[HN Gopher] Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection sy...
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Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection system [pdf]
Author : doener
Score : 134 points
Date : 2026-03-19 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (static.nhtsa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (static.nhtsa.gov)
| Animats wrote:
| _" In the crashes that ODI has reviewed, the system did not
| detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera visibility
| and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated
| until immediately before the crash occurred."_
|
| Does it not detect them at all, or fail to deal with detected
| sensor degradation adequately? Does "Full Self Driving
| (assisted)" slow down under conditions of poor visibility?
|
| Does Tesla even look for the road surface? One big advantage of
| those up-top LIDAR units is that you have a good scan of the
| pavement ahead. If you're not sensing flat pavement ahead, don't
| go there. That's basic. Vision-only systems, going back to
| Mobileye, have been overly dependent on looking for known kinds
| of obstacles. Original Mobileye could only detect car rear ends.
| altairprime wrote:
| > _Does "Full Self Driving (assisted)" slow down under
| conditions of poor visibility?_
|
| Under conditions of poor _camera_ visibility?
|
| Humans drivers can see under conditions that cameras cannot,
| and people will otherwise misinterpret "visibility" as
| referring unpredictably (and with personal biases) towards
| either human sight and/or camera processing and/or lidar
| processing.
| dstroot wrote:
| I own two Tesla's. When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy
| rain, the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual
| driving. Elon has said several times that humans can drive with
| two eyes and Tesla should be able to drive with X number of
| cameras. however, it suffers from the same problems humans do:
| if it can't see it can't drive and ironically that's when it
| reverts back to human control.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Remember that Elon isn't actually an engineer
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| This. He makes a lot of unfounded assertions.
| 9dev wrote:
| Birds can fly with two wings and humans should be able to fly
| with X number of limbs.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I definitely agree that in principle a computer can drive
| with cameras alone. I don't know whether it's a useful
| statement. Like a human can determine the genre of a movie
| merely by watching it. I wouldn't suggest to blockbuster in
| 1990 that they should collect no genre metadata for movies
| because the database server should automatically sort it out
| on its own. (Nowadays somewhat feasible with ML of course,
| but 20+ years later.) What sensors/data you need is a
| question of where computers are now or will shortly be, and
| it seems that for now they need the extra structure of LIDAR
| for best effectiveness.
| carlmr wrote:
| >I definitely agree that in principle a computer can drive
| with cameras alone.
|
| Obvious things first, cameras have way worse contrast and
| low light sensitivity than human eyes.
|
| Humans have much more evolved logical thinking capacity,
| even the stupid ones can figure stuff out that modern AI
| struggles with.
|
| Humans have other sensors, too that they use to
| plausibility check the picture they see. I.e. one of the
| best sensor fusion systems on the planet.
|
| When in doubt humans can figure out whether it's a lens
| occlusion or a some other artifact in their vision by
| virtue of moving their head around.
|
| There's probably other things I'm not thinking of. In any
| case to make full self driving work we should first start
| by using all available tech to make it safe. When you have
| safe tech you can slowly start removing individual sensors
| while verifying that safety remains high. As the experience
| and system evolves there will be optimization potential.
|
| And until we have that low light thing and high contrast
| figured out, camera alone doesn't cut it.
| Eridrus wrote:
| Unrelated to FSD, what's a good example where frontier AI
| struggles with logical thinking that even stupid humans
| can figure out?
|
| I personally feel like that isn't really true any more.
| kerridge0 wrote:
| The recent one was should I drive my car to the car wash
| if it's only 300 feet from my house although it wasn't a
| slam dunk.
| XorNot wrote:
| Well that, but Elon is also downplaying the quality of the
| human vision system compared to the cameras Tesla's have.
|
| They're just not that good - nowhere near human vision
| performance. And a human in a car has a surprisingly good
| view of the road and a very fast pan tilt system to look
| around.
|
| Tesla's do not actually have 360 degree full binocular vision
| coverage - nor the ability for a camera to lean left or right
| to improve an ambiguous sensor picture.
|
| So while I fully believe that vision only self driving could
| work, within the constraints of automobile platforms and
| particularly the Tesla and it's current camera deployments,
| it is not remotely similar enough to human visual fidelity
| for that to solve a valid argument.
