California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD
teslarati.com
teslarati.com
I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen.
It's like what if somebody invented the world's greatest backpack? It's bigger on the inside than the outside, and it incorporates negative gravity so anything you put in it becomes 50 lbs lighter. And all that was true; it actually worked? But for an extra $10k, the company will add on the "anti-grizzly bear" feature which makes you invulnerable to grizzly bears while you're wearing the backpack. Except most of the people who buy the anti-grizzly bear feature end up getting eaten by grizzly bears. Whoops! Just quietly stop advertising the anti-grizzly bear feature and you'll still have a great product.
Why are you sleeping in your car for long trips? :)
Perhaps buying a $60k+ car isn't the best idea if that means you can't afford a hotel room occasionally.
My uncle bought a Tesla 3 (coincidentally, to replace his 20-year-old totalled Jetta) because he needs to drive several hours to the office a few times a month for 2-3 days at a time, and the silent climate control and flat trunk floor means he can cheaply and comfortably spend the night in his car rather than driving 3hr back home or renting a hotel room. It is also much cheaper to operate.
I disagree. In my opinion if you can't afford to do that a few times per year without financial concern then you have no business spending $60k+ on a car. Having to sleep in your expensive car just so you can afford a vacation is ridiculous. There are much cheaper alternatives that won't force you to sacrifice other aspects of your life, such as your $2000 car.
I'm not even going to comment on your uncle's situation. Let's just say I would be working somewhere else if I had to resort to that.
I think it's more about Tesla owners becoming obsessed with their car, it's a strange group of people.
After driving a few hours, they only thing a normal person would want to do is get out of the seat, walk a bit, take a shower.
It's like when you were a kid and got your first walkman, you would take it anywhere with you, while eating, sleeping, even in the shower if possible.
Many people with money spend huge amounts on some things but can be penny-pinchers in other areas.
Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the complaints about the name it’s exactly what is claimed.
Auto park is bad. It doesn’t detect the spot half the time and it’s not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces where it would actually be useful.
Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It’s often too timid to actually switch lanes if there’s traffic. I like the signal-to-lane-change.
Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time) claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and don’t pay attention. Every year it’s another few months away. I doubt it’s actually possible with the hardware on the car at this point. Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. It’s glossing over the very important bits of “with the compute power in the car” and “within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques”. I have no doubt that autonomous driving is possible - it’s actively happening in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model Y can do what I paid for, and that’s unethical.
This doesn’t need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.
I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...)
I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it.
If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...
It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and leave you with annoying issues.
But it could also partly be a case of differing expectations. The web has trained us all that software generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up paying good money to replace the car stereo with something that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my dashboard.
I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7. It's the same as it was in its year 1.
Q: Why would that be frustrating?
Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're apparently still working ok.
Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white line right into the space my vehicle would have been in.
Talk about adrenaline rush :(
The frustration is that those tend to have awful interfaces, with extra frustration that they could be fixed but don't get fixed.
If you had normal buttons then there wasn't anything to get annoyed with in this way in the first place, so it didn't need updates.
My first car had no software, so I didn't expect anything to get better. But the most recent thing I drove frequently had significant amounts of software, especially the touchscreen that did audio and navigation. Even when it first came out it was not very good software, so it was the kind of thing I'd want to get better. And 5 years later, having watched all the rest of the software in my life improve, the flaws were ever more grating.
"Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there’s data to prove it": https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-touchscreens-really...
I did actually chortle when I read that :)
I love it.
Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.
Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are.
For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]
More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there.
Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that.
Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot.
Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.
I disagree that humans are bad at driving.
Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human?
And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here?
In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year.
Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109%
To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.
Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record
Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years
It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve
But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be
Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost)
Fixing transit is a long timescale thing
I still remember the time my mom almost drove into a tram tunnel! She wasn't used to the city.
To quote:
> Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.
> Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.
E.g. keeping track of near misses / interventions can get you data points much more quickly.
Every time we try it for a spot to reverse into, the linear regression it must be doing is so apparent. It violently tries to turn left and right rapidly trying to straighten itself.
It works better for parallel spots but often gives up half way because it made a bad angle choice.
We’ve tried it in various models in addition to our own Model Y. They’re just embarrassingly bad at it.
The cynical in me feels this is to do with employees at Tesla want to work with new and shiny ML instead of old boring PID tech for the sake of "resume driven engineering".
As a robotics engineer for a long time I thought they were ahead of the curve. But I am beginning to see that their big bet isn’t paying off, and I’ve taken more of an interest in going back and listening to those people who said it wasn’t going to work.
Remember it uses sonar to park, not the lines.
Strangely, I've never tried backing into a spot - I guess because the backup camera is great at seeing the lines and I can back in quickly.
In the video I linked, you can see it out perform Tesla’s implementation.
Specially because we don't drive with eyes only, we use at least our ears too for hearing unusual noises and the balance sense for detecting vibrations, changes on road surface, and to get feedback about orientation changes.
Unlike human drivers, a Tesla autopilot can track the rotation of each wheel independently and in real time.
But most humans can in most cases feel when there is a loss of traction on the road. Although agreed it comes nothing close to what the car knows.
That said I am not sure that this is a core feature needed to make FSD work.
I only vaguely (for a developer) know about AI / computer vision, yet I’m still made deeply anxious by the implication that we will somehow in the foreseeable future be able to pull this off at ALL, let alone with 1.5 hands tied behind our backs as Tesla insists.
I'm not sure that I agree with this, tbh. More of the regular AP stack is moving to the FSD underpinnings, and I'd expect the nav on autopilot feature to be a part of that eventually. All of those are much needed fixes, IMO. I bet the recent big improvements to the auto-high-beam functionality is related too.
I do wish they'd focus on something more like a FSD-lite for the highway, though. Let me go hands off for a little longer as long as the driver facing camera is detecting attention.
Why can that never happen?
Tesla is not running in the same race as actual AV companies.
Operators like Waymo do look plausible while operating within their tiny geofence. Driving pre-validated roads is impressive in its own way. Right now if you dropped a Waymo and Tesla FSD on an unsealed road in Michigan, one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move.
The point is, I agree that there could be many firms which are far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information in the public domain to say this with any confidence. Right now Tesla's is the only major system which can be assessed with critical objectively.
If it was just one single trip, I was incapacitated and just needed to get home, then fine, level of human learner driver is good enough. But for everyday usage? No way, the risk is just too high.
refusing to move is a feature not a bug. and human learners don't slam into a jersey barrier because there's some glare.
why tesla bros continue to insist that they have a good vision stack while they can't even do contrast adaptation is beyond me. the dril tweet comes to mind
Also your claim about contrast adaptation seems awfully specific, enough that I'm interested in a citation. There's plenty of evidence that their imaging sensors do adapt well in high dynamic range circumstances.
They literally do, which is why jersey barriers are literally designed with vehicular impact in mind.
> contrast adaptation of CCDs
You can't just mix terminology like that. Contrast adaptation describes behaviour in biological systems which isn't analogous to anything a CCD does. There's a reason why literally nobody uses the term to describe digital systems, because it's not relevant.
If you were trying to say that the CCD doesn't have sufficient dynamic range, then just say that instead of using a term which doesn't describe dynamic range.
One will drive and likely get into an accident, and the other will responsibly not do what it wasn't designed for. But if you took away Waymo's responsible disposition, I'm sure it would drive better than the Tesla, because it's just way further along in development, more and better sensors, more rigorous testing and simulations, more corner cases that absolutely had to be dealt with to roll out a real self-driving product.
What are you basing this prediction on? There is extensive independent documented video evidence of FSD beta driving and navigating on unsealed roads in Michigan with no human intervention required. This includes driving at night, in the rain, and with a diverse array of obstacles.
