Pretend you don’t know anything about the different levels. You’re just a random person looking to buy a car. What does “full self driving” sound like to you?
Edit: When I pre-ordered a Model 3 Musk’s promise at that time was literally “press a button and your car will work as a taxi to earn money when you’re not using it”.
There is some room to argue about the conditions under which the car can drive itself. If the car couldn't handle a high-grade, winding mountain road with an inch of snow on the ground and yet more coming down, I don't think too many people would be fussed is a "full self-driving" car said "uh, no" (especially as a good fraction of drivers couldn't handle that either).
To my end, if the car can't handle any condition that doesn't make me go "I think I should stay home," that should disqualify it.
But I don't think a "full self-driving" car refusing to drive in those conditions would be a deal breaker. I'd prefer it if autonomous vehicles were more conservative and just refused to drive in unsafe conditions.
We already had problems back when people started coming back from mandatory WFH and accident rate spiked, this would be essentially similar or worse, a bunch of drivers that might do 10k miles a year but drive 500 of them and have extremely rusty normal driving skill, let alone driving in bad conditions.
It would be essentially like letting your kid drive your car only in blizzard and pouring rain...
Full describes the set of use cases the car can drive in. All of them, not some with conditions and exceptions.
I think excluding off road / hazardous mountain roads etc. might be OK for the definition. And still cover many 9s of actual trips.
Driving into a parked ambulance is definitely a no no though.
Such as rain, fog, snow, construction work, tunnels, bridges, downtown intersections, bike lanes, etc...
I wouldn't expect it to handle rare phenomena such as hurricanes, hail storms, a collapsed bridge, etc...
I might biased because I work on actual self-driving efforts, but nothing at all about Tesla has ever indicated they were serious about solving self driving in any capacity.
The day that Elon proclaimed they already had the sensor suite decided was the day that they openly admitted this was fraud.
I don’t work in sensing let alone using AI with sensing data, but I’m around it a lot and my second-hand knowledge kind of set off some red flags.
In remote sensing for landscape architecture, hydrography, and other similar fields (making sense of static things where no one is at risk of dying immediately, and humans review the data), the care and knowledge that goes into choosing sensor suites and processing the data properly is huge. Yet Tesla comes out saying “we’ve got some mediocre cameras and we’re gonna run with it!”
Seriously? What? I get that it’s a lot of cameras but making sense of 3d space isn’t trivial at all. It’s so bizarre.
Again, I know nothing, they know more than I do. The whole thing just doesn’t sit right.
To be fair, humans managed to solve self-driving with some mediocre cameras, some crappy microphones, and some unreliable force-feedback and chemical sensors, without (importantly) adding any new sensors to the hardware between start-of-project and successful full driving. So it's not a priori implausible that "use whatever sensors we have now, and just learn to compensate for any deficiencies in software", could work, since our only preexisting examples of full-self-driving (humans) essentially do that.
It's just kind of stupid to hobble youself that way when you don't have to.
Eyes are actually the only visible part of our brains. They aren’t wired pretty directly, they themselves are brain material.
Our sight is also enhanced by our hearing or familiarity with certain driving situations and, in most cases, familiarity with certain places we drive frequently.
If we isolated our eyes from our other senses I have a feeling we might actually be much worse at detecting things around us or making sense of what we’re seeing.
Our senses like road feel can even help us use our eyes in anticipation of dangerous conditions like loose gravel or black ice.
I know machines can do this too, but ours works so well and so quickly; it’s hard to compare with what’s on the market at the moment.
Regardless, I think we agree on the final point. Such a strange way to limit a self driving car.
FSD needs the human sense that seeing a stop sign on the freeway (sticking out of the back of a highway maintenance trailer) doesn't mean what a stop sign usually means - but that stopped highway trailer, with a person holding the same sign and looking at you means you should follow it.
Should you run into a pile of gravel to avoid a baby stroller? If a loose garbage can and a baby stroller appear on opposite sides of the road and both block your path, which one do you hit? A soccer ball coming out between parked cars probably has a kid following it...
The people who have died with FSD ran into problems like these. A human would see a transport truck cab, and the wheels on the other side of the road and infer that - even though it blends into the sky - that there's a trailer in between. One of the Tesla accidents was that the side of the trailer appeared the same color and location as the sky, so the Tesla didn't see it and went under the trailer at highway speeds. The driver wasn't paying attention and didn't make it.
Sensing packages will only get you so far, human intuition for new unexpected situations is impossible to get AI to learn - at least at this point.
