The death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated
understandingai.org
understandingai.org
Given that, perceiving the environment with radar, lidar, visible light, infrared, and so on is equivalent to human vision.
As far as I'm aware, Tesla uses more than just visible light sensors. Am I wrong in my understanding?
You have input, taken by sensors, converted into usable form by a processor. There is no fundamental difference between visible light and radio waves, per se.
When paired with a general intelligence evolved over a couple million years, and visual sensors that have much more dynamic range than commercially available sensors yeah.
The problem is without those 2 things Teslas crash into fire trucks.
And different bands of EM have different properties so eyes aren’t equivalent to radar. Otherwise we would be able to see around corners.
And if humans had more sensory data we would definitely be integrating it into our driving. Otherwise ADAS tech wouldn’t be so commonplace in 2023.
Though, it seems Tesla reincorporated radar from their post '21 models on, so the premise of this sub-thread is at best outdated and at worst a half-truth. Oh well.
- A failure by Tesla to view the system that they are developing as what it really is - a physical safety-critical system and not "an AI". Those two are distinct systems as, with a physical safety-critical systems, the totality of the systems safety components cannot be fully expressed in software - neither initially nor continuously.
- To build on that point, Tesla is not allowing the Operational Design Domain (ODD) via a robust, well-maintained validation process determine the vehicle hardware as the ODD demands it to be. Instead, Tesla is trying to "front run" it (ignore the demands of the ODD) by largely focusing on hardware costs. The tension from failing to recognize that is why Tesla, in part, has a long history of being forced to (somewhat clandestinely) change the relevant sensor and compute hardware on their vehicles while promising to "solve FSD" (whatever that means) by the end of every year since around 2015 or so.
But what is AI? If it's just "artificial intelligence", it effectively includes all programming with if/then logic gates based on program input.
And? You think that is the totality of a physical safety critical system?
I can see how it appears to intelligent, but it lacks reasoning, creativity, and critical thinking.
It requires creativity to recognize the rules of the game as “try to be the first to reach the ball”, to recognize that the thrower may not have time to carefully aim, and that the others might chase the ball regardless of its location. Only if all three of those creative leaps are made, then logical deduction can take over to conclude “if the ball goes in front of me, stop before a kid does the same”.
And that’s not even getting into cases where you conditionally act like there’s a stop sign. The city of Houghton,MI has major streets along the side of a hill, and minor streets going up and down the hill. Every winter, sand is put down for traction, and every spring it is cleaned away. If there’s a late-season snowstorm after the spring cleaning, cars going downhill on the minor streets physically cannot stop, so everybody on the major streets looks uphill before crossing.
Short of location-dependent fine-tuned models, I’m not sure how machine learning could replicate the logic of “if snowy in late spring, grant right-of-way to cars headed downhill”.
This is one argument for vision alone. It’s easier for humans to teach the deep neural network what to do if they both see and label the same thing.
It’s harder to build labeling systems that work on representations that humans don’t understand like point clouds or noisy depth maps.
That isn’t to say that other sensors including radar, gps, LiDAR, other spectrum, etc don’t help.
But you have to develop more complex labeling methods or move away from supervised learning.
https://dataloop.ai/platform/lidar/
A good supervised learning process requires teaching humans to label consistently.
Imagine trying to write down precise instructions to train hundreds or thousands of humans to label many different types of objects using a tool like the above. Now hire, train, and manage those humans.
Compare that to having the humans draw rectangles around 2d color pictures of cars.
Also note that such tools need to be built and improved.
And it's a good bet. There's tons more to self driving than perceiving the world (lidar does not help a driver what to do in a novel and ambiguous situation, it's not a perception problem) and Tesla's vision is quite good based on all the FSD videos on YouTube.
I thought their argument was a little more like “since roads are designed for human vision, we should take a vision-based approach, too”.
Not saying it’s the right idea, just that’s how I thought they had put it.
https://neurosciencenews.com/peripheral-vision-brain-illusio...
Actually, my understanding is that the depth perception induced by binocular vision is relevant only within a relatively short range (like, single-digit number of feet away), which makes it relatively useless for long-distance depth perception needed for driving.
So it's not useless for e.g. pulling into a parking spot or steering around a close vehicle.
(I'm crosseyed and don't benefit from binocular depth cues. For the most part I do alright, though rarely I'm comically off when someone throws me a ball or I'm picking up something close to me).
Most of our depth perception isn't from stereopsis or other binocular cues.
Lidar has since dropped in price by a lot, an order of magnitude or more.
- why would the goal be "the same level or performance as humans" ?
For context, some towns are actively removing cars from whole areas not just for pollution impact but also for pedestrian safety. Moral issues aside, the status quo is just not enough, it needs to be way better.
- achieving the same level as humans being possible in theory doesn't mean we'll get there in practice.
Having enough hardware to realize something doesn't help if the software is not up to the task. And assuming they "just" solve the software issue could be like assuming 18th century people would "just" discover relativity.
Software becoming as good as human in video processing just feels like a "general AI is around the corner" kind of expectation.
This is what I mean with the last part of my argument. Lidar is supposedly an extremely thorough 3d depth map hopefully capturing at hundreds or thousands of FPS. But even if you have this data, the actual bulk of the problem with current self-driving isn't solved, that being the "business logic" for how to navigate the world smoothly and efficiently and to 'communicate' with other road users.
The result is subpar food because most recipes have a 1% problem called “seasoning”.
The “seasoning” of driving — the completely unpredictable and intuiting 1% of situations you find yourself behind the wheel where you just have to draw on your intuition and gut instinct — are the reason we need nothing short of AGI for _completely_ self driving vehicles.
I do think, though, trucking is ripe for AI disruption.
It's possible that the richest person on Earth is more concerned with doing good slash achieving his goals vs obtaining more currency/profit, which it would seem would have little to no marginal utility to him.
They are all, in the terminology, presently "default dead" until they figure it out.
I work for Google and I like what Waymo has accomplished (disclaimer: what I work on is nowhere near Waymo). Tesla is making a different bet with different engineering resources. And why would Google give up their secret sauce to Tesla?
It's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I think most people would agree that human beings are better off with the overlapping set of sensors that are available to us compared to the alternative.
There is no other day to day activity where this level of risk is considered acceptable.
More people have been killed by cars than I have.
Whataboutism but puts those numbers in perspective.
Guns… most of those are suicides, and that stat is uniquely American in terms of developed countries.
Opioids… also almost entirely self-inflicted (not willingly, but getting flattened by a bus is different than getting accidentally hooked)
Car stats also don’t count the incredible number of people who have lifelong or major injuries due to cars, which I would imagine is much higher. I feel pretty comfortable saying that a majority of people I know have been injured by cars, something that isn’t true for opioids or guns.
That seemed unbelievable to me, so I had to do some checking. The CDC[0] put 48k suicides in 2021, and attributed 55% to guns. Leaving us with 26.4k suicide gun deaths. While still a large number, there are still a significant portion of GP's 48k gun deaths which were not self inflected.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html
Anybody who says humans are bad drivers is almost certainly underestimating the difficulty of replacing humans by a factor of 1000x.
I mean, you wouldn’t say humans are good at tic-tac-toe, and bad at chess, right? Chess is just a much harder game.
[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Compared to sharing roads going opposite directions at high speeds inches away from each other, it is no contest that humans driving is the much more impressive number.
And even GA pilots are probably in much better physical shape than the general public that drives cars.
That's actually not a very big number. 5000 years of regular driving is about the lifetime driving for 100-150 people. Which means one of them will have a fatal accident within their lifetime.
This was in California's central valley where it can get very foggy making it very hard to see traffic until it was almost in the intersection.
It was a quiet rural area though and by opening the windows on both sides and turning off the radio I could hear traffic quite a bit before I could see it. I'd sit at the stop listening until I'd heard a car or two go by to be sure that it was quiet enough that I could hear them. Once I'd calibrated my senses to that day's current conditions I was able to make the turn.
A better example would probably be hearing emergency sirens before there was any line of sight to the emergency vehicle.
It won't be a retrofit for older cars, which tells me current owners won't get to experience that next generation on FSD which will be possible.
I never bought mine (Ryzen '22 LR3 with earlier gen radar, now disabled, plus USS - still in use fortunately) for the FSD anyway so I don't mind. I won't blame those who might do though! (This is presently all speculation/rumours until officially confirmed).
Quiet vehicles should emit a peace cry, and I should look before I rocket.
Having fake noise just encourages pedestrians to keep looking at their phones and not use their eyes when crossing roads or cycle lanes and they can injure themselves or others by doing that.
Also, there's far too much noise in busy areas as it is, so it seems unhelpful to deliberately add extra noise to the environment.
They turn off over ~18MPH, though. After that, tire noise is much louder. As loud as an ICE car.
So, realistically, you’d hear a Prius if it’s going normal road speeds.
Side note: I wish the sound was more pleasant. When multiple cars are moving in a lot I call it the “choir of the damned”. They’re also louder than ICE cars and that’s kinda lame, we moved backwards WRT noise.
Are you saying the typical EVs you hear are _louder_ than ICE cars where you live?