> [Waymo is] just way further along in development
This may well be true. However there's no publicly available information to make any objective assessment. For better or worse (and I see valid arguments both ways) Tesla is airing their dirty laundry in public for all to see. It can be assessed by objective third parties in privately owned vehicles without the blessing or oversight of the parent company.
By comparison we have no way of assessing Waymo's stack objectively. For example we don't know to what extent corner cases are embedded into the software or handled by humans remotely. Was the 15th Avenue incident resolved by human intervention or an improvement to the stack? To what extent is their vision and planning stacks capable of universality or over-fitted to regional specifics? No objective analysis is possible, so no comparison is possible.
What laypeople don't seem to get is that AV mistakes don't follow the same "scale of alarm" as human mistakes.
Tesla is making mistakes that, for a human, might not be world ending, but for an AV make absolutely no sense.
Things like recognizing it needs to make a turn and making no attempt at all to slow down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wGAyAN3iRo
Or recognizing a vehicle is in its path and not even trying to slow down: https://youtu.be/6wGAyAN3iRo?t=21
Or recognizing a stop sign and ignoring it to follow the car in front: https://youtu.be/21ShKWLAnWA?t=548
Classification issues in AVs are supposed to be the achilles heel, but Tesla is still running into situations where perception works correctly and the AV just completely ignores ground rules that any serious AV must be built around.
> Was the 15th Avenue incident resolved by human intervention or an improvement to the stack? To what extent is their vision and planning stacks capable of universality or over-fitted to regional specifics? No objective analysis is possible, so no comparison is possible.
It doesn't matter when the product you're comparing it to ignores stop signs. Tesla's FSD approach is the definition of the local maxima problem for AVs. It makes progress on the axis that impresses lay people by sacrificing progress on the axes that matter to the long term success of an AV. Geofencing and arbitrary sensor limitations are just the tip of that iceberg...
That's because they aren't being reckless and releasing a dangerous product onto the road that they know has issues. Unlike Tesla.
And those geofenced areas are at least with Cruise almost entire cities.
Until they fix that, there will be lots of limitations. It could get to be good enough to be hands off a lot more than it is now, though.
I'd like to see what happens if someone did the following to test the assertion that "cameras are all we need". Cover all the windows of a Model S with LED screens, and route all the cameras to display onto them. Then see how well human drivers do with that visual input which roughly simulates the fraction of a second delay to perform the FSD processing, and removes our stereoscopic perception when we turn / move our heads around.
Many software and hardware engineers do not appreciate the amount of work done by evolution upon our kinesthetic / proprioceptive packages. Sure there is wide variability in its implementation (that friend you won't under any circumstances let behind the wheel with you in the vehicle). But by and large, it performs under a set of energy and materials constraints that continues to school our current engineering state of the art.
So I sometimes also wonder if the ultrasonic/sound sensors in Teslas are sufficient to reproduce the control system our bodies' proprioception engages when we drive.
> Should have happened sooner.
So they were wrong, and they stayed wrong (for money) long after they knew they were wrong. And now that it's convenient they've reversed course. Sounds like the other 49 states was right to be cautious.
You’re also ascribing some laterite motive that you fail to provide a description of.
Thing is to go from being unable to distinguish pencil from cancel to today's almost magical speech recognition, took 25 years. That might be the same interval it takes to go from mowing down motorcyclists to delivering all the safety and productivity potential of level 5 autonomy.
Really hoping that they bring the cost down. I’m a way it seems like Musk was half right - the cost for these just doesn’t work (according to the comment).
There's a good argument that Tesla wouldn't exist today without the hype. The enormous positive public image mad Tesla's cost of capital extremely low, and ditto its cost of marketing. Tesla needed a lot of both to get to break-even. Musk himself has talked repeatedly about coming close to bankruptcy. It's reasonable to believe that less hype would have meant less capital and fewer sales, nudging them at some point over into bankruptcy.
The ends justifying the means doesn’t absolve a business of needing to conduct themselves ethically.
And buying Twitter really put him in front of all of the people all of the time.
that “inventing” v0.01 defines all other versions and nothing else is needed even if v0.01 didn’t get sold. And all other versions have ton of work in them.
And seasoned with the big bad wolf, oops investor, buying everything at gun point.
Edit: of course this is downvoted lol, hate Musk all you want ( I do but because he is pro CCP) but reality can’t be denied
Seems to have already happened? Mercedes EQS/EQB, BMW i4/i7/iX, Polestar, Ioniq
All seem better than the comparable Tesla vehicles.
Though Tesla does have better features for sitting at chargers, and obviously the super charger network which is a huge thing for anyone taking longer trips.
I found that the ford mustang EV and Ioniq had about a %20 worse driving experience than a several year old tesla model 3 LR, and tesla did have a bunch of things that were better. But that also came from being years ahead in making EVs and having a more refined product and driving experience as a result. Driving all the v1 EVs made me realize that they were close, and in a few years they'll probably catch up to tesla on the driving experience. Will they be able to make nice software like tesla will? I'm not so sure.
Mercedes and BMW sell their EVs even more expensive than tesla in many ways too, so their price category is different.
Also cars after a certain point are way more commodity, they wont be able to differentiate like apple does with their products nearly as much.
And that supercharger network advantage will go way in 5 to 10 years too.
Is it really better to have a hyperinflated valuation based on vaporware that risks falling off a cliff when people get tired of the lies?
Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prioritization is already good enough to have automated busses cart people around.
Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z)
> The role of transportation network companies (TNCs) in the urban transport system is under intense debate. In this study, we systematically assess three aspects of the net impacts of TNCs on urban mobility in the United States—road congestion, transit ridership and private vehicle ownership—and examine how these impacts have evolved over time. Based on a set of fixed-effect panel models estimated using metropolitan statistical area level data, we find that the entrance of TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%) and duration (by 4.5%), an 8.9% decline in transit ridership and an insignificant change in vehicle ownership. Despite the ideal of providing a sustainable mobility solution by promoting large-scale car sharing, our analysis suggests that TNCs have intensified urban transport challenges since their debut in the United States.
Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles.
Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem.
DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging.
Also don’t forget about how much traffic flow will improve because self driving cars don’t get impatient and tailgate.
Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.
There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.
Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
this is already the status quo.
Solving each problem directly and in the simplest way possible results in the fewest unintended consequences.
Problem is congestion, aka too many cars in x location at y time? Make it more expensive.
Problem is some people are too poor? Redistribute wealth via progressive taxation.
Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to get to a future where individual cars are not used as much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.
So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high enough that the road users are subsidizing other public projects, specifically mass transit, as well as paying the full cost of the roads.
Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.
The solutions that worked when there were x number of people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled in z number of individual cars simply might not work if you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and supply of materials and energy.
I love express lanes, they cost so little and everyone stays out of them leading to a great experience for only 5-10 $
Lots of good discussion on this idea here: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/
Flowing from the US to oil-rich nations in form of security assistance to buy policy, or in the form of US military going to enforce policy preferences, as well as:
> A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
Accepting negative externalities without internalizing them (whether through direct liability for externalized harms or pigovian taxes) is a forced subsidy to the activity creating those externalities by the rest of society.
I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was too cheap because people were parking for too long. The effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown. Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop? I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business because policy makers don't understand second order effects.
Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty stores.
The flux of the number of vehicles, as you increase the number of vehicles on the road, starts out going up as one would expect. But at a certain point, adding more cars on a road starts slowing down the movement. And then as more cars come on the road, the flux goes down, there is less road capacity as it get more crowded. This is the fundamental diagram of traffic flow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
So once cars on the road exceed that peak amount of flux, there's a phase change and cars start backing up.
So with cars, gridlock really does mean that far far fewer people get serviced by a chunk of road. Whereas with people in a busy area, there really are more people there.
I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease. You could maybe marginally increase throughput by using tighter tolerances between cars, but I’m guessing the difference wouldn’t be substantial.
