driving is invisible.
|
| I'm literally saying that it is visible, to me, the
| passenger. And for reasons that aren't just bad vibes. If I'm
| in an Uber and I feel unsafe, I'll report the driver. Why
| would I pay for my car to do that to me?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| GP means that the signs aren't obvious to other drivers. We
| generally underestimate how important psychological
| modelling is for communication, because it's transparent to
| most of us under most circumstances, but AI systems have
| _very_ different psychology to humans. It is easier to
| interpret the body language of a fox than a self-driving
| car.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| We are taking about the same thing: unpredictability. If
| you and everyone else _can 't predict_ what your car will
| do, then that seems objectively unsafe to me. It also
| sounds like we agree with each other.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't think you're supposed to merge left when people are
| merging on the highway into your lane- you have right of way. I
| find even with the right of way many people merging aren't
| paying attention, but I deal with that by slightly speeding up
| (so they can see me in front of them).
| sangnoir wrote:
| You don't have a right of way over a slow moving vehicle that
| merged _ahead_ of you. Most ramps are not long enough to
| allow merging traffic to accelerate to highway speeds before
| merging, so many drivers free up the right-most lane for this
| purpose (by merging left)
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Most ramps are more than long enough to accelerate close
| enough to traffic speed if one wants to, especially in most
| modern vehicles.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Unless the driver in front of you didn't.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you can safely move left to make room for merging
| traffic, you should. It's considerate and reduces the
| chances of an accident.
| dekhn wrote:
| Since a number of people are giving pushback, can you point
| to any (California-oriented) driving instructions
| consistent with this? I'm not seeing any. I see people
| saying "it's curteous", but when I'm driving I'm managing
| hundreds of variables and changing lanes is often risky,
| given motorcycles lanesplitting at high speed (quite
| common).
| davidcalloway wrote:
| Definitely not California but literally the first part of
| traffic law in Germany says that caution and
| consideration are required from all partaking in traffic.
|
| Germans are not known for poor driving.
| dekhn wrote:
| Right- but the "consideration" here is the person merging
| onto the highway actually paying attention and adjusting,
| rather than pointedly not even looking (this is a very
| common merging behavior where I life). Changing lanes
| isn't without risk even on a clear day with good
| visibility. Seems like my suggestion of slowing down or
| speeding up makes perfect sense because it's less risky
| overall, and is still being considerate.
|
| Note that I personally do change lanes at times when it's
| safe, convenient, I am experienced with the intersection,
| and the merging driver is being especially unaware.
| watwut wrote:
| Consideration is also making space for slower car wanting
| to merge and Germans do it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| It's not just courteous, it's self serving, AFAIK, a
| self-emergent phenomenon. If you're driving at 65 mph and
| anticipate a slow down in your lane due merging traffic,
| do you stay in your lane and slow down to 40 mph, or do
| you change lanes (if it's safe to do so) and maintain
| your speed?
|
| Texas highways allow for much higher merging speeds at
| the cost of far large (land area), 5-level interchanges
| rather than 35 mph offramps and onramps common in
| California.
|
| Any defensive driving course (which fall under
| instruction IMO) states that you don't always _have_ to
| exercise your right of way, and indeed it may be unsafe
| to do so in some circumstances. Anticipating the actions
| of other drivers around you and avoiding potentially
| dangerous are the other aspects of being a defensive
| driver, and those concepts are consistent with freeing up
| the lane slower-moving vehicles are merging onto when it
| 's safe to do so.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Just because you have the right of way doesn't mean the
| correct thing to do is to remain in the lane. If remaining in
| your lane is likely to make _someone else_ do something
| reckless, you should have been proactive. Not legally, for
| the sake of being a good driver.
| dekhn wrote:
| Can you point to some online documentation that recommends
| changing lanes in preference to speeding up when a person
| is merging at too slow a speed? What I'm doing is following
| CHP guidance in this post:
| https://www.facebook.com/chpmarin/posts/lets-talk-about-
| merg... """Finally, if you are the vehicle already
| traveling in the slow lane, show some common courtesy and
| do what you can to create a space for the person by slowing
| down a bit or speeding up if it is safer. """
|
| (you probably misinterpreted what I said. I do sometimes
| change lanes, even well in advance of a merge I know is
| prone to problems, if that's the safest and most
| convenient. What I am saying is the guidance I have read
| indicates that staying in the same lane is generally safer
| than changing lanes, and speeding up into an empty space is
| better for everybody than slowing down, especially because
| many people who are merging will keep slowing down more and
| more when the highway driver slows for them)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > recommends changing lanes in preference to speeding up
| when a person is merging at too slow a speed
|
| It doesn't matter, Tesla does neither. It always does the
| worst possible non-malicious behavior.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I read all this thread and all I can say is not
| everything in the world is written down somewhere
| modeless wrote:
| Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year.
| It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who
| tried it for the first time probably share your opinion.
|
| That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3
| that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version
| 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the
| improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly, the rate
| of improvement in the past two months has been much faster than
| before.
|
| Yesterday I spent an hour in the car over three drives and did
| not have to turn the steering wheel at all except for parking.
| That _never_ happened on 12.3. And I don 't even have 12.6 yet,
| this is still 12.5; others report that 12.6 is a noticeable
| improvement over 12.5. And version 13 is scheduled for release
| in the next two weeks, and the FSD team has actually hit their
| last few release milestones.
|
| People are right that it is still not ready yet, but if they
| think it will stay that way forever they are about to be very
| surprised. At the current rate of improvement it will be quite
| good within a year and in two or three I could see it actually
| reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| _If_ this is the case, the calls for heavy regulation in this
| thread will lead to many more deaths than otherwise.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I have yet to see a difference. I let it highway drive for an
| hour and it cut off a semi, coming within 9 to 12 inches of
| the bumper for no reason. I heard about that one believe me.
|
| It got stuck in a side street trying to get to a target
| parking lot, shaking the wheel back and forth.
|
| It's no better so far and this is the first day.
| modeless wrote:
| You have 12.6?
|
| As I said, it still makes mistakes and it is not ready yet.
| But 12.3 was much worse. It's the rate of improvement I am
| impressed with.
|
| I will also note that the predicted epidemic of crashes
| from people abusing FSD never happened. It's been on the
| road for a long time now. The idea that it is
| "irresponsible" to deploy it in its current state seems
| conclusively disproven. You can argue about exactly what
| the rate of crashes is but it seems clear that it has been
| at the very least no worse than normal driving.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Hm. I thought that was the latest release but it looks
| like no. But there seems to be no improvements from the
| last trial, so maybe 12.6 is magically better.
| modeless wrote:
| A lot of people have been getting the free trial with
| 12.3 still on their cars today. Tesla has really screwed
| up on the free trial for sure. Nobody should be getting
| it unless they have 12.6 at least.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I have 12.5. maybe 12.6 is better but I've heard that
| before.
|
| Don't get me wrong without a concerted data team building
| maps a priori, this is pretty incredible. But from a pure
| performance standpoint it's a shaky product.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| The latest version is 12.5.6, I think he got confused by
| the .6 at the end. If you think that's bad then there
| isn't a better version available. However it is a
| dramatic improvement over 12.3, don't know how much you
| tested on it.
| modeless wrote:
| You're right, thanks. One of the biggest updates in
| 12.5.6 is transitioning the highway Autopilot to FSD. If
| he has 12.5.4 then it may still be using the old non-FSD
| Autopilot on highways which would explain why he hasn't
| noticed improvement there; there hasn't been any until
| 12.5.6.
| hilux wrote:
| > ... coming within 9 to 12 inches of the bumper for no
| reason. I heard about that one believe me.
|
| Oh dear.
|
| Glad you're okay!
| eric_cc wrote:
| Is it possible you have a lemon? Genuine question. I've had
| nothing but positive experiences with FSD for the last
| several months and many thousands of miles.
| ben_w wrote:
| I've had nothing but positive experiences with
| ChatGPT-4o, that doesn't make people wrong to criticise
| either as modelling their training data too much and
| generalising too little when they need to use it for
| something where the inference domain is too far outside
| the training domain.
| kelnos wrote:
| If the incidence of problems is some relatively small
| number, like 5% or 10%, it's very easily possible that
| you've never personally seen a problem, but overall we'd
| still consider that the total incidence of problems is
| unacceptable.
|
| Please stop presenting arguments of the form "I haven't
| seen problems so people who have problems must be extreme
| outliers". At best it's ignorant, at worst it's actively
| in bad faith.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect the performance might vary widely depending on
| if you're on a road in california they have a lot of data
| on, or if its a road FSD has rarely seen before.
| dham wrote:
| A lot of haters mistake safety critical disengagements
| with "oh the car is doing something I don't like or I
| wouldn't do"
|
| If you treat the car like it's a student driver or
| someone else driving, disengagements will go do. If you
| treat it like you're driving there's also something to
| complain about.
| snypher wrote:
| So just a few more years of death and injury until they reach
| a finished product?
| quailfarmer wrote:
| If the answer was yes, presumably there's a tradeoff where
| that deal would be reasonable.
| londons_explore wrote:
| So far, data points to it having far fewer crashes than a
| human alone. Teslas data shows that, but 3rd party data
| seems to imply the same.
| rvnx wrote:
| It disconnects in case of dangerous situations, so every
| 33 miles to 77 miles driven (depending on the version),
| versus 400'000 miles for a human
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Tesla does not release the data required to substantiate
| such a claim. It simply doesn't and you're either lying
| or being lied to.
| londons_explore wrote:
| tesla releases this data:
| https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
| rainsford wrote:
| That data is not an apples to apples comparison unless
| autopilot is used in exactly the same mix of conditions
| as human driving. Tesla doesn't share that in the report,
| but I'd bet it's not equivalent. I personally tend to
| turn on driving automation features (in my non-Tesla car)
| in easier conditions and drive myself when anything
| unusual or complicated is going on, and I'd bet most
| drivers of Teslas and otherwise do the same.
|
| This is important because I'd bet similar data on the use
| of standard, non-adaptive cruise control would similarly
| show it's much safer than human drivers. But of course
| that would be because people use cruise control most in
| long-distance highway driving outside of congested areas,
| where you're least likely to have an accident.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Per the other comment: no, they don't. This data is not
| enough to evaluate its safety. This is enough data to
| mislead people who spend <30 seconds thinking about the
| question though, so I guess that's something (something
| == misdirection and dishonesty).
|
| You've been lied to.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No, it releases enough data to actively mislead you
| (because there is no way Tesla's data people are unaware
| of these factors):
|
| The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to
| FSD mode: the conditions, weather, road, location,
| traffic all have to meet a certain quality threshold
| before the system will be enabled (or not disable
| itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear spring day to
| Pittsburgh December nights.
|
| There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers,
| all conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all
| traffic.
|
| It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are
| not that stupid, so it's willfully misleading.
|
| This report does not include fatalities. It also doesn't
| consider any incident where there was not airbag
| deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially
| reasonable until you consider:
|
| - first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision
| exceeds threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety
| systems consider duration of impact, speeds, G-forces,
| amount of intrusion, angle of collision, and a multitude
| of other factors before deciding what, if any, systems to
| fire (seatbelt tensioners, airbags, etc.) So hit
| something at 30mph with the right variables? Tesla: "this
| is not an accident".
|
| - Tesla also does not consider "incident was so
| catastrophic that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an
| accident, because "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella
| could also include egregious, "systems failed to deploy
| for any reason up to and including poor assembly line
| quality control", as also not an accident and also "not
| counted".
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| If this is what society has to pay to improve Tesla's
| product, then perhaps they should have to share the
| software with other car manufacturers too.
|
| Otherwise every car brand will have to kill a whole heap of
| people too until they manage to make a FSD system.
| modeless wrote:
| Elon has said many times that they are willing to license
| FSD but nobody else has been interested so far. Clearly
| that will change if they reach their goals.
|
| Also, "years of death and injury" is a bald-faced lie.
| NHTSA would have shut down FSD a long time ago if it were
| happening. The statistics Tesla has released to the
| public are lacking, it's true, but they cannot hide
| things from the NHTSA. FSD has been on the road for years
| and a billion miles and if it was overall significantly
| worse than normal driving (when supervised, of course)
| the NHTSA would know by now.
|
| The current investigation is about performance under
| specific conditions, and it's possible that improvement
| is possible and necessary. But overall crash rates have
| not reflected any significant extra danger by public use
| of FSD even in its primitive and flawed form of earlier
| this year and before.
| the8472 wrote:
| We also pay this price with every new human driver we
| train. again and again.
| dham wrote:
| You won't be able to bring logic to people with Elon
| derangement syndrome.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| i have the same experience 12.5 is insanely good. HN is full
| of people that dont want self driving to succeed for some
| reason. fortunately, it's clear as day to some of us that
| tesla approach will work
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Curiousity about why they're against it and enunciating
| your why you think it will work would be more helpful.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| It's evident to Tesla drivers using Full Self-Driving
| (FSD) that the technology is rapidly improving and will
| likely succeed. The key reason for this anticipated
| success is data: any reasonably intelligent observer
| recognizes that training exceptional deep neural networks
| requires vast amounts of data, and Tesla has accumulated
| more relevant data than any of its competitors. Tesla
| recently held a robotaxi event, explicitly informing
| investors of their plans to launch an autonomous
| competitor to Uber. While Elon Musk's timeline
| predictions and politics may be controversial, his
| ability to achieve results and attract top engineering
| and management talent is undeniable.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Then why have we been just a year or two away from actual
| working self-driving, for the last 10 years? If I told my
| boss that my project would be done in a year, and then
| the following year said the same thing, and continued
| that for years, that's not what "achieving results"
| means.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It 's evident to Tesla drivers using Full Self-Driving
| (FSD) that the technology is rapidly improving and will
| likely succeed_
|
| Sounds like Tesla drivers have been at the Kool-Aid then.
|
| But to be a bit more serious, the problem isn't
| necessarily that people don't think it's improving (I do
| believe it is) or that they will likely succeed (I'm not
| sure where I stand on this). The problem is that every
| year Musk says the next year will be the Year of FSD. And
| every next year, it doesn't materialize. This is like the
| Boy Who Cried Wolf; Musk has zero credibility with me
| when it comes to predictions. And that loss of
| credibility affects my feeling as to whether he'll be
| successful at all.
|
| On top of that, I'm not convinced that autonomous driving
| that only makes use of cameras will ever be reliably
| safer than human drivers.
| modeless wrote:
| I have consistently been critical of Musk for this over
| the many years it's been happening. Even right now, I
| don't believe FSD will be unsupervised next year like he
| just claimed. And yet, I can see the real progress and I
| am convinced that while it won't be next year, it could
| absolutely happen within two or three years.
|
| One of these years, he is going to be right. And at that
| point, the fact that he was wrong for a long time won't
| diminish their achievement. As he likes to say, he
| specializes in transforming technology from "impossible"
| to "late".