As to the pleasantness of the noise - yeah, that seems to be a manufacturer's choice, or perhaps even driver choice? And let's hope just like annoying ring-tones of years past that the current selection dies out soon...
ICE cars are pretty quiet where I live. Either that or there is so much ambient noise that I've lost some of my hearing but either way I don't hear much of an engine noise with recent cars.
I don't know the people driving these cars well; perhaps they modded them (seems unlikely, given the neighborhood), or perhaps they're old enough to have escaped new requirements; regardless - they're too quiet here in my sample size of 1 neighborhood in NL.
Some have figured out how to disable it completely (just pulling the noisemaker causes a fault code to trigger) but quieting it down to roughly the volume of an ICE seems more reasonable to me.
Irrespective of the volume it is remarkable why any car designer thought that this was the right _kind_ of noise for the car to emit. Somebody chose that soundtrack, and you kind of have to wonder why...
Just when significantly cutting noise pollution from motor vehicles in urban areas is finally within our grasp we toss it away by forcing them to make stupid and annoying UFO noises on the grounds of nebulous safety concerns.
There were any number of ways of solving this that would have been less annoying and better for peoples' health[0].
For one thing, most people are able to use their eyes and will learn soon enough that EVs don't make much noise at low speeds and will keep an eye out for them. How do I know this? I live in Cambridge, UK, which is brimming with cyclists. They don't make much noise either, but you learn to look out for them (and very quickly too).
And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.
But, no, we've gone for stupid noises instead.
[0] We now, of course, know that noise pollution does in fact cause health issues and, I'd argue, these outweigh the safety argument.
Check out: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=815
What do you have in mind? I can’t think of anything as effective as sound—the blind person needs no special hardware to perceive it, and it can be easily spatially localized.
Noise pollution from ie ambulance, sports car, basically any motorbike, old car, trucks and so on is much much bigger. Where is your outrage for those?
And no, noise pollution from these cars discussed is not causing massive health issues that outweigh people getting maimed and killed by them, thats just your personal preferences (like not owning a car because you are young without a family etc) you would like to push on whole society for whatever personal reasons.
Maybe his personal reason is that he's absolutely capable of getting out of the way of a car, but he doesn't like noise. That's a reasonable preference. If you absolutely can't guarantee that a kid ends up under a car without the noise, fine, but I doubt that's true.
Sure, we dont live on this planet alone, but that seems like it's more justification for not intentionally making our shared space miserable, not less.
I've heard that some EV drivers turn off the sound because it annoys them. They are potentially setting themselves up for a lifetime of remorse.
Before this a Prius or any modern car would be dead silent at a stop because of stop-start technology. And even those small 1.6L don't make that much noise when idling.
Now you hear all these cars making their high-pitched UFO sound. And it is VERY irritating.
Presumably this intersection is at high enough speed on the cross traffic that it's the road noise tzs is listening for, not engine noise.
Is this maliciously specious or am I missing something? I drive using vision plus decades of life experience and all the tacit knowledge, judgement, and reasoning ability that comes from that. We have not reproduced any of that with math, and getting/stalling 90% of the way there with mimicry is not good enough.
If everyone could take some deep breathes and press pause on their emotional response to Elon Musk (and not assume everyone who happens to agree with him has a Musk tattoo) then they would fine plenty of rational arguments from an engineering perspective.
Which is insipid because humans do not use just vision when driving. We use hearing, touch, and proprioception extensively when driving.
Now, all of these things except the last one have some representation through an electronic or electromechanical sensor, but gluing them all together into what it takes to deal effectively with the intersection of vehicle dynamics and environmental dynamics is very hard.
Indeed, but humans also have an incentive to drive well, embodied by local traffic police and local laws, and even before passing their driving test they're made aware of the penalties for not driving well (which, let's remind ourselves, range from "mild ticking off"/"pay $$$" through "forfeit driving licence for a time" all the way to "forfeit liberty for a time")
Where are these incentives for self-driving algorithms?
If your algo breaks the law to a sufficient level, is someone(something?) prevented from driving for a time? Is that really going to be just that one vehicle, or should it be all vehicles with that same algo? If something really bad happens, who is charged; in the worst case, who might end up going to jail?
We all know CEOs tend to believe "this time it's different", that they're special, and that the annoying rulebook is to be viewed as guidance at best. VW/Martin Winterkorn, anyone?
Surely the equivalent is the reward during training?
> If your algo breaks the law to a sufficient level, is someone(something?) prevented from driving for a time? Is that really going to be just that one vehicle, or should it be all vehicles with that same algo? If something really bad happens, who is charged; in the worst case, who might end up going to jail?
Personal opinion:
Algorithm should learn from fleet and should be shared by fleet; therefore all accidents should be treated like aircraft crashes and investigated extremely thoroughly with a goal of eliminating root cause.
If that cause was CEO demanding corners be cut to boost shareholder value then jail them; if it's that the algorithm had, say, never seen a flying shark drone[0] before, and misclassified it as a something it needed to take evasive manoeuvres to avoid and that led to a crash, then perhaps not (except anything I suggest probably should be in their list of things to check for, so even then perhaps it would still be a CEO-at-fault example…)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/RiToEasysports-Control-Inflated-Infla...
Surely the counter-example to when a self-driving vehicle drives straight into a stationary fire truck?[0]
If a human driver did this more than once (and lived to tell the tale!) - yet had no explanation other than "Of course I saw it, but I wasn't sure what it was and didn't realise I needed to avoid hitting it it <shrug>" - wouldn't they lose their driving licence fairly quickly?
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+stationary+fire+truck
You asked for the incentives for AI; the equivalent isn't the same as for humans.
The nature of the AI doesn't include a concept of prison or licensing, so it can't be threatened with it, for the same reason I can't threaten a human driver with Af'nek-leigh D'Och entRah'negh.
I can however 'punish' (air-quotes necessary because it might not feel like anything) an AI by altering the weights and biases of its network — once done, it then thinks differently.
Don't anthropomorphise it, that's a category error.
Also, the field of "how does it even?" is tiny, which is itself a reason to not grant them control of vehicles, but that's a separate issue.
There certainly should be incentives for the humans creating an AI, though.
> Don't anthropomorphise it, that's a category error.
Volkswagen [human!] engineers created the illegal defeat devices in Dieselgate, under the supervision of their [human!] managers. The device is illegal, we punish the humans in charge when laws are broken, not the devices themselves. It should be the same with AI.
If this means software engineering becomes a field where you need mandatory liability insurance to work on AI, is that a bad thing?
In the glorious words of Stelios Haji-Ioannou, "If you think safety is expensive, try [having] an accident"
What is the basis for this claim? Have you seen the kind of data other sensors provide?
Radar gives you exact distance and velocity of a vehicle thats hundreds of meters away, through fog, in the dark.
Cameras can't even give you distance for objects that are too far away
Poor, poor Tesla cameras freak out as soon as the sunshine is too bright or there's snow or rain or ice or mud in the way. You'd think if they're going to rely on vision, every camera mounted on the car would have a way to "squint" in blinding-light conditions, or "wipe" the lens or something when smudges, rain, snow, ice, mud, or bug-splat blocks the view. But then, Tesla is insanely cheap, and all that would require parts, and that would impact margins, and that would impact stock price, and so, this is why we can't have nice things ....
Current self driving systems sometimes fail in perfect weather conditions on correctly marked, empty roads. There's a long road ahead if it's supposed to actually work in the real world.
It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans.
All the sources I'm able to find say there are no cameras in existence that are as good as human vision. Human vision is quite good and adaptive to real world conditions of all sorts.
The reason we invented machines in the first place is because they're significantly better and more reliable than humans.
They go the boring path. Work together with regulators. Prove to them that whatever they are doing is actually save to use. Don’t oversell to their customers.
They go the way of building and retaining trust - with customers and regulation bodies.
Human vision isn't that perfect for driving when it's looking at a mobile phone.
https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/analogwire/posts/ultrasonic-lens...
You could emulate the properties of blinking using piezoelectric transducers.
The proper argument is “humans do driving with ~only vision -> roads are therefore universally designed and built to be driven via by vision -> computers should do driving with only vision”. It is essentially a standards-based argument: since vision is the universal standard for driving, computers must be able to drive using just vision.
So vision is always going to be the core of self-driving. Why not augment with LIDAR anyway?
Well, in situations where vision and LIDAR are both right, you didn’t need LIDAR; in situations where vision is right and LIDAR is wrong, you didn’t need LIDAR and it potentially made you worse off; in situations where vision is wrong and LIDAR is right, you need to spend more on improving your vision; and in situations where both vision and LIDAR are wrong, you need to spend more on improving both, but improving vision is a higher priority. These are all the possible outcomes and none of them make a compelling case for investing in LIDAR.
a vision only approach _may_ be possible at some time, but only with a strong computational model of the human brain and thought process.
also, most people drive poorly— i wouldn’t say vision is the be-all-end-all of autonomous driving. it’s also clear that waymo and cruise have taken a full sensor based approach and are successful, whereas tesla is not.
