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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Can the footage be trusted? From my understanding Tesla has only rolled this out to a small number of users, browsing the YT search results you’ve provided I see that almost all the results are Tesla super fan accounts.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to disregard this until you see an objective assessment in the field.

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There is a NDA. One tester has said that it [at least in part] says "you can't livestream drives"[0], and while otherwise NDA details are sparse, given the many close calls, bad performance situations, and multiple periods of rapid uploads [1,2], chances are they aren't screening videos.

0: https://youtu.be/AkexMo_jdcQ?t=346

1: https://i.judge.sh/enormous/Flim/chrome_RIGtEw3oE3.png (Chuck Cook)

2: https://i.judge.sh/sturdy/Derpy/chrome_NZrYtjHAeP.png (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)

It's fair to question the motivations of the FSD beta testers. They were obviously hand picked to ensure maximum safety, adequate public profile, having committed large sums of money to prove their allegiance, as well as being existing fans of the company. So they're likely to be biased.

But that's a long way from alleging that they've doctored their videos, or that Tesla itself has censored them. There are many many instances of footage showing almost crashes that were only avoided because the driver intervened. If you were the censor, would you allow those?

Compare that to Waymo or Cruise or anyone else. They are obviously heavily censoring and have no independent owners recording footage, nor sharing it like this. It's a huge step up in much needed transparency.

> Compare that to Waymo or Cruise or anyone else. They are obviously heavily censoring and have no independent owners recording footage, nor sharing it like this. It's a huge step up in much needed transparency.

You clearly haven't searched Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/c/JJRicksStudios is one such channel which frequently posts videos of his Waymo rides. There are others if you search, not so much volume as Tesla though.

What you need to know about the performance of various autonomous vehicles is not observable through a bunch of youtube videos. The improvements are happening at the statistical margins, that's where 99.9% of the work is. Youtube videos won't do much to show the difference between Google's car's performance 7 years ago and today. You need granular statistical data to make any kind of informed judgement.

That Tesla is just now getting to the place where they can get a few miles in moderately complex traffic without fucking up, while still having many other videos of failures and close calls should tell you that Tesla has a long way to go. There are tens of thousands of driving scenarios that all need special attention.

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