The marketing for this stuff is absolutely liable and as much as I like what Tesla has done for electric cars in general we are one big, massive accident away from this all absolutely blowing up.
Not do I understand anyone trusting their Tesla this much. Even the cruise control freaks out sometimes and slams on the brakes from phantom apparitions. I don’t even trust the base autosteer feature going down the highway.
Those blue screens occurred in dramatically less complex and better understood software, too.
I'm not saying we don't understand how FSD works, or the underlying technology. It's not a complete black box. I believe there was even a proof recently showing that these things are essentially massive decision trees and they can be deterministically unravelled.
But this is otherwise totally negligent from where I'm standing.
This might be mitigated if the result includes a confidence percentage, ie panic if confidence below threshold, but even then I'm not sure how reliable this metric is.
When we need to audit something that is more complex than we can really comprehend, can we come to reliably accurate conclusions? If we need tools to do this for us, can we be certain they’re accurate as well?
All of it feels very Icarus-like. I’d be content if we tested this stuff out in isolation for another 20 years before throwing it on public streets.
He'd have to work around and bypass several safety features that prevent you from doing this. You cannot do this out of the box. You have to work hard to get it to do it.
I take any claims of people doing this with a large grain of salt.
imagine doing nothing else besides working and commenting. I can't. It sounds like a recipe for a lonely life.
If the solution is not tenable, the plan should be aborted. Not rammed through via abuse of technology.
- move closer to work
- secure lodging to amortize the commute over more days
- arrange a carpool
- work remotely to reduce the cost of any of the above options
- find a different job.
(edit for list format)
Think about that. If someone can literally sleep while the car is driving itself, and it doesn't crash, then the self-driving feature actually works really well.
I mean, try doing that in a Chevy.
Compare it to other self-driving cars and you’ll see that it is actually one of the better systems on the market.
It is in fact so good that people can sleep in their cars and not crash -- and I wouldn't bet that the guy who sleeps in the car only did it once!
If you are going to compare it to human drivers, it also matters which humans you compare it to. Every time I drive I see people doing things far stupider than what a Tesla would do. Driving skill, and judgment, is so unevenly distributed in the human population that it would not be difficult to find a large number of humans who underperform the Tesla system.
It would be weird to punish Tesla for not being perfect. It has delivered self driving features that are already better than a lot of the humans on the roads today, and better than all of its competitors.
Let's go a bit deeper into your argument:
> Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?
Ok, pretend you are someone who is looking to buy a self-driving car because you don't want to do the driving. Wouldn't you want to buy one that works well? It's a matter of life and death, after all. So you would do some research to find out who had the best systems. If you did that you would find out that Tesla's system, despite all the criticism it gets, is one of the few on the market that is worth buying.
This thinking is absolutely going to get someone killed. It’s also why Tesla faces so much criticism.
Any improvement under 99.999% is unremarkable because the end product is unusable. No one is going to buy a car that crashes once a year.
Disengagements should be unheard of if Elon wants to continue selling FSD.
Even the worst component of the driving system (the driver) is solidly over 99.999%. And every single hardware component is vastly better than the driver. The Pinto, a classic example of a death trap, only resulted in a hardware-induced fatality something like every 1,000,000,000 miles, or using the minute basis above a fatality every 1,500,000,000 minutes (99.9999999%, 9 9s). The person you responded to is correct, 99.999% is unusably, criminally bad.
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
Out of politeness I engage in chit-chat with the drivers, but I would be completely comfortable reading hacker news in the backseat or even sleeping. I hope self-driving reaches this level of ability soon; I’m going to be to old to drive in 15 years.
To get a perspective of what this requires, reflect carefully on what your brain is attending to while you drive. Does it ever require higher levels of reasoning than pattern matching? It does for me. I regularly encounter issues that would confuse current technology: bad fog, reckless drivers, icing on overpasses, drivers going the wrong way, a marathon blocking my route, boisterous junior high-school students walking along the curb, detours, temporary lanes inconsistent with actual markings, broken traffic lights, and damaged or vandalized traffic signs. I could sleep soundly on my way being driven by a professional driver under such circumstances.
This comment is everything that's wrong with FSD and its marketing.
The bar isn't what self-driving cars can do in general (besides the fact you completely ignore that other companies are operating driverless taxis as we speak).
>It's a matter of life and death, after all.
Consider this: it's not just life or death for you. Do you understand that bystanders and other drivers don't want to be part of your experiment? The selfishness is unreal.
If you want to ban FSD, then go ahead and vote for a ban. But it’s not realistic to say that FSD is allowed only when it’s perfect — no technology reaches perfection without first passing through a phase of imperfection.
About 40,000 people die per year in the US from traffic fatalities. There are about 200,000,000 people licensed to drive in the US. So, about 1 in 5,000 drivers die per year. Tesla has released FSD Beta to ~160,000 drivers. So, to first order, we can approximate that as ~32 Tesla drivers will die a year due to a traffic fatality if they constitute a representative sample (they do not, but we are doing some quick estimates here). So, a system that is used as a full-time, unassisted replacement for their human drivers will result in, on average, one extra person dying per year per 3% worse it is than a human driver when applied to a mere 0.1% of the US driving population. If applied over the entire US driving population a system that is 3% worse applied to all driving interactions would result in ~1,200 extra people dying per year.
At the scales being discussed, extremely small differences applied over the entire domain result in very serious risks to human life. It is not okay to knowingly sacrifice people at the altar of moving fast and breaking things so that Elon Musk can make another couple billion dollars.
Also, it is not even close to being one of the better systems from a safety perspective. It is something like 400-800x worse than Waymo and 2,000-4,000x worse than Cruise [1]. It is so far behind so many other companies it is fair to say that they are not even in the race let alone a frontrunner.
No one else sells self-driving cars to consumers because they know they cannot.
"Being unable to do something and not saying you can do it"
"Being unable to do something and saying you can do it"
Spot the difference?
I was under the impression Chevy SuperCruise outperformed Tesla FSD in most ways, other than being bound to mapped roads.
SuperCruise is only rated higher than Autopilot when people use rating systems that dock Autopilot for having fewer driver monitoring features, i.e. nanny features that scold you for not paying enough attention. I haven't seen any evidence that the actual driving part of SuperCruise or any other competitor is better than Autopilot.