I broadly agree with your second point, about vision-only presenting big computational challenges. I think you do get some easy wins that bring down the challenge a bit - e.g. you don’t need to model human brains, you just need to model whatever the brain is doing when it’s driving; also the fact that we can teach people to drive without understanding what their brain is doing is a reassurance that we can teach a neural network to drive without understanding what it is doing either, so it frees us from (some) of the modeling of thought processes as well. But it is still a big computational challenge. I heard that Tesla has a server farm with thousands of Nvidia A100s, if true, that could make a dent in the problem for sure.
And yeah, I also wouldn’t say vision is the be-all and end-all when it comes to driving. (It’s a pity that we can’t easily integrate LiDAR, radar, and other sensors into the human brain so we could use them like we do sight and sound in order to drive better.)
My point is more that roads come in all shapes and types and sizes, but one consistent thing about them is that they’re all designed so that humans can use vision to drive on them. Like, you don’t know if future roads/signs/cars will be built in ways that are hard to read with LiDAR, but you can be pretty confident they won’t be built to be hard to see. Road builders, car makers - everyone else involved in the driving industry is designing for vision. It’s implicit, and it’s aimed at human vision, but it’s one of the few universal constraints on driving.
That’s what I mean when I say it’s a standards-based argument, that vision is sort of a “universal interface” for roads. Another “universal interface” for roads might be wheels (with traction), or more specifically tires. You don’t need to have rubber tires, or even wheels at all, to drive on roads - but if you do have tires, you can pretty confident that you can drive on pretty much any road you come across.
Quick disclaimer that this doesn't reflect the views of my employer, nor does any of what I'm saying about self-driving software apply specifically to our system. Rather I am making broad generalizations about robotics systems in general, and about Tesla's system in particular based on their own Autonomy Day presentations.
When you drive on the road as a human, you rely a lot more on intuition and feel than exact measurements. This is exactly the opposite of how a self-driving car works. Modern robotics systems work by detecting every relevant actor in the scene (vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians etc.), measuring their exact size and velocity, predicting their future trajectories, and then making a centimeter level plan of where to move. And they do all of this 10s of times per second. It's this precision that we rely on when we make claims about how AVs are safer drivers than humans. To improve performance in a system like this, you need better more accurate measurements, better predictions and better plans. Every centimeter of accuracy is important.
By contrast, when you drive as a human it really is as simple as "images in, steering angle out". You just eyeball (pun intended) the rest. At no point in time can you look at the car in the lane next to you and tell its exact dimensions or velocity.
Now perhaps with millions of Nvidia A100s we could try to get to a system that's just "images in, steering angle out" but so far that has proven to be a pipe dream. The best research in the area doesn't even begin to approach the performance that we're able to get with our more classical robotics stack described above, and even Tesla isn't trying to end-to-end learn it all.
That isn't to say it's impossible (obviously, humans do it) but I think one could make a strong argument that "images in, steering angle out" is like epsilon close to just solving the problem of AGI, and perhaps even a million A100s wouldn't cut it ;)
The best human drivers do this not at centimeter, but at the millimeter level. Look as downhill (motor)bike racing, Formula 1, WRC, etc..., These drivers can execute millimeter level accuracy maneuveurs that are planned well in advance at over 100km/h.
Basically humans are really really good at guesstimating with great accuracy (but poor reproducibility) and since we don't use basic measurements in the first place, having better measurement accuracy wouldn't really help us be better drivers on average (it does help for certain scenarios like parking though, where knowing the # of inches remaining to an obstacle can be very useful).
But for everyday driving at speed, we wouldn't even be able to process measurements in real time even if someone was providing them to us. AVs are different and that's basically the gist of what I was trying to say. Because they actually do use, rely on, and process measurements in real time, improving their measurement accuracy (ie. switching from camera based approximate depth, to cm level accurate depth from a LiDAR) can have a meaningful impact on the final performance of the system.
> humans do driving with ~only vision -> roads are therefore universally designed and built to be driven via by vision -> computers should do driving with only vision
What is 'should', is it a moral imperative? Is it a social obligation? Who made this argument, a catholic priest?
Where is consideration of this argument from an engineering perspectove - analysis of advantages disadvantages, where consideration of cost benefit? Where is assesment that, for example, 50% of human crashes are due to poor visibility or spatial awareness and comparison of how well computer handles them?
If I posted this vacuous, unsupported argument here, I would be laughed at, and rightly so.
But if Elon announces something, there is always 10% of the population willing to defend it, no matter how dumb it is.
Karpathy is one of the world's top self driving engineers. This isn't a vacuous argument. People are driving with just vision every single day. The part we're missing is the ChatGPT moment on the computational side.
From what I've heard firsthand Autopilot still steadily improves, irrespective of what people say about their favourite sensing modalities...
You can tell apart grass and green carpet with a simple formula. You can coint trees without machine learning. Yoi can detect which plants are whilting, land that is wet from land that is dry. All of that is easy with the right sensors - becauae they have more data than an RGB camera can produce.
I know people that work with mutispectral imagery, they can tell you that pixel N45 has a spesific substance - concrete, steel or wood - jusy from spectra alone. Thye dont need to know what pixels around it are showing, or classify objects.
It's not like Waymo dropped a LiDAR onto the roofs of their vehicles and started driving unsupervised in traffic the next day. Nor Cruise, nor Uber. The sensing is just a small part of the whole system.
* Humans can drive with vision alone
* A sufficiently advanced compute system can drive with cameras alone
* Telsa's FSD computer cannot match human performance without additional sensors
So currently the vision stack is not greatly holding them back.
While our eyes can do that pretty reliable, we are organics and get tired - how many hours one can drive until this becomes almost imposible? I had a situation where I would hallucinate and and start believing something is in the street do I did a full stop - nothing happened, but was quite intense. Imagine the other way around - not stopping and hitting something.
A normal radar + some low level ASIC programming would do that without geting tired. My Audi from 2014 is quite good at that and I actually rely on this feature all the time.
Updates are happening around once a month and the decision making is getting noticeably better.
The full system for humans is “vision + brain” and for self-driving its “sensors + planner”.
The Waymo/Cruise philosophy is that since we don’t know how to make the planner human-brain-level, we should shift as much of the load as possible to the sensors, where we have the ability to use things that humans don’t have, like lidar and radar.
To me, Tesla FSD going vision-only is a bet on the progress of AI planning models. If the planner reaches a human-equivalent level, then human-equivalent sensors are fine. Time will tell if this is a good bet, but so far it’s not.
Reducing that to "vision" doesn't even make superficial sense.
A model which can use predictive behaviour for the objects that the visual part detects seems orders of magnitude better than one that just does visual detection from scratch. Seems like a huge wasted opportunity to have to model the world starting from zero for every frame they receive from the cameras.
Objects that pop-in and out of the field of vision due to occlusion or other reasons seem to trip Teslas (in at least some of the reported incidents), but even like that it's hard to believe that they didn't implement such an obvious improvement.
On top of that, you have theory of mind. For example, you have 4 cars next to you, all of them with opaque windows that do not let you see the driver:
A) a loud sports car with a bunch of modifications, decals and racing related stuff
B) a grandma car with cat related stickers
C) an unmaintained car with collision damage, and loud music coming from it
D) a family station wagon with a baby on board sticker and other family related stuff
Your mind will process what it sees and quickly assign each one of those cars a different personality. A and C will likely be perceived as riskier cars, B and D will be likely perceived as safer cars. You will avoid A and C and remain unconcerned about B and D.
The problem with the self-driving cars right now is that they only perceive the road as bodies that move.
I just imagined myself driving without sound. That seems crazy to me. I need to hear cars, kids playing, etc.
And you're right that we subconsciously assign risk values to each car. A heavily modified BMW with decals? Could be an irresponsible young male adult trying to show off on the road. I should probably be prepared to brake or let him go first.
AI will probably eventually very good at picking up these behavior tendencies. Or at least better than the people who aren't driving all day.
I'd rather have a computer keep track of everybody just the same but with millisecond reaction to all changes. Something that I can't do lacking eyes all around and processing power.
Given what is public now, I'd speculate that perhaps they were working on replacing radar all this time. Then they used vision as an excuse to dump the existing radar early when there was a parts shortage.
I see Musk acting a lot like Jobs in certain ways. They were both very cagey about the future direction of their products. Although Musk didn't exactly backtrack on radar, he wasn't transparent about Tesla's plans either. You don't telegraph your moves to your competitors. Similarly, I'd be very surprised if Tesla wasn't keeping an eye out for lidar crossing a specific cost/function threshold. They're not saying that aloud, though.
Tesla has been working on building a high res radar since 2018 and have yet to officially announce anything. Tesla dropped radar in new vehicles in mid-2021.
That he later may have changed his tune is probably true, as reality does eventually catch up even with someone like him.
They got all the hype and PR for the AI angle without the money pit that comes with a real self driving project.
Even if they eventually get cannibalized by actual self driving cars then they still made billions and billions in the process.
Sounds great in practice but isn’t realistic in the slightest
And that's also why a "self driving" car isn't realistic.
I think the proper term for what we have now should, at most, be something more akin to "Assisted Driving Features" because right now it's far to blurry.
Thats what road are already. They are costly and they are mostly standard through out the world.
https://electrek.co/2019/11/07/tesla-autopilot-handle-constr...