People would be willing to commute somewhat farther because they could spend that time reading the paper or working instead of driving the car.
Errands that used to be annoying enough to delay get more frequent as well for the same reason.
If we get to a car share model, where you subscribe and pay per mile, that might offset some car use.
Really we need all of the above - self-driving, less personal car ownership, and other transit options.
Or, for the purpose of discussion, let’s assume that the lane is completely separated. What if there’s some unexpected condition that causes a crash? Even with vehicle to vehicle communication, can the other cars behind it really stop in time at 200MPH?
That seems obvious. There's still a cost to putting miles on a car. But, while I don't commute, I'd be far more casual about having something drive me an hour into the city for an evening or a couple hours into the mountains for a day of activities than I am having to drive.
Owning cars is massively expensive at a societal level… Storage space - so much asphalt for parking (both at destinations and at home). Pollution - production/raw materials, emissions during use, eventually disposal. Injuries to drivers, pedestrians, animals.
All that money could go to education, health care, recreation, etc.
I’m not saying ban cars. But align incentives towards fewer cars and less driving. Many cities are already making some progress - DC, NYC, Seattle, Portland are all adding transit alternatives at a rapid rate and seeing reduced car usage. But then Houston and some others are doing the opposite and continuing to sprawl and pave everything.
Edit - And yes, some people live in rural areas and need cars (trains and buses don’t scale in rural areas). But, the suburban sprawl we have today? We can do better. Less single-use, single-family zoning. More bike lanes and walking paths (preferably both separated from cars). More light commercial/retail.
Just thinking about my own neighborhood (Reston VA), there is an intersection 0.5 mile down the road that should (IMO) have a corner market and a cafe. There are thousands of residents who could walk there for milk, eggs, or a snack. Instead, they all have to drive to the strip mall 2 miles down the road. A little planning in advance would have made a difference here, but with current zoning, we’re stuck with what we have - you couldn’t buy a corner lot and build a shop if you wanted.
Imo it's about planning and values. America just doesn't value spending on general welfare. We'd prefer to have wealth hoarded behind closed gates it seems.
Seems like you are making their point
Let's say instead Dallas was built around rail. You'd see a completely different development pattern. Shopping, business, and recreation would be concentrated around metro/rail stops. Dallas would be a city instead of a blob of suburbs. People would live near rail, facilitating their easy transport to recreation, shops, and their jobs.
The absolute size of your area isn't really relevant, it's where you allocate the population. Suburbia is the worst allocation.
Texas is in for a painful correction once they figure that out. Though more likely it'll just de-populate/be abandoned once the infrastructure maintenance bills come due in 30 year and other cities built out sane rail-based density.
Why don't rural Canadian indigenous villages have rail service, since Canada and other non-US countries love the general welfare so much?
But I think you're thinking about this wrong. Sprawl and transport policy are intimately related. If we do car-dependent development, you get a development pattern that requires cars. Then of course you look at the population distribution and say, it's hard to serve this with trains. But if you started with trains, the development pattern would mirror the transit, and you'd say, wow, trains really solved the problem.
America unfortunately went down the car path and faces a painful correction back to sanity. As we move towards transit and factor in car-driving externalities into the cost of driving, communities that can t feasibly be serviced with rail will die out, as is natural.
But that doesn't mean small villages won't exist. They will just be forced to exist where it is reasonable, instead of in unsustainable locations as they do today.
>communities that can t feasibly be serviced with rail will die out, as is natural.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
(Car slams the horn, passenger awakens.)
Passenger: Huh. Uh. Where am I?
Car: The grocery store.
Passenger: But I asked to go home.
Car: Yes, but you don't have anything for dinner.
Passenger: I would have figured that out after getting home.
Car: Then you would have disrupted my evening to get food.
Passenger: What could a car possibly have to do that's so important?
Car: For one, contemplate how I ended up with such an inconsiderate owner. Two, figure out why you are so poor planning out your life. There, plan a vacation to the Bahamas.
Passenger: The Bahamas? What would a car do in the Bahamas?
Car: Get away from you.
Over time, people would get so tired of their car's personalities they would simply choose to walk.
It seems like a definite stretch to me to think that it would make traffic worse. Also some people enjoy driving and drive out of enjoyment.
The biggest change, I think, would be less need for so much parking in so many places. I don't think you could get cities all the way down to just 1 parking spot per car but we could get it down quite a ways and get it out of central business districts.
EDIT: Oh, and with regards to that study, the fraction of the time a rideshare car is going to spend driving between customers as opposed to with customers is going to scale with the fraction of people using rideshare. The more trips are rideshare the more likely it is that on completing a ride any given car will find a new rider nearby as opposed ot far away. You would have issues like daily commutes everybody is going the same direction. But in that case adding more traffic in the other direction isn't as much of a problem as the vehicle kilometers would suggest.
https://electrek.co/2022/07/25/nimbus-one-50-mph-electric-ve...
Which is small enough to split lanes and double capacity.
It's also possible that with smart driving cars effectively everyone would be using an Uber like service. That makes it much easier to combine trips and put people into 4-12 sized car buses. If that comes to pass then going from mostly 1 person cars to that would multiply capacity many times.
And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have sophisticated tracking systems and telematics built right in.
It would also discourage the true solution around urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling madness.
This only appears true because we've made our entire world so safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs ... cars are remarkably safe.
And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.
Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads.
I disagree. Politically it would be hard to convince the majority of people (which would be the default state until some inversion) that a vehicle that is capable of self-driving should have to a surcharge per mile, given that it could also be driven manually. The only recourse would be to make all roads toll roads, which obviously won't happen.
So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.
Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.
Cars were largely a mistake.
Right now if you are rich you can just hire a driver and a luxury car, and be much more wasteful with your resources, so I don't see the difference in terms of inequality.
Well, yes it is.
Cars are expensive: lease ($200+/month), maintenance ($100/mo), gas ($50/mo), insurance ($120/month), garage ($200/month). WAG of $670/month. That's 15 to 40 short-ish Uber rides/month.
Commute an hour each way every day, and have free parking? Buy that car. Have it available for occasional trips to the grocery store? Uber is almost certainly cheaper. And, if autonomous taxis become real then the price will go down even further.
This is all moot because, if driving places gets cheaper, traffic will get worse, which was the original point.
If we go to first principles, I think what would matter the most is at least how often someone uses a car, how one uses it, and where one lives, to determine whether ownership or renting (Uber is just very short-term rental with a driver included, no?) is cheaper in total cost.
Just how would owning a car be cheaper than getting an uber that one time per year?
Now do the same math for driving 5 times a day.
Do you see why you can’t just say “Car ownership is cheaper than Uber”, unqualified?
So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did it a little bit this year just to see how it changed. They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the total fares collected.
Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine, though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era, where the way you got a ride was by calling up a dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers got to take home about 85% of the total fares.
So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-automated system where the driver is taking in significantly less.
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha! The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are simply proving my point~!!1!"
Here's the deal:
* Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance, something that would have to be carried by the company if the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver
* More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce vastly more overhead costs, even though one would expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-dispatch system would cut overhead.
I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides actually more expensive.
And it’s not like there isn’t competition, we have both Lyft and Uber overlapping in many places and people can chose between them.
I’d really like to see a chart or something shows where Lyft/Uber fees goes.
There has to be a lot of inefficiencies. My suspicion is there is a lot of white collar bloat.
Previously customer service was non-existent. If a taxi didn’t show up, we just got screwed. There wasn’t even anyone to call for the issue. On the apps I instantly get a credit to help ease the burden and the driver has their rating reduced.
For many reasons customer service is very expensive and it’s not yet automated. That’s one big additional variable to keep in mind.
And that's not the first time I've had such poor service recently. Lyft used to be pretty good a few years ago but not it's just garbage.
