Hacker News Reader

> 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!

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.

Any improvement _over_ 99.999% is impossible. Saying something like this is completely detached from reality. People _do_ buy cars that crash once a year. All the time. And often the defects in the system aren't even related to self driving functionality. Further, most drivers who get in a car have records far worse than that.

No, on basically all accounts. In the US there is a fatality every 75,000,000 miles, a injury every 1,250,000 miles, and a reported accident every 550,000 miles on average [1]. From a "reliability" perspective, we can reasonably assume that at any given time, you will probably crash in less than a minute without control over your car. The average driver probably averages ~40 MPH per unit time. So, on a minute basis that is one fatality per 111,000,000 minutes (99.999999%, 8 9s) a injury every 1,875,000 minutes (99.99995%, 6 9s), a accident every 315,000 minutes (99.9996%, 5 9s).

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

>Tesla is doing self-driving as well as it can possibly be done with today's technology. If it could be done better, it would be, by one of their competitors, but they can't beat it.

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 FSD to improve then you need to allow experimentation in the real world. That means accepting risk. Our governments have wisely decided to do that and most people don’t seem to be worked up about it.

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.

What I want from full self driving is something at least close to hiring a professional chauffeur. I’ve had to do this a few times in Europe. The driver pulls up in an immaculate Mercedes sedan, he drives precisely and carefully with an expert understanding of local traffic and road conditions. This is something I’ve also experienced in Tokyo in every taxi I’ve hailed on the street (except for the brand of vehicle).

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.