Of course. The real argument is "LIDAR is expensive in comparison and after scamming people for almost a decade, we have to be careful what kind of money we ask for". LIDAR was never considered an overkill by Elon.
That said, Tesla was never in a position to use LiDAR because it has generally been extremely expensive. Solid state lidars are supposedly now hitting low volume testing for 2025 production years. Tesla is a mass manufacturer not a self driving start up, so there was never really an option for them to offer LiDAR without an extremely expensive self driving package.
One thing however that was obviously wrong was Elon’s promises, which were extremely misleading and helped build his fortune thanks to the misunderstanding. (Assuming this inflated stock values)
With solid state LiDAR supposedly becoming available for $500 in the next two years (a promise we have heard since 2016 but one that seems possibly to finally be coming true) we may never end up seeing if Tesla could have ever done it with pure vision - they could go with solid state LiDAR for forward facing driving in the next few years.
That said, over promising is going well for them. Perhaps they will just keep doing that.
Installing the LiDAR unit in the front bumper would require replacing the entire existing front bumpers since there's no handy fake grille or whatever you can pop out and replace. You'll also have to paint the bumpers to match and blend onto surrounding panels since these cars have been in the sun long enough that a fresh-from-the-factory bumper will have an obvious color mismatch. If you don't, you'll have pissed off car owners to deal with and, in all likelihood, another class-action suit.
A roof-mount avoids that, but has its own issues. You'll needs techs to drill a freaking hole in the roof, mount the LiDAR unit, hope that they manage to seal the penetration well enough that water won't leak into the car, and then run cables through the interior. A whole hell of a lot of cars will leak, even if the work is performed to spec, so you'll have extend warranty coverage to deal with it. Plus, you've now got an ugly box on the roof that may or may not match the paint properly, whereas presumably the new cars will at least integrate the unit's lines into the body panels so it's not quite as obvious. The same thing goes sticking it on the hood. That's to say nothing of any hardware replacements and the fiddly bits that'll be necessary for refits.
Tesla of course claims that the HW3 cars will still get FSD at some point, but unless they somehow figure out how to bend light, that blind spot will continue to be an issue on older cars.
The fact that some early HW4 units will ship with the updated camera suite but not the Radar only further adds to my point that some users are going to be left with inferior sensing systems despite having paid the same $10k for FSD as everyone else. The whole "radar will be used to train and improve the vision" argument is just nonsense made up by Elon & Tesla fans. A properly functioning radar camera sensor fusion system will be superior in every way to a camera only solution. And there will be 0 Tesla's that actually achieve "full self driving" (ie. you going to sleep in the back-seat and waking up at your destination) until Tesla adds things like a cleaning system to their existing camera solution for example. The hardware is simply inadequate.
I'm saying that, as we see, HW4 and radar are two distinct hardware configurations: saying that there will be a large sore spot because HW4 cars have radar is objectively false as not all of them do.
The fact that HW4 and radar are separate configurations by name is not important. HW3 is also included in the mix (you can buy FSD on it) and it has totally different camera placement. So radar aside there’s still a difference in the sensor suite.
People who paid $10k and were promised “FSD” and future hardware upgrades have every right to be pissed off about this.
The sensor costs $125 on eBay.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/175646053526?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...
Honda says it’s millimeter wave.
https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/web/docs/AJA15434.P...
Our Odyssey uses a combination of multiple radar sensors and a camera to provide excellent sensing. From what I have read, millimeter wave is best of both worlds between LiDAR and Radar.
https://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDes...
LiDAR doesn’t seem practical.
I'm wondering why there isn't a law firm that wants to make a fortune by starting a class action suit.
Not the strongest of arguments.
“since humans move around on foot, that’s how we should design machines that help us move stuff around”
“Since humans do long-distance communication by shouting, hand or smoke signals, that’s how we should do it in transatlantic communication”
“since birds can fly using wings, that’s how we should do it in machines that fly”
Humans also use their sense of motion from the car sliding, rocking, tilting, jerking, etc.
Then humans integrate all such input, combine that with what they know about how cars work, traffic, people, the road, diagnose what has happened, apply years of prudent judgment, and then decide what to do.
E.g., maybe they have an ice chest with 20 pounds of ice which has melted and now, due to the motion of the car, has tilted, spilled, and is about to get the dog soaked with ice water. Good luck with the self-driving with a good response to such a scenario.
You listen to the road condition.
You sense the road bumping.
You feel the acceleration.
Your eye have better dynamic range.
The main argument after the collision? "I haven't seen them!".
Ultimately the market will only ask two things: Does it work? And, how much does it cost?
No-one cares that "Ah but ours only uses vision".
That said, there is no point making a self driving rig if it’s going to only be as good as the best humans are. For adoption, it must be provably better in any situation imaginable: moving obstacles, weather, dust, dark drunk humans in the night, emergency vehicles, no lanes drawn on the road, read all road signs correctly (say my Yaris gives me mistaken readings where maximum mass is confused with speed, it doesn’t know what “built-up” area means with regard to speed limits, it sometimes reads a sign that belongs to an adjacent road). For it all to work, you need more input than vision. And redundancy. Lots of redundancy.
Opinion: a lot of people in this space thought “no one wants to get in a car with a radar tower on top, can’t we make it just look like a car?”
And decisions proceeded from there.
If they can finally make it work well one day, that comment will be the one looking dumb in the end.
just saying that one should be careful about making this kind of assumptions...
> if given additional senses, wouldn’t humans use them for safer driving?
It's all a question of costs in the end. It would be safer to fly with 10 pilots in one airplane, but the economics make it work for 2-3 at most.
The hard problems in autonomous driving are not related to sensing, but deciding what to do in weird or complex situations.
See this video for an example of a typical problem in recent FSD (and you can see from the screen that it's not related to sensing / detection): https://youtu.be/eY3z1kgX5hY?t=74
But that wouldn't be a problem if Tesla didn't advertise their cars as containing all the necessary hardware for self driving. If Tesla admitted that cameras were insufficient for self-driving, they would open themselves up to legal liability.
I’m fairly certain that people would drive more safely in GTA if their life was literally at stake.
The thing is, Elon has lots of fans.
You’ll need to solve vision anyway. Because you need to know what the object is. Is it a trash can or is it a dog? Will it move or stay?
If you had LiDAR, you’d still need sensor fusion with a camera to answer those questions, introducing more problems.
That’s why Elon says that any company that relies on LiDAR is doomed. LiDAR isn’t the gold standard - it’s the low hanging fruit.
I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast.
Guys like Elon or Geohot have been simply delusional.
I think that being naïvely over optimistic is a good trait for innovation engineering, but we should also manage expectations…
Nothing is done until it’s done, proof is in the pudding.
But all the other cases, that wild element of reality, is so endlessly widely puzzling.
Society won’t accept robots that kill people. You can bring out statistics until you are blue in the face, but a major reason car accidents are tolerated is that a person can be convicted if they break the law. A faceless AI that hides behind insurance won’t cut it.
Enthusiasts of self-driving cars can be hyper-logical about statistics, safety analyses, etc. while simultaneously ignoring all the other areas of political life that are based on emotion rather than rational logic. If we can’t convince huge fractions of society about basic truths - pick whatever truths you are passionate about that half the country disbelieves - why do you think society will accept robot cars that cause accidents (even 1)? It’s not going to happen.
The other example is of course railroads and trains. People literally made laws and diminish freedoms of people to allow giant polluting noisy hazardous carriages do their thing and punish anyone who impeded them harshly.
No reason to think it can't happen third time. We just adapt roads, laws and customs to tell people e.g. "if a purple vehicle on purple road kills you, it is 100% your fault because this law says so". And other nations will have to accept it too because nobody wants to be outcompeted.
I didn't know that statistics for self-driving car is that good (just 2x worse than humans). Last time I've checked, it was an order of magnitude worse. Perhaps, the statistics is for ideal conditions.
Because progress went so quickly from "cars are entirely human operated" to "cars can nearly drive themselves", so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace.
We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now
It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.
So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard.
It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet?
The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported).
Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point?
And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo...
Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).
It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with.
But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.
a false equivalency.
The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
Pretty much all those optimistic estimates were done by highly untrustworthy companies and in highly artificial conditions.
We are making the same mistake now with chatGPT. We think if it progressed so much in the last 3 years, future progress will go at the same speed. But the last 1% is exponentially harder than the previous 99%.
if we have a model that can do (end to end) the role of a lawyer, scientist or software engineer, then I think we have reached AGI.
Chat AI will improve at at least 10x the rate as car AI.
Also, sometimes (often?) you can quickly make a lot of progress using the WRONG methods that are completely useless in the remaining 50% or more of the work.
Then that field hits a dead end and is mothballed until a decade or so later when sometimes dares to restart it from a fresh perspective.
we may very well get another step change soon
or we may never get another one!
An S-curve just looks exponential from the bottom. It's not until you hit the flattening part of it you see where the limit is.
Like electric cars, or landing rockets, or even getting to the moon.
I don't think anyone honestly thought self driving cars would be easy or fast, but they're getting better every single month, and sooner or later they're going to be better than human drivers.
