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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

Neither does every other car on the market.

Wait, yes they do. Every other car has a driver who, presumably, does not want to randomly veer off into concrete pillars or oncoming traffic like FSD seems to do with an alarming frequency. Humans are imperfect and make mistakes when distracted or driving illegally (under the influence of alcohol or drugs or without a license or with poor eyesight...) but the argument that a Tesla operating under FSD is just as safe as this most dangerous class of drivers is an extremely unconvincing one.

There are human drivers in Tesla vehicles too. And FSD beta isn’t doing anything fundamentally different than any other “regular” car with adaptive cruise and lane centring—it is steering, braking and accelerating based on conditions reported by sensors. The only difference is that the FSD beta is capable of doing this task in a wider variety of scenarios.

Why call it fsd when it can’t do fsd? Also if I need to watch my car driving, then why should I pay $199 a month for it rather than drive the car myself, or call an Uber.

Too many Tesla apologists around.

They call it “potentially FSD” in Germany because they got sued for false advertising by the consumer protection agency and they lost.

They call it FSD in the US because nobody has won a lawsuit against them yet. Doesn’t the US have customer protection agencies ?

I'm not defending the FSD name. Personally I think the name is stupid.

I'm not defending the price. Personally I wouldn't pay for it.

For the record, I don't own a Tesla vehicle. I don't know anyone who owns a Tesla vehicle. I don't own TSLA stock (or any other individual stock or derivatives). I've never driven a Tesla vehicle or even sat inside any Tesla vehicle.

When does it cross the line from "bad naming" to "fraud"? If I call my product a "life jacket" and you wear it while out on the water but all it does is make you sink faster it's not just a bad name.

So long as Tesla correctly explains what FSD does to its paying customers, then it is not fraud. It is inconceivable that anyone could go through the Tesla buying process and check the box for "FSD" without reading the clear description of what the feature actually is. This isn't like installing iTunes, it adds $8k to the purchase price of the car and it's not optioned by default.

It's true that some people who haven't purchased a Tesla vehicle might be misinformed about FSD. But it's not fraud if they aren't customers.

I don't like the FSD name and I think Tesla should change it. But I can see how people can come to different conclusions about it. The word "full" can mean very different things depending on how you think about the word and the context of its use. The two extremes:

MAXIMALLY NARROW — "Full" self driving means the car can reliably control the vehicle perfectly in all circumstances, on all road surfaces, at all times, in all conditions. This is something that most HUMANS are incapable of, by the way. So under this definition, most humans aren't "full" drivers either.

MAXIMALLY BROAD — "Full" self driving can perform the "full" set of driving tasks, imperfectly, in certain circumstances, on some road types, only at some times, only in some conditions. Doesn't even mean it can drive in these limited situations well, only that it can drive them.

Most people would agree that a realistic definition fits somewhere between those extremes. But there's no question that FSD satisfies the maximally broad definition.

For several years now, in the EU at least, all new cars need to have automatic emergency breaks. It's basically impossible to run into something, run someone over, etc. This kind of system reduces stress and gives at least me a certain peace of mind. In this regard Tesla self driving is a step backwards.

You seem to be confused about what AEB is and what it does. It is generally effective at braking for static or rapidly slowing vehicles ahead. Most AEB systems are not effective "safeguards against driving into oncoming traffic and parked cars". These would involve a steering intervention, not a braking intervention.

I assume AEB ignores a lot of stuff on purpose, otherwise it'd be braking due to things on the side of the road, and cars in the other lane on a curve that are heading straight towards you

Correct. Most AEB systems use a forward facing radar, which often receive spurious reflections from various street elements overhead bridges, overhead signage and manhole covers. As a result, most radar-based implementations will actively ignore completely stationary objects while driving at high speed.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu... has some more info, they will stop for things stopped in front of them, but only at city speeds, I assume because randomly braking at 60mph is bad

That is a good article which summarises the state of AEB and its general capability. It's worth noting that the most effective system they tested doesn't use radar at all, it was an entirely vision-based system: Subaru Eyesight. Worth remembering this when people agonise over Tesla ditching radar sensors on the Model 3.

I chose my parents' most recent new car precisely because of this—a 2019 model year Subaru Forester. Not only was the active safety top notch, its chassis tuning means that it's more capable of remaining composed after swerving to avoid an obstacle. (It was also one of the few vehicles which ticked every box for them.)

Here is the comparison I relied upon for that decision. (Yes, I am Australian.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs7PSpIMJYk

eyesight has stereoscopic vision, so can compute actual distances from obstacles from the input feed instead of faking it all with machine learning.

If you're interested, Tesla's head of AI recently did a public presentation of their new vision based depth system. It's worth a watch if you find this stuff interesting and enjoy learning about the forefront of technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc

A key takeaway is that they've been running this stack in shadow mode (validating output but not controlling the car) on everyone's Tesla for quite some time. Equivalent to 1000 YEARS worth of real world driving. And from this data they've proven it is now superior to radar in all circumstances.

being very suspicious about that talk, the output they show doesn't matches at all with the output people have extracted from running teslas - https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1412597377228226562 - specifically the 'trained' heath signature running horizontally across the dash.

It’s not going to match because it’s different data from a different ML model visualised in a different way. Weird that you’d expect it to.

Well,the rest have radar, so that's not a problem.

"Stereoscopic vision works most effectively for distances up to 18 feet. Beyond this distance, your brain starts using relative size and motion to determine depth."

What has brain performance anything to do with the discussion at hand? Eyesight eyes are further apart than humans anyway.

That humans use size to determine distance when driving

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