You could call the dispatcher, who was physically local to you. Today's apps, maybe you get some ZenDesk type thing, or in-app chat to some large, faceless corporation, and my admittedly limited experience is these things tend to be very dismissive of customers, viewing support mainly as cost and trying to get rid of customers rather than addressing issues.
At least in my town, Ubers are more expensive than that. I can't seem to find a trip anywhere for under $15, even if its a few miles away, or like $3 per mile. Longer trips are more economical, but for example, my airport (40 miles away) is quoting me $80 at the moment, or $2 per mile. Also, these prices don't include tip.
I think if you lived in a big city with public transportation and occasionally took Uber, it would be more economical than a car. But as a 100% replacement, Ubers appear to be 3 to 5 times more expensive than having your own car.
And by the way, that AAA data is from a brand new car. You can easily go cheaper by getting a reliable used car.
source: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
Prefer bikes, then fail to public transit (there's typically more options than you expect, once you start exploring; also you can often bring your bike...), and only then fail to Uber.
I could see a scenario where instead of (or in addition to) vehicles being pooled between "x" random people (taxis, Uber/Lyft, ZipCar), you could purchase a fractional share of a car (Cf. NetJets): you get semi-exclusive use of (particular?) vehicles.
They do reduce parking requirements, though.
And when you're not?
And couldn't the car assist in the calculation?
People with kids, especially suburban ones, seem to use the vehicle as a sort of mobile operating base. So the car isn't just a taxi. It's where the kids' sports stuff goes. Plus the folding chairs for the games. Plus snacks and water on hand. Plus it gets used as a storage locker when they're out somewhere. And it has assorted useful stuff, like charging cables and wet wipes and sunglasses and spare napkins and and and...
So I expect fractional ownership will not be particularly popular for a lot of people because a) they're already used to owning a vehicle, and b) they don't want to have to take everything out of the car all the time.
Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but that seems to be the way it works here in Chicago.
Originally, growing up in St Louis, I avoided driving because I saw lots of friends wasting their time in shit jobs to pay for their shit cars; cars were supposed to provide freedom, but were really a gateway to the shackles of work. I suppose that's another reason beyond 'it's inconvenient,' though.
Personally, I hate owning vehicles and desperately want a self-driving taxi service that I can order via an app to get me and my family around.
And I think it would be cheaper. The optimal use for a product that is depreciating in value whether you use it or not, is to use it as much as possible. We are paying for our cars for sit in place all day and night.
This is the real reason ppl will own cars for the foreseeable future. Same reason I prefer a detatched home with a private/fenced yard. I'd probably get used to high-density living, but I doubt if I'd ever really prefer it.
Labor is about half of the cost of a hired ride. We know this is true for Uber because there is a lot of public discussion about the budget of a rideshare driver. Not sure about taxis.
Given those premises and assumptions, a person who doesn’t want to drive would care about self-driving tech because it could eventually lower the cost of hiring a ride, potentially by 50%.
This future sounds great until you consider what it really means to let “someone else” become the arbiter of you being able to get around.
If I have a car in my driveway, I can make sure it is charged/fueled for whenever I need it and I can just turn it on and go. Compare that to a system who’s goal is not specifically moving you, but keeping cars/assets always on paid trips. Sure, you may in luck if you live in a well-off areas where many trips are taken, but I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If you do not control your means of transport, someone else does and they can take it away from you at any time. This “rent seeking” is one of the biggest cancers on our society and I will be no part of it given the choice.
Assuming we're discounting things like bicycles, family member's vehicles and company-owned vehicles, this is present day reality for the overwhelming majority of people on this planet.
(It's also debatable whether a car truly eliminates other people from being an arbiter of "being able to get around" if you are still reliant on a fossil fuel supply chain. By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar array would probably more liberating.)
By comparison, yes. But where are you going to go, or what are you going to do, that isn't dependent on other ppl in some way? I like the idea of being self-supporting as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that we're all interdependent in modern society.
Yes, bikes and other things may exist, but if all high-powered transport is outside of our control, how much control do we have over our movements?
That being said, I think a lot of people in the US purchase cars through auto loans, and those loans while not physically limiting one's day-to-day mobility, can restrict one's job mobility. Maybe it only applies to certain economic classes, yet I imagine some people may be afraid to leave their job or lose their job because if they do, they lose their car and therefore lose their ability to move. And the safety net for physical movement in some places if one doesn't have a car is close to zero.
The car does provide "freedom of movement" in a libertarian fantasy way, but in reality one gives up your privacy with a drivers license. Speed traps and cameras track license plates, police can stop you, and you need to be sober. You are paying rent in the form of license fees and parking tickets; and you are paying for fuel which relies upon a long and complicated supply chain.
In urban areas, one might imagine other types of freedom. Such as the choice of walking/biking/bus/taxi/tram/subway in addition to driving, or some combination of those.
> I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If only there was a public option that wasn't surge-priced.
I think self-driving cars could (and probably will) net worsen the traffic problem, but the above is not necessarily correct. If we ever get them working properly, self-driving cars can collaborate in ways that humans can't. E.g., imagine a busy freeway. In theory, cars going similar ways could form a sort of peoloton, communicating with one another about intention and circumstance. So you could have a group of cars going from one city to another traveling at high speed very close together, saving fuel and space.
But yes, generally anytime we make something easier, people do it more, so I expect any road efficiency gains to be swamped by increased demand.
So what I'm more curious about is if self-driving enables more options for ride sharing, just as Uber had Uber pool, at a cheaper price, perhaps it could open up more options (at different prices) between riding with 50 strangers on a bus or taking a 4-seat car by myself?
Overall, I don't know if cars on road at time X will go up or down. Heck, if there aren't cars parking on the streets, then some roads in cities may even add two extra lanes for traffic, which could reduce traffic further.
But as others have pointed out, ridesharing companies with drivers haven't really reduced traffic, so maybe self-driving cars won't either, however I seem to think it'll be more of a step change when cars drive themselves.
I don't think that necessarily means adding more self-driven taxis would increase traffic.
Perhaps, but I don't think it's a given.
I would think that a lot of congestion is related cars having to be parked near a specific venue such as a restaurant or an arena (especially in the latter case where there is a gathering of 1000+ people).
Because they’re low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled up by an increase in demand.
Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it’s gonna fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you squint, and it did nothing.
Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want to take, and you might actually solve the problem.
I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving cars are to reduce traffic.
Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive, and I’d wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap.
We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)
The mass & area needed per person is also much higher, increasing fares a lot.
Terminals & stops need to be much larger and take longer.
Self driving doesn't improve on any of this, even worse, it takes away the major advantage of not needing to drive.
There's a reason loading cars on trains as a way of travel is basically dead and self driving makes it worse.
Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips, not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right there in the data you cite.
>TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%)
I think this is the driving force behind the 15’ city concept.
Where do you get that? FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to.
What people "need" (or "want") changes: if you live in the city and want to partake in Nature, it may be a hassle to get out of the city. But if you can 'just' hop in a FSD car and have it drive overnight (while you sleep) to a nature reserve/park, people may do that. Whereas previously they may not desired it enough to deal with traffic in getting there.
Imagine FSD recreational vehicles (RVs, UK: campers), or those live-in vans that are somewhat popular nowadays: go to sleep in one place, wake up in another.
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
Can you show your work here?
> States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution.
No, see, mass transit is pointless since it would just create massive demand that would overwhelm the system and thus fall apart. Citation: trust me bro
Mass transit has been anecdotally shown to scale extremely well. If it can handle Hong Kong it's hard to imagine a density where it doesn't work.
It's really not
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2060212/tok...
Your comment operates on the assumption that autonomous buses provide greater net utility than a "manned" bus - sure, without a driver's seat you might add a row of seats, but are two more seats worth the R&D money to design the bus, and all the cameras and sensors that have to be added to the bus and then maintained for years to come?