|
| > I'm not convinced that autonomous driving that only
| makes use of cameras will ever be reliably safer than
| human drivers.
|
| Believing this means that you believe AIs will never
| match or surpass the human brain. Which I think is a much
| less common view today than it was a few years ago.
| Personally I think it is obviously wrong. And also I
| don't believe surpassing the human brain in every respect
| will be necessary to beat humans in driving safety.
| Unsupervised FSD will come before AGI.
| Animats wrote:
| > and Tesla has accumulated more relevant data than any
| of its competitors.
|
| Has it really? How much data is each car sending to Tesla
| HQ? Anybody actually know? That's a lot of cell phone
| bandwidth to pay for, and a lot of data to digest.
|
| Vast amounts of data about routine driving is not all
| that useful, anyway. A "highlights reel" of interesting
| situations is probably more valuable for training. Waymo
| has shown some highlights reels like that, such as the
| one were someone in a powered wheelchair is chasing a
| duck in the middle of a residential street.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Anyone who believes Tesla beats Google because they are
| better at collecting and handling data can be safely
| ignored.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The crux of the issue is that _your interpretation of
| performance cannot be trusted_. It is absolutely
| irrelevant.
|
| Even a system that is 99% reliable will _honestly feel_
| very, very good to an individual operator, but would
| result in _huge_ loss of life when scaled up.
|
| Tesla can earn more trust be releasing the data necessary
| to evaluate the system's performance. The fact that they
| do not is _far_ more informative than a bunch of
| commentators saying "hey it's better than it was last
| month!" for the last several years -- even if it is true
| that it's getting better and even if it's true it's
| hypothetically possible to get to the finish line.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Tesla's sensor suite does not support safe FSD.
|
| It relies on inferred depth from a single point of view.
| This means that the depth/positioning info for the entire
| world is noisy.
|
| From a safety critical point of view its also bollocks,
| because a single birdshit/smear/raindrop/oil can render
| the entire system inoperable. Does it degrade safely?
| does it fuck.
|
| > recognizes that training exceptional deep neural
| networks requires vast amounts of data,
|
| You missed _good_ data. Recording generic driver 's
| journeys isn't going to yield good data, especially if
| the people who are driving aren't very good. You need to
| have a bunch of decent drivers doing specific scenarios.
|
| Moreover that data isn't easily generalisable to other
| sensor suites. Add another camera? yeahna, new model.
|
| > Tesla recently held a robotaxi event, explicitly
| informing investors of their plans
|
| When has Musk ever delivered on time?
|
| > his ability to achieve results
|
| most of those results aren't that great. Tesla isn't
| growing anymore, its reliant on state subsidies to be
| profitable. They still only ship 400k units a quarter,
| which is tiny compared to VW's 2.2million.
|
| > attract top engineering and management talent is
| undeniable
|
| Most of the decent computer vision people are not in
| tesla. Hardware wise, their factories aren't fun places
| to be. He's a dick to work for, capricious and
| vindictive.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Completely agree. It's very strange. But honestly it's
| their loss. FSD is fantastic.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Very strange not wanting poorly controlled 4,000lb steel
| cages driving around at 70mph stewarded by people calling
| "only had to stop it from killing me 4 times today!" as
| great success.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _HN is full of people that dont want self driving to
| succeed for some reason._
|
| I would love for self-driving to succeed. I do long-ish car
| trips several times a year, and it would be wonderful if
| instead of driving, I could be watching a movie or working
| on something on my laptop.
|
| I've tried Waymo a few times, and it feels like magic, and
| feels safe. Their record backs up that feeling. After
| everything I've seen and read and heard about Tesla, if I
| got into a Tesla with someone who uses FSD, I'd ask them to
| drive manually, and probably decline the ride entirely if
| they wouldn't honor my request.
|
| > _fortunately, it 's clear as day to some of us that tesla
| approach will work_
|
| And based on my experience with Tesla FSD boosters, I
| expect you're basing that on feelings, not on any empirical
| evidence or actual understanding of the hardware or
| software.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I would love self-driving to succeed. I should be a Tesla
| fan, because I'm very much a fan of geekery and tech
| anywhere and everywhere.
|
| But no. I want self-driving to succeed, and when it does
| (which I don't think is that soon, because the last 10%
| takes 90% of the time), I don't think Tesla or their
| approach will be the "winner".
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good
| within a year
|
| I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not sure "quite good" is
| the next step after "feels dangerous".
| rvnx wrote:
| "Just round the corner" (2016)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Musk in 2016 (these are quotes, not paraphrases): "Self
| driving is a solved problem. We are just tuning the
| details."
|
| Musk in 2021: "Right now our highest priority is working
| on solving the problem."
| delusional wrote:
| > That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD
| 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest
| version 12.6
|
| >And I don't even have 12.6 yet, this is still 12.5;
|
| How am i supposed to take anything you say seriously when
| your only claim is a personal anecdote that doesn't even
| apply to your own argument. Please, think about what you're
| writing, and please stop repeating information you heard on
| youtube as if it's fact.
|
| The is one of the reasons (among many) that I can't take
| Tesla booster seriously. I have absolutely zero faith in your
| anecdote that you didn't touch the steering wheel. I bet it's
| a lie.
| modeless wrote:
| The version I have is already a night and day difference
| from 12.3 and the current version is better still. Nothing
| I said is contradictory in the slightest. Apply some basic
| reasoning, please.
|
| I didn't say I didn't touch the steering wheel. I had my
| hands lightly touching it most of the time, as one should
| for safety. I occasionally used the controls on the wheel
| as well as the accelerator pedal to adjust the set speed,
| and I used the turn signal to suggest lane changes from
| time to time, though most lane choices were made
| automatically. But I did not _turn_ the wheel. All turning
| was performed by the system. (If you turn the wheel
| manually the system disengages). Other than parking, as I
| mentioned, though FSD did handle some navigation into and
| inside parking lots.
| eric_cc wrote:
| I can second this experience. I rarely touch the wheel
| anymore. I'd say I'm 98% FSD. I take over in school zones,
| parking lots, and complex construction.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > I have absolutely zero faith in your anecdote that you
| didn't touch the steering wheel. I bet it's a lie.
|
| I'm not GP, but I can share video showing it driving across
| residential, city, highway, and even gravel roads all in a
| single trip without touching the steering wheel a single
| time over a 90min trip (using 12.5.4.1).
| jsjohnst wrote:
| And if someone wants to claim I'm cherry picking the
| video, happy to shoot a new video with this post visible
| on an iPad in the seat next to me. Is it autonomous? Hell
| no. Can it drive in Manhattan? Nope. But can it do >80%
| of my regular city (suburb outside nyc) and highway
| driving, yep.
| wstrange wrote:
| I have a 2024 Model 3, and it's a a great car. That being
| said, I'm under no illusion that the car will _ever_ be self
| driving (unsupervised).
|
| 12.5.6 Still fails to read very obvious signs for 30 Km/h
| playgrounds zones.
|
| The current vehicles lack sufficient sensors, and likely do
| not have enough compute power and memory to cover all edge
| cases.
|
| I think it's a matter of time before Tesla faces a lawsuit
| over continual FSD claims.
|
| My hope is that the board will grow a spine and bring in a
| more focused CEO.
|
| Hats off to Elon for getting Tesla to this point, but right
| now they need a mature (and boring) CEO.
| pelorat wrote:
| The board is family and friends, so them ousting him will
| never happen.
| dboreham wrote:
| At some point the risk of going to prison overtakes
| family loyalty.
| dlisboa wrote:
| There is no risk of going to prison. It just doesn't
| happen, never have and never will, no matter how unfair
| that is. Board members and CEOs are not held accountable,
| ever.
| rvnx wrote:
| https://fortune.com/2023/01/24/google-meta-spotify-
| layoffs-c...
|
| As they say, they take "full responsibility"
| llamaimperative wrote:
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-enron-ceo-jeffrey-
| skil...
| jeffbee wrote:
| If I had a dime for every hackernews who commented that FSD
| version X was like a revelation compared to FSD version X-e
| I'd have like thirty bucks. I will grant you that every
| release has surprisingly different behaviors.
|
| Here's an unintentionally hilarious meta-post on the subject
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29531915
| modeless wrote:
| Sure, plenty of people have been saying it's great for a
| long time, when it clearly was not (looking at you, Whole
| Mars Catalog). _I_ was not saying it was super great back
| then. I have consistently been critical of Elon for
| promising human level self driving "next year" for like 10
| years in a row and being wrong every time. He said it this
| year again and I still think he's wrong.
|
| But the rate of progress I see right now has me thinking
| that it may not be more than two or three years before that
| threshold is finally reached.
| ben_w wrote:
| The most important lesson I've had from me incorrectly
| predicting in 2009 that we'd have cars that don't come
| with steering wheels in 2018, and thinking that the
| progress I saw each year up to then was consistent with
| that prediction, is that it's really hard to guess how
| long it takes to walk the fractal path that is software
| R&D.
|
| How far are we now, 6 years later than I expected?
|
| Dunno.
|
| I suspect it's gonna need an invention on the same level
| as Diffusion or Transformer models to be able to get all
| the edge cases we can get, and that might mean we only
| get it with human level AGI.
|
| But I don't know that, it might be we've already got all
| we need architecture-wise and it's just a matter of
| scale.
|
| Only thing I can be really sure of is we're making
| progress "quite fast" in a non-objective use of the words
| -- it's not going to need a re-run of 6 million years of
| mammilian evolution or anything like that, but even 20
| years wall clock time would be a disappointment.
| modeless wrote:
| Waymo went driverless in 2020, maybe you weren't that far
| off. Predicting that in 2009 would have been pretty good.
| They could and should have had vehicles without steering
| wheels anytime since then, it's just a matter of hardware
| development. Their steering wheel free car program was
| derailed when they hired traditional car company
| executives.
| ben_w wrote:
| Waymo for sure, but I meant also without any geolock
| etc., so I can't claim credit for my prediction.
|
| They may well best Tesla to this, though.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Waymo is using full lidar and other sensors, whereas
| Tesla is relying on pure vision systems (to the point of
| removing radar on newer models). So they're solving a
| much harder problem.
|
| As for whether it's worthwhile to solve that problem when
| having more sensors will always be safer, that's another
| issue...
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| While it ought to be possible to solve for just RGB...
| making it needlessly hard for yourself is a fun hack-day
| side project, not a valuable business solution.
| Laaas wrote:
| Doesn't this just mean it's improving rapidly which is a
| good thing?
| jeffbee wrote:
| No, the fact that people say FSD is on the verge of
| readiness constantly for a decade means there is no
| widely shared benchmark.
| kylecordes wrote:
| On one hand, it really has gotten much better over time.
| It's quite impressive.
|
| On the other hand, I fear/suspect it is asymptotically,
| rather than linearly, approaching good enough to be
| unsupervised. It might get halfway there, each year,
| forever.
| m463 wrote:
| > the rate of improvement in the past two months has been
| much faster than before.
|
| I suspect the free trials let tesla collect orders of
| magnitude more data on events requiring human intervention.
| If each one is a learning event, it could exponentially
| improve things.
|
| I tried it on a loaner car and thought it was pretty good.
|
| One bit of feedback I would give tesla - when you get some
| sort of FSD message on the center screen, make the text BIG
| and either make it linger more, or let you recall it.
|
| For example, it took me a couple tries to read the message
| that gave instructions on how to give tesla feedback on why
| you intervened.
|
| EDIT: look at this graph
|
| https://electrek.co/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/3/2024/10/Scree...
| latexr wrote:
| > At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good
| within a year and in two or three I could see it actually
| reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.
|
| That's not a reasonable assumption. You can't just
| extrapolate "software rate of improvement", that's not how it
| works.
| modeless wrote:
| The timing of the rate of improvement increasing
| corresponds with finishing their switch to end-to-end
| machine learning. ML does have scaling laws actually.
|
| Tesla collects their own data, builds their own training
| clusters with both Nvidia hardware and their own custom
| hardware, and deploys their own custom inference hardware
| in the cars. There is no obstacle to them scaling up
| massively in all dimensions, which basically guarantees
| significant progress. Obviously you can disagree about
| whether that progress will be enough, but based on the
| evidence I see from using it, I think it will be.
| josefx wrote:
| > it will be quite good within a year
|
| The regressions are getting worse. For the first release
| anouncement it was only hitting regulatory hurdles and now
| the entire software stack is broken? They should fire whoever
| is in charge and restore the state Elon tried to release a
| decade ago.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| If you were a poorer driver who did these things you wouldn't
| find these faults so damning because it'd only be say 10%
| dumber than you rather than 40% or whatever (just making up
| those numbers).
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That just implies FSD is as good as a bad driver, which isn't
| really an endorsement.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I agree it's not an endorsement but we allow chronically
| bad drivers on the road as long as they're legally bad and
| not illegally bad.
| kelnos wrote:
| We do that for reasons of practicality: the US is built
| around cars. If we were to revoke the licenses of the 20%
| worst drivers, most of those people would be unable to
| get to work and end up homeless.
|
| So we accept that there are some bad drivers on the road
| because the alternative would be cruel.
|
| But we don't have to accept bad software drivers.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Oh, I'm well aware how things work.
|
| But we should look down on them and speak poorly of them
| same as we look down on and speak poorly of everyone else
| who's discourteous in public spaces.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto
| the highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system
| should have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first
| place.
|
| This is what bugs me about ordinary autopilot. Autopilot
| doesn't switch lanes, but I like to slow down or speed up as
| needed to allow merging cars to enter my lane. Autopilot never
| does that, and I've had some close calls with irate mergers who
| expected me to work with them. And I don't think they're wrong.
|
| Just means that when I'm cruising in the right lane with
| autopilot I have to take over if a car tries to merge.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Agreed. Automatic lane changes are the only feature of
| enhanced autopilot that I think I'd be interested in, solely
| for this reason.
| kelnos wrote:
| While I certainly wouldn't object to how you handle merging
| cars (it's a nice, helpful thing to do!), I was always taught
| that if you want to merge into a lane, you are the sole
| person responsible for making that possible and making that
| safe. You need to get your speed and position right, and if
| you can't do that, you don't merge.
|
| (That's for merging onto a highway from an entrance ramp, at
| least. If you're talking about a zipper merge due to a lane
| ending or a lane closure, sure, cooperation with other
| drivers is always the right thing to do.)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >cooperation with other drivers is always the right thing
| to do
|
| Correct, including when the other driver may not have the
| strictly interpreted legal right of way. You don't know if
| their vehicle is malfunctioning, or if the driver is
| malfunctioning, or if they are being overly aggressive or
| distracted on their phone.
|
| But most of the time, on an onramp to a highway, people on
| the highway in the lane that is being merged into need to
| be taking into account the potential conflicts due to
| people merging in from the acceleration lane. Acceleration
| lanes can be too short, other cars may not have the
| capability to accelerate quickly, other drivers may not be
| as confident, etc.
|
| So while technically, the onus is on people merging in, a
| more realistic rule is to take turns whenever congestion
| appears, even if you have right of way.
| lolinder wrote:
| I was taught that in _every_ situation you should act as
| though you are the sole person responsible for making the
| interaction safe.
|
| If you're the one merging? It's on you. If you're the one
| being merged into? Also you.
|
| If you assume that every other driver has a malfunctioning
| vehicle or is driving irresponsibly then your odds of a
| crash go way down because you _assume_ that they 're going
| to try to merge incorrectly.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| More Americans should go drive on the Autobahn. Everyone
| thinks the magic is "omg no speed limits!" which is neat
| but the _really_ amazing thing is that NO ONE sits in the
| left hand lane and EVERYONE will let you merge
| _immediately_ upon signaling.
|
| It's like a children's book explanation of the nice things
| you can have (no speed limits) if everyone could just stop
| being such obscenely selfish people (like sitting in the
| left lane or preventing merges because of some weird "I
| need my car to be in front of their car" fixation).
| rvnx wrote:
| Tesla FSD on German Autobahn = most dangerous thing ever.
| The car has never seen this rule and it's not ready for a
| 300km/h car behind you.
| macNchz wrote:
| At least in the northeast/east coast US there are still
| lots of old parkways without modern onramps, where moving
| over to let people merge is super helpful. Frequently these
| have bad visibility and limited room to accelerate if any
| at all, so doing it your way is not really possible.
|
| For example:
|
| I use this onramp fairly frequently. It's rural and rarely
| has much traffic, but when there is you can get stuck for a
| while trying to get on because it's hard to see the coming
| cars, and there's not much room to accelerate (unless
| people move over, which they often do).