Fully automatic train systems are a proof that it can be done, but lack of imagination among policy makers makes them think the only way forward is with privately owned consumer market cars.
The fact that they’ve figured out how to make income from unfinished self driving software makes them, in my opinion, likely to succeed eventually. For everyone else self driving is a money pit. Tesla can continue working the problem indefinitely until it’s solved.
So if I said yes, what's your response? No, of course.
Not saying everyone thinks it's a scam here, just that your argument it's not doesn't do much with the bias of already paying...
My argument is that since I’m paying month by month I clearly know what I’m buying and have properly evaluated the value proposition. The classic argument that FSD is a scam because consumers don’t understand what they’re buying falls apart when FSD is a no contract subscription service.
Sounds like FSD doesn’t actually FSD.
In other words, you know what you’re buying is not what’s advertised so it isn’t a scam?
I have learned that there is no point trying to tell a Tesla fanboy what the problem is. They will not listen. In the nytimes article, a guy bought another Tesla right after the previous one was totalled because of an FSD error.
The thing I have been telling myself is that fortunately I am not risking my own life for that.
The “totaled car” was a 2015 Model S which would have been running MobilEye software, not FSD. Stirring up hysteria is a classic tactic that news sites use to generate revenue. Always look at the title of the page. When you see something like “New York Time Magazine” there’s a good chance what you’re reading is not actually a reputable NYT article.
When you see something like “New York Time Magazine” there’s a good chance what you’re reading is not actually a reputable NYT article.
I guess you might not be getting scammed if you know it is unfit for any purpose, but at the very least you are being a danger to society for using a explicitly unsafe product that can not be operated safely.
I suppose what you’re saying is true, in the same sense that using any modern computer technology which has software in it’s stack, which hasn’t been formally verified, is fundamentally unsafe.
If an IDE on your laptop malfunctions, you end up with a crash or some malformed data.
If self-driving fails, you end up barreling down the road in a 2 tonne deathbox, likely killing you or someone else.
Not equivalent in the slightest.
By your own argument all adaptive cruise control is unsafe. Maybe you think the manual and warnings given to the consumer qualify "defining any operational domain where it can operate safely", but it doesn't give an exhaustive list of "here's where you can safely operate this", it just says to not use it when it's unsafe to do so - it's always "drive safely and take control when necessary" because the scenarios are literally infinite.
I get enjoyment from my heroin too, so scam is the wrong word.
But a crime is commited in both cases
I use lane following, summoning (which saves me time), and the windshield wipers every day.
Does anyone remember will it wipe? https://youtu.be/0SSYFMtdJ5k
I’m also furious about the hype, and how much of my time it has personally wasted.
I sometimes have to turn off the auto wipe, when there is a lot of glare…
Which is sad because they’re still the best value for money you can get in the EV space. The only reason I haven’t bought one is because I hate touchscreens.
whether Tesla is level 2 or 4 autonomous. I'm very impressed with Tesla's FSD.
edit: Tesla FSD reach the destination first by taking the high way while Waymo go the local route and far longer to reach the same destination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv9HtWUf27s
marques brownlee FSD demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nF0K2nJ7N8
To put it succinctly, the difference in safety between a car manufactured in 1953 vs 2023 is not fully obvious to a driver who has not been in an accident.
Google had a self driving car over 10 years ago, that is at the level of FSD, but their approach is to go straight to L5 for safety.
A Level 4-capable vehicle (a Waymo vehicle) is an incomparably different system than a Level 2-capable vehicle (a vehicle equipped with FSD Beta).
The Waymo vehicle has a design intent such that there is no human driver fallback requirement within their vehicle's Operational Design Domain (ODD).
The Tesla vehicle has a de facto design intent such that the human driver is the fallback at all times - which makes the control relationship between the human driver and the automated system exactly the same as if the Tesla vehicle was equipped with no automation at all.
The risk profiles and failure mode analyses are Night and Day different and, therefore, the validation traits between these two vehicle are Night and Day different.
But, more than that, there are no guarantees that:
- The human driver of the FSD Beta-active vehicle shown in that video did not manipulate any of the vehicle controls out-of-view that clandestinely assisted the vehicle without deactivating the automated system (possible and inherent Human Factors safety issues with that aside); and
- The creators of this comparison video did not select the most visually-performant run out of several attempts.
Naturally, since we are dealing with safety-critical systems here, assumptions of "positive safety" are not compatible with any internal or external analysis.
Lastly, I have yet to see a video involving FSD Beta where indirect and "unseen" systems safety issues were satisfied. Appearances can be deceiving and deadly with safety-critical systems.
Point is, you are assuming a certain legal outcome, and there is no reason to believe it won't go the opposite way
that's why i included Marques Brownlee's demo.
Videos and personal experiences can only reveal safety issues, never positive progress.
Marques (and every other FSD Beta user) is not read into a would-be systems safety lifecycle for this safety-critical systems that Tesla should be maintaining.
Marques (and every other FSD Beta user) is entirely blind to that.
It is a complete Black Box to them.
Therefore, the assessments made are always subjective and are almost entirely based on emotions and appearances (and other hand-wavy, ill-defined aspects such as "interventions" or "disengagements") rather than a complete accounting of all relevant systems safety components.
Systems safety is about exhaustively asking questions and then exhaustively seeking quantifiable answers to those questions against established failure modes and in the context of the system and every other system that interacts with it (including the human driver in the case of a FSD Beta-equipped vehicle as a Level 2-capable vehicle).
That is the whole point of a company maintaining a robust systems safety lifecycle - to convert subjective opinions of system characteristics into quantifiable understanding.
Tesla is not maintaining that.
Throughout the video, there are several places were Marques states "he thinks" or "he believes" or "that looks good" and such comments are also prevalent in the YouTube comments attached to the video.
These are safety-critical systems where an unhandled failure can readily result in an injury or death.
Responsible systems developers need something far more quantifiable than blind opinions of run-of-the-mill consumers.
That FSD Beta-active vehicles do not appear to "run into things as often" on the roadway is not a complete evaluation of the system.
There are also very real indirect and "unseen" safety components that are inherently part of the public roadways that must also be accounted for.
For what it is worth, I touched on some examples of this recently in a Mastodon thread: https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@adamjcook/1101629508444173...
If you think it's a black box to the Tesla drivers, how is it not a black box to the Waymo customers in the back seat of these cars? Or how are you evaluating Tesla vs Waymo if not by how how humans subjectively feel each system is performing?
If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems. And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.
Also, I just realized that the systems safety engineer you responded to has also posted a reply, so you should look to their statement for a more in-depth analysis as they are a expert on the subject.
The general public (as a vehicle occupant) only interacts with a Waymo vehicle as a passenger with no vehicle control responsibilities.
That is in stark contrast from the integral human-machine relationship that exists in a Tesla vehicle.
> If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems.
True.
Waymo's internal processes are a Black Box to me (and anyone external to Waymo) because we are not read into their systems safety lifecycle, whatever it may be.
Hopefully and presumably, Waymo is maintaining a Safety Management System (SMS) with their test operators and other internal teams, as they have claimed in the past.
Of course, since there is little-to-no regulatory oversight of this in the US (at the moment, perhaps)... Waymo's "word" is really the only thing the public has to go by.
That is not acceptable, in my view, in constructing a novel transportation system that ultimately relies on public trust to be economically viable... but that is the regulatory reality right now.
In the case of Tesla, it is definitive that they are not maintaining a SMS, in large part, because Tesla's (untrained) customers utilizing the system cannot be sufficiently read into a lifecycle. There is simply no way to do that without maintaining a highly-controlled, continuous relationship with the test operator.
For example, the "release notes" (sprinkled with some Tweets from Musk) that Tesla issues with some of the FSD Beta updates are simply too puny relative to the complexity of not only the vehicle system, but the larger complexity of the roadway.
> And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.
As I stated elsewhere, these are physical safety-critical systems where the totality of the systems safety components cannot be expressed in software alone.
Remote vehicle telemetry is valuable of course, but as a tool to serve the validation process... not the validation process itself.
Vehicle telemetry cannot be a complete accounting of all of the interacting systems safety components involved here.
For that, like all other safety-critical systems, one needs exhaustive, controlled and physical validation.
The fact that they profit handsomely off this structurally dangerous wrongdoing is just the cherry on top.
And, without robustly maintaining a systems safety lifecycle (which, by necessity, must incorporate a Safety Management System)... no technical progress is quantifiable by anyone, including Tesla.
Tesla effectively throws a system over-the-wall and throws it all on the human driver and on the public.
You do understand that people are concerned about setting these cars free on public roads, right, where they can kill unwilling participants? I don't think the concern here is about your freedom to choke on billionaire boots.
And yet, the average driver kills 0 people. It’s in the far margins where deaths occur - a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
This is in comparison to the arguably singular entity “Tesla Autopilot” which has already killed several.
And we hold them responsible for the humans in their care.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
The fact that Tesla does not put their money where their mouth is says all you need to know.
Wake me up when someone is willing to take on liability. Until then automated driving does not exist.
FSD with a safety driver does not pose a threat to public safety. That’s not coming from me, it’s coming from the NHTSA.
