Comment by nja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nja | Hacker News Reader

I was just watching this video of a Tesla trying and miserably failing to drive itself through the streets of Boston: https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1488555256162172928

A number of these near-crashes seem to be pretty odd errors (a couple of times it just decided to drive on the wrong side of the street?) -- albeit ones that one _could_ see drivers unfamiliar with the area making.

If a human driver started driving on the wrong side of a street, etc -- at least in Boston -- they would be greeted by a chorus of horns and rude gestures from those around, which would hopefully indicate to them that they were in error. Brings up an interesting question: does anyone know if Teslas are monitoring for surrounding horns/etc?

Another common problem in Boston is being blocked by geese crossing the road. Are Teslas able to detect such low, slow-moving obstacles?

It seems like it's not super feasible to rely on self-driving vehicles in a dense city like Boston, but maybe such features could be geofenced to areas like highways?

I like the guy who jumps in on the comments with "you're doing it wrong".

https://twitter.com/ButchSurewood/status/1488602615407681541

Isn't the whole idea that you're not doing anything?

This is interesting. I have seen similar videos of Tesla self-driving successfully on similar type of streets in Seattle. I wonder if the quality of FSD changes from city to city based on how much data Tesla receives from other drives in that city. I guess I'm suggesting that Seattle could have more Tesla drivers than Boston. I have no idea if any of this is true. Just a thought.

It for sure does. Where I live, Oxnard it fails so badly I don't know how I was allowed into the beta. But if I drive down a few cities over it works well enough that if I didn't know better I'd say it's ready for public. It's just wild.

That is wild. I know nothing about ML, but I would think that the driving data Tesla sucking in from various places supposed to improve overall driving regardless of the location. At least within the same country. Would be interesting to know how this actually works, but I'm sure it's all secret sauce we'll never know much about.

I'm guessing its primarily road & map quality followed by whatever other 'not HD maps' they use.

I will have to stop by Oxnard and check it out. I’d been thinking that I must have an atypical experience since FSD is quite wonderful for me. But if a few dozen miles over and you get a city where FSD becomes awful…

Along Gonzales rd it struggles when taking turns, in particular on and from Oxnard Blvd and Rose Ave. Every time I drive west past Ventura rd it violently swerves when the lanes shift next to the Popeyes. For fun try the residential areas around. It does 'ok' but often will do flying left turns where it doesn't even bother to slow down even though theres cars parked blocking visibility.

Westlake on the other hand haven't really had an issue. Thousand Oaks has been pretty smooth as well.

I now wonder how the quality of FSD changes when you're cruising in a road with blue houses vs. red houses on the side. I'm not being snarky here, that's the kind of thing "AI" is known to do.

In those interventions it's not 100% clear the car would have generated an accident. They get very "close" so the driver intervenes. And of course this is the safe thing to do. But highly sensitive AI driving should be able to come much closer to crashing than the average human, without issue. Perhaps it's the drivers that will need to adapt. Is Tesla accounting for this fear factor already?

I see what you’re getting at but no I don’t think AI driving is meant to get much closer than the average driver. I think in some cases driving on the wrong side of the road and drifting or not detecting objects is certainly 100% failure without need to experience a crash. An AI needs to drive at safe distances just like humans until and only when there are no more humans behind the wheel.

To be fair Boston city roads are like horse carriage routes that were converted to streets and will probably one of the last places FSD optimizes for.

Interestingly, the routes in that video are in one of the few parts of Boston with a street grid (Southie: https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1488555262655045637 ) -- so I wonder how much _worse_ it is on the cowpath roads elsewhere...

Good point, Boston is a great real-world fuzzer. If they spent their time making it work there they'd have less issues elsewhere

Those roads seem much easier to drive on than basically any city I've been in Europe. Paris is 10x more complex than that for instance. If FSD can't handle that there's really not of a use case apart from highways in Europe.

To give you an idea of the incredible features in some cities, I have recently driven in Rennes where they found a good idea to makes roads with one single central lane for cars with wide bicycle path on each side. You are supposed to drive in the center and if a car comes in the other direction each car needs to go on the bicycle lane on their respective side of the road while giving priority to bicycles. I wonder how FSD would handle that...

Iirc that concept actually comes from the netherlands. I’ve seen videos on Dutch road design showing that, i had no idea they’d been implemented in france.

So the feature is useless in most european cities?

If FSD is expected to perform poorly on those roads then it shouldn't be available on said roads and it certainly shouldn't be legal to use it there.

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