| buildbot wrote:
| Literally some of the highest dynamic range sensors
| attached to probably the best generally intelligent model
| existing we know of -
|
| Humans are hard to compete with! I'd want LIDAR & RADAR
| just to give me an edge.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two
| eyes and Tesla should be able...
|
| And this is an amazingly stupid statement. Humans drive with
| most of their senses, not just vision. In fact our
| proprioception plays an important role in driving.
|
| Even Tesla's use of cameras is poor because they're monocular
| and fixed in place. Most humans have binocular vision and
| those visual sensors have multiple degrees of freedom and the
| ability to adjust focus.
|
| Even if you wanted to only use vision for navigation it's
| irresponsible to not use binocular configurations that get
| more reliable depth sensing.
| UltraSane wrote:
| "Elon has said several times "
|
| At this point I truly don't understand why anyone cares what
| that liar says.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's a normative claim.
|
| It might be dishonest (if he doesn't believe it is
| possible), but I don't think he's saying that the current
| systems have reached the mark.
| renlo wrote:
| > When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy rain, the
| system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving.
|
| I also own a Tesla, and there is no indication shown to the
| user that FSD's vision is degraded. They need to add this in.
|
| For example, numerous times I have been driving my Tesla with
| FSD activated with ostensibly a clean and clear windshield
| when suddenly the car will do the "clean the windshield in
| front of the camera routine" without any indication that the
| car's camera is degraded. If people haven't seen this "clean
| the windshield routine", the wiper fluid is dispensed and the
| wiper will vigorously wipe in front of the camera only -- the
| rest of the windshield only gets a cursory wipe.
|
| This indicates to me that the camera has poor visibility and
| I am not informed or aware of this as a driver, which is
| concerning. I am often curious if there is a thin occluding
| film on the windshield in the camera box in front of the
| camera, or something that has degraded FSD's vision, but they
| do not give you the ability to view the camera feed, nor do
| they notify you that the vision is degraded. I think a "thin
| occluding film" may be in the camera box because my normal
| windshield outside of the camera box started to show a thin
| chemical film after a couple of months, which apparently
| (according to a Google search) happens when a new car off-
| gasses, adding a thin film of chemical byproduct to the
| windshield. This is my first new car so I've no idea if this
| is normal or not.
| bradfox2 wrote:
| Maybe you have not received an alert but, yes it does, and
| it's annoying as all hell. Dirt, sun, etc all pop an alert
| about degraded performance.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Absolutely could be a clouded windshield on the inside
| (where it's really hard for normal people to clean). I
| brought this up when I got my last Model Y that it was
| foggy and they said it was "fine". Took it into service
| over a year ago and noticed they cleaned it. Clearly it's a
| problem but they're not being too transparent about it. I
| suspect they don't want to because it's not the easiest
| thing to remove the cover for normal people to clean.
| conductr wrote:
| My Lexus does this too. I rarely get it due to weather
| however it's how I know I'm past due for a car wash (dust on
| sensors)
|
| In any case, it seems reasonable to me that the human should
| be making the decisions once conditions become adverse. It's
| a simple liability issue for the car company but also I'd
| rather trust my own judgment if it's only 80% certain it's
| not driving me off a cliff.
| lateforwork wrote:
| > _humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able to
| drive with X number of cameras_
|
| Systems built from cameras that are only _nearly as capable_
| as human eyes and software that is only _nearly as capable_
| as the human brain will fall short overall. To match or
| surpass human performance, the individual components need to
| exceed human abilities where possible--and that 's where
| LiDAR provides an advantage.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think vision-only can certainly work for 99.9% of driving.
|
| But it's that 0.1% of situations where the results will be
| catastrophic. Sure, you can detect vehicles, traffic cones,
| bikes (both bicycles and motorcycles), people, mopeds, traffic
| lights, lane markings, everything you'd expect on a road.
|
| But what about the mattress that fell out of someone's truck?
| If the car doesn't know what a mattress is and what it looks
| like, it can't really adequately determine its size based on
| the monocular vision that Tesla has. Sure, maybe it could use
| motion vectors between video frames to make a guess, but I'm
| not convinced that's going to work well, especially relative to
| LIDAR.