Although, I guess my bigger issue is actually with the government that takes no action about false advertising.
I would have thought that something called Full Self Driving would be capable of fully driving by itself.
Sarcasm aside, that’s how most people use it.
The NHTSA hasn’t regulated it, but that doesn’t mean it’s an endorsement. It just means that they haven’t found anything within their legislative mandate that they can regulate here. US agencies are largely reactive, and I’m not sure I trust them with my life to get this right.
No one who has used the software for more than a minute has any misconceptions about FSD.
But people who have heard the name might. Honestly, it's a ridiculous name. Just "Self-driving" might be arguable. What are they going to call it when it's really fully self driving? "Literally Fully Self Driving Totally Serious"
Elon is a bit of a monster (personal opinion), but regulators have the final say. When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument, but this hasn’t happened and that sends signal.
You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance/appetite benchmark has been set. FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.
As always, nuance. More people will die in the next ~10 minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).
(Again, not a billionaire simp, just a rationalist; booo on Elon, but props to Tesla engineers in the aggregate; personally, I hope he gets blown out the door and JB Straubel takes over as CEO)
This is true.
> When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument.
Well, I suppose that it is pretty hard to dispute this, but it should be recognized that the NHTSA (the theoretical regulator of vehicle and highway safety in the US) is extremely weak and virtually non-existent.
The NHTSA lacks anything close to the skill sets necessary to independently, proactively and robustly scrutinize even rudimentary mechanical issues (which has been confirmed by several USDOT OIG reports over the years).
With opaque, complex automated systems and software... the NHTSA stands no chance.
The NHTSA lacks the internal skill sets to understand any of the comments that I have made elsewhere on this post.
Again, you are not wrong per se, but again, it should be recognized that the NHTSA is concerned primarily with establishing plausible deniability to protect the agency and with headlines rather than protecting the public with solid regulatory processes and oversight.
(Coincidentally enough, yet another USDOT OIG report was buried in a Friday afternoon release: https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/02/nhtsa-fails-to-meet-inte.... I kid you not, every four years or so the USDOT OIG releases another critical report on the NHTSA that focused on issues not rectified in the previous report. It is like Groundhog Day.)
> You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance benchmark has been set.
This is true.
Because the US public does not demand change and because roadway deaths are high, but distributed across time and space... the NHTSA remains weak and overall US transportation policy remains dreadfully poor.
> FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.
Unquantifiable.
There is no way to accurately and independently quantify the downstream safety impact of FSD Beta.
Sure, perhaps the NHTSA believes that (because they must given their structural issues), but we should recognize why such assumptions are flawed.
> More people will die in the next few minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).
There is the possibility for "indirect" incidents caused by FSD Beta where the FSD Beta-active vehicle is never physically impacted.
We cannot assume that those do not exist.
And we also cannot assume that the media is able to pick up on every Tesla vehicle-related incident - even as well-followed as Tesla, the company, is.
In fact, other than the automaker's word, in many cases, safety investigators like those from the NTSB cannot independently and forensically establish specific root causes.
The second is a crime and I believe the first is a misdemeanor. Getting caught in either scenario repeatedly will cause you to lose your license.
So we may share the road with dangerous drivers, but we don't accept it. So it isn't grounds to accept more danger.
Really this line of argument is always wrong. The presence of danger should make you less comfortable accepting additional danger, not more. It's not like they cancel out, they sum. (One might say that mature and accessible self driving technology would take these drivers off the road, but the situation today is immature technology and high end vehicles.)
As a self described rationalist, I think you should take another look at that - to me, it reads like you're saying that because it doesn't feel like we're taking on additional marginal risk in comparison to the risks we've already taken on, we don't need to worry about how we're actually doing so, so I was caught a bit off guard when you said you were a rationalist.
I'm skeptical of any digital technology use case where the analogies/comparisons tend to be:
a) to non-digital things, when there are perfectly decent digital comparisons to be made (e.g., autopilot in the airline industry)
b) to conspicuous non-digital things, here drunk or inattentive humans
c) more or less a $small-human-scale-X improvement on the performance/efficiency/safety of the non-digital thing, often implying a future $unspecified-X improvement that, say, Moore's law would suggest (not saying you're doing the latter here, btw)
Those last two especially. I'm just imagining someone hawking a newfangled realtime audio system, claiming that it outperforms hand-punching a player-piano score. It's a silly example for sure; but on a regular basis on HN I read how Bitcoin is no worse than fiat in terms of global energy use, how crypto scam rates are roughly equivalent to wildcat banks in the old west (and hey, we eventually improved on those, so...), and how many more humans cause car deaths than these intractable systems which are "arguably" better than drunks.
My experience with FSD is it’s a terrible autonomous system and anyone who uses it as such is a fool, and a fool with a car is dangerous no matter what. However the joint probability of my driving awareness and skill and the cars combined is greater than mine alone. I’ve had it suddenly brake when a car I didn’t notice was drifting into my lane and had it not I would have been in an accident. Likewise it made mistakes and I took control.
I personally don’t care if it ever is able to take me from point A to point B without my attention or assistance. I value its ability to navigate with my assistance especially on long trips, reducing my overall fatigue and taking me through confusing sections of urban interstate without errors - when I always make a wrong turn. The fact it’s 360 aware and I’m not and it’s indefatigable and I’m not is valuable.
In the last year it’s become remarkably more capable. I don’t know if they can continue this rate of improvement but if they can it’s about as good as I would expect from todays technology on a consumer car. That’s a decent bar for me. I think it’s also something valuable on the roads - as a driver assistance tool. The folks who turn it on and get in the backseat would do something just as bone headed without FSD. Rather I notice enormous number of Tesla cars on the road not being drive by total idiots, and presumably quite a few using FSD without issue. And, as I assert above, I believe the joint probability of the aware driver with FSD having an accident is lower than either alone.
I don’t care what hyperbole a bipolar nut job spouts, but I do appreciate him setting an unreasonable goal and failing halfway there while the rest of the world seems content with stagnating. Tesla created the EV movement in the mainstream, SpaceX created the space revival we are experiencing.
Fwiw, I think the choking on billionaire boots comment is not a particularly high value contribution.
I do appreciate him setting an unreasonable goal and failing halfway there while the rest of the world seems content with stagnating.
I feel the same way about teenagers, grandmas, and grandpas, and yet here we are.
FSD does not have rights.
> first?
According to your own citation, there are no deaths where FSD Beta has been alleged to be involved in any way.
But even without that, there are no allegations of such FSD beta related fatal or incapacitating incidents, who would say it even if the beta put the human in harm’s way 10, 15 seconds earlier. The black box in the car includes both the dash cam camera and whether auto steer is activated, so any fatal crash would still leave such evidence of Beta being active.
Shouldn't the public be already outraging from the existing deaths? what's the difference... There will not be any change with an FSD death. As there wasn't with the previous deaths. Most people just don't care.
> So a Tesla driving off a cliff
This is a lie. There is no evidence that any Tesla vehicle has ever driven itself off a cliff.
Perhaps you are thinking about media reports from a few months ago where a human drove their vehicle off a cliff? If so, it is concerning that you misremembered and/or misrepresented this news event in this way. This news event was of a human driving a vehicle off a cliff. That vehicle happened to be a Tesla — noteworthy only because experts were saying that the chassis did an astoundingly good job of protecting its occupants.
No use of driving aids was ever alleged.
> Shouldn't the public be already outraging from the existing deaths?
Yes. A million people are killed by vehicles driven by humans every year. A million people dead. Every year. This is an outrage.
As for deaths where use of Tesla Autopilot is indicated or alleged, I find them no more outrageous than deaths involving any manufacturer's brand name for lane centering/adaptive cruise control. These features do not lower the driver's responsibility to keep the vehicle under control. And they do not diminish the accountability of the driver in the event of a collision.
I agree that where we are is balderdash, and dishonest, unclear about itself in extreme & lacking. But I detest this My Paradigm Is Required phrasing. Say what you think please! Browbeating the topic with particular/spefific engineering dogmatisms is unhelpful, unclear: it leans on authority, while also not having assertable claims anyone else could contest. This kind of hollow criticism degrades.
Tesla's own systems from five years ago, when they used a proper sensor suite, worked better than what they ship today.
They did this because they were (and remain) massively behind the market leaders, and the only way to catch up was to start bulk data collection early with a system that wasn't ready.
As to the baseline rate, the baseline rate for police reported accidents in the US is 1 per ~500k miles and fatalitys is 1 per ~80M miles [1]. That is approximately 1 per 30 years of driving and 1 per 5,000 years of driving, respectively using the reported average of ~15,000 miles per year per driver.
As to the availability of FSD data, you can see my other comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36181877
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
That's about 80B test miles per year at about a capital cost of $0.50 per mile.
For a company that, say, spends ~10% on R&D, it would require the company be about a trillion dollars, which only Apple, etc. have reached.
Tesla does some of this, but then releases fast to the public... So far it has had some concrete consequences when they pushed this testing responsibility onto unaware people.
> As FSD is a safety-critical product, the burden of proof is on Tesla to prove in a verifiable way to third partys that it is safe. Absent that, it is assumed to be unsafe. So, no, it is the weakest allegation possible and the default assumption.