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/ALt8UmJDzvn89uvM7?g_st=ic
|
| Preemptively getting in the left lane before going under
| this bridge is a defensive safety maneuver I always make--
| being in the right lane nearly guarantees some amount of
| conflict with merging traffic.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/PumaSM9Bx8iyaH9n6?g_st=ic
| rainsford wrote:
| > You need to get your speed and position right, and if you
| can't do that, you don't merge.
|
| I agree, but my observation has been that the majority of
| drivers are absolutely trash at doing that and I'd rather
| they not crash into me, even if would be their fault.
|
| Honestly I think Tesla's self-driving technology is long on
| marketing and short on performance, but it really helps
| their case that a lot of the competition is human drivers
| who are completely terrible at the job.
| japhyr wrote:
| > Just means that when I'm cruising in the right lane with
| autopilot I have to take over if a car tries to merge.
|
| Which brings it right back to the original criticism of
| Tesla's "self driving" program. What you're describing is
| assisted driving, not anything close to "full self driving".
| dham wrote:
| Autopilot is just adaptive cruise control with lane keep.
| Literally every car has this now. I don't see people on
| Toyota, Honda, or Ford forums complaining that a table-stakes
| feature of a car doesn't adjust speed or change lanes as a
| car is merging in. Do you know how insane that sounds. I'm
| assuming you're in software since you're on Hacker news.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith
| that this is a reasonable system
|
| This is probably the worst way to evaluate self-driving for
| society though, right?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Why would I be supportive of a system that has actively
| scared me for objectively scary reasons? Even if it's the
| worst reason, it's not a bad reason.
| paulcole wrote:
| How you feel while riding isn't an objective thing. It's
| entirely subjective. You and I can sit side by side and
| feel differently about the same experience.
|
| I don't see how this is in any way objective besides the
| fact that you want it to be objective.
|
| You can support things for society that scare you and feel
| unsafe because you can admit your feelings are subjective
| and the thing is actually safer than it feels to you
| personally.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I also did write about times when the car would have
| damaged itself or likely caused an accident, and those
| are indeed objective problems.
| paulcole wrote:
| > It failed with a cryptic system error while driving
|
| I'll give you this one.
|
| > In my opinion, the default setting accelerates way too
| aggressively. I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver
| and it is too aggressive for my taste
|
| Subjective.
|
| > It started making a left turn far too early that would
| have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to
| manually intervene.
|
| Since you intervened and don't know what would've
| happened, subjective.
|
| > It tried to make way too many right turns on red when
| it wasn't safe to. It would creep into the road, almost
| into the path of oncoming vehicles
|
| Subjective.
|
| > It would switch lanes to go faster on the highway, but
| then missed an exit on at least one occasion because it
| couldn't make it back into the right lane in time.
| Stupid.
|
| Objective.
|
| You've got some fair complaints but the idea that
| _feeling_ safe is what's needed remains subjective.
| TheCleric wrote:
| > Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be
| before we tolerate it.
|
| There's a simple answer to this. As soon as it's good enough
| for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if
| Tesla doesn't trust it, why should I?
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| I think this is probably both the most concise and most
| reasonable take. It doesn't require anyone to define some
| level of autonomy or argue about specific edge cases of how
| the self driving system behaves. And it's easy to apply this
| principle to not only Tesla, but to all companies making self
| driving cars and similar features.
| concordDance wrote:
| Whats the current total liability cost for all Tesla drivers?
|
| The average for all USA cars seems to be around $2000/year,
| so even if FSD was half as dangerous Tesla would still be
| paying $1000/year equivalent (not sure how big insurance
| margins are, assuming nominal) per car.
|
| Now, if legally the driver could avoid paying insurance for
| the few times they want/need to drive themselves (e.g. snow?
| Dunno what FSD supports atm) then it might make sense
| economically, but otherwise I don't think it would work out.
| Retric wrote:
| Liability alone isn't nearly that high.
|
| Car insurance payments include people stealing your car,
| uninsured motorists, rental cars, and other issues not the
| drivers fault. Further insurance payments also include
| profits for the insurance company, advertising, billing,
| and other overhead from running a business.
|
| Also, if Tesla was taking on these risks you'd expect your
| insurance costs to drop.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Yeah any automaker doing this would just negotiate a flat
| rate per car in the US and the insurer would average the
| danger to make a rate. This would be much cheaper than
| the average individual's cost for liability on their
| insurance.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Somehow I doubt those savings would be passed along to
| the individual car buyer. Surely buying a car insured by
| the manufacturer would be much more expensive than buying
| the car plus your own individual insurance, because the
| car company would want to profit from both.
| thedougd wrote:
| And it would be supplementary to the driver's insurance,
| only covering incidents that happen while FSD is engaged.
| Arguably they would self insure and only purchase
| insurance for Tesla as a back stop to their liability,
| maybe through a reinsurance market.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| What if someone gets killed because of some clear
| bug/error and the jury decides to award 100s of millions
| just for that single ? I'm not sure it's trivial to
| insurance companies to account for that sort of risk
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Not trivial, but that is exactly the kind of thing that
| successful insurance companies factor into their
| premiums, or specifically exclude those scenarios (e.g.
| not covering war zones for house insurance).
| kalenx wrote:
| It is trivial and they've done it for ages. It's called
| reinsurance.
|
| Basically (_very_ basically, there's more to it) the
| insurance company insures itself against large claims.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| I'm not sure Boeing etc. could have insured any liability
| risk resulting from engineering/design flaws in their
| vehicles?
| concordDance wrote:
| Good points, thanks.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| How much would every death or severe injury caused by FSD
| cost Tesla? We probably won't know anytime soon but since
| unlike anyone else they can afford to pay out virtually
| unlimited amounts and courts will presumably take that
| into account
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Also I wouldn't be surprised if any potential wrongful
| death lawsuits could cost Tesla several magnitudes more
| than the current average.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The liability for killing someone can include prison time.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Good. If you write software that people rely on with their
| lives, and it fails, you should be held liable for that
| criminally.
| beej71 wrote:
| And such coders should carry malpractice insurance.
| dmix wrote:
| Drug companies and the FDA (circa 1906) play a very
| dangerous and delicate dance all the time releasing new
| drugs to the public. But for over a century now we've
| managed to figure it out without holding pharma companies
| criminally liable for every death.
|
| > If you write software that people rely on with their
| lives, and it fails, you should be held liable for that
| criminally.
|
| Easy to type those words on the internet than make it a
| policy IRL. That sort of policy IRL would likely result
| in a) killing off all commercial efforts to solve traffic
| deaths via technology and vast amounts of other semi-
| autonomous technology like farm equipment or b)
| government/car companies mandating filming the driver
| every time they turn it on, because it's technically
| supposed to be human assisted autopilot in these testing
| stages (outside restricted pilot programs like Waymo
| taxis). Those distinctions would matter in a criminal
| court room, even if humans can't always be relied upon to
| always follow the instructions on the bottle's label.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Your take is understandable and not surprising on a site
| full of software developers. Somehow, the general
| software industry has ingrained this pessimistic and
| fatalistic dogma that says bugs are inevitable and
| there's nothing you can do to prevent them. Since
| everyone believes it, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy
| and we just accept it as some kind of law of nature.
|
| Holding software developers (or their companies) liable
| for defects would definitely kill off a part of the
| industry: the very large part that YOLOs code into
| production and races to get features released without
| rigorous and exhaustive testing. And why don't they spend
| 90% of their time testing and verifying and proving their
| software has no defects? Because defects are inevitable
| and they're not held accountable for them!
| viraptor wrote:
| > that says bugs are inevitable and there's nothing you
| can do to prevent them
|
| I don't think people believe this as such. It may be the
| short way to write it, but actually what devs mean is
| "bugs are inevitable at the funding/time available". I
| often say "bugs are inevitable" when it practice it means
| "you're not going to pay a team for formal specification,
| validated implementation and enough reliable hardware".
|
| Which business will agree to making the process 5x longer
| and require extra people? Especially if they're not
| forced there by regulation or potential liability?
| everforward wrote:
| It is true of every field I can think of. Food gets
| salmonella and what not frequently. Surgeons forget
| sponges inside of people (and worse). Truckers run over
| cars. Manufacturers miss some failures in QA.
|
| Literally everywhere else, we accept that the costs of
| 100% safety are just unreasonably high. People would
| rather have a mostly safe device for $1 than a definitely
| safe one for $5. No one wants to pay to have every head
| of lettuce tested for E Coli, or truckers to drive at
| 10mph so they can't kill anyone.
|
| Software isn't different. For the vast majority of
| applications where the costs of failure are low to none,
| people want it to be free and rapidly iterated on even if
| it fails. No one wants to pay for a formally verified
| Facebook or DoorDash.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Literally everywhere else, we accept that the costs of
| 100% safety are just unreasonably high.
|
| Yes, but also in none of these situations would the
| consumer/customer/patient be held responsible. I don't
| expect a system to be perfect, but I won't accept any
| liability if it malfunctions as I use it the way it is
| intended. And even worse, I would not accept that the
| designers evade their responsibilities if it kills
| someone I know.
|
| As the other poster said, I am happy to consider it safe
| enough the day the company accepts to own its issues and
| the associated responsibility.
|
| > No one wants to pay for a formally verified Facebook or
| DoorDash.
|
| This is untenable. Does nobody want a formally verified
| avionics system in their airliner, either?
| everforward wrote:
| You could be held liable if it impacts someone else. A
| restaurant serving improperly cooked chicken that gives
| people E Coli is liable. Private citizens may not have
| that duty, I'm not sure.
|
| You would likely also be liable if you overloaded an
| electrical cable, causing a fire that killed someone.
|
| "Using it in the way it was intended" is largely circular
| reasoning; of course it wasn't intended to hurt anyone,
| so any usage that does hurt someone was clearly
| unintended. People frequently harm each other by misusing
| items in ways they didn't realize were misuses.
|
| > This is untenable. Does nobody want a formally verified
| avionics system in their airliner, either?
|
| Not for the price it would cost. Airbus is the pioneer
| here, and even they apply formal verification sparingly.
| Here's a paper from a few years ago about it, and how
| it's untenable to formally verify the whole thing:
| https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf
|
| Software development effort generally tends to scale
| superlinearly with complexity. I am not an expert, but
| the impression I get is that formal verification grows
| exponentially with complexity to the point that it is
| untenable for most things beyond research and fairly
| simple problems. It is a huge pain in the ass to do
| something like putting time bounds around reading a
| config file.
|
| IO also sucks in formal verification from what I hear,
| and that's like 80% of what a plane does. Read these 300
| signals, do some standard math, output new signals to
| controls.
|
| These things are much easier to do with tests, but tests
| only check for scenarios you've thought of already
| kergonath wrote:
| > You could be held liable if it impacts someone else. A
| restaurant serving improperly cooked chicken that gives
| people E Coli is liable. Private citizens may not have
| that duty, I'm not sure. > You would likely also be
| liable if you overloaded an electrical cable, causing a
| fire that killed someone.
|
| Right. But neither of these examples are following
| guidelines or proper use. If I turn the car into people
| on the pavement, I am responsible. If the steering wheel
| breaks and the car does it, then the manufacturer is
| responsible (or the mechanic, if the steering wheel was
| changed). The question at hand is whose responsibility it
| is if the car's software does it.
|
| > "Using it in the way it was intended" is largely
| circular reasoning; of course it wasn't intended to hurt
| anyone, so any usage that does hurt someone was clearly
| unintended.
|
| This is puzzling. You seem to be conflating use and
| consequences and I am not quite sure how you read that in
| what I wrote. Using a device normally should not make it
| kill people, I guess at least we can agree on that.
| Therefore, if a device kills people, then it is either
| improper use (and the fault of the user), or a defective
| device, at which point it is the fault of the designer or
| manufacturer (or whoever did the maintenance, as the case
| might be, but that's irrelevant in this case).
|
| Each device has a manual and a bunch of regulations about
| its expected behaviour and standard operating procedures.
| There is nothing circular about it.
|
| > Not for the price it would cost.
|
| Ok, if you want to go full pedantic, note that I wrote
| "want", not "expect".