|
| Steering back to the subject at hand...
|
| > "In the crashes that ODI has reviewed, the system did not
| detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera
| visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had
| deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred."
|
| I don't think I've ever had my Tesla disable Autopilot based on
| road conditions, though maybe it's because when conditions are
| bad, I've just taken manual control preemptively. I've let it
| go through construction areas where cones are guiding traffic
| outside the painted lines, and surprisingly, it's handled it
| fine, though I've only done this at low speeds (~20 mph).
|
| Camera visibility is another story. In heavy rain at night,
| I've had it not allow me to enable AP, though I've never had it
| disable AP and tell me to take control. However, it HAS limited
| the cruise speed based on visibility.
|
| All this to say...
|
| ...anybody buying Tesla's FSD is being swindled, as far as I'm
| concerned. "FSD (Supervised)" is a scam. If you have to
| supervise it, it's not self-driving. It's just a party trick
| that you have to watch to make sure nothing goes wrong.
| cornell532 wrote:
| Mine shuts off because of conditions regularly. It's very
| annoying.
|
| FSD is a better driver than me 99% of the time.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 99.9%? I'm not an expert on climate, but I would guess that
| at minimum 50% of the world faces snow or fog or heavy rain
| while driving at times. In some places, 30%+ of all driving
| year-round could be in snow-inclusive conditions.
|
| 99.9% of driving of sea-level, non-rainy, near-the-coast
| California/Austin weather, maybe. I would guess it's a no-go
| in the inland foggy conditions in CA, for example, or
| freezing rain in TX.
|
| In terms of ALL conditions? 60-70% maybe.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Not too much to specifically take away yet, but appears that the
| degradation detection system did not function well. That is
| pretty egregious for FSD given a human won't be able to tell if
| FSD is confident or needs the human to intervene. I'd expect this
| to be a VERY important test case with high reliability of
| passing, but who knows.
|
| Overall, yikes.
| himata4113 wrote:
| A reflection on a white truck makes it confident that it can
| move into that truck. I really have nothing else to say
| (happened to my friend).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >In each of these crashes, FSD also lost track of or never
| detected a lead vehicle in its path.
|
| Oh good, Tesla vehicles apparently struggle with the task of
| "Hey, there's a car there" in degraded conditions.
|
| Probably don't need to worry about that while driving though.
|
| >Tesla also described internal data and labeling limitations that
| prevented a uniform identification and analysis of crash events
| with the subject system engaged. ODI believes this limitation
| could have led to under-reporting of subject crashes over
| portions of the defined time-period.
|
| I thought Tesla was a "Software" company!
|
| This report is insanely vague though. It's very preliminary,
| opened yesterday.
| kvuj wrote:
| > This report is insanely vague though. It's very preliminary,
| opened yesterday.
|
| Yeah I think posting this here is premature without any
| details.
|
| Maybe I'm misremembering things, but I feel like 4-5 years ago
| we didn't have these clickbait headlines that fed political
| discourse. It feels like reddit culture has permeated this
| place for a while.
|
| Anytime one of Elon Musk's company has a misstep, the headlines
| violently shoots to the top of the front page.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| It's not premature. Every single expert in this field has
| warned about these issues since even ~2012 days when these
| types of platforms were being publicly discussed.
|
| This is an expected and understood result given the hardware
| and software involved.
|
| You will not get past these issues without a RADICAL
| improvement in camera technology paired with specialized,
| dedicated processing hardware matched against several (and I
| mean several several) "common" environment profiles.
|
| FSD is a scam. It's not safe. It is not technically sound.
|
| The fact that there aren't many more accidents with the
| system is a by product of consistent and well thought out
| road standards, car standards, other safety systems present
| on cars, and driver education.
| resfirestar wrote:
| You're just reciting your priors, which I think supports
| GP's point: no one is getting new information out of the
| posted link, so it's probably premature to comment on it.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| You are misusing some of those words and I'm not even
| sure how to interpret them even with a hefty dose of
| good-faith reading.
|
| The report is not premature and it's not premature to
| comment on them.
|
| Can you clearly and explicitly state why you feel like
| the report or the commentary is premature?