And what you are talking about in this comment is quite different. Please don't move the goal post (or actually, sure, safety certification makes much more sense than verifiable safety).
Again, I wouldn't find these objectionable statements in casual conversation, even as someone who participates in the mess that is certification.
"It is up to Tesla to get safety certification (that doesn't exist yet)."
That is obviously nowhere near what you wrote:
> As FSD is a safety-critical product, the burden of proof is on Tesla to prove in a verifiable way to third partys that it is safe. Absent that, it is assumed to be unsafe.
How does that in any way relate to safety certification?
I used extra words because I was expressing the core principle of certification which is to demonstrate to a third party that you achieve some set of agreed upon requirements. I did this because there is no current specific safety certification for autonomous vehicles, so I must appeal to the general principle underlying all safety certifications which is that you must demonstrate "safety" whatever that happens to be and that a product is not assumed "safe" by default.
Manufacturers are all pursuing self-certification in the US because regulators have been unwilling to answer petitions either way or commit to firm guidelines.
https://driving.ca/auto-news/industry/the-tesla-model-y-just...
If you compare the Model Y to the Corolla it outsells it. If you compare the Model Y to every car that is built on a Toyota B chassis (Corolla chassis) it blows Tesla out of the water. The B chassis alone has 10 different models, 9 of which aren’t Corollas. In other words, is a “JPN taxi” model that looks like a Corolla and has the same parts a as a Corolla not a Corolla?
Unfortunately, neither consumers nor the market have punished them for it. So it's inevitable that they will continue, and that other companies will follow.
I think there are two misconceptions in this space:
1) People mostly only talk about US companies and self driving cars in the US. China actually has a lot of self driving cars as well. Mostly following strategies similar to Waymo and with some borrowing from Tesla. And China is nowhere near as burdened by trigger happy lawyers slowing everything down. It's an ideal test ground for self driving from a legal point of view. And they are well funded. And they are running circles around most of the US in terms of car manufacturing. In general, the rest of the world will need to be covered by self driving eventually. Forget Phoenix; that's easy and rather boring. Can self driving cars manage in Italy, Spain, or conquer the German autobahn? I'm not pessimistic. But it won't be next year.
2) Painting this as a black and white game. All or nothing. Waymo is leading the way here by focusing on where it can work and gradually expanding their abilities. They are not even trying to make it work everywhere; just where they need it to work to make money. It's expanding it's area of operation and as it does the area it operates in adapts to self driving cars rather than the other way around. And it undeniably moves people from A to B at this point, seemingly without major incidents. The one thing that makes self driving cars hard is having human drivers around. Easy solution: get them out of the equation. This technology is basically going to be safety statistics and cost driven. As it gets better (i.e. safer and cheaper), it gets easier to optimize roads for self driving and the problem as a whole gets easier to deal with. Meanwhile there are big market opportunities in personal transport, freight, containers, etc. where self driving makes a lot of sense. Those are already happening.
My prediction is that Tesla will do well where companies like Waymo do well in as well and that they will meet in the middle sooner rather than later. And being positioned as a safety feature, all Tesla needs to keep on doing is failing to cause a lot of fatalities and gradually keep on improving. The rest is just raw numbers. As soon as there are millions of cars driving semi autonomously most of the time failing to cause a lot of trouble, confidence increases and it gets harder to argue there is a problem. Eventually, people will let go of their steering wheels. Insurance companies and cost will incentivize them. Based on the numbers.
So if I was a betting man, I'd say that you can expect Cruse, Waymo & others to scale a little bit now, just to show investors that they can but for them to really save the bulk of the scaling (to hit that targeted figure of 1B/yr of revenue) until after they've found a way to get the costs down. That's going to come in the form of more bespoke vehicles that are better vertically integrated with custom hardware and sensing solutions (like the Cruise Origin).
The average (hedge fund owned) media outlet, especially the financial ones, basically read "please remember to hate Elon".
My view is very simple. Lots of people insist that this stuff is dangerous and will kill people. Lots of Tesla FSD capable cars are on the road and are racking up billions of miles. Where are the traffic deaths? Where are the countless crashses? Those supposedly dangerous situations escalating all the time? It's all failing to happen as people insist it ought to be happening. Maybe that's because they are wrong. If anything, it seems Tesla runs circles around the likes of Volvo in terms of car safety by now. They certainly seem to insist so and they claim to have the numbers to prove it. And I'm not hearing a lot of statistics that counter that.
Meanwhile, there are of course lots of traffic deaths. The vast majority of which involve human drivers making fatal mistakes and getting themselves into trouble. Even adjusted for relative miles driven by humans and AI, the numbers aren't good for humans. They are terrible actually. It's not that hard to do better than that. AI vs. drunk, tired, reckless, moronic, etc. human drivers is basically no contest. And there are a lot of those. Roads are dangerous because of that.
So while we can give Tesla props for shipping a very useful feature, it's not reliable enough to be considered "fully self driving". There could easily be fatal consequences for consumers who don't babysit it diligently enough.
Also, the eye tracking update that was rolled out a few months ago is strict - you are either paying attention to the road and never looking at a phone, or FSD is going to shut itself off and suspend your use of it. It easily holds you to a higher standard than the average driver holds themself for being engaged with the road (which is a low bar.)
Without a driver monitoring system, what would have been your life expectancy if you let it drive without you monitoring it?
Full Self Driving can only be fully self driving when it approaches the reliability and safety of human drivers.
But if it’s how reliable and useful this feature is in practical applications, that’s a completely different story, and for 99% of people who don’t actually care about semantics, that’s going to be the important part.
Think about when they're GA. You're going to have all sorts of people, not just the invited few as it is right now(fellow techies and such, who mostly are not going to trash and destroy property).
The public transit is gross most of the time with trash, vandalism, and grimy seats. Do you really think people are going to treat cars well where they're all alone inside (when have cameras stopped some people from being vile?)?
IMO these AI car services should be priced at a premium above Uber/Lyft. I want individual door to door service any time, with a guarantee it will be clean and comfortable. Otherwise, I'm always opting for my own car.
Are Uber and Lyft not also GA? Are their cars also trashed? Seems strange that you picked on public transit as if the "unwashed masses" can't also order an Uber.
The public transit in SF is definitely not vile or trashed. Sometimes there's a bit of litter on the ground. Not grimy seats. I've never seen it the way you describe it and I ride several times a week.
I grew up in a 3rd world country poorer than the poorest person you can find here. Most of my life I was poor until I started making easy money in tech once I got some experience, so everything I know from my US experience has been either inner city public transit or walking. I do know that the more money I got, the cleaner and more comfortable my environment became. I don't blame you for making some ridiculous statement like that, high compensation tends to do that to people especially people who have never faced actual adversity or difficulties so they have to pretend things are OK and rosy out of guilt.
So let's be clear. If you live west of the 101, you're in a good area. Things are definitely fine in Sunset, Richmond, Portola, etc. I spend a lot of time in Mission, Soma, Bayview for work and social activities. It is not clean and nice in these areas. Graffiti, trash, people passed out in the street, etc. Common sights there.
If you're in tech in SF and clearing 300-400k plus, you're not going to deal with this. If you're in these not-so-nice areas you're going to be in a nice apartment with modern security systems paying 3-4k a month or more. You probably have a nice view of the SF skyline or water, and spend time in parks wearing at worst a store brand like Patagonia while snapping pictures of your $4000 dog. You probably use Uber and Lyft, which let's be honest, are mostly used by upper middle class persons and up.
> Are Uber and Lyft not also GA? Are their cars also trashed? Seems strange that you picked on public transit as if the "unwashed masses" can't also order an Uber.
Uber and lyft have a person driving the car. There are obviously instances of people ruining these cars, but in Cruise and Waymo there isn't a driver. It cost me 40 bucks to go from Soma to Sunset one time. These services are for people with disposable income. There are people who can barely afford public transit. They aren't using Uber of Lyft. Be real dude lol. Have you ever taken public transit outside of Pacific Heights or out of necessity?
Anyway, the sad reality is that people destroy property for no reason, and most of the occurrences I've personally experienced of this have been in areas where people are not present and/or entry fee is cheap/free. The desks in my American schooling and university would always be vandalized and ruined.. why etch shit onto the desks it makes it hard to write. People rip out keys from the public library computers. I take the bus sometimes. Why are the seats ripped intentionally and shit scribbled into the window and the hand rails?
Self-driving cars will not have that, so you need to counter it somehow. Cameras and fines are probably sufficient, but OP's point that probably charging people more upfront will reduce this is probably valid, as the type of person who is willing to pay more is also going to be easier to collect fines from.
I've seen some of the cars of drivers who clearly don't clean as often, and they can get pretty gross looking (at least in daylight) pretty quickly.
I think these self driving taxis are going to need really good internal cameras, a vast network of human cleaners large enough that one is always reasonably nearby, higher pricing and a strong fine/fee system to avoid looking nasty for the majority of riders. With maybe a little less cleaning needed at night.
I can't imagine what these cars will look like late on a Saturday night once this is normal.