We have an incredible level of understanding.
Jeez I even put myself in other drivers’ shoes/heads so as to predict their behavior. Their subtle cues in lane positioning, distraction, etc. they’re all incredibly telling if you can model human psychology.
Your eyes are sensitive enough to see a candle flame at 2.6 km away. A rod can actually be stimulated by a single photon, but the brain squelches activation that small. The human ear is sensitive enough to hear a watch tick from about 20 feet away in a quiet room. That's pretty darn good.
The messaging by Tesla has been misleading, yes. There have been many other examples of couching date-slippage and over-promises with phrases like "no promises but Cybertruck|FSD|Model 3|Rockets|AI|Robotics|Neural-Link|End-Of-The-World should be here in two years."
Announcing a capability, and importantly MUSK acting as a widely-recognized public figure like it's ready - shaming every other fledgling competitor, before it's ready, is amounting to GASLIGHTING.
A speculate this is what we should expect from the company-owner's notable, controversial personality type.
Immediately upon receiving "Full Self Driving Beta", in the 201x's, some Tesla drivers CRASHED because they turned ON the lane-keep-assist and then left the car to do the driving .. straight into the back of a stopped truck, or a split open lane-divider, and died.
To reiterate, this mis-leadership has resulted in death.
I suspect that CEO personality-type is a salient factor in whether a company should be allowed to operate. Should we stop this .. should we prevent actual Companies operating? Not just a group of hobbyists but tax-paying, licensed, employing companies. It is OUR government. We can stop this predictable travesty of gaslighting -> good-faith belief -> bad outcomes.
That never goes the way you think it will.
But to discard an argument entirely is to bury your head in the sand.
Regulations are applied to many industries and limit the kinds of claims that can be made about products, and those regulations are important to public safety.
Such regulations most often apply to products that involve life or death consequences.
A company marketing vitamin supplements can’t claim that the supplements are proven to cure cancer, and that’s a good thing.
This is not to say that the government can’t or doesn’t get things wrong. But I’m curious how you feel about limitations placed on financial, food, and pharmaceutical companies.
At a minimum, there’s a fraud angle. You shouldn’t be able to claim to sell something that does A when that thing cannot in fact do A.
And when A happens to be critical to not dying, the implications of that claim just raise the stakes even higher.
Heavy-handed regulation I can't back though, in part because it is (increasingly these days) as broad as possible, as vague as possible, ensnaring far more then the initial case merited.
Not bragging, just bored.
Although honestly, it should also be on the regulation proposer to say cite why such a rule is necessary, and more importantly, under which conditions, if it doesn't work out, such a rule might be withdrawn.
I mean: We've had Medicaid, but still have problems in elderly healthcare. We have the Patriot Act, but still have terrorists. We have a Department of Education, but still have low (possibly lower) quality schools. We have a CDC, that failed in testing and containment of disease. We have an SEC, but SBF's fraud went unabated (although hopefully punished soon). We have an FAA, but still have unworthy aircraft (737 Max looking at you).
Perhaps then next round of rules proposed by folk looking to win their next popularity contest will work next time, I just doubt it very much. I just don't see much value in these rules - if bad things keep happening, what was the point? Might as well not have them, and make people directly responsible, through a court of actual law, when actual damages have occurred.
In the case of misleading statements and marketing causing death, that seems like something that a lawsuit would handle, not regulation.
In the case of false marketing misleading investors, we would see investor lawsuits for that if the stock price suffered as a result. Right now, what damages would you show for musks lies?
Instead of new regulation, a lot of nonsense would have been avoided had the SEC not given him a free pass after the last round of investor fraud. It was entirely predictable that an egomaniacal child would not change behaviour after a slap on the wrist and a warning.
The most generous interpretation is that Musk is delusional and out of touch with his company and his technology. But I think it is more accurately described as bullshit ("speech intended to persuade without regard for truth") or a lie (making knowingly false statements).
I think the interesting question is whether that legally ends up being fraud in the context of a civil suit. Whatever was going on in Musk's head (deluded, reckless, or lying) it seems like Tesla as an entity should have known that the cars were not actually self driving and that customers could reasonably think they were getting self driving.
I'm not sure I'd describe that as a generous interpretation, but there is other evidence that he's just wildly optimistic/over-confident. E.g., he still pours significant investment/effort into his project to colonize Mars, even after describing falcon wing doors as "engineering hubris"
Some asterisks like non-paved roads will cause poor and potentially dangerous performance, technically.