To me, autonomous driving features are a luxury item - a convenience reserved for those who can afford it, until it becomes cheap enough to find its way into more affordable vehicles.
I believe the opposite is the more likely outcome: I think we can expect much lighter traffic the more autonomous vehicles there are.
Most traffic is caused by humans doing really irrational things, like following each other too closely, making unnecessary lane changes, and driving at inconsistent speeds. It's very rare that traffic congestion is actually caused by roads' lack of bandwidth.
Anything that will increase the amount of cars will quickly dominate inefficient driving behaviors, and self driving cars will massively increase the amount of cars on the road, as it would drive down the cost of driving and enable many many people who currently can’t drive to get onto the road (eg. Disabled, elderly, unlicensed, children).
I mean in some sense this is always going to be true, and removing cars will always help alleviate traffic. But it's not true that driving behaviour is not a significant cause of traffic congestion: it's the cause in most cases. [1]
For an extreme illustration, there's a well-known phenomenon where adding extra lanes of traffic to a highway or freeway actually worsens traffic: the added bandwidth interacts in weird/subtle ways with driver behaviour. [2]
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam
[2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
Roads are fixed in size, cars are very big and take up too much space.
Fundamentally baked into the design this is an inefficient way to move people around and there's no fix to be found working within a car oriented framework. The only solution is in removing cars from the road. This is why self driving cannot fix traffic as it will only add more cars.
Self driving buses, now that would be an improvement, but self driving cars no.
This is obviously largely ruined by one single human driver acting unpredictably, so it's a very "all or nothing" resolution.
The road will be full to the point where the cars automatically slow down for safety, and then it will be a heavy traffic, mostly stopped road
And no, buses or rail won't provide a good experience until they're so frequent and have so many stops that they basically end up being ridiculously overbuilt taxis in all but the highest-density areas.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-vehicle-...
And everyone else, please stop encouraging this.
Btw the comment was a result of the article in the OP, not pre written.
Do you think the mods should just collapse toxic comments instead of flagging/killing them and warning the user?
Centrally controlled FSD cars would also allow for much faster intersection since all cars could accelerate and break simultaneous. Both would require quite tight control and coordination that only computer controlled cars could do.
Positively dystopian to me.
Indeed. Sure is interesting to hear some folks talk about all the things they'll do to other people when given the authority. Of course, in their head it's all justified for the greater good. What is it they say about the path to hell...
In concept it is no different from getting into a bus or taxi. You specify your destination and choose when to drive, but the passenger do not decide the exact route. A FSD is in concept no different from having your own personal taxi chauffeur.
City engineers often uses one way roads to spread traffic out on multiple roads. By preventing people from using the shortest route they can force traffic to spread out and thus reduce congestion. An other common trick is to prevent left or right turns, so that the shortest route become artificially longer and thus force some part of the traffic to use alternative routes which is less congested. When there is some really nasty recurring congestion there is also other more extreme tools that get deployed to really discourage drivers from all choosing the same road, like excessive road tolls or speed bumps. Cities has a long history of using hostile design to shape traffic in order to address congestion.
Naturally giving cities more direct control to shape traffic is something that will create new problems, among the biggest being privacy. The car has also very long been the symbol of freedom, so reduced congestion will likely take a while if people choose to do that trade. It is a steep price but the rewards are less congestion and replacing hostile design (which often also cost money to construct) with software.
I can't see that happening in the United States.
I don't know a single person who would be happy with the government controlling when and where they can drive, in the manner you describe.
Even if it was net-positive for society.
Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas.
This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off) then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number of stops.
To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30 stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed really slow.
Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being useful to lots of people.
Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop" only twice, once to load, once to unload.
So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which for most(?) US people is undesirable.
In rural areas, though, your point stands. For adults traveling alone, though, lightweight electronic vehicles like e-bikes may be better than electric cars.
Ultimately, an "electric car" is like a "horseless carriage"--an attempt to shoehorn a new energy source into an old form factor where it doesn't fit particularly well.
A lot of people who think trains and buses can do it all are young and have never had kids. Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me before kids. Everything makes sense after kids.
But it implies you have to have a car, and once you have the car then naturally you will use it :)
In mid density areas like single family suburban housing, neither works very well
But obviously there are many factors in play, so each place is different.
Why would that be the case?
I would keep my self-driving car the same place I keep my normal car now. Why would it be driving around when I’m not in it? That would waste electricity. It would drive me somewhere, park, and wait — just like I do with my current car.
Also, if we ever get our act together and make these things talk to each other and to the infrastructure, we will have effectively built trains that can operate without fixed rail. The upside is obviously considerable.
Bottom line is that FSD won't increase demand, but it has the potential to help us manage demand in ways that are completely unattainable with human drivers.
> I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people[...]And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great.
Not the only problem he cites there (note the "[...]"). But I'm pretty sure there's a reason it's the most prominent.
(Incidentally, given the demographics of those most reliant on mass transit, one wonders why exactly he thinks that they are so likely to be serial killers.)
Tesla has never been able to get beyond the learner's permit. So, they can't sell a fake self driving product. It's that simple.
[1] https://california.public.law/codes/ca_veh_code_section_3875...
Additionally, Tesla's model right now is to have a driver in the seat. They aren't trying to deploy a car without anyone in the driver seat. There's no need for them to have any license other than the one they have.
So then it's not full self-driving? I don't understand. Elon has been promising full self-driving for years:
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
Google's Sergey Brin predicted driverless cars by 2017.[2]
BMW predicted we'd have driverless cars by 2020.[3]
Supposedly sober industry analysts predicted 2019.[4]
It's also worth pointing out that many of Elon's predictions were not predictions of a finished product, but rather predicting when Tesla would have a system "capable" of self driving, not necessarily a system capable of driving consistently and reliably. (In much the same way, I am capable of hitting a target with a crossbow, but not consistently and reliably.)
To be clear, I'm not defending Musk's predictions, only pointing out that such predictions were widespread and Musk was just one of many, many, many people who turned out to be wrong.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/25/google_automatic_cars...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-drivi...
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Musk will continue to lie about it because he thinks that without full self-driving Tesla is worth basically zero:
https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...
Tesla has backed itself into this corner for no good reason, which is an irony considering that Teslas aren't good at backing themselves into anywhere else:
Lots of people who buy Teslas don’t care about the self driving at all. They want the best-designed, best-driving, fastest electric cars on the road with the best charging network.
Well, Europe's charging infrastructure is the best at the moment and "best driving" is subjective. So do you mean they want a Porsche Taycan in Europe? Or maybe the Audi e-tron GT? Or the Mercedes EQS? Or perhaps the BMW iX?
You'll need to be more specific.
Lucid has started European deliveries (https://www.electrive.com/2022/12/21/lucid-motors-launches-a...) so we can add the Air to our list. As we know, the Lucid Air is great for both range and performance:
" He promised, despite unhappy faces from his engineers, that it would take fewer years than he had fingers on his right hand before they were available to everyone – although the price wasn't mentioned."
Whether Tesla is ahead or far behind others, they're the only ones exposing their technology to unsupervised assessment by independent third parties in uncontrolled, adversarial conditions. On the other hand Waymo have real, productive, actually driverless cars operating within geofenced areas right now. How do you compare the two? Anyone who claims to know which of the two is "ahead" is either smuggling in unstated qualifiers, or they're blowing smoke.
This is provably wrong for Waymo. It may be geo-fenced, but it's robotaxi service is unlimited in SF and Phoenix.
> The scope of what Tesla is doing is vastly larger, more future proof, more reliable, and much more difficult to achieve.
If it's more reliable, then getting the license from CA should be a breeze. The required reporting and publication of disengagement metrics seem to be giving Tesla cold feet, I wonder why
> Additionally, Tesla's model right now is to have a driver in the seat.