Then imagine what they look like after a few years of this. They will be as clean as the local pay by the hour motel.
Let's plug in some reasonable guesses and see. 6000 vehicles x 10 trips/day average x $25/trip average x 250 days/year: $375M.
To an analyst that maybe be practically the same as a billion, but not to an accountant. And that's gross revenue. Take off all the car costs as well as the overhead.
(Remember: these vehicles can't cope with the busiest, most profitable locations for taxis.)
This means they would need 20 trips per day on average, or higher pricing on average for each trip.
Why no focus on e.g. a top down federal "system" that would take over the driving e.g. just on the highways/interstates? Seems like that would be orders of magnitude EASIER.
Why not automate cargo ships? There's far less to hit in the ocean and far fewer inputs required.
Why still have human pilots in airplanes when they're largely automated?
Or use GPS to limit the speed of vehicles to the speed limit that's been set? For that matter why allow the sale of vehicles capable of exceeding 85 miles per hour (the highest speed limit anywhere in the country)?
To respond to your tangent: Breathalyzers are not all that reliable, nor is GPS localisation... And a national speed limit would mostly reduce revenue (not to mention the new problems regarding who is liable for maintaining the limit correctly). There is a great history of implementing practical safety requirements, maybe not the first globally, but when it becomes practical to adopt something we generally do.
Maneuvering a ship is but a very small part of all that's needed to maintain a ship operational – engine maintenance, paperwork, dealing with port agents and customs, operating the radio, etc.. Much of that can be automated, I'm sure, but the return on investment is quite poor. Crew salaries are a small part of all operations costs, so you're not saving much by removing them from the equation. (Add to that the fact that large cargo ships can exceed $1B worth of cargo, so I'm not surprised that the economics don't make much sense.)
Well officer, I'm sorry I ran through yellow tape and killed a paramedic responding to the crash scene, but have some perspective. I've now learned not to do that, incidents like this help me improve my driving ability.
On March 18, 2018, a prototype Uber self-driving car slammed into Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bike across a road in Tempe, Arizona. First and foremost, Herzberg’s death was a tragedy for her family.
Anyhow, crossing yellow lines isn't okay for that reason in particular, it's to keep first responders safe. The incidents listed should be just seen as failures which developers need rectify, not as a "learning experience" the public needs perspective on. The learning experiences should have happened in their controlled testing, not on the road.
I will say that generally in life, when you fail, even spectacularly; sure, you can tell yourself it was a learning experience to keep your mind sane. You do have to be careful saying such things to others judging you as if to ward them off because it comes across as cheapening the fault, or even faulting them for judging you (the lacking "perspective" bit). The best you can do is apologize, admit fault, and then assure them you'll do better in the future.
Wouldnt Tesla just just have Auto Pilot simulate what it would do and then compare that with what a human actually did and then learn from that?
In the end, we'll regret the investment in these things. A few reliable, human-assisted tramways in and between towns is all people actually need. It isn't high tech, but it is high value: the ROI for society is huge. The money spaffed on self driving cars is just a waste.
As an example, I can't imagine Munich without public transport. It's great. But 3-6 times per year I do need a car. If my friends or I didn't need to get a license, that would have been nice as well (it costs 2000-3000€ here), it also allows everyone to get driven.
No doubt that's how they'll be marketed though. I just hope segregated cycle lanes become ubiquitous first so driverless cars don't kill me and my kids.
When we have a place for self driving cars you can drive onto and have our car switch to automatic, it frees up a lot of the problems you need to solve. We can control the traffic more like a network then by having nodes at various intervals that conducts the traffic allowed on the route. This removes the need for the car to take on the responsibility of being aware of its surroundings.
The same could be implemented more cheaply for passenger (arial) drones.
I don't know what exactly is going on here, maybe Waymo and Cruise media relations teams are really earning their bonuses this year, but it's pretty gross. Kevin Roose had the guy from Cruise on and they were talking about the effect of self driving cars on gig drivers, and he said he felt like Cruise needed to take an active part in helping those drivers retrain or find other work. All I wanted was a single follow up: "what are you currently working on in that space?" Because the answer would be "lol we're not actually working on it, and if anyone does it it will be the government" (which is also the AI industry's response).
But also these cars are driving in the best of circumstances: nice weather, slow or predictable traffic, reasonable road layouts, etc. Wake me up when a car can drive me through snow on a highway narrowed to a single lane on New Year's Eve after I've been drinking heavily.
My guess here is that industry is hoping we'll start adapting to self-driving cars, not the other way around. I'm not saying that's bad, but it's an entirely different story than "The tech is close to working!" It would be more like "The tech never worked right, we basically made trams, and that was fine, but woof very expensive"
Has anyone here made an
accurate 5 year roadmap?
I think what people will expect is that you can call them and they'll come any time a human-driven Uber would come. By that I mean on a rainy night, or in the winter in a northern city. I really would like to see them operating year-round in someplace like Boston or, better, Pittsburgh (SF-like hills but with snow).
It's quite possible to outdo a human at keeping rolling boxes from hitting each other and the unpredictable human particles buzzing around them. (Mainly because humans suck at paying attention and don't have millisecond response times.)
It's also quite possible to put people on the moon, but budgetary appetites are always the limiting factor.
So self-driving can still die if the difficulty exceeds the money and patience of the people footing the billions. Shareholders are free to say "why are we still paying for this when we were promised success 5 years ago?" and demand the plug be pulled. I hope they don't, but I also hoped NASA would get a higher budget.
Whereas humans are never going to do better than 0.2s and will usually do much worse, especially if they have to turn their head, focus their eyes, and manipulate physical controls.
[0]for example: https://youtu.be/ynEdke5dzIU?t=10
https://www.basvanhooren.com/is-it-possible-to-react-faster-...
Humans are far better at complex things like reacting appropriately to an unanticipated input (someone yelling stop, or honking a horn)
I have for a long time had a gut feeling that practical broadscale self-driving is a $ trillion- or 2 trillion-dollar R&D project. It's still under a trillion so far, I think.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-69...
Marginal efficiency gains? Possibly - impossible to prove - less deaths cause by cars? What else?
Is it worth all this hype, money and brain/manpower? Should we chase other things?
In a potential future with self driving cars i do see massive benefits for women wanting safe rides home. Many still have hard time with being creeped out by drivers often enough.
Why do people always seem to forget that cars also requires huge infrastructure changes, even more so than some other options.
I'd love to bring it somewhere where it'll fail and sue them for damages, I'm sure I'm not alone
Edit: exhibit A, tesla won their case this year because fsd was enabled on city streets, where it is not capable and they tell you so themselves.
Accordingly this is going to significantly increase the amount of cars on the road which will make traffic miserable.
We could make them extra long, and add hyper efficient metal wheels on metal roadways.
For a subset of the elderly or differently abled it will offer a less social alternative to taxis.
That's worth a lot. Some kind of hybrid state where you need to always have your eyes on the road but maybe can take your hands off the wheel? Yeah I agree, I don't really see the point in that case. Or at least it's not something I get excited over.
If autonomous driving can considerably reduce that road death number, I'd say it's a worthwhile endeavour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Biggest benefit is that most people will stop owning cars.
I really dislike cars, I know there are sometimes necessary, I hate car parking spots, but this "hey we can safe parking spots" argument doesn't really work imo.
The reasoning here seems flawed to me. I assume Tesla use periods when the human is driving for training data, so this is no constraint at all.
It's not dead, it's just extremely niche. Try testing in the sticks in country roads in England. Most people from the US who try that for the first time are terrified, and that's not even the worst of it, roads world wide are complex, diverse and require immense adaptability and negotiation. Negotiation of large, well defined city roads is only progress towards that niche not arbitrary self driving ability.
If you solve the 80% of that use case, you still have most of the thing, and that seems close.
I am expecting something like the automatic convoying some of the trucking companies have been experimenting with to be more successful since they avoid the tedium aspects (they're already paying a driver to handle everything), don't drive in terrible conditions or unusual roadways, and since they get heavy utilization of the vehicles there isn't the problem of paying even more for something which already sits idle 95% of the time.
I imagine it is a bit of a pipe dream. When it goes wrong it is going to go horribly wrong, most likely at very high speeds and the liability will all be on the trucking company.
There are also some newly developed areas in the middle of some cities where the roads are pristine, well marked, with generous and consistent lane widths, those look closer to something like Phoenix (except not a giant grid), but that's uncommon, most areas are a patchwork due to the way everything has evolved slowly over time.
There’s a reason that they aren’t doing this where it snows, or in cities that aren’t giant car-first grids.
I've seen in numerous recent videos him mentioning Tesla's Ai team is the #1 real world AI company and no one is even close, and that FSD will be here very soon.
Marketing babble
>and that FSD will be here very soon.
Same story he told the last 5 years.
Literally the only thing most people know about FSD is that it is hard. This is very on brand for Elon:
1. Claim something is super simple and easy
2. Get billion dollar contracts for vaporware
3. Fail to actually achieve anything remotely useful
4. Go silent
see: The Boring Company, Hyperloop, FSD, etc...
> Tesla's Ai team is the #1 real world AI company
Big doubt on that one, I'm sorry, but it's almost