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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

What about non California weather? I imagine radar might handle fog, but driving rain as in Carolina or serious snow as in Canada?

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I've wondered the same thing about FSD in Canada.

Often we Canadians drive on roads where we cant see the lines due to snow/ice. We sort of form our own "lanes" based on where we think the lines SHOULD be.

How would a FSD Tesla handle a situation where everything is white?

Even Humans who are use to these conditions still fail: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/opp-responds-to-numerous-crashes-o...

> We sort of form our own "lanes" based on where we think the lines SHOULD be.

And that is exactly what FSD does. You can search YouTube, there's plenty of examples if you want to see how it performs in different weather conditions. Snow is challenging but not impossible.

That is not my experience at all. It either says “Full self driving unavailable. Poor weather detected,” or it freaks the fuck out and tries to kill me.

FSD can’t adequately handle rain, let alone snow where the road lines are not visible.

Based on many hours of footage, rain doesn't seem to be a big problem unless it's very heavy, but the experience can vary I suppose. Snow for sure is still a problem, but there is a path to improving it. The current state of perception shows that it can be solved by deep learning (more training data for these conditions), in the sense that in many situations it can guess where the lines and lanes are based on other context, like tire tracks, positioning of other cars, width of the road and lane meta data, snow protrusions etc. There's also the problem of when to treat snow as an obstruction to go around and avoid vs when to just go over it. There will always be more uncertainty in these conditions though, just like there is for us humans, we are often unsure where the lanes are exactly, and one of the challenges if having the system deal with this uncertainty better. And then control has clearly not been worked on for snow and ice yet.

Forget rain and snow, they can't even handle non-California roads yet.

I had the misfortune of taking a rental on narrow mountain roads and it actively attempted to kill us twice. While moving over to pass an oncoming car, the lane keeping feature decided we were too close to the shoulder and started steering us back into the oncoming car.

After pulling over, regaining my composure for a few minutes, and figuring out how to disable it; somehow it activated again on a different day and it happened again.

> somehow it activated again on a different day and it happened again.

I dont have a tesla but my car has things like "lane assist" and most of these safety features can be turned off, but the default state is "ON" and this is reset once the car is turned off/on again.

Oddly enough, what it calls "advanced cruse control" defaults to OFF on my car and must be turned on any time you want to use it?

Yeah, I think it was something like that. Once I began checking for it, it seemed inconsistent - possibly related to how long the car was off?

The joys of modern technology - every time I get in my car, I have to spend 15 seconds checking the state of the "Car may decide to murder you setting".

Granted it did fine on wider, more developed roads once we got closer to larger towns, and it would probably do fine in my day-to-day life; but that whole experience has left me really shaken on any self driving tech. The roads it fell apart on weren't even that bad - well paved and maintained, just narrow and without any sort of center stripe.

"lane assist" can defiantly be annoying. While mine doesn't try to kill me by driving off a cliff... It does seem to prefer that i drive dangerously close to those cement "jersey barrier" walls they use in construction sites??

The lane narrows due to construction and it prefers to maintain the lane even thought it is too narrow... I don't get why it cant detect the barrier and realize that driving over the line is safer?

This is my big issue with the whole "FSD" - roads are not uniform and driving conditions are not always idea.

Let's say FSD is fine for 80% of the time, but what happens if drivers depend on it and it is now in the 20%?

I think giving drivers a false sense of security is very harmful.

Psychologists have shown time and again that as car safety improves, driver aggression only increases to remove the benefits.

ABS - You can now drive faster knowing you wont skid...

"lane assist" has shown that people will depend on it and allow their cars to drive right off the road and into the ditch (youtube has a lot of these). FSB will only be worse.

That is because NCAP and rest only counts features that are on after starting car into that rating.

Similarly MPG rating also requires that, which is why stuff like auto stop/start and the safety features don't remember settings after restart.

The rain can be no joke here. I've had to stop driving and pull over for the first time in my life after moving to NC. The rain was too heavy to see more than 10 feet or so.

Rain + city lights can make it hard to see even road markins in front. Technically self-driving car would theoretically have opportunity for advantage here (as it can just refer to maps) but practically it's super hard problem to solve.

Rain fade affects GPS does it not? Is the car relying on inertial navigation for a period? This rain is not something a camera and iffy GPS signal can keep you on the road. The intensity and amount of rain would definitely not let a camera see.

Quick add: this was at 12PM (noon) on a countryish road. City lights had nothing to do here.

> The rain was too heavy to see more than 10 feet or so.

Probably a hurricane. Did you see any cattle flying?

Not hurricane season at the time. There's a clearly defined season for that weather. This is just a normal thunderstorm.

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