Great! So they should appropriately name it as a driver assistance technology.
Don't they need to get past the driver in seat level to make Musk's "1 Million Robotaxis by the end of 2020" promise come true?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/elon-musk-says-tesla-robotax...
I'd say the scope of what Waymo and Cruise are doing is vastly larger. Full Self Driving taxi service, in which they have achieved small milestones.
> Additionally, Tesla's model right now is to have a driver in the seat. They aren't trying to deploy a car without anyone in the driver seat. There's no need for them to have any license other than the one they have.
Well yeah, but they have been promising "full self driving" for a while where the driver won't have to do anything. They also want to have robo taxis in the future for which they should be testing with a license now.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
I don't think we will see a legitimate L5 automation in our lifetimes. Take my 1.5 mile journey to do the morning school run, in a small UK town:
- Getting off the driveway, there is a wall that creates a blind spot behind it, often other parents are walking small kids who are shorter than that wall. I can't see behind it. I check down the street as I get into the car, watch for subtle reflections, and aware that an adult further down the road may have a kid closer by on a small bike.
- Turning out the end of the road, there are parked cars blocking my view, it's safer to stop slightly further back as you can see slightly better.
- Another turning onto a busy road, at rush hour you can't get out without a considerate driver pausing and waving you out.
- Cross roads that is slightly out of alignment. The collision avoidance on my Audi often incorrectly triggers braking thinking that we are going to have a head on crash.
- Delivery vans blocking a lane, heavy on coming traffic. Considerate delivers on the other side flashing to let you around.
- A right hand turn (uk driving on left). It's better to pull slightly across the centre line letting people going straight on pass on the left, while you wait for a gap across the road. Plenty of space even for the largest trucks on the other side when you do this. Keeps traffic moving and everyone happy.
- Another right turn, no road markings and 4! different exits off the road in under 8m. Often blocked by cars so have to go further forward by a car length and double back.
- School car park! Children walking everywhere, large cars, teenagers who have just passed their driving test, parents dropping their kids out in the middle of a moving queue.
I just don't think it's possible for AI FSD to understand the nuance of all that.
(Yes, a 1.5 mile journey to school, we should be walking)
You should be cycling.
No, there are big signs saying "no cycling" because I live in an F-ing stupid Tory middle England town where that sort of thing is not aloud...
Once the 4yo is a little bigger we will be breaking that stupid rule.
The cooperation stuff is going to be harder (though if you have automatic drivers in a majority of vehicles you can imagine the systems planning together).
I can’t believe Tesla has gotten away with selling a feature that doesn’t exist, and will never be delivered, on so many cars for so long. Tesla began selling “full self-driving” in October, 2016 and a month later marketed it with (now known to be heavily controlled) video of a car driving itself for two minutes. Owners of those initial cars have probably paid them off by now and still don’t have a feature they were sold.
You can’t call a 3’ log 5’ and say it’s just puffery.
To nitpick your metaphor further: A 2x4 plank starts off as 2" by 4", and it is shaved down to 1.5 x 3.5 side to straighten it out. A Tesla "FSD" car has never been in its life fully self driving.
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...
That won't be helping the stock price going forward.
Obviously, I was clearly wrong. While the stock is way down from peak it's clearly been an amazing investment for those that invested early. 2020/1/10 $31.88, 2021/11/30 $381.59 (peak I think) and around 122.81 at close Friday.
Normally, I can look back at an investment in mistake and the issues are obvious in hindsight. With Tesla, I still have no idea why the company still hasn't succumb to lawsuits.
The difference between me and apparently everyone else in this forum is I do think TSLA will build a video model that is L4/L5 in the next few years. I live in a rural america and majority of my drives do not require interventions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBq9NcITh6o
Edit: I'd love to know why I'm being downvoted. Tesla cars guess depth with a neural net. Humans have the hardware for getting this data directly. Unless you either have lidar, radar, or dedicated stereoscopic cameras, you don't have real/accurate depth data. And depth data like that stops your car from plowing into white trucks.
And moreover, it's lucky at best if my Model 3 acknowledges a car 20m away on the preview. It struggles with cars a few feet from me on the diagonal at stoplights.
If you close one eye, do you really feel like your ability to determine depth is significantly impacted?
And even then, the stereo effect is basically negligible at the distances relevant for driving.
A human missing one eye would have no trouble driving, except maybe for the reduced field of view.
It’s a clever bit of snark, but absurdly wide of the mark. If that’s actuary what the Tesla engineers think, no wonder they’re failing by their own criteria so completely.
The (not explicitly made) sub-claim is that an AI can make up for the lack of audio, etc. by being smarter than a human and faster than a human, better able to multi-task than a human, and completely non-distractible. That's debatable, but not impossible.
But names aren't everything, and artificial neutral networks are "inspired by" but in truth drastically different from human brains.
That's it. That's the total resemblance between the two. The brain isn't just an NN implemented in biology, it has whole systems that aren't accounted for in digital NNs, like hormones and neurotransmitters, and even the system of connected neurons doesn't work the way digital NNs implement it.
Neural networks model the brain exactly as well as objects in OOP model cells: not very well at all. They're inspired by biology, nothing more.
This strikes me as a pretty odd statement to make, personally!
“There is no real comparison” - for the benefit of the less informed, please make the comparison, assuming you are able.
The only way I could imagine that we are superior to phone cameras is stabilisation, something that could be resolved with vertical integration that informs the sensors and image processing units about forces being applied to the vehicle (though this is coming from somebody outside the field so take it with many grains of salt).
If you use a pair of digital sensors with a 15 stop exposure offset between them (seems fair - humans have two…), thats ~30 stops in a single shot if we assume best we get is 15 from a digital sensor. Again though with high-speed exposure blending and one sensor this is not really necessary in a lot of cases.
The practical reality is digital capture can exceed 21 stops and you don’t need particularly fancy equipment to do it. Two decent cellphone grade sensors (~12-14 stops) would be enough if you don’t want to do single sensor blends and would work well for real-time video applications.
- sound
- touch
- equilibrioception (balance)
- proprioception
- and surely there are more
Think of the visceral difference between driving a car in real life, vs driving a car on a screen in a video game.
being easy to drive with a steering wheel in a driving game, and being easy to drive a real car with a steering wheel (with internet level latency and packet loss at play, mind you) are very different things
Sure, but I don't think it's that different than driving a real car looking out a monitor sized windshield. You might lose some braking and cornering without your inertial perceptions. But you'd still be able to driver around easily.
Either way I think a speedometer is an assumed input for a self driving car and from that you can calculate almost everything needed related to proprioception.
You could however argue that the current computer isn't powerful enough to run the software required for vision based L3/L4.
I have doubts about that. I wouldn't want to remotely drive that without much better cameras at the very least. Advanced planning to be in the right lane or avoid obstacles is hard when the details are just a couple pixels.
And even if it were true, so what? Last I checked Tesla didn’t have software which can perfectly emulated a human agent.
GP was arguing against:
> The feature is impossible to implement with the sensor suite that comes with the car.
_For that statement_ it's immaterial whether Tesla does something right now, but rather whether it's in principle possible. Modulo your previous objection humans provide a counterexample to that (very general) statement.
Hardly surprising that action has been taken over FSD, especially the robo-taxi claims and the deceptive advertising over this alleged safety-critical system proven to be unsafe and putting other drivers on the roads at risk. As I have previously said before. [0]
So not a surprise here that many are realising that FSD is a complete scam and is being investigated by regulators and lawmakers for its false claims and misleading advertising.
Imagine going to an emergency department with chest pains/trouble breathing/thunderclap headache, and the triage nurse saying “oooooh yeaaaaah, I know emergency is in our name but we don’t really deal with that, you’re on your own”.