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Punishing individual developers is of course absurd
| (unless intent can be proven) the company itself and the
| upper management on the hand? Would make perfect sense.
| chgs wrote:
| You have one person in that RACI accountable box. That's
| the engineer signing it off as fit. They are held
| accountable, including with jail if required.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > And why don't they spend 90% of their time testing and
| verifying and proving their software has no defects?
| Because defects are inevitable and they're not held
| accountable for them!
|
| For a huge part of the industry, the reason is entirely
| different. It is because software that mostly works today
| but has defects is _much_ more valuable than software
| that always works and has no defects 10 years from now.
| Extremely well informed business customers will pay for
| delivering a buggy feature today rather than wait two
| more months for a comprehensively tested feature. This is
| the reality of the majority of the industry: consumers
| care little about bugs (below some defect rate) and care
| far more about timeliness.
|
| This of course doesn't apply to critical systems like
| automatic drivers or medical devices. But the vast
| majority of the industry is not building these types of
| systems.
| hilsdev wrote:
| We should hold Pharma companies liable for every death.
| They make money off the success cases. Not doing so is
| another example of privatized profits and socialized
| risks/costs. Something like a program with reduced costs
| for those willing to sign away liability to help balance
| social good vs risk analysis
| ywvcbk wrote:
| > criminally liable for every death.
|
| The fact that people generally consume drugs voluntarily
| and make that decision after being informed about most of
| the known risks probably mitigates that to some extent.
| Being killed by someone else's FSD car seems to be very
| different
| sokoloff wrote:
| Imagine that in 2031, FSD cars could exactly halve all
| aspects of auto crashes (minor, major, single car, multi
| car, vs pedestrian, fatal/non, etc.)
|
| Would you want FSD software to be developed or not? If
| you do, do you think holding devs or companies criminally
| liable for half of all crashes is the best way to ensure
| that progress happens?
| blackoil wrote:
| Say cars have near 0 casualty in northern hemisphere but
| occasionally fails for cars driving topsy turvy in south.
| If company knew about it and chooses to ignore it because
| of profits, yes they should be charged criminally.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| From a utilitarian perspective sure, you might be right
| but how do you exempt those companies from civil
| liability and make it impossible for victims/their
| families to sue the manufacturer? Might be legally tricky
| (driver/owner can explicitly/implicitly agree with the
| EULA or other agreements, imposing that on third parties
| wouldn't be right).
| Majromax wrote:
| > how do you exempt those companies from civil liability
| and make it impossible for victims/their families to sue
| the manufacturer?
|
| I don't think anyone in this thread has talked about an
| exemption from _civil_ liability (sue for money), just
| criminal liability (go to jail).
|
| Civil liability is the far less controversial issue
| because it's transferred all the time: governments even
| mandate that drivers carry insurance for this purpose.
|
| With civil liability transfer, imperfect FSD can still
| make economic sense. Just as an insurance company needs
| to collect enough premium to pay claims, the FSD
| manufacturer would need to reserve enough revenue to pay
| its expected claims. In this case, FSD doesn't even need
| to be better than humans to make economic sense, in the
| same way that bad drivers can still buy (expensive)
| insurance.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| > just criminal liability (go to jail).
|
| That just seems like a theoretical possibility (even if
| that). I don't see how any engineer or even someone in
| management could go to jail unless intent or gross
| negligence can be proven.
|
| > drivers carry insurance for this purpose.
|
| The mandatory limit is extremely low in many US states.
|
| > expected claims
|
| That seems like the problem. It might take a while until
| we reach an equilibrium of some sort.
|
| > that bad drivers can still buy
|
| That's still capped by the amount of coverage + total
| assets held by that bad driver. In Tesl's case there is
| no real limit (without legislation/established
| precedent). Juries/courts would likely be influenced by
| that fact as well.
| DennisP wrote:
| In fact, if you buy your insurance from Tesla, you
| effectively do put civil responsibility for FSD back in
| their hands.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > make that decision after being informed about most of
| the known risks
|
| Like for the COVID-19 vaccines? Experimental yet given to
| billions without ever showing them a consent form.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Yes, but worse. Nobody physically forced anyone to get
| vaccinated so you still had some choice. Of course
| legally banning individuals from using public roads or
| sidewalks unless they give up their right to sue
| Tesla/etc. might be an option.
| dansiemens wrote:
| Are you suggesting that individuals should carry that
| liability?
| izacus wrote:
| The ones that are identified as making decisions leading
| to death, yes.
|
| It's completely normal in other fields where engineers
| build systems that can kill.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Pretty much. Fuck. I just watched higher ups sign off on
| a project I know for a fact has defects all over the
| place going into production despite our very explicit:
| don't do it ( not quite Tesla level consequences, but
| still resulting in real issues for real people ). The
| sooner we can start having people in jail for knowingly
| approving half-baked software, the sooner it will
| improve.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Should we require Professional Engineers to sign off on
| such projects the same way they are required to for other
| safety critical infrastructure (like bridges and dams)?
| The Professional Engineer that signed off is liable for
| defects in the design. (Though, of course, if the design
| is not followed then liability can shift back to the
| company that built it)
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I hesitate, because I shudder at government deciding
| which algorithm is best for a given scenario ( because
| that is effectively is where it would go ). Maybe the
| distinction is, the moment money changes hands based on
| product?
|
| I am not an engineer, but I have watched clearly bad
| decisions take place from technical perspective so that a
| person with title that went to their head and a bonus
| that is not aligned with right incentives mess things up
| for us. Maybe some proffesionalization of software
| engineering is in order.
| _rm wrote:
| What a laugh, would you take that deal?
|
| Upside: you get paid a 200k salary, if all your code
| works perfectly. Downside: if it doesn't, you go to
| prison.
|
| The users aren't compelled to use it. They can choose not
| to. They get to choose their own risks.
|
| The internet is a gold mine of creatively moronic
| opinions.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Read the site rules.
|
| And also, of course some people would take that deal, and
| of course some others wouldn't. Your argument is moot.
| thunky wrote:
| You can go to prison or die for being a bad driver, yet
| people choose to drive.
| ukuina wrote:
| Systems evolve to handle such liability: Drivers pass
| theory and practical tests to get licensed to drive (and
| periodically thereafter), and an insurance framework that
| gauges your risk-level and charges you accordingly.
| kergonath wrote:
| Requiring formal licensing and possibly insurance for
| developers working on life-critical systems is not that
| outlandish. On the contrary, that is already the case in
| serious engineering fields.
| ekianjo wrote:
| And yet tens of thousands of people die on the roads
| right now every year. Working well?
| _rm wrote:
| Arguing for the sake of it; you wouldn't take that risk
| reward.
|
| Most code has bugs from time to time even when highly
| skilled developers are being careful. None of them would
| drive if the fault rate was similar and the outcome was
| death.
| notahacker wrote:
| Or to put even more straightforwardly: people who choose
| to drive rarely expect to drive more than a few 10s of k
| per year. People who choose to write autonomous
| software's lines of code potentially drive a billion
| miles per year, experiencing a lot more edge cases they
| are expected to handle in a non-dangerous manner, and
| have to handle them via advance planning and interactions
| with a lot of other people's code.
|
| The only practical way around this which permits
| autonomous vehicles (which are apparently dependent on
| much more complex and intractable codebases than, say,
| avionics) is a much higher threshold of criminal
| responsibility than the "the serious consequences
| resulted from the one-off execution of an dangerous
| manoeuvre which couldn't be justified in context" which
| sends human drivers to jail. And of course that double
| standard will be problematic if "willingness to accept
| liability" is the only safety threshold.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting people be
| held accountable for bugs which are ultimately accidents.
| But if you knowingly sign off on, oversea, or are
| otherwise directly responsible for the construction of
| software that you know has a good chance of killing
| people, then yes, there should be consequences for that.
| chgs wrote:
| Need far more regulation of the software industry, far
| too many people working in it fail to understand the
| scope of what they do.
|
| Civil engineer kills someone with a bad building, jail.
| Surgeon removes the wrong lung, jail. Computer programmer
| kills someone, "oh well it's your own fault".
| caddemon wrote:
| I've never heard of a surgeon going to jail over a
| genuine mistake even if it did kill someone. I'm also not
| sure what that would accomplish - take away their license
| to practice medicine sure, but they're not a threat to
| society more broadly.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Assuming there's the kind of guard rails as in other
| industries where this is true, absolutely. (In other
| words, proper licensing and credentialing, and the
| ability to prevent a deployment legally)
|
| I would also say that if something gets signed off on by
| management, that carries an implicit transfer of
| accountability up the chain from the individual
| contributor to whoever signed off.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's a dangerous line and I don't think it's correct.
| Software I write shouldn't be relied on in critical
| situations. If someone makes that decision then it's on
| them not on me.
|
| The line should be where a person tells others that they
| can rely on the software with their lives - as in the
| integrator for the end product. Even if I was working on
| the software for self driving, the same thing would apply
| - if I wrote some alpha level stuff for the internal
| demonstration and some manager decided "good enough, ship
| it", they should be liable for that decision. (Because I
| wouldn't be able to stop them / may have already left by
| then)
| presentation wrote:
| To be fair maybe the software you write shouldn't be
| relied on in critical situations but in this case the
| only place this software could be used in are critical
| situations
| viraptor wrote:
| Ultimately - yes. But as I mentioned, the fact it's sold
| as ready for critical situations doesn't mean the
| developers thought/said it's ready.
| elric wrote:
| I think it should be fairly obvious that it's not the
| individual developers who are responsible/liable. In
| critical systems there is a whole chain of liability.
| That one guy in Nebraska who thanklessly maintains some
| open source lib that BigCorp is using in their car should
| obviously not be liable.
| f1shy wrote:
| It depends. If you do bad sw and skip reviews and
| processes, you may be liable. Even if you are told to do
| something, if you know is wrong, you should say it. Right
| now I'm in middle of s*t because of I spoked up.
| Filligree wrote:
| > Right now I'm in middle of s*t because of I spoked up.
|
| And you believe that, despite experiencing what happens
| if you speak up?
|
| We shouldn't simultaneously require people to take heroic
| responsibility, while also leaving them high and dry if
| they do.
| f1shy wrote:
| I do believe I am responsible. I recognize I'am now in a
| position that I can speak without fear. If I get fired I
| would make a party tbh.
| gmueckl wrote:
| But someone slapped that label on it and made a pinky
| promise that it's true. That person needs to accept
| liability if things go wrong. If person A is loud and
| clear that something isn't ready, but person B tells the
| customer otherwise, B is at fault.
|
| Look, there are well established procedures in a lot of
| industries where products are relied on to keep people
| safe. They all require quite rigorous development and
| certification processes and sneaking untested alpha
| quality software through such a process would be actively
| malicious and quite possibly criminal in and of itself,
| at least in some industries.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is the beginning of the thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891164
|
| You're in violent agreement with me ;)
| latexr wrote:
| No, the beginning of the thread is earlier. And with that
| context it seems clear to me that the "you" in the post
| you linked means "the company", not "the individual
| software developer". No one else in your replies seems
| confused by that, we all understand self-driving software
| wasn't written by a single person that has ultimate
| decision power within a company.
| viraptor wrote:
| If the message said "you release software", or "approve"
| or "produce", or something like that, sure. But it said
| "you write software" - and I don't think that can apply
| to a company, because writing is what individuals do. But
| yeah, maybe that's not what the author meant.
| latexr wrote:
| > and I don't think that can apply to a company, because
| writing is what individuals do.
|
| By that token, no action could ever apply to a company--
| including approving, producing, or releasing--since it is
| a legal entity, a concept, not a physical thing. For all
| those actions there was a person actually doing it in the
| name of the company.
|
| It's perfectly normal to say, for example, "GenericCorp
| wrote a press-release about their new product".
| kergonath wrote:
| It's not that complicated or outlandish. That's how most
| engineering fields work. If a building collapses because
| of design flaws, then the builders and architects can be
| held responsible. Hell, if a car crashes because of a
| design or assembly flaw, the manufacturer is held
| responsible. Why should self-driving software be any
| different?
|
| If the software is not reliable enough, then don't use it
| in a context where it could kill people.
| krisoft wrote:
| I think the example here is that the designer draws a
| bridge for a railway model, and someone decides to use
| the same design and sends real locomotives across it. Is
| the original designer (who neither intended nor could
| have foreseen this) liable in your understanding?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That's a ridiculous argument.
|
| If a construction firm takes an arbitrary design and then
| tries to build it in a totally different environment and
| for a different purpose, then the construction firm is
| liable, not the original designer. It'd be like Boeing
| taking a child's paper aeroplane design and making a
| passenger jet out of it and then blaming the child when
| it inevitably fails.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Or alternatively, if Boeing uses wood screws to attach an
| airplane door and the screw fails that's on Boeing, not
| the airline, pilot or screw manufacturer. But if it's
| sold as aerospace-grade attachment bolt with attachments
| for safety wire and a spec sheet that suggests the
| required loads are within design parameters then it's the
| bolt manufacturers fault when it fails, and they might
| have to answer for any deaths resulting from that. Unless
| Boeing knew or should have known that the bolts weren't
| actually as good as claimed, then the buck passes back to
| them
|
| Of course that's wildly oversimplifying and multiple
| entities can be at fault at once. My point is that these
| are normal things considered in regular engineering and
| manufacturing
| krisoft wrote:
| > That's a ridiculous argument.
|
| Not making an argument. Asking a clarifying question
| about someone else's.
|
| > It'd be like Boeing taking a child's paper aeroplane
| design and making a passenger jet out of it and then
| blaming the child when it inevitably fails.
|
| Yes exactly. You are using the same example I used to say
| the same thing. So which part of my message was
| ridiculous?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| If it's not an argument, then you're just misrepresenting
| your parent poster's comment by introducing a scenario
| that never happens.
|
| If you didn't intend your comment as a criticism, then
| you phrased it poorly. Do you actually believe that your
| scenario happens in reality?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It was not a misrepresentation of anything. They were
| just restating the worry that was stated in the GP
| comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41892572
|
| And the only reason the commenter I linked to had that
| response is because its parent comment was slightly
| careless in its phrasing. Probably just change "write" to
| "deploy" to capture the intended meaning.
| krisoft wrote:
| > you're just misrepresenting your parent poster's
| comment
|
| I did not represent or misrepresent anything. I have
| asked a question to better understand their thinking.
|
| > If you didn't intend your comment as a criticism, then
| you phrased it poorly.
|
| Quite probably. I will have to meditate on it.
|
| > Do you actually believe that your scenario happens in
| reality?
|
| With railway bridges? Never. It would ring alarm bells
| for everyone from the fabricators to the locomotive
| engineer.
|
| With software? All the time. Someone publishes some open
| source code, someone else at a corporation bolts the open
| source code into some application and now the former "toy
| train bridge" is a loadbearing key-component of something
| the original developer could never imagine nor plan for.
|
| This is not theoretical. Very often I'm the one doing the
| bolting.
|
| And to be clear: my opinion is that the liability should
| fall with whoever integrated the code and certified it to
| be fit for some safety critical purpose. As an example if
| you publish leftpad and i put it into a train brake
| controller it is my job to make sure it is doing the
| right thing. If the train crashes you as the author of
| leftpad bear no responsibility but me as the manufacturer
| of discount train brakes do.
| kergonath wrote:
| Someone, at some point signed off on this being released.
| Not thinking things through seriously is not an excuse to
| sell defective cars.
| f1shy wrote:
| Are you serious?! You must be trolling!
| krisoft wrote:
| I assure you I am not trolling. You appear to have
| misread my message.
|
| Take a deep breath. Read my message one more time
| carefully. Notice the question mark at the end of the
| last sentence. Think about it. If after that you still
| think I'm trolling you or anyone else I will be here and
| happy to respond to your further questions.
| sigh_again wrote:
| >Software I write shouldn't be relied on in critical
| situations.
|
| Then don't write software to be used in things that are
| literally always critical situations, like cars.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Software requires hardware that can bit flip with gamma
| rays.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Which is why hardware used to run safety-critical
| software is made redundant.