If I tell it to drive into a volcano, and getting it to do so is significantly harder than five minutes of repeating various variations on "Yes, I know it's a volcano and will likely destroy the car and everything in it; do so anyway.", it's defective. (Preferably it also should not be significantly easier, of course, at least not to the point of being able to do so accidentally.)
Living on the coast, I would still have to resort to flying, but there are many places I would enjoy that are reachable in an eight hour drive.
And we have buses that go between lots of cities(greyhounds). They just suck compared to driving yourself or flying, which is why you'll pretty much only find poor and desperate people on them.
Engineering is about solving part of the problem first, then iterating. If you look at what they've accomplished only in the last year with FSD, I find it highly unlikely that 0-disengagement drives don't become the norm by the end of 2023.
Currently, 90+% of drives have 0 safety-critical disengagements, and 50+% have no human-discomfort-related disengagements.
I hear excuses when I point this out, but lane keeping and adaptive cruise on the Model 3/Y are inferior to the competition now. AP was a selling point when the Model 3 first came out, it has become a bit of a joke now. If you buy a Model 3 today, it comes with an asterisk. If you want cruise control, beware, adaptive cruise has notable bugs and there is no option to turn it off and go old-school.
> Currently, 90+% of drives have 0 safety-critical disengagements, and 50+% have no human-discomfort-related disengagements.
No one is going to put their pre-teen child in a car for a 5 hour trip when there is a 10% chance that the car will crash.
And yet you think that such a thing will be the norm in 12 months or less?
And fraud is about selling solutions to parts of the problems you haven’t yet solved. While there are engineering criticisms of Tesla FSD, that’s not the issue here, so presenting definitions of engineering is a non-sequitur.
Well, that I would be fully self driving the car? ^^
It’s that second part that is the important one. If the car can’t drive in heavy snow or roadless areas or whatever that’s fine, as long as it’s able to recognize and avoid those situations in a graceful way, like refusing to engage with them and parking in a safe area, suggesting the trip be cancelled, that kind of thing.
The current approach of it works, but when it doesn’t it will say “just kidding take over for me now” while going 70mph towards the side of a truck is definitely not that.
Words have meaning. Full self driving, to anyone who isn't a nerd who likes to pick shit apart, means the freaking car will drive all by itself as if a human were driving it, maybe even better.
It is being marketed as "Full Self Driving", and the CEO is publicly saying it is "in beta", "coming next year", and "just waiting for regulatory approval". In reality it needs constant driver supervision, is still primitive enough that it is directly linked to multiple fatalities, has been coming "next year" for over 6 years, and is clearly not even remotely finished. Customers have paid thousands of dollars for a feature they are not able to use, half a decade down the line. They may never be able to use it as advertised at all. The product as delivered is substantially different from anything the company says.
It's like saying your car can do 0 to 60 in less than ten seconds and then delivering a car without an engine - while putting a statement in the small writing that the car currently only reaches this in freefall from a mountain top, but pinky promise that they will install the engine in a few years.
I can still go to Verizon’s website today and find “Unlimited” plans so the name clearly wasn’t the problem in whatever lawsuits they might have been involved in.
And to reiterate, my point is not that Tesla is innocent. My point is that the most common argument used to point to their guilt is a stupid argument, especially considering there are better arguments available to argue the same underlying point.
> I can still go to Verizon’s website today and find “Unlimited” plans
That other scams exist doesn't negate that.
Where did I state otherwise?
Once again, all these comments are reinforcing my point which is that there are plenty of more concrete complaints to make about this than “Autopilot is a misleading name”. I don’t know how many times I need to say I’m not defending Tesla. I am criticizing a bad argument. But I guess I should just accept my downvotes. I should know better than to try to have a nuanced conversation about Tesla and Musk.
We do have that. We have a very thorough argument, and it has been repeated endlessly. So that's why you got downvoted.
Personally, i think it’s bullshit that that’s not cracked down on too.
The idea that we don’t let marketers make misleading product claims is very old. As a society our point of view is that no, actually the burden of proof should not be on the customer to figure out if a tube labeled “toothpaste” is actually wet gypsum or something.
But I don't think it's true for believing the car company CEO when he repeatedly said that the car came equipped with all the necessary hardware for full self driving, and if you purchased the $15000 package the full self driving software would be with you by the end of the year, with most of the remaining obstacles being regulatory...
It's a bit like consumers have a responsibility to read the label on medical devices to use them properly, but they don't have a responsibility to advance their medical understanding to the point they can tell if Elizabeth Holmes is telling the truth about her product actually doing what she said it was doing.