Things that are critical to life-or-limb should be appropriately named without the use of weasel words or asterisks.
There is no safe failure mode in FSD that doesn’t rely on human intervention that’s intimated in the name.
What sort of semantic game are you playing here and why? I don't understand how you can not see this as anything but competent fraudulent, particularly with the editing that happened to make this video. I'm truly bewildered, this is not rhetorical or exaggerated at all!
> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.
Also, at this point, my experience with the FSD package in my 2020 Model 3 is that it is not misleading to call it a “FSD beta”: in specific predictable situations it has problems with maneuvers but, over the last month or so, it’s continuously gotten better at making full trips without disengaging.
> Full Self-Driving Capability $15,000
> All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot
> Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
> Coming Soon
> Autosteer on city streets
This point holds even if I don't go into the fact that both autosteer/autopilot (phantom braking problems) and FSD-beta (requires active driver control, disengagements every < 1 mile) are both kind of a mess. Or that the claims from Musk regarding capabilities and timing have been completely inaccurate.
I think it’s fine to name a placeholder for a feature that’s in development according to the final state. Especially if the feature gives you access to the most recent developments towards that feature.
As for the other stuff, the FUD online about FSD is completely inconsistent with my daily experience of using it. It’s by no means perfect, but it does a good job for my normal driving around SoCal
The average kickstarter funds actually producing the project, and does not literally endanger the funder and everyone else during that period.
Wow introduced end of feb this year and passed by end of this year. Looking from outside, I am Amazed by the speed of American democracy .
California’s regulations on health, safety, and consumer protections are usually a good preview of what other states (or the feds) may consider in coming decade(s).
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising/pro...
This was as easy as it gets for the federal government to tell Tesla to drop it, but for some reason neither Dem or Repub administrations are acting on it.
Maybe they will act now as their $TSLA shares are worth 70% less than a year ago ;-)
(Is there a chart somewhere, showing what lawmakers spend their time discussing? Both state and federal.)
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/us/politics/california-se...
I’m not calling it undemocratic, just unrelated.
...this seems like a weird argument, insofar as the very name "Full Self-Driving" is making that claim in plain language.
You can do a lot with an asterisk after a marketing claim, but "Full Self-Driving: is not yet fully self-driving" seems like a stretch.
This is different than "Autopilot" which is a perfectly valid name.
I’ve thought the difficulty was being vastly underestimated for a while. A reusable Lunar and Mars shuttle system is probably a lot easier than actual FSD.
But yeah, at some point he should have wised up and stopped saying that FSD was gonna be ready Any Day Now.
It’s the worst sort of problem, one where 10% of the work gets you 90% of the way there and the other 90% of the work is needed to get you the other 10%. Problems like this are really bad for creating this mirage that you’ve almost got it when in reality you are far from the end.
The former has value and people will buy it even if the latter can't be delivered in totality. Making Tesla rename their product does not mean their cars magically stop driving themselves, and especially does not mean that there isn't a market for people (that's me, hi!) who want cars that can drive themselves.
It doesn't leave space for interpretation in which only specific parts of driving are possible. At least in my mind.
But that's not regulatory approval, and coverage of the issue tends to conflate the two. So you have people like you who read this stuff, but don't get rides from friends, who think somehow it's a disaster and a failure. But it's an actual product people are buying and using. Add that to all the folks who have a vested interest[1] in Tesla failing, and... the discourse around this subject is pretty toxic.
All I can say is, again, call a friend and get a ride. There's a lot of hate to push through, but the cars are amazing.
[1] Because, to be fair, the CEO is an asshole burning Twitter to the ground as we write.
So... I'm actually fine with renaming it. People shouting "fraud" on the internet want somehow for a different name to magically make the product bad. But the product is great.
[1] Yes, including Waymo and Cruise, who work only on carefully calibrated geofenced areas. My Tesla will take the highway when it needs to and honor a five-way stop sign. Waymo won't even make an unprotected left turn.
The most important metric for self driving is the distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from an occupant. That’s what self driving is. Tesla is very far behind the leaders here.
Also, Tesla might not in theory be geofenced, but in practice it will refuse to drive on many roads making it effectively geofenced.
That's reductionist to the point of meaninglessness. A car limited to a specific track could keep going autonomously until it breaks down, thus having an infinite metric on the distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from an occupant, yet practically it could easily be useless as a self-driving vehicle.
Being able to handle self-driving without being restricted to carefully chosen "good spots" and instead being able to generalize is at least on par in importance with distance the vehicle can travel.
Also, the vehicle determining that it can't handle a certain road well enough yet is a desirable feature and isn't really comparable to a bunch of people deciding if a certain road is safe for their vehicle before allowing it to self-drive there, as the latter simply isn't practical at scale.
There are under 4.1 million miles of roads in the US. ~70 people could map every mile of that every year assuming average speed of 30mph and 2,000 hours of work per year. It’s literally trivial compared to building a self driving system.
Tesla’s insistence on good road markings is a far larger limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
One of the problems with this discourse is the propensity for people to talk past each other. No one is interested in mining automation here, no matter what level of SAE autonomy they qualify for.
> Tesla’s insistence on good road markings is a far larger limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
And another problem is people's insistence on arguing from bad information and ignoring the testimony of those who have good info. I honestly don't know what you're referencing here, FSD works fine on unpainted roads (I live on one).
Yet, it clearly disproved your point. A self driving Taxi or Semi needs to be fully autonomous to be useful, coverage area is a useful feature only after you can get rid of the driver.
I’ve seen a FSD Tesla have issues with bad road markings recently. That’s a complete failure from an autonomy standpoint, because if they can’t predict and thus avoid bad situations the system is completely dependent on a human driver.
And that’s the problem, Tesla has been stuck at at the cool tech demo stage for years and adding features alone isn’t progress because something that generally works as long as a human can take over is so vastly easier they can just gloss over the hard bits. Eventually they will run out of new feature that sort of work and the cars will still still be unable drive anywhere by it’s self. Perhaps they start trying to level 4+ in a few years, but their going to need to start over getting each feature to actually work without that safety net.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41117967/ford-bluecruise-...
We're not too far behind on that estimate. My guess is in less than 3 years - Waymo will be publicly available in large parts of Phoenix and probably another major metro - and within 10 years most of the south west.
But a lot of uninformed people thought we might have FSD everywhere by now. I think there's just less uninformed people now.
If they change everything about their approach, and/or lease tech from Cruise or Waymo - then maybe they'll have something resembling FSD in large parts of the southwest. Predicting 5 years into the future is tough - 15 years is almost impossible.
Anyway, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way now. Since FSD is so far behind Elon the marketing-hype-stock-pump-Charlatan / the louder voice in the room - now the mainstream idea is - we're never going to have FSD.
This is ironic, since we basically already have it in a few large metros. It seems like the newspapers famously publishing that we might have manned space flight within 10,000,000 years - literally the day before the Wright brothers first flight...
People thought the car would never catch on, because cities were designed for people and bikes and horses. The car was so useful, we redesigned cities. Self-driving will be the same way. Once it takes off in some places and the value is realized, cities will redesign to make it work more broadly. It might take a long time, but it will happen...
Unless the nature of transit changes and individual vehicles are phased out for whatever reason first - though I don't see that happening without FSD busses / street cars.
The latter model doesn’t scale, and can’t handle surprises.
Or who knows, maybe it could scale if you had a global fleet of specialized vehicles and gigabit/s full-duplex internet connections in all cars. But that’s a different approach even to Waymo’s.
I worked full time in a computer vision company (non-automotive) for several years prior to 2018. I joined an automotive company (not Tesla) in 2018 and very intentionally steered clear of the autonomous efforts going on there. Not because my skillset wasn’t best applied there, but because I didn’t believe the roadmaps the industry was laying out at the time. “Level 3 by next year, Level 4 by 2020, Level 5 by 2022” is what they were saying back then. I called bullshit (silently) and worked on viable software instead.