| resfirestar wrote:
| I was agreeing with kvuj and rguyorama that the original
| link is to an announcement that an investigation is
| happening, and it's too early in the process to
| productively discuss it. People have very strong and
| emotional pro or anti stances on the Tesla Vision system
| in general, and love an excuse to have the debate again,
| but in the comments here where people are talking about
| their stance you might notice that they don't reference
| any specific facts from the linked report to support
| their arguments. This is because the report is still
| vague at this stage and doesn't provide any specifics
| that inform the discussion.
| corygarms wrote:
| To be fair, Tesla vehicles are recalled more than any other
| automaker and it isn't close
| https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-
| news/a43625242/tesla-...
| dkenyser wrote:
| > clickbait titles that fed political discourse.
|
| Eh, while I agree with you on the permeation of reddit
| culture on this board, this post is in no way clickbait or
| political in nature.
|
| In fact, the title of this post is literally copy and pasted
| from the problem description.
| ModernMech wrote:
| People have been warning about this for over a decade, others
| have died as a result of the lack of action, and yet we're
| still sitting on our hands waiting for the government to
| catch up to what expects have known for years - Tesla
| Autonomy is fundamentally busted/cooked/broken, and needs to
| be outlawed.
|
| The reason this stuff shoots to the top is because Elon Musk
| and his companies are a red alert _menaces_ to society.
| People are sick of him and the damage he causes with his
| money, and wish he and his cars would just fuck off for good.
| From his cars slamming into people and property, his website
| spreading hate, his starships raining fiery debris, or he 's
| personally taking an axe to government programs we rely on,
| everyone has cause to be absolutely _done_ with his antics.
|
| But since businesses can apparently unleash autonomous
| murderbots onto the public roadways with zero repercussions
| for 10+ years, I guess we'll have to settle for endless
| flamewars about Musk's campaign of destruction on HackerNews
| instead.
| sonofhans wrote:
| You know, I agree with everything you said, and I still
| wish this discussion weren't happening on HN.
| starkeeper wrote:
| "Cameras only" is a cost cutting for profit only feature that is
| subject to Wile E. Coyote attacks.
|
| It is a shameful engineering design to leave out LIDAR and it has
| cost human lives.
|
| Let's hope Musk does not leave out something important for the
| moon landing. His proposal for it is absolutely ridiculous, it
| looks like a children's book fantasy and many smaller top-heavy
| craft have already toppled on the moon!
| shmoe wrote:
| NASA already let 'em off the hook for testing an elevator to
| get down to the surface from the ship. The best part is no
| part/elevator!
|
| One giant leap?
| jedmeyers wrote:
| > One giant leap?
|
| The gravity is weaker so just jump down /s
| xnx wrote:
| 40 foot drops would be survivable on the moon.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| His moon lander will deploy a parachute that keeps the lander
| suspended for as long as it takes for the AI to grok the fact
| that there is no air on the moon, and then it finally falls
| according to cartoon physics with a whistling sound you can
| hear through the vacuum.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSHzenjiNA
| loxodrome wrote:
| The introduction of self-driving technology at scale will
| inevitably result in a few accidents no matter how many sensors
| are used. It's the same with every new technology deployed in
| high-risk situations, including motor vehicles themselves. Even
| malfunctioning airbags have caused fatalities. The important
| thing is to identify the issue early so the company can address
| it before more people get hurt, which the ODI in this case is
| thankfully doing.
| starkeeper wrote:
| There is still no excuse for not using LIDAR in addition to
| anything else.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yes, this was something that the industry figured out in 2007.
| But because Musk has a lot of money, people do whatever he
| says, no matter how ignorant and deadly and dangerous. He never
| even had a cogent rationale, just absurd amounts of money. The
| shame is so profound and widespread it's hard to fathom really.
| starkeeper wrote:
| The renderings look like the cover of a Young Adult Sci Fi
| novel by Robert H. Heinlein. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
| comes to mind. Probably the first true Science Fiction I have
| ever read!
| delabay wrote:
| The dreaded Wile E Coyote attack, the bane of every commuter's
| existence.
| vizzier wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APY-spLNvHI puddle might do
| it tho
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| What are wile e coyote attacks? Painting a tunnel entrance on a
| wall?
|
| If Tesla FSD is better than the average driver using it, isn't
| it still a net win, even if it might crash in different
| scenarios than a human? Especially because a human has a window
| to override FSD, but FSD doesn't really get a chance to
| override a human, except in limited scenarios like automatic
| emergency braking. And it gets more people using it by
| providing FSD at a lower cost?
| ModernMech wrote:
| > What are wile e coyote attacks?
