Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW, as far as "will the car drive itself?", FSD is already here. Call a friend and get a ride. The beta lets people in relatively rapidly now, and there are hundreds of thousands of enabled cars on the roads. It's pretty amazing. Now, it's absolutely true that it's not at a 100% supervision-free level. It's still timid, it has trouble with lane selection in some areas and misses turns, etc... But for months and months intervention-free drives in my area have been the rule and not the exception. My car, for sure, drives me around. It's pretty amazing.

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.

Other companies have cars one public streets without drivers. Calling what current Tesla’s do Full Sell Driving is so misleading it’s probably just fraud.

As an owner in the FSD beta, I think the most misleading thing is Elon's BS time lines. When I bought in August 2019, they were basically telling everyone they have it ready to be a taxi next year with a flip of a switch. Implying they already have it figured out when they didn't. I bought my car with FSD and didn't get into the Beta until a year after they were suppose to be ready for use as a taxi. At this point for me, it's not really good enough to use on city/rural streets without frequent interventions. I pretty much only use self driving on the highway, which is currently using a separate stack than FSD Beta. They are suppose to start using the same stack for highways soon.

Is there any consumer car that is anywhere close? My understanding is that no other car has things like automatic lan change and route following. Let alone stopping at stop signs / red lights etc.

Yeah, nothing else does that stuff. Which is I think the big disconnect in this discourse. People who want to take the anti- side can lean on "It's not complete!" as an argument, because it isn't. But in terms of capability, it's way ahead of the competition[1] And some of us want this feature and want to pay for it! And it works!

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.

Other driver assist/hands free driving systems do lane changing and still clarify they aren’t self driving.

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.

>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.

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.

Self driving trucks at mines have very limited routes but they are legitimately self driving and quite useful.

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.

> Self driving trucks at mines have very limited routes but they are legitimately self driving and quite useful.

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).

> no matter what level of SAE autonomy they qualify for.

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.

Ford blue cruise does automated lane change.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41117967/ford-bluecruise-...

That is not full self driving

If you don’t have a friend, I thought this MKBHD video from a few days ago was a fair appraisal of the current state of FSD:

https://youtu.be/9nF0K2nJ7N8

I think he has another good video on TSLA and tech hype in general.

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