|
| Take the Boeing 777 Primary Flight Computer for example.
| This is a fully digital fly-by-wire aircraft. There are 3
| separate racks of equipment housing identical flight
| computers; 2 in the avionics bay underneath the flight
| deck, 1 in the aft cargo section. Each flight computer
| has 3 separate processors, supporting 2 dissimilar
| instruction set architectures, running the same software
| built by 3 separate compilers. Each flight computer
| captures instances of the software not agreeing about an
| action to be undertaken and wins by majority vote. The
| processor that makes these decisions is different in each
| flight computer.
|
| The power systems that provide each flight computer are
| also fully redundant; each computer gets power from a
| power supply assembly, which receives 2 power feeds from
| 3 separate power supplies; no 2 power supply assemblies
| share the same 2 sources of power. 2 of the 3 power
| systems (L engine generator, R engine generator, and the
| hot battery bus) would have to fail and the APU would
| have to be unavailable in order to knock out 1 of the 3
| computers.
|
| This system has never failed in 30 years of service.
| There's still a primary flight computer disconnect switch
| on the overhead panel in the cockpit, taking the software
| out of the loop, to logically connect all of your control
| inputs to the flight surface actuators. I'm not aware of
| it ever being used (edit: in a commercial flight).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You can't guarantee the hardware was properly built.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Unless Intel, Motorola, and AMD all conspire to give you
| a faulty processor, you will get a working primary flight
| computer.
|
| Besides, this is what flight testing is for. Aviation
| certification authorities don't let an aircraft serve
| passengers unless you can demonstrate that all of its
| safety-critical systems work properly and that it
| performs as described.
|
| I find it hard to believe that automotive works much
| differently in this regard, which is what things like
| crumple zone crash tests are for.
| chgs wrote:
| You can control for that. Multiple machines doing is
| rival calculations for example
| ekianjo wrote:
| How is that working with Boeing?
| mlinhares wrote:
| People often forget corporations don't go to jail. Murder
| when you're not a person ends up with a slap.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Doesn't seem to happen in the medical and airplane
| industries, otherwise, Boeing would most likely not exist
| as a company anymore.
| jsvlrtmred wrote:
| Perhaps one can debate whether it happens often enough or
| severely enough, but it certainly _happens_. For example,
| and only the first one to come to mind - the president of
| PIP went to jail.
| hibikir wrote:
| Remember that this is neural networks doing the driving,
| more than old expert systems: What makes a crash happen
| is a network that fails to read an image correctly, or a
| network that fails to capture what is going on when
| melding input from different sensors.
|
| So the blame won't be on a guy who got an if statement
| backwards, but signing off on stopping training, failing
| to have certain kinds of pictures in the set, or other
| similar, higher order problem. Blame will be incredibly
| nebulous.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Do we send Boeing engineers to jail when their plane
| crashes?
|
| Intention matters when passing crime judgement. If a
| mother causes the death of her baby due to some poor
| decision (say feed her something contaminated), no one
| proposes or tries to jail the mother, because they know
| the intention was the opposite.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| In the United States? Come on. Boeing executives are not in
| jail - they are getting bonuses.
| f1shy wrote:
| But some little boy down the line will pay for it. Look
| for Eschede ICE accident.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| There are many examples.
|
| The Koch brothers, famous "anti-regulatory state"
| warriors, have fought oversight so hard that their gas
| pipelines were allowed to be barely intact.
|
| Two teens get into a truck, turn the ignition key - and
| the air explodes:
|
| https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-
| world/1996...
|
| Does anyone go to jail? F*K NO.
| IX-103 wrote:
| To be fair, the teens knew about the gas leak and started
| the truck in an attempt to get away. Gas leaks like that
| shouldn't happen easily, but people near pipelines like
| that should also be made aware of the risks of gas leaks,
| as some leaks are inevitable.
| 8note wrote:
| As an alternative though, the company also failed at
| handling that the gas leak started. They could have had
| people all over the place guiding people out and away
| from the leak safely, and keeping the public away while
| the leak is fixed.
|
| Or, they could buy sufficient buffer land around the
| pipeline such that the gas leak will be found and stopped
| before it could explode down the road
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| And corporations are people now, so Tesla can go to jail.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is how I feel about nuclear energy. Every single plant
| should need to form a full insurance fund dedicated to paying
| out if there's trouble. And the plant should have strict
| liability: anything that happens from materials it releases
| are its responsibility.
|
| But people get upset about this. We need corporations to take
| responsibility.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| While we're at it how about why apply the same standard to
| coal and natural gas plants? For some reason when we start
| taking about nuclear plants we all of a sudden become
| adverse to the idea of unfunded externalities but when
| we're talking about 'old' tech that has been steadily
| irradiating your community and changing the gas composition
| _of the entire planet_ it becomes less concerning.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I think it is a matter of perceived risk.
|
| Realistically speaking, nuclear power is pretty safe. In
| the history of nuclear power, there were two major
| incidents. Considering the number of nuclear power plants
| around the planet, that is pretty good. However, as those
| two accidents demonstrated, the potential fallout of
| those incidents is pretty severe and widespread. I think
| this massively contributes to the perceived risks. The
| warnings towards the public were pretty clear. I remember
| my mom telling stories from the time the Chernobyl
| incident became known to the public and people became
| worried about the produce they usually had from their
| gardens. Meanwhile, everything that has been done to
| address the hazards of fossil based power generation is
| pretty much happening behind the scenes.
|
| With coal and natural gas, it seems like people perceive
| the risks as more abstract. The radioactive emissions of
| coal power plants have been known for a while and the
| (potential) dangers of fine particulate matters resulting
| from combustion are somewhat well known nowadays as well.
| However, the effects of those danger seem much more
| abstract and delayed, leading people to not be as worried
| about it. It also shows on a smaller, more individual
| scale: people still buy ICE cars at large and install gas
| stoves into their houses despite induction being readily
| available and at times even cheaper.
| pyrale wrote:
| > However, the effects of those danger seem much more
| abstract and delayed, leading people to not be as worried
| about it.
|
| Climate change is very visible in the present day to me.
| People are protesting about it frequently enough that
| it's hard to claim they are not worried.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Climate change is certainly visible, although the extend
| to which areas are affected varies wildly. However, there
| are still shockingly many people who have a hard time
| attributing ever increasing natural disasters and more
| extreme weather patterns to climate change.
| brightball wrote:
| During power outages, having natural gas in your home is
| a huge benefit. Many in my area just experienced it with
| Helene.
|
| You can still cook. You can still get hot water. If you
| have gas logs you still have a heat source in the winter
| too.
|
| These trade offs are far more important to a lot of
| people.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Granted, that is a valid concern if power outages are
| more frequent in your area. I have never experienced a
| power outage personally, so that is nothing I ever
| thought of. However, I feel like with solar power and
| battery storage systems becoming increasingly widespread,
| this won't be a major concern for much longer
| brightball wrote:
| They aren't frequent but in the last 15-16 years there
| have been 2 outages that lasted almost 2 weeks in some
| areas around here. The first one was in the winter and
| the only gas appliance I had was a set of gas logs in the
| den.
|
| It heated my whole house and we used a pan to cook over
| it. When we moved the first thing I did was install gas
| logs, gas stove and a gas water heater.
|
| It's nice to have options and backup plans. That's one of
| the reasons I was a huge fan of the Chevy Volt when it
| first came out. I could easily take it on a long trip but
| still averaged 130mpg over 3 years (twice). Now I've got
| a Tesla and when there are fuel shortages it's also
| really nice.
|
| A friend of ours owns a cybertruck and was without power
| for 9 days, but just powered the whole house with the
| cybertruck. Every couple of days he'd drive to a
| supercharger station to recharge.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure, we can have a carbon tax on everything. That's
| fine. And then the nuclear plant has to pay for a
| Pripyat-sized exclusion zone around it. Just like the guy
| said about Tesla. All fair.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That's not a workable idea as it'd just encourage
| corporations to obfuscate the ownership of the plant (e.g.
| shell companies) and drastically underestimate the actual
| risks of catastrophes. Ultimately, the government will be
| left holding the bill for nuclear catastrophes, so it's
| better to just recognise that and get the government to
| regulate the energy companies.
| f1shy wrote:
| The problem I see there is that if "corporations are
| responsible" then no one is. That is, no real person has
| the responsibility, and acts accordingly.
| tiahura wrote:
| I think that's implicit in the promise of the upcoming-any-
| year-now unattended full self driving.
| mrjin wrote:
| Even if it does, can it resurrect the deceased?
| LadyCailin wrote:
| But people driving manually kill people all the time too.
| The bar for self driving isn't <<does it never kill
| anyone>>, it's <<does it kill people less than manual
| driving>>. We're not there yet, and Tesla's <<FSD>> is
| marketing bullshit, but we certainly will be there one day,
| and at that point, we need to understand what we as a
| society will do when a self driving car kills someone. It's
| not obvious what the best solution is there, and we need to
| continue to have societal discussions to hash that out, but
| the correct solution definitely isn't <<don't use self
| driving>>.
| amelius wrote:
| No, because every driver thinks they are better than
| average.
|
| So nobody will accept it.
| the8472 wrote:
| I expect insurance to figure out the relative risks and
| put a price sticker on that decision.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Assuming I understand the argument flow correctly, I
| think I disagree. If there is one thing that the past few
| decades have confirmed quite conclusively, it is that
| people will trade a lot of control and sense away in the
| name of convenience. The moment FSD reaches that sweet
| spot of 'take me home -- I am too drunk to drive' of
| reliability, I think it would be accepted; maybe even
| required by law. It does not seem there.
| Majromax wrote:
| > The bar for self driving isn't <<does it never kill
| anyone>>, it's <<does it kill people less than manual
| driving>>.
|
| Socially, that's not quite the standard. As a society,
| we're at ease with auto fatalities because there's often
| Someone To Blame. "Alcohol was involved in the incident,"
| a report might say, and we're more comfortable even
| though nobody's been brought back to life. Alternatively,
| "he was asking for it, walking at night in dark clothing,
| nobody could have seen him."
|
| This is an emotional standard that speaks to us as human,
| story-telling creatures that look for order in the
| universe, but this is not a proper actuarial standard. We
| might need FSD to be manifestly safer than even the best
| human drivers before we're comfortable with its universal
| use.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > As soon as it's good enough for Tesla to accept liability
| for accidents.
|
| That makes a lot of sense and not just from a selfish point
| of view. When a person drives a vehicle, then the person is
| held responsible for how the vehicle behaves on the roads, so
| it's logical that when a machine drives a vehicle that the
| machine's manufacturer/designer is held responsible.
|
| It's a complete con that Tesla is promoting their autonomous
| driving, but also having their vehicles suddenly switch to
| non-autonomous driving which they claim moves the
| responsibility to the human in the driver seat. Presumably,
| the idea is that the human should have been watching and
| approving everything that the vehicle has done up to that
| point.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| The responsibility doesn't shift, it _always_ lies with the
| human. One problem is that humans are notoriously poor at
| maintaining attention when supervising automation
|
| Until the car is ready to take over as _legal_ driver, it
| 's foolish to set the human driver up for failure in the
| way that Tesla (and the humans driving Tesla cars) do.
| f1shy wrote:
| What?! So if there is a failure and the car goes full
| throttle (no autonomous car) it is my responsibility?!
| You are pretty wrong!!!
| kgermino wrote:
| You are responsible (Legally, contractually, morally) for
| supervising FSD today. If the car decided to stomp on the
| throttle you are expected to be ready to hit the brakes.
|
| The whole point is that is somewhat of an unreasonable
| expectation but it's what Tesla expects you to do today
| f1shy wrote:
| My example was clear about NOT about autonomous driving.
| Because the previous comment seems to imply for
| everything you are responsible
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > If the car decided to stomp on the throttle you are
| expected to be ready to hit the brakes.
|
| Didn't Tesla have an issue a couple of years ago where
| pressing the brake did _not_ disengage any throttle? i.e.
| if the car has a bug and puts throttle to 100% and you
| stand on the brake, the car should say "cut throttle to
| 0", but instead, you just had 100% throttle, 100% brake?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| If it did, it wouldn't matter. Brakes are required to be
| stronger than engines.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| That makes no sense. Yes, they are. But brakes are going
| to be more reactive and performant with the throttle at 0
| than 100.
|
| You can't imagine that the stopping distances will be the
| same.
| xondono wrote:
| Autopilot, FSD, etc.. are all legally classified as ADAS,
| so it's different from e.g. your car not responding to
| controls.
|
| The liability lies with the driver, and all Tesla needs
| to prove is that input from the driver will override any
| decision made by the ADAS.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > The responsibility doesn't shift, it always lies with
| the human.
|
| Indeed, and that goes for the person or persons who say
| that the products they sell are safe when used in a
| certain way.
| f1shy wrote:
| >> When a person drives a vehicle, then the person is held
| responsible for how the vehicle behaves on the roads, so
| it's logical that when a machine drives a vehicle that the
| machine's manufacturer/designer is held responsible.
|
| Never really understood the supposed dilemma. What happens
| when the brakes fail because of bad quality?
| arzig wrote:
| Then this would be manufacturing liability because they
| are not fit for purpose.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > What happens when the brakes fail because of bad
| quality?
|
| Depends on the root cause of the failure. Manufacturing
| faults would put the liability on the manufacturer;
| installation mistakes would put the liability on the
| mechanic; using them past their useful life would put the
| liability on the owner for not maintaining them in
| working order.
| jefftk wrote:
| Note that Mercedes does take liability for accidents with
| their (very limited level) level 3 system:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892154/mercedes-benz-
| dr...
| f1shy wrote:
| Yes. That is the only way. That being said, I want to see
| the first incidents, and how are they resolved.
| theptip wrote:
| Presumably that is exactly when their taxi service rolls out?
|
| While this has a dramatic rhetorical flourish, I don't think
| it's a good proxy. Even if it was safer, it would be an
| unnecessarily high burden to clear. You'd be effectively
| writing a free insurance policy which is obviously not free.
|
| Just look at total accidents / deaths per mile driven, it's
| the obvious and standard metric for measuring car safety.
| (You need to be careful to not stop the clock as soon as the
| system disengages of course. )
| mike_d wrote:
| > Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be
| before we tolerate it.
|
| When I feel as safe as I do sitting in the back of a Waymo.
| eric_cc wrote:
| That sucks that you had that negative experience. I've driven
| thousands of miles in FSD and love it. Could not imagine going
| back. I rarely need to intervene and when I do it's not because
| the car did something dangerous. There are just times I'd
| rather take over due to cyclists, road construction, etc.
| windexh8er wrote:
| I don't believe this at all. I don't own one but know about a
| half dozen people that got suckered into paying for FSD. All
| of them don't use it and 3 of them have stated it's put them
| in dangerous situations.
|
| I've ridden in an X, S and Y with it on. Talk about vomit
| inducing when letting it drive during "city" driving. I don't
| doubt it's OK on highway driving, but Ford Blue Cruise and
| GM's Super Cruise are better there.
| eric_cc wrote:
| You can believe what you want to believe. It works
| fantastic for me whether you believe it or not.
|
| I do wonder if people who have wildly different experiences
| than I have are living in a part of the country that, for
| one reason or another, Tesla FSD does not yet do as well
| in.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think GP is going too far in calling you a liar, but I
| think for the most part your FSD praise is just kinda...
| unimportant and irrelevant. GP's aggressive attitude
| notwithstanding, I think most reasonable people will
| agree that FSD handles a lot of situations really well,
| and believe that some people have travel routes where FSD
| _always_ handles things well.
|
| But ok, great, so what? If that _wasn 't_ the case, FSD
| would be an unmitigated disaster with a body count in the
| tens of thousands. So in a comment thread about someone
| talking about the problems and unsafe behavior they've
| seen, a "well it works for me" reply is just annoying
| noise, and doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Open discussion and sharing different experiences with
| technology is "annoying noise" to you but not to me.
| Slamming technology that works great for others should
| receive no counter points and become an echo chamber or
| what?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| These "works for me!" comments are exhausting. Nobody
| believes you "rarely intervene", otherwise Tesla themselves
| would be promoting the heck out of the technology.
|
| Bring on the videos of you in the passenger seat on FSD for
| any amount of time.
| eric_cc wrote:
| It's the counter-point to the "it doesn't work for me"
| posts. Are you okay with those ones?