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-autopilot-fails-wile-
| e-c...
|
| > If Tesla FSD is better than the average driver using it,
| isn't it still a net win, even if it might crash in different
| scenarios than a human?
|
| That was the analysis when the industry was in its infancy. I
| think a lot more work has to go into that argument for people
| to accept it now that the driverless car industry has been
| operating for a decade+, it's not really clear that this pans
| out.
|
| For example, today you can look at a car and predict how it's
| going to behave because you have a good model for how people
| drive. But let's say in the future driverless cars are much
| "safer" on paper than human drivers, but they behave very
| differently from them such that it's hard for people to
| predict their behaviors.
|
| Now you've created a highly dynamic system where you don't
| have a good model for the all the actors because some of them
| behave one way but others behave a completely different way.
| Does this increase the overall safety of the system or
| decrease it, despite the new actors being statistically safer
| than the current ones?
|
| I don't think you can with great confidence say what's going
| to happen just by looking at crash rates and comparing to the
| current system. You're going to change the whole system by
| introducing large numbers of actors who "crash in different
| scenarios than a human"
| starkeeper wrote:
| >> What are wile e coyote attacks? Painting a tunnel entrance
| on a wall?
|
| Yes!!! Thank you hopefully I will get credit for inventing
| this attack :)
|
| >> IncreasePosts 39 minutes ago | parent | context | flag |
| on: Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection ...
|
| What are wile e coyote attacks? Painting a tunnel entrance on
| a wall?
|
| >> If Tesla FSD is better than the average driver using it,
| isn't it still a net win, even if it might crash in different
| scenarios than a human?
|
| I don't think so because it is fooled by simple things that
| could easily be prevented and counting on a human to override
| is very risky because the human is simply not alert in the
| passive mode.
|
| I think cameras are great, but there is no excuse not to also
| use LIDAR.
| kakacik wrote:
| What if I am better than average driver? Thats anyway a very
| low bar for success and its not going to fly with general
| populations, laws and so on.
|
| tesla cars killing people would be all over the news each
| time and nobody would care that similar or even marginally
| smaller amount of people would die anyway. People simply
| expect way more for giving up control.
|
| Is it really that hard to see?
| jonthepirate wrote:
| Tesla is a premium product - if someone is going to use FSD they
| know its a luxury feature and should pay for the most
| comprehensive safety features available which in my mind would of
| (of course) require lidar
| mbreese wrote:
| _> Tesla is a premium product_
|
| I'm not sure that's the case anymore. Each Tesla model has
| gotten more spartan over the years. And the interiors have
| never been all that "premium" when compared with other
| manufacturers. They should still offer the most comprehensive
| safety features, but whether or not thats because of "luxury"
| or not, I'm not sure.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Tesla is an _expensive_ product, but it 's never been premium
| as in "high quality". The interior has always felt bare like a
| portapotty, the body panels have always been misaligned,
| products like the CyberTruck have trim that is glued on and can
| be ripped off by a pinky finger. And of course driverless
| assist systems that have been known to decapitate multiple
| peoples and get fooled by a cartoon wall.
| jedberg wrote:
| Ironic to see this on the front page just next to the report
| about Waymos being 13 times safer than humans.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Not surprising at all though, considering the "safety first" vs
| "yolo" approaches, right?
| jedberg wrote:
| Not in the least. Cutting costs by only using cameras and
| then claiming "well humans can do it so why not us" is one of
| the dumbest things I've ever heard.
| ares623 wrote:
| This moved from the top spot on the front page so fast
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Looks like you're right: https://hnrankings.info/47445175/
| haunter wrote:
| Tesla / Elon is one of the topics where HN can't have a
| meaningful discussion.
|
| Some people upvote everything slightly negative about the
| topic: "see how bad it is!!!"
|
| Some people flag everything slightly negative about the topic:
| "we rather not let you see how bad it is"
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