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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

I love that beta testing is now endangering people lives.

Really taken to a whole new level!

I think the OP just coined the phrase "Tesla Privilege" for egregious acts of attempted vehicular manslaughter...

Edit because humor isn't the done thing here, or for the subject, the quote is "a privileged system of trust to enable learning." But that would be less pithy.

Let me know when the beta has a casualty rate over 0. Until then, enjoy the "human privilege" of driving 10mph+ over the speed limit, cutting off traffic, weaving out of the lane, brake checking highway traffic because work was rough, and the other myriad human privileges killing 42,915 Americans in 2021 and your smarmy misquotes to justify it to yourself.

A special case of "move fast and break things"

If you care for the math, even in it's current state it is saving lives. Things like braking early to cause a fender collision rather than a door collision are remarkable superhuman feats, but beyond that the mere fact that it is always paying attention in every direction, has no ego, no sense of tardiness, urgency, efficiency, selfishness, aggressiveness or defensiveness makes it really easy to kill less people than human drivers do.

The breaking to avoid collisions is both standard on a lot of cars, and not part of the FSD Beta.

Additionally, even though the FSD Beta is able to more accurately detect objects in a wide view that isn't borne into safety yet for a few reasons:

- the driving behavior is inconsistent and often will still ignore things that it detects because the hardcoded and ML models don't know what to do

- Tesla don't have the strongest sensor coverage. In fact, for higher end cars, they actually lag behind most competitors by having quite significant blind spots right in front of the hood and lack (depending on the model) rear and forward facing radars, therefore having vision blind spots that radar could see around by bouncing.

I say this as a 2020 Model Y owner, the FSD is way further behind than what you describe.

Yeah, AEB is almost a mandate at this point. It was voluntary but almost all automakers got on board:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-announces-2020-up...

I am describing human damage mitigation in the event of a side impact crash. No AEB system operates in that situation.

https://youtu.be/C15IYntlmvo

You're incorrect. Other car safety systems do in fact do that as well, where they'll analyze object momentum towards the vehicle.

Some high end cars even adjust their suspension and body angle to minimize damage https://youtu.be/1ZSinXkJBMU

your example still allows the car to strike the door directly. It is also based upon radar data rather than a 3d simulation, so it could also result in a rollover with certain geometries. I suspect that's why pre-sense 360 is not available as an option on any of the non-etron audis at my local dealership, and why even in the e-tron that includes it, it is not even advertised as a side-impact safety feature anywhere, while it clearly explains its performance in front and rear collision.

If you keep watching the video, you'll see you're again incorrect.

The first section of the video is with the car in a fixed stationary position to demonstrate how it can activate safety even in an immobile state.

At the end of the video, they show how it breaks because it detects a lateral incoming object around a blind corner, preventing door collision all together.

This isn't unique to Audi either, other brands like Volvo have oncoming traffic detection around corners and will break to avoid it.

Again, Tesla actually lacks some sensors that these other brands which causes Tesla's to actually have a greater blind spot. E.g most of these cars can "see around corners" whereas a Tesla cannot. This is in part because Tesla has removed radar (and the ultrasonic sensors are too short range on any vehicle). Radar was what allowed it to do bounce detection around obstacles that obscured pure vision based approaches.

My Honda minivan has helped me brake in a sudden and emergency way on several occasions.

Of course, Honda doesn't sell something called "full self driving" which might lull me into a false sense of security, human nature being what it is and all.

Breaking early to avoid a collision is a standard feature of modern vehicles. Even my very not cutting edge, definitely not top of the line 10 year old Volvo has it! (Admittedly Volvo tends to pack more safety features into their vehicles than other manufacturers for a given target market / price point iirc.)

Tesla gets no bonus points for having collision avoidance, pedestrian detection or any of the now standard safety features that are available on every modern vehicle that targets the same markets.

I did not describe emergency automatic braking. I described a side collision that is unavoidable, e.g. someone running a red light, and the car being able to determine how to control that accident to prevent injury.

No other manufacturers uses side cameras and continuous 3d mapping and localization and physics projections to do things like this.

And despite the -4 karma tax for speaking on behalf of Tesla, the statistics DO show that no other manufacturer is as good at it.

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