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the problem with the "it works for me" type posts
| is that most people reading them think the person writing
| it is trying to refute what the person with the problem
| is saying. As in, "it works for me, so the problem must
| be with you, not the car".
|
| I will refrain from commenting on whether or not that's a
| fair assumption to make, but I think that's where the
| frustration comes from.
|
| I think when people make "WFM" posts, it would go a long
| way to acknowledge that the person who had a problem
| really did have a problem, even if implicitly.
|
| "That's a bummer; I've driven thousands of miles using
| FSD, and I've felt safe and have never had to intervene.
| I wonder what's different about our travel that's given
| us such different experiences."
|
| That kind of thing would be a lot more palatable, I
| think, even if you might think it's silly/tiring/whatever
| to have to do that every time.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I can see it. How FSD performs depends on the environment.
| In some places it's great, in others I take over relatively
| frequently, although it's usually because it's being
| annoying, not because it poses any risk.
|
| Being in the passenger seat is still off limits for obvious
| reasons.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm glad for you, I guess.
|
| I'll say the autopark was kind of neat, but parking has never
| been something I have struggled with.
| phito wrote:
| I hope I never get to share road with you. Oh wait I won't,
| this crazyness is illegal here.
| concordDance wrote:
| This would be more helpful with a date. Was this in 2020 or
| 2024? I've been told FSD had a complete rearchitecting.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| It was a few months ago
| dchichkov wrote:
| > I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer
| this year.
|
| I'm curious, what is the alternative that you are considering?
| I've been delaying an upgrade to electric for some time. And
| now, a car manufacturer that is contributing to the making of
| another Jan 6th, 2021 is not an option, in my opinion.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I've got a deposit on the Dodge Charger Daytona EV
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I also went into car shopping with that opinion, but the
| options are bleak in terms of other carmakers' software. For
| some reason, if you want basic software features of a Tesla,
| the other carmakers want an extra $20k+ (and still don't have
| some).
|
| A big example is why do the other carmakers not yet offer
| camera recording on their cars? They are all using cameras
| all around, but only Tesla makes it available to you in case
| you want the footage? Bizarre. And then they want to charge
| you an extra $500+ for one dash cam on the windshield.
|
| I even had Carplay/Android Auto as a basic requirement, but I
| was willing to forgo that after trying out the other brands.
| And not having to spend hours at a dealership doing paperwork
| was amazing. Literally bought the car on my phone and was out
| the door within 15 minutes on the day of my appointment.
| bink wrote:
| Rivian also allows recording drives to an SSD. They also
| just released a feature where you can view the cameras
| while it's parked. I'm kinda surprised other manufacturers
| aren't allowing that.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Rivians start at $30k more than Teslas, and while they
| may be nice, they don't have the track record yet that
| Tesla does, and there is a risk the company goes bust
| since it is currently losing a lot of money.
| pbasista wrote:
| > I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer
| this year.
|
| I have no illusions about Tesla's ability to deliver an
| unsupervised self-driving car any time soon. However, as far as
| I understand, their autosteer system, in spite of all its
| flaws, is still the best out there.
|
| Do you have any reason to believe that there actually is
| something better?
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| I believe they're fine with losing auto steering
| capabilities, based on the tone of their comment.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Autopilot has not been good. I have a cabin four hours from
| my home and I've used autopilot for long stretches on the
| highway. Some of the problems:
|
| - Certain exits are not detected as such and the car
| violently veers right before returning to the lane. I simply
| can't believe they don't have telemetry to remedy this.
|
| - Sometimes the GPS becomes miscalibrated. This makes the car
| think I'm taking an exit when I'm not, causing the car to
| abruptly reduce its speed to the speed of the ramp. It does
| not readjust.
|
| - It frequently slows for "emergency lights" that don't
| exist.
|
| - If traffic comes to a complete stop, the car accelerates
| way too hard and brakes hard when the car in front moves any
| substantial amount.
|
| At this point, I'd rather have something less good than
| something which is an active danger. For all intents and
| purposes, my Tesla doesn't have reliable cruise control,
| period.
|
| Beyond that, though, I simply don't have trust in Tesla
| software. I've encountered _so many_ problems at this point
| that I can 't possibly expect them to deliver a product that
| works reliably at any point in the future. What reason do I
| have to believe things will magically improve?
| absoflutely wrote:
| I'll add that it randomly brakes hard on the interstate
| because it thinks the speed limit drops to 45. There aren't
| speed limit signs anywhere nearby on different roads that
| it could be mistakenly reading either.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I noticed that this happens when the triangle on the map
| is slightly offset from the road, which I've attributed
| to miscalibrated GPS. It happens consistently when I'm in
| the right lane and pass an exit when the triangle is ever
| so slightly misaligned.
| geoka9 wrote:
| > It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto
| the highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system
| should have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first
| place.
|
| I've been on the receiving end of this with the offender being
| a Tesla so many times that I figured it must be FSD.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Probably autopilot, honestly.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Was this the last version, or the version released today?
|
| I've been pretty skeptical of FSD and didn't use the last
| version much. Today I used the latest test version, enabled
| yesterday, and rode around SF, to and from GGP, and it did
| really well.
|
| Waymo well? Almost. But whereas I haven't ridden Waymo on the
| highway yet, FSD got me from Hunters Point to the east bay with
| no disruptions.
|
| The biggest improvement I noticed was its optimizations on
| highway progress.. it'll change lanes, nicely, when the lane
| you're in is slower than the surrounding lanes. And when you're
| in the fast/passing lane it'll return to the next closest lane.
|
| Definitely better than the last release.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm clearly not using the FSD today because I refused to
| complete my free trial of it a few months ago. The post of
| mine that you're responding to doesn't mention my troubles
| with Autopilot, which I highly doubt are addressed by today's
| update (see my other comment for a list of problems). They
| need to really, really prove to me that Autopilot is working
| reliably before I'd even consider accepting another free
| trial of FSD, which I doubt they'd do anyway.
| mrjin wrote:
| I would not even try. The reason is simple, there is absolutely
| no ability of understanding in any of current self claimed auto
| driving approach, no matter how well they market them.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with your experience. But if it's as bad as
| you say, why aren't we seeing tens or hundreds of FSD
| fatalities per day or at least per week? Even if only 1000
| people globally have it on, these issues sound like we should
| be seeing tens per week.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Perhaps having more accidents doesn't mean more fatal
| accidents.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla.
|
| May I ask how this initial trust was established?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The numbers that are reported aren't abysmal, and people have
| anecdotally said good things. I was willing to give it a try
| while being hyper vigilant.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > right turns on red
|
| This is a idiosyncrasy of the US (maybe other places too?) and
| I wonder if it's easier to do self driving at junctions, in
| countries without this rule.
| dboreham wrote:
| Only some states allow turn on red, and it's also often
| overridden by a road sign that forbids. But for me the
| ultimate test of AGI is four-or-perhaps-three-or-perhaps-two
| way stop intersections. You have to know whether the other
| drivers have a stop sign or not in order to understand how to
| proceed, and you can't see that information. As an immigrant
| to the US this baffles me, but my US-native family members
| shrug like there's some telepathy way to know. There's also a
| rule that you yield to vehicles on your right at uncontrolled
| intersections (if you can determine that it is
| uncontrolled...) that almost no drivers here seem to have
| heard of. You have to eye-ball the other driver to determine
| whether or not they look like they remember road rules. Not
| sure how a Tesla will do that.
| bink wrote:
| If it's all-way stop there will often be a small placard
| below the stop sign. If there's no placard there then
| (usually) cross traffic doesn't stop. Sometimes there's a
| placard that says "two-way" stop or one that says "cross
| traffic does not stop", but that's not as common in my
| experience.
| herdcall wrote:
| Same here, but I tried the new 12.5.4.1 yesterday and the
| difference is night and day. It was near flawless except for
| some unexplained slowdowns and you don't even need to hold the
| steering anymore (it detects attention by looking at your
| face), they clearly are improving rapidly.
| lolinder wrote:
| How many miles have you driven since the update yesterday? OP
| described a half dozen different failure modes in a variety
| of situations that seem to indicate quite extensive testing
| before they turned it off. How far did you drive the new
| version and in what circumstances?
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| I recently took a 3000 mile road trip on 12.5.4.1 on a mix
| of interstate, country roads, and city streets and there
| were only a small handful of instances where I felt like
| FSD completely failed. It's certainly not perfect, but I
| have never had the same failures that the original thread
| poster had.
| anonu wrote:
| My experience has been directionally the same as yours but not
| of the same magnitude. There's a lot of room from improvement
| but it's still very good. I'm in a slightly suburban setting...
| I suspect you're in a fender denser location that me, in which
| case your experience may be different.
| amelius wrote:
| Their irresponsible behavior says enough. Even if they fix
| all their technical issues, they are not driven by a safety
| culture.
|
| The first question that comes to their minds is not "how can
| we prevent this accident?" but it's "how can we further
| inflate this bubble?"
| rainsford wrote:
| Arguably the problem with Tesla self-driving is that it's stuck
| in an uncanny valley of performance where it's worse than
| better performing systems but _also_ worse from a user
| experience perspective than even less capable systems.
|
| Less capable driver assistance type systems might help the
| driver out (e.g. adaptive cruise control), but leave no doubt
| that the human is still driving. Tesla though goes far enough
| that it takes over driving from the human but it isn't reliable
| enough that the human can stop paying attention and be ready to
| take over at a moment's notice. This seems like the worst of
| all possible worlds since you are both disengaged by having to
| maintain alertness.
|
| Autopilots in airplanes are much the same way, pilots can't
| just turn it on and take a nap. But the difference is that
| nothing an autopilot is going to do will instantly crash the
| plane, while Tesla screwing up will require split second
| reactions from the driver to correct for.
|
| I feel like the real answer to your question is that having
| reasonable confidence in self-driving cars beyond "driver
| assistance" type features will ultimately require a car that
| will literally get from A to B reliably even if you're taking a
| nap. Anything close to that but not quite there is in my mind
| almost worse than something more basic.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Come on US, regulate interstate commerce and tell them to delete
| these cameras
|
| Lidar is goated and if tesla didn't want that they can pursue a
| different perception solution, allowing for innovation
|
| But just visual cameras aiming to replicate us, ban that
| bastloing wrote:
| It was way safer to ride a horse and buggy
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The SEC is clearly afraid of Musk. I wonder what the intimidation
| factor is at NHTSA.
| leoh wrote:
| Not meaningful enough.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| Tesla testing and developing FSD with normal consumer drivers
| frankly seems criminal. Test drivers for AV companies get
| advanced driver training, need to filed detailed reports about
| the cars response to various driving scenarios, and generally are
| paid to be as attentive as possible. The fact that any old tech-
| bro or un-assuming old lady can buy this thing and be on their
| phone when the car could potentially turn into oncoming traffic
| is mind boggling.
| buzzert wrote:
| > can buy this thing and be on their phone when the car could
| potentially turn into oncoming traffic is mind boggling
|
| This is incorrect. Teslas have driver monitoring software, and
| if the driver is detected using a phone while driving, will
| almost immediately give a loud warning and disable FSD.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| >Test drivers for AV companies get advanced driver training,
| need to filed detailed reports about the cars response to
| various driving scenarios, and generally are paid to be as
| attentive as possible.
|
| Like this one, who ran over and killed a woman?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
|
| While not fully being the driver's fault, during the
| investigation they were found to have watched TV on their
| smartphone at the time of the accident and the driver-facing
| camera clearly showed them not even looking at the road! Such
| attentiveness.
| quitit wrote:
| "Full Self-Driving" but it's not "full" self-driving, as it
| requires active supervision.
|
| So it's marketed with a nod and wink, as if the supervision
| requirement is just a peel away disclaimer to satisfy old and
| stuffy laws that are out of step with the latest technology. When
| in reality it really does need active supervision.
|
| But the nature of the technology is this approach invites the
| driver to distraction, because what's the use in "full self
| driving" if one needs to have their hands on the wheel and feet
| near the pedals ready to take control at a moments notice?
| Worsening this problem is that the Teslas have shown themselves
| to drive erratically at unexpected times such as phantom braking
| or misidentifying natural phenomena for traffic lights.
|
| One day people will look back on letting FSD exist in the market
| and roll their eyes in disbelief of the recklessness.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| Unpopular take: Even with perfect FSD which is much better than
| the average human driver (say having the robotic equivalent of a
| Lewis Hamilton in every car) the productivity and health gains
| won't be as great as people anticipate.
|
| Sure way less traffic deaths but the spike in depression
| especially among males would be something very big. Life events
| are much outside of our control, having a 5000lbs thing that can
| get to 150mph if needed and responds exactly to the accelerator,
| brake and steering wheel input...well that makes people feel in
| control and very powerful while behind the aforementioned
| steering wheel.
|
| Also productivity...I don't know...people think a whole lot and
| do a whole lot of self reflection while they are driving and when
| they arrive at destination they just implement the thoughts they
| had while driving. The ability to talk on the phone has been
| there for quite some time now too, so thinking and communicating
| can be done while driving already, what would FSD add?
| HaZeust wrote:
| As a sports car owner, I see where you're coming from -- but
| MANY do not. We are the 10%, the other 90% see their vehicle as
| an A-B tool, and you can clearly see that displayed with the
| average, utilitarian car models that the vast majority of the
| public buy. There will be no "spike" in depression; simply put,
| there's not enough people that care about their car, how it
| gets from point A to point B, or what contribution they give,
| if any, into that.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| Maybe they don't care about their car to be a sports car but
| they surely enjoy some pleasure out of the control of being
| at the helm of something powerful like a car (even though
| it's not a sports car)
|
| Also even people in small cars they think a lot while driving
| already, and they also communicate, how much more productive
| they could be with FSD?