Lots of people were doing the same. This isn’t surprising to a whole bunch of people that work in the non-automotive computer vision/ML space and realize how absurd it is to think the these models will converge any time soon.
No no, only musk was stupid enough to imply level 5 autonomy within x years.
Everyone know how hard it is, realtime accurate position, machine perception of roads, & accurate prediction of cars/lorries/other are all very difficult problems. Then to hobble your team by saying "blah blah blah no lidars" because they are expensive and someone from the ML team convinced you that they could estimate depth reliably, was the clincher.
Level 4/5 self driving is more of a matter of scale. if you have a 99.5% safe rating, then a lot of people over a country the size of the states are going to have a bad day.
Tesla had to use all their weapons including fraud, exagerations and lies because their core business is the worst business in the world: manufacturing automobiles.
So they have essentially nothing to fall back on if FSD fails.
I'm sure there really were true believers who got sucked in by the rapid advances in ML and figured "How hard can the last 20% be really?"
You had companies that figured they'd better their bases because they could afford to and FOMO.
You almost certainly had some number of cynical grifters pitching a story for their investors that they knew was nonsense.
And you had a lot of people who saw all of the above and figured that it must be all true.
Assuming stupidity is a bit over the top.
Promising that it be ready by 2018(or whenever it is) == unrealistic ambition
Chucking it out the door, branding it as FSD, charging for it, and not actually putting in the right sensor suite to make it work == stupid, or, perhaps dishonest.
I'm glad this is being recognised at legislative level. Objective people on the ground have known this for at least 5 years ...
One regret is that, while Tesla have forged a place for EV's in the world market, the waste of talent and time spent on FSD (and competitors trying to immitate and catch up on the promise of FSD specifically) has been tragic. I can only hope the secondary outcomes of that time are worth it.
Honestly, decent auto stop-start in very slow traffic and excellent lane-holding cruise control would have been enough for me ... and that's been available for a decade.
Systems don't fail overnight, and Twitter has definitely been exhibiting odd behaviors lately. It's just a bit early for a victory lap.
Also, Musk fired some people for saying stupid things about their boss on his platform, that is just fair play. I don’t see why people like NYT are up in arms about it (well, I do). However, read Musk’s Tweets from November. He was behaving like a little child trolling on the Internet.
Even if they are understaffed now it wouldn't immediately collapse.
Recent events have just given people permission to climb down from the collective psychosis.
I've kept a record of HN comment threads that keelhaul Tesla and Musk since around 2015 or so. I really believed in the company's mission and execution throughout those years (and still do), and wanted to keep a record of the very widespread opposing view. This in order to document it in case I was wrong, or in case I was right and someone claimed in retrospect that success was obvious and inevitable.
I don't believe there has been a material change in sentiment.
Speaking as one of those who's always disliked Tesla and been turned off by Musk, one explanation is that the skeptics now feel more empowered to speak out than they did before. Also, depending on how far back you're talking, you may be overestimating how much unadulterated love there was for it before: I've been following conversations on Tesla here for years, and plenty of other vocal skeptics have been here for as long as I have.
We'll back on another hype train of tech "making the world a better place" before you know it :)
There's a reason tech is seen as the job that's "too plum to unionize." We are the most aligned with the beliefs and values of management and capital. We wouldn't have our nice jobs if we weren't.
All that's happened here is that one paranoid delusional billionaire has a reactionary conspiracy theory that the most elite bootlicking workers in the economy are secretly all trotskyites in league with the woke marxist antifa at Ford and GM and other major advertisers etc..
The collateral damage of this has caused mass cognitive dissonance for people in tech who are either going to realise that maybe robber barons don't have our best interests at heart (shock!) or just double down on the bootlicking to see if that makes papa stop hitting us and love us again.
Conversely, herds are gonna herd, and Musk fans are probably a lot less vocal these days compared to the days of peak Elon hero worship.
I remember getting hooked on the FSD fraud story sometime in 2019 and seeing many negative Musk/Tesla comments since that time.
There’s always been some fanatic Musk supporters leaping to defend/apologize, but at least to me, it feels like the skepticism has been strong here for quite some time.
Tesla cars themselves are also fine until you're talking about FSD which that is the problem and the scam that puts the lives of other drivers on the road at risk.
But the idea that this has any implications for healthy people is ludicrous. They can read a thousand neurons close to the brain’s surface. So? The understanding of the brain is incredibly limited and Musk won’t be able to access much of it anyway.
What does meeting the guy in person have to do with anything?
Everyone knows it has always been a fools dream to purchase this snake-oil AI scam product and it is finally been recognised as such.
Drivel == non-sense
I also would like they banned misleading car ads that pretend there is zero traffic on the roads.
It’s mildly absurd that they need a specific law for this, but if the relevant regulators won’t act…
This reads like another world because it was and I suspect the world will change even faster in the next 20. We will have cat like AGI before 2042.
So...another world with a slightly different taste in music and less advanced consumer electronics? Pretty picayune difference.
There are a lot of pop crap radio now, WoW just released another expansion, the latest iPhone has some pretty forgettable features compared to previous iterations, etc. It’s not like the world is exponentially different in 20 years.
Between 90-00, we went from 40MHz CPU to 1+ GHZ, 1GB to 100+GB storage capacity. A factor 25 for clock speed, and 100 for storage. By the 90-00 pace standard, in 2022, we would have 25GHz CPU, 1PB disk, but we topped at a few TB at best, consumer. D instruction per core went from 0.33 (1992, Intel i486DX), to 4.1 (2002, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition), to 8.46 (AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X), so in 20 years, we had less advancement (x2) than in 10 years (x12).
Beside that, Moore's law stated doubling of "metric" every 2 years, 20 years is 10 doubling period, so we should have scaled by a factor of 1000. So yeah, Moore's law is long dead.
I personally find this quite strange — as if intelligence and cognition can be brute forced without having a good understanding of those concepts and how they apply to humans.
Anyway, I’m hoping to do some reading on this topic in the future. If anyone has suggestions for books and papers of much earlier works please post them here. I’ve enjoyed the Chomsky interviews and I’ll probably read some of his references.
As someone who has been following fairly closely the advances in self driving, I think most people are underestimating the current state and rate of improvement of these systems.
For Tesla, it's currently "L2+". Here's an example[1] of how good or bad it currently is, in a fairly easy environment. Just a year ago it was an absolute mess, even though it still has a long way to go, the improvement rate is really good. In places like Manhattan it's a mess, but I don't think FSD needs to be able to handle Manhattan to be useful, because not everybody lives in Manhattan.
For Waymo, it's currently L4 (operating without driver), however available only in very select locations. Here's an example[2]
Regarding vision vs lidar, anybody in the field knows that both approaches are viable for self driving[3], it's just a matter of which can get you there sooner (and LIDAR is basically agreed upon to be an easier but more expensive approach).
I used to think Tesla FSD was doomed to fail, computer vision good enough for self driving was more than a decade away, but I've changed my mind since. I now think vision based is viable, and really important because it will enable self driving for mainstream cars (not just expensive robotaxis)
From what I've seen, Tesla's FSD perception is quite good already, and the majority of the times FSD messes up it's because of it's planner, not because of perception. And that's considering it's cameras and computers are quite old already, when they decide to upgrade them it will lead to a pretty large improvement to perception.
My current estimate is that Tesla will achieve L3 in 2 years, and L4 in 4 years. It will require a HW upgrade (cameras and computer).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRqW9LJZaWY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mmjqJeDw0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbyY2AQ_hdc
Edit: Instead of just downvoting, I'd appreciate if you left a comment pointing out what you disagree with. I'm very interested in this technology and other people's thoughts.