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Comment by mcot2 | Hacker News Reader

Actual user of the beta here. Happy to answer any questions that are honest. My opinion is let the technology develop in the open, warts and all.

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As someone who shares a road with Teslas, it feels like I have been enrolled in this beta without my consent, and without any tangible benefits to me.

What are the arguments for why non-owners should support this approach?

As someone who shares (reality) with (people), it feels like I have been enrolled in this beta (consisting of taking photos, video recording, coughing, driving) without my consent, and without any tangible benefits to me.

What are the arguments for why non-owners should support this approach?

I actually have no idea what point you are trying to make, assuming there was one.

I have a dash cam in my Yaris. It's not any different than a Tesla recording video around you.

There are several tangible benefits if you drive near a lot of Teslas on autopilot in a highway setting. Besides the advantages of adaptive cruise control (constant speed and set follow distance) it is adding safe lane changes where it always has visbility into blind spots and always activates the blinkers.

This beta adds the same benefits and more on city streets.

Help me understand how you think your opinion entitles you to gamble with other people's lives.

Because I don’t view it that way as an actual user of the system. I know I am still in full control of the vehicle as is any driver using it. Merely tapping the brakes is hardwired to return control to the driver. The system also has many controls to montior driver attentivness and alert or disable itself if the driver is not attentive. Recently folks have been kicked out of the beta program for lots of reasons so they are monitoring this closely.

Just because you can make steering, braking, and acceleration changes to the car does not mean you are “in control”. The software makes such aggressive decisions that it can become impossible to react, causing massive additional danger to others, such as was the case in the recent crash.

https://twitter.com/mostlyharmlessz/status/14694217625553510...

I don’t know the specifics of that incident but it should be exceedingly rare. I would like to know more about it and will try to find out more.

I see the argument, but I don't think driver control/supervision is actually the crux of the issue. If Firestone had a completely new tire technology that was mostly ok but had an elevated risk of spontaneously blowing out, I would not be happy if they were doing their beta testing in public roads regardless of who was driving.

The technology being tested seems half baked and not yet ready for testing on a public roads. At the very least, their approach to software updates does not seem like its being sufficiently tested before deployment. This video[1] linked in another thread is an example of what I mean.

[1] https://twitter.com/mostlyharmlessz/status/14694217625553510...

Its not clear to me that a general purpose autonomous car can be developed in a vaccum as you mention. Tesla has all the resources in the world to test with their own drivers on closed loops and using simulations however they choose to go this route and open themselves up to significant liability. Given the pace of development of other autonomous cars I think this may be the only viable approach.

Agree, but I think this boils down to a disagreement over at what point a FSD beta is ready for public testing.

What? How many people do you think we should sacrifice on the altar of technological progress? And why wouldn't they get a say in that?

The system also has many controls to montior driver attentivness and alert or disable itself if the driver is not attentive.

Sorry, but they same system lets the driver play video games while driving down the road[1] which is kinda the opposite of what you claim.

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/business/tesla-video-game...

Would you trust it to drive your mother or a loved one across the country with zero assistance or interventions?

It is not possible in the current state so the point is moot. Seeing how it works first hand I am a firm believer in the vision only approach. I do think one day this will be possible with Vision (cameras) only.

Why do you say that? Did you have a first hand experience with not-only-vision approach?

Doesn't "warts and all" for developing self-driving tech mean people dying?

It is possible and it has already happened with the Uber incident (even with that car having a saftey driver).

The ultimate fake it 'til you make it.

Having seen many hours of FSD beta on Youtube, with the most recent updates, I am convinced the FSD driving is safer on the highway than humans driving. I bet the stats for accidents per mile driven are much lower for FSD than humans. It does stumble, very gracefully, in really unusual circumstances when driving in city streets. But it's so so close to covering these outlier situations.

If I could choose to have only FSD teslas around me on the highway, or only human drivers, I'd pick the FSD every time.

This is pretty much my experience. A lot of people testing it are in city centers with lots of complex things going on. For the most part in suburbs or smaller cities the driving is a lot more straightforward and it is already quite good there.

My delivery isn’t until June but I’ve held off on buying FSD (maybe I’ll enable it for the month when I do a long trip), but I’m worried about this fantom braking issue I’ve heard about.

I would get an older one. Newer ones lack the expensive radar component. Camera-only can be disabled by kids with a Q-beam (bright flashlight).

On the contrary phantom braking for me was almost always caused by the radars and especially with overpasses in front of you.

You will have basic autopilot which can also phantom brake. It is not as bad as it seems and was possibly worse when they used radar. As long as you are attentive to the system it is not a big deal.

But why would I bother to buy an autonomous driver if I must be attentive to the system? I can just drive it myself then.

Does it work?

It does work quite well already and each release is getting better. I’ve done several city drives with zero interventions. As long as you are attentive it is very safe.

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