| HaZeust wrote:
| I really don't think you're right about the average person,
| or even a notable size of people, believing in the idea of
| their car being their "frontier of freedom" as was popular
| in the 70-80's media. I don't think that many people _care_
| about driving nowadays.
| drodio wrote:
| I drive a 2024 Tesla Model Y and another person in my family
| drives a 2021 Model Y. Both cars are substantially similar (the
| 2021 actually has _more_ sensors than the 2024, which is strictly
| cameras-only).
|
| Both cars are running 12.5 -- and I agree that it's dramatically
| improved over 12.3.
|
| I really enjoy driving. I've got a #vanlife Sprinter that I'll do
| 14 hour roadtrips in with my kids. For me, the Tesla's self-
| driving capability is a "nice to have" -- it sometimes drives
| like a 16 year old who just got their license (especially around
| braking. Somehow it's really hard to nail the "soft brake at a
| stop sign" which seems like it should be be easy. I find that
| passengers in the car are most uncomfortable when the car brakes
| like this -- and I'm the most embarrassed because they all look
| at me like I completely forgot how to do a smooth stop at a stop
| sign).
|
| Other times, the Tesla's self-driving is magical and nearly
| flawless -- especially on long highway road trips, like up to
| Tahoe. Even someone like me who loves doing road trips really
| appreciates the ability to relax and not have to be driving.
|
| But here's one observation I've had that I don't see quite
| sufficiently represented in the comments:
|
| The other person in my family with the 2021 Model Y does not like
| to drive like I do, and they really appreciate that the Tesla is
| a better driver than they feel themselves to be. And as a
| passenger in their car, I also really appreciate that when the
| Tesla is driving, I generally feel much more comfortable in the
| car. Not always, but often.
|
| There's so much variance in us as humans around driving skills
| and enjoyment. It's easy to lump us together and say "the car
| isn't as good as the human." And I know there's conflicting data
| from Tesla and NHTSA about whether in aggregate, Teslas are safer
| than human drivers or not.
|
| But what I definitely know from my experience is that the Tesla
| is already a better driver than _many_ humans are -- especially
| those that don 't enjoy driving. And as @modeless points out, the
| rate of improvement is now vastly accelerating.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You are a living example of survivorship bias. One day your car
| will kill you or someone else, and then maybe you'll be able to
| come back here and tell us how wrong you were. How, with your
| new experience, you can see how the car only "seemed"
| competent, how it was that very seeming competence that got
| someone killed, because you trusted it.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I have FSD in my Plaid. I don't use it. Too scary.
| lrvick wrote:
| All these self driving car companies are competing to see whose
| proprietary firmware and sensors kill the fewest people. This is
| insane.
|
| I will -never- own a self driving car unless the firmware is open
| source, reproducible, remotely attestable, and built/audited by
| several security research firms and any interested security
| researchers from the public before all new updates ship.
|
| It is the only way to avoid greedy execs from cutting corners to
| up profit margins like VW did with faking emissions tests.
|
| Proprietary safety tech is evil, and must be made illegal.
| Compete with nicer looking more comfortable cars with better
| miles-to-charge, not peoples lives.
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| You are conflating two seperate problems (security vs
| functionality).
|
| "Firmware" can be open source and secure, but how does this
| translate to driving performance at all? Why does it matter if
| the firmware is validated by security researchers, who
| presumably don't know anything about motion planning,
| perception, etc? And this is even assuming that the code can be
| reasonably verified statically. You probably need to to run
| that code on a car for millions of miles (maybe in simulation)
| in an uncoutable number of scenarios to run through every edge
| case.
|
| The other main problem with what you're asking is that most of
| the "alpha" of these self driving companies is in proprietary
| _models_, not software. No one is giving up their models. That
| is a business edge.
|
| As someone who has been at multiple AV companies, no one is
| cutting corners on "firmware" or "sensors" (apart from making
| it reasonably cost effective so normal people can buy their
| cars). Its just that AV is a really really really difficult
| problem with no closed form solution.
|
| Your normal car has all the same pitfalls of "unverified
| software running on a safety critical system," except that its
| easier to verify that straightforward device firmware works vs
| a very complex engine whose job is to ingest sensor data and
| output a trajectory.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm on my second free FSD trial, just started for me today. Gave
| it another shot, and it seems largely similar to the last free
| trial they gave. Fun party trick, surprisingly good, right up
| until it's not. A hallmark of AI everywhere, is how great it is
| and just how abruptly and catastrophically it fails occasionally.
|
| Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel
| and your foot ready for the brake. When it goes off the rails, it
| usually does so in surprising ways with little warning and little
| time to correct. And since it's so good much of the time, you can
| get lulled into complacence.
|
| I never really understand the comments from people who think it's
| the greatest thing ever and makes their drive less stressful.
| Does the opposite for me. Entertaining but exhausting to
| supervise.
| darknavi wrote:
| You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it
| will fail.
|
| I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as
| our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be
| supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| This feels like the most dangerous possible combination (not
| for you, just to have on the road in large numbers).
|
| Good enough that the average user will stop paying attention,
| but not actually good enough to be left alone.
|
| And when the machine goes to do something lethally dumb, you
| have 5 seconds to notice and intervene.
| jvolkman wrote:
| This is what Waymo realized a decade ago and what helped
| define their rollout strategy:
| https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=247&si=Twi_fQJC7whg3Oey
| nh2 wrote:
| This video is great.
|
| It looks like Wayno really understood the problem.
|
| It explains concisely why it's a bad idea to roll our
| incremental progress, how difficult the problem really
| is, and why you should really throw all sensors you can
| at it.
|
| I also appreciate the "we don't know when it's going to
| be ready" attitude. It shows they have a better
| understanding of what their task actually is than anybody
| who claims "next year" every year.
| yborg wrote:
| You don't get a $700B market cap by telling investors "We
| don't know."
| rvnx wrote:
| Ironically, Robotaxis from Waymo are actually working
| really well. It's a true unsupervised system, very safe,
| used in production, where the manufacturer takes the full
| responsibility.
|
| So the gradual rollout strategy is actually great.
|
| Tesla wants to do "all or nothing", and ends up with
| nothing for now (example with Europe, where FSD is sold
| since 2016 but it is "pending regulatory approval", when
| actually, the problem is the tech that is not finished
| yet, sadly).
|
| It's genuinely a difficult problem to solve, so it's
| better to do it step-by-step than a "big-bang deploy".
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Does Tesla take full responsibility for FSD incidents?
|
| It seemed like most players in tech a few years ago were
| using legal shenanigans to dodge liability here, which,
| to me, indicates a lack of seriousness toward the safety
| implications.
| nh2 wrote:
| > So the gradual rollout strategy is actually great.
|
| I think you misunderstood, or it's a terminology problem.
|
| Waymo's point in the video is that in contrast to Tesla,
| they are _not_ doing gradual rollout of seemingly-
| working-still-often-catastropically-failing tech.
|
| See e.g. minute 5:33 -> 6:06. They are stating that they
| are targeting directly the shown upper curve of safety,
| and that they are not aiming for the "good enough that
| the average user will stop paying attention, but not
| actually good enough to be left alone".
| zbentley wrote:
| Not sure how tongue-in-cheek that was, but I think your
| statement is the heart of the problem. Investment money
| chases confidence and moonshots rather than backing
| organizations that pitch a more pragmatic (read:
| asterisks and unknowns) approach.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| All their sensors didn't prevent them from crashing into
| stationary object. You'd think that would be the absolute
| easiest to avoid, especially with both radar and lidar on
| board. Accidents like that show the training data and
| software will be much more important than number of
| sensors.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/12/waymo-second-robotaxi-
| reca...
| rvnx wrote:
| The issue was fixed, now handling 100'000 trips per week,
| and all seems to go well in the last 4 months, this is
| 1.5 million trips.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| So they had "better understanding" of the problem as the
| other user put it, but their software was still flawed
| and needed fixing. That's my point. This happened two
| weeks ago btw: https://www.msn.com/en-
| in/autos/news/waymo-self-driving-car-...
|
| I don't mean Waymo is bad or unsafe, it's pretty cool. My
| point is about true automation needing data and
| intelligence. A lot more data than we currently have,
| because the problem is in the "edge" cases, the kind of
| situation the software has never encountered. Waymo is in
| the lead for now but they have fewer cars on the road,
| which means less data.
| jraby3 wrote:
| Any idea how many accidents and how many fatalities? And
| how that compares to human drivers?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Five seconds is a _long_ time in driving, usually you'll
| need to react in under 2 seconds in situations where it
| disengages, those never happen while going straight.
| theptip wrote:
| Not if you are reading your emails...
| lolinder wrote:
| When an update comes out does that relationship get reset
| (does it start failing on things that used to work), or has
| it been a uniform upward march?
|
| I'm thinking of how every SaaS product I ever have to use
| regularly breaks my workflow to make 'improvements'.
| xur17 wrote:
| For me it does, but only somewhat. I'm much more cautious /
| aware for the first few drives while I figure it out again.
|
| I also feel like it takes a bit (5-10 minutes of driving)
| for it to recalibrate after an update, and it's slightly
| worse than usual at the very beginning. I know they have to
| calibrate the cameras to the car, so it might be related to
| that, or it could just be me getting used to its quarks.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| I wouldn't take OP's word for it, if they really believe
| they know how it's going to react in every situation in the
| first place. Studies have shown this is a gross
| overestimation of their own ability to pay attention.
| eschneider wrote:
| "You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where
| it will fail."
|
| I spent over a decade working on production computer vision
| products. You think you can do this, and for some percentage
| of failures you can. The thing is, there will ALWAYS be some
| percentage of failure cases where you really can't perceive
| anything different from a success case.
|
| If you want to trust your life to that, fine, but I certainly
| wouldn't.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Or until a software update quietly resets the relationship
| and introduces novel failure modes. There is little more
| dangerous on the road than false confidence.
| peutetre wrote:
| Elon Musk is a technologist. He knows a lot about
| computers. The last thing Musk would do is trust a computer
| program:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/musk-pushes-
| debunked-...
|
| So I guess that's game over for full self-driving.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Oooo maybe he'll get a similar treatment as Fox did
| versus Dominion.
| sumodm wrote:
| Something along this lines is the real danger. People will
| understand common failure modes and assume they have
| understood its behavior for most scenarios. Unlike common
| deterministic and even some probabilistic systems, where
| behavior boundaries are well behaved, there could be
| discontinuities in 'rarer' seen parts of the boundary. And
| these 'rarer' parts need not be obvious to us humans, since
| few pixel changes might cause wrinkles.
|
| *vocabulary use is for a broad stroke explanation.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I just gave it another try after my last failed attempt.
| (https://tomverbeure.github.io/2024/05/20/Tesla-FSD-First-
| and...)
|
| I still find it shockingly bad, especially in the way it
| reacts, or doesn't, to the way things change around the car
| (think a car on the left in front of you who switches on
| indicators to merge in front of you) or the way it makes the
| most random lane changing decisions and changes it's mind in
| the middle of that maneuver.
|
| Those don't count as disengagements, but they're jarring and
| drivers around you will rightfully question your behavior.
|
| And that's all over just a few miles of driving in an easy
| environment if interstate or highway.
|
| I totally agree that it's an impressive party trick, but it has
| no business being on the road.
|
| My experience with Waymo in SF couldn't have been more
| different.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > (think a car on the left in front of you who switches on
| indicators to merge in front of you)
|
| That car is signaling an intention to merge into your lane
| _once it is safe for them to do so_. What does the Tesla do
| (or not do) in this case that 's bad?
| cma wrote:
| Defensive driving is to assume they might not check their
| blindspot, etc. And just generally ease off in this
| situation if they would merge in tight if they began
| merging now.
| tverbeure wrote:
| That's the issue: I would immediately slow a little bit
| to let the other one merge. FSD seems to be noticing
| something, and eventually slow down, but the action is
| too subtle (if at all) to signal the other guy that
| you're letting them merge.
| hotspot_one wrote:
| > That car is signaling an intention to merge into your
| lane once it is safe for them to do so.
|
| Only under the assumption that the driver was trained in
| the US, to follow US traffic law, and is following that
| training.
|
| For example, in the EU, you switch on the indicators when
| you start the merge; the indicator shows that you ARE
| moving.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That seems odd to the point of uselessness, and does not
| match the required training I received in Germany from my
| work colleagues at Daimler prior to being able to sign
| out company cars.
|
| https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__9.html
| seems to be the relevant law in Germany, which Google
| translates to "(1) Anyone wishing to turn must announce
| this clearly and in good time; direction indicators must
| be used."
| nielsole wrote:
| Merging into the lane is probably better addressed by
| SS7, with the same content:
| https://dejure.org/gesetze/StVO/7.html
| Zanfa wrote:
| > For example, in the EU, you switch on the indicators
| when you start the merge; the indicator shows that you
| ARE moving.
|
| In my EU country it's theoretically at least 3 seconds
| _before_ initiating the move.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > it makes the most random lane changing decisions and
| changes it's mind in the middle of that maneuver.
|
| This happened to me during my first month of trialing FSD
| last year and was a big contributing factor for me not
| subscribing. I did NOT appreciate the mess the vehicle made
| in this type of situation. If I saw another driver doing the
| same, I'd seriously question if they were intoxicated.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| This was my experience as well. It tried to drive us (me, my
| wife, and my FIL) into a tree on a gentle low speed uphill turn
| and I'll never trust it again.
| jerb wrote:
| But it's clearly statistically much safer
| (https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport) 7 million miles
| before an accident w FSD vs. 1 million when disengaged. I agree
| I didn't like the feel of FSD either, but the numbers speak for
| themselves.
| bpfrh wrote:
| Teslas numbers have biases in them which paint a wrong
| picture:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-.
| ..
|
| They compare incomparable data(city miles vs highway miles),
| autopilot is also mostly used on higways which is not where
| most accidents happen.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Tesla released a promotional video in 2016 saying that with FSD a
| human driver is not necessary and that "The person in the
| driver's seat is only there for legal reasons". The video was
| staged as we've learned in 2022.
|
| 2016 folks... Even with today's FSD which is several orders of
| magnitude better than the one in the video, you would still
| probably have a serious accident within a week (and I'm being
| generous here) if you didn't seat in the driver's seat.
|
| How Trevor Milton got sentenced for fraud and the people
| responsible for this were not is a mystery to me.
| 1f60c wrote:
| AFAIK the owner's manual says you have to keep your hands on
| the wheel and be ready to take over at all times, but Elon Musk
| and co. love to pretend otherwise.
| Flameancer wrote:
| This part doesn't seem to be common knowledge. I don't own a
| Tesla but I have been a few. From my understanding the
| feature as always said it was in beta and that it still
| required that you have your hands on the wheel.
|
| I like the idea of FSD, but I think we should have a serious
| talk about how the safety implications of making this more
| broadly available and also compatibility with making a mesh
| network so FSD vehicles can communicate. I'm not well versed
| in the tech but I feel like it would be safer if you have
| like say have more cars on the road that can communicate and
| making decisions together than separate cars existing in a
| vacuum having to make a decision.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| I've wondered about the networked vehicle communication for
| a while. It doesn't even need to be FSD. I might be
| slightly wrong on this, but I would guess most cars going
| back at least a decade can have their software/firmware
| modified to do this if the manufacturers so choose. I
| imagine it would improve the reliability and reaction-times
| of FSD considerably.
| sanp wrote:
| This will go away once Trump wins
| greenie_beans wrote:
| why as a consumer would you want that? sounds extremely against
| your interest. i doubt you're a billionaire who less regulation
| would benefit
| amelius wrote:
| Add it to the list ...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
| InsomniacL wrote:
| As I come over the top of a crest, there was suddenly a lot of
| sun glare and the my Model Y violently swerved to the left,
| fortunately I had just overtaken a car on a two lane, dual
| carriageway and hadn't moved back to the left hand lane yet.
|
| The driver I had just overtaken, although he wasn't very close
| anymore slowed right down to get away from me and I didn't blame
| him.
|
| That manoeuvre in another car likely would have put it on two
| wheels.
|
| They say FSD crashes less often than a human per mile driven, but
| I can only use FSD on roads like motorways, so I don't think it's
| a fair comparison.
|
| I don't trust FSD, I still use it occasionally but never in less
| than ideal conditions. Typically when doing something like
| changing the music on a motorway.
|
| It probably is safer than just me driving alone, when it's in
| good conditions on a straight road with light traffic with an
| alert driver.
| mglz wrote:
| The underlying problem is that the current FSD architecture
| doesn't seem to have good guard rails for these outlier
| situations you describe (sunlight blinding the camera from just
| the right angle probably?) and it is probably not possible to
| add such rules without limiting the system enormously.
|
| Fundamentally driving consists of a set of fairly clear cut
| rules with a ridiculous amount of "it depends" cases.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'm a Tesla fan but I have to say anecdotally that it seems like
| Teslas represent an outsize number of bad drivers in my
| observations. Is it the FSD that's a bit too aggressive and
| sporadic? Lots of lane changing, etc?
|
| They're up there with Dodge Ram drivers.
| Fomite wrote:
| "Driver is mostly disengaged, but then must intervene in a sudden
| fail state" is also one of the most dangerous types of automation
| due to how long it takes the driver to reach full control as
| well.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Yeah, I don't drive but I would think it would be worse than
| actually paying attention all the time
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's also a problem that gets worse as the software gets
| better. Having to intervene once every 5 minutes is a lot
| easier than having to intervene once every 5 weeks. If lack
| of intervention causes an accident, I'd bet on the 5 minute
| car avoiding an accident longer than the 5 week car for any
| span of time longer than 10 weeks.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I feel like the full self driving cars should have a
| "budget". Every time you drive, say, 1000 km in FSD, you
| then need to drive 100 km in "normal" mode to keep sharp.
| Or whatever the ratio / exact numbers TBD. You can reset
| the counter upfront by driving smaller mileage more
| regularly.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| You are required to pay attention all the time. That's what
| the "supervised" in "FSD (supervised)" means.
| freejazz wrote:
| FSD stands for Fully Supervised Driving, right?
| dhdaadhd wrote:
| yeah, that sounds like Elon's marketing to me.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Traffic jams and long monotonous roads are really where these
| features, getting to level 3 on those should be the focus over
| trying to maintain a fiction of level 5 everywhere. (And like
| other comments, >2 should automatically mean liability)
| Yeul wrote:
| Now we know why Musk wants Trump to win. To completely subjugate
| the state to the whims of it's billionaire class. Going back to
| the 19th century's gilded age.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg78ljxn8g7o
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Are the insurance prices different if you own a Tesla with FSD?
| if not, why not?
| JTbane wrote:
| How can you possibly have a reliable self-driving car without
| LIDAR?
| dham wrote:
| Returning to this post in 5 years when FSD has been solved with
| just vision.
| masto wrote:
| I have such a love-hate relationship with this thing. I don't
| think Tesla's approach will ever be truly autonomous, and they do
| a lot of things to push it into unsafe territory (thanks to you
| know who at the helm). I am a tech enthusiast and part of the
| reason I bought this car (before you know who revealed himself to
| be you know what) is that they were the furthest ahead and I
| wanted to experience it. If they had continued on the path I'd
| hoped, they'd have put in _more_ sensors, not taken them out for
| cost-cutting and then tried to gaslight people about it. And all
| this hype about turning your car into a robotaxi while you 're
| not using it is just stupid.
|
| On the other hand, I'd hate for the result of all this to be to
| throw the ADAS out with the bathwater. The first thing I noticed
| even with the early "autopilot" is that it made long road trips
| much more bearable. I would arrive at my destination without
| feeling exhausted, and I attribute a lot of that to not having to
| spend hours actively making micro adjustments to speed and
| steering. I know everyone thinks they're a better driver than
| they are, and it's those other people who can't be trusted, but I
| do feel that when I have autopilot/FSD engaged, I am paying
| attention, less fatigued, and actually have more cognitive
| capacity freed up to watch for dangerous situations.
|
| I had to pick someone up at LaGuardia Airport yesterday, a long
| annoying drive in heavy NYC-area traffic. I engaged autosteer for
| most of the trip both ways (and disengaged it when I didn't feel
| it was appropriate), and it made it much more bearable.
|
| I'm neither fanboying nor apologizing for Tesla's despicable
| behavior. But I would be sad if, in the process of regulating
| this tech, it got pushed back too far.
| TeslaCoils wrote:
| Works most of the time, Fails at the worst time - Supervision
| absolutely necessary...
| deergomoo wrote:
| This is an opinion almost certainly based more in emotion than
| logic, but I don't think I could trust any sort of fully
| autonomous driving system that didn't involve communication with
| transmitters along the road itself (like a glideslope and
| localiser for aircraft approaches) and with other cars on the
| road.
|
| Motorway driving sure, there it's closer to fancy cruise control.
| But around town, no thank you. I regularly drive through some
| really crappily designed bits of road, like unlabelled approaches
| to multi-lane roundabouts where the lane you need to be in for a
| particular exit sorta just depends on what the people in front
| and to the side of you happen to have chosen. If it's difficult
| as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a
| largely computer vision-based system to work it out.
|
| The roads here are also in a terrible state, and the lines on
| them even moreso. There's one particular patch of road where the
| lane keep assist in my car regularly tries to steer me into the
| central reservation, because repair work has left what looks a
| bit like lane markings diagonally across the lane.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If it 's difficult as a human to work out what the intent
| is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to
| work it out._
|
| Most likely, every self-driving car company will send drivers
| down every road in the country, recording everything they see.
| Then they'll have human labellers figure out any junctions
| where the road markings are ambiguous.
|
| They've had sat nav maps covering every road for decades, and
| the likes of Google Street View, so to have a detailed map of
| every junction is totally possible.
| deergomoo wrote:
| In that case I hope they're prepared to work with local
| authorities to immediately update the map every time road
| layouts change, temporarily or permanently. Google Maps gets
| lane guidance wrong very often in my experience, so that
| doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
| tjpnz wrote:
| And the contractors employed by the local authorities to do
| roadworks big and small.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I kind of assumed that already happened. Does it not? Is
| anyone pushing for it?
|
| Honestly it seems like it ought to be federal law by now
| that municipalities need to notify a designated centralized
| service of all road/lane/sign/etc. changes in a
| standardized format, that all digital mapping providers can
| ingest from.
|
| Is this not a thing? If not, is anyone lobbying for it? Is
| there opposition?
| jjav wrote:
| > I kind of assumed that already happened.
|
| Road layout can change daily, sometimes multiple times
| per day. Sometimes in a second, like when a tree falls on
| a lane and now you have to reroute on the oncoming lane
| for some distance, etc.
| lukan wrote:
| "Honestly it seems like it ought to be federal law by now
| that municipalities need to notify a designated
| centralized service of all road/lane/sign/etc. changes in
| a standardized format, that all digital mapping providers
| can ingest from"
|
| Why not just anyone and make that data openly avaiable?
| fweimer wrote:
| Coordinating roadwork is challenging in most places, I
| think. Over here, it's apparently cheaper to open up a
| road multiple times in a year, rather than coordinating
| all the different parties that need underground access in
| the foreseeable future.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > didn't involve communication with transmitters along the road
| itself (like a glideslope and localiser for aircraft
| approaches) and with other cars on the road
|
| There will be a large number of non-participating vehicles on
| the road for at least another 50 years. (The _average_ age of a
| car in the US is a little over 12 years and rising. I doubt we
| 'll see a comms-based standard emerge and be required equipment
| on new cars for at least another 20 years.)
| lukan wrote:
| "There will be a large number of non-participating vehicles
| on the road for at least another 50 years."
|
| I think so too, but I also think, if we would really want to,
| all it would take is a GPS device with internet connection,
| like a smart phone, to make a normal car into a realtime
| connected one.
|
| But I also think we need to work out some social and
| institutional issues first.
|
| Currently I would not like my position to be avaiable in real
| time to some obscure agency.
| stouset wrote:
| Hell, ignore vehicles. What about pedestrians, cyclists,
| animals, construction equipment, potholes, etc?
| emmelaich wrote:
| Potential problem with transmitters is that they could be
| faked.
|
| You could certainly never rely on them alone.
| wtallis wrote:
| There are lots of other areas where intentionally violating
| FCC regulations to transmit harmful signals is already
| technologically feasible and cheap, but hasn't become a
| widespread problem in practice. Why would it be any worse for
| cars communicating with each other? If anything, having lots
| of cars on the road logging what they receive from other cars
| (spoofed or otherwise) would make it too easy to identify
| which signals are fake, thwarting potential use cases like
| insurance fraud (since it's safe to assume the car
| broadcasting fake data is at fault in any collision).
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree, the problem has been solved.
|
| If a consensus mechanism similar to those used in
| blockchain were implemented, vehicles could cross-reference
| the data they receive with data from multiple other
| vehicles. If inconsistencies are detected (for example, a
| car reporting a different speed than what others are
| observing), that data could be flagged as potentially
| fraudulent.
|
| Just as blockchain technologies can provide a means of
| verifying the authenticity of transactions, a network of
| cars could establish a decentralized validation process for
| the data they exchange. If one car broadcasts false data,
| the consensus mechanism among the surrounding vehicles
| would allow for the identification of this "anomaly",
| similar to how fraudulent transactions can be identified
| and rejected in a blockchain system.
|
| What you mentioned with regarding to insurance could be
| used as a deterrent, too, along with laws making it illegal
| to spoof relevant data.
|
| In any case, privacy is going to take a toll here, I
| believe.
| 15155 wrote:
| This is a complicated, technical solution looking for a
| problem.
|
| Simple, asymmetrically-authenticated signals and felonies
| for the edge cases solve this problem without any
| futuristic computer wizardry.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I did not intend to state that we ought to use the
| blockchain, at all, for what it is worth. Vehicles should
| cross-reference the data they receive with data from
| multiple other vehicles and detect inconsistencies, any
| consensus mechanism could work, if we could call it that.
| sva_ wrote:
| I agree with you about the trust issues and feel similarly, but
| also feel like the younger generations who grow up with these
| technologies might be less skeptical about adopting them.
|
| I've been kind of amazed how much younger people take some
| newer technologies for granted, the ability of humans to adapt
| to changes is marvelous.
| vmladenov wrote:
| Once insurance requires it or makes you pay triple to drive
| manually, that will likely be the tipping point for many
| people.
| Teknomancer wrote:
| This is just an opinion. The only way forward with automated and
| autonomous vehicles is through industry cooperation and
| standardization. The Tesla approach to the problem is inadequate,
| lacking means for interoperability, and relying on inferior
| detection mechanisms. Somebody who solves these problems and does
| it by offering interoperability and standards applied to all
| automakers wins.
|
| Sold Tesla investments. The company is on an unprofitable
| downward spiral trajectory. The CEO is a total clown. Reinvested
| on advise in Diamler, after Mercedes-Benz and Diamler Trucks
| North America demonstrated their research and work into creating
| true autonomous technology and safe global industry
| standardizations.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of
| crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility
| like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in
| Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021
| Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said.
|
| This is going to be another extremely biased investigation.
|
| 1. A 2021 Model Y is not on HW4.
|
| 2. FSD in November 2023 is not FSD 12.5, the current version. Any
| assessment of FSD on such outdated software is not going to be
| representative of the current experience.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| HW4 is a ridiculous requirement, it's only post 2023 and even
| then except Model Y, there's no HW4.
|
| FSD in Nov 2023 is not latest but it's not that old, I guess
| it's not in the 12 series which is much better but no need to
| not investigate this.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| That is literally the entire point. The whole investigation
| is moot because both the hardware _and_ software are out of
| date, and no longer used for any current Model Ys off the
| production line.
| ra7 wrote:
| The perfect setup. By the time an incident in the "current"
| software is investigated, it will be outdated. All Tesla has to
| do is a rev a software version and ignore all incidents that
| occurred prior to it.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| You are welcome to conjure whatever conspiracy theories you
| like but the reality is FSD 12.5 is exponentially better than
| previous versions. Don't just take it from me, this is what
| all Tesla owners are saying too.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| One thing thats a little weird with the constant tesla framing of
| fsd being better than the average driver, is this assumption that
| a tesla owner might be an average driver. The "average" driver
| includes people who total their cars, who kill pedestrians, who
| drive drunk, who go 40 over. Meanwhile I've never been in an
| accident. For me and probably for many other drivers, their own
| individual average performance is much better than the average of
| all drivers. And given that its a possibility that relying on fsd
| is much worse for you than not in terms of rate of risk.
| metabagel wrote:
| Cruise control with automatic following distance and lane-keeping
| are such game changers, that autonomous driving isn't necessary
| for able drivers.
|
| OK, the lane-keeping isn't quite there, but I feel like that's
| solvable.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I'm not turning FSD on until it is a genuine autonomous vehicle
| that requires no input from me and never disengages. Until Tesla
| is, under the law, the legal driver of the vehicle, and suffers
| all the legal impact, you'd have to be mental to let it drive for
| you. It's like asking, "Hey, here's a chauffeur who has killed
| several people so far, all over the world. You want him to
| drive?" Or "Hey, here's a chauffeur. You're fine, you can read a
| book. But at some point, right when something super dangerous is
| about to happen, he's going to just panic and stop driving, and
| then you have to stop whatever you're doing and take over."
| That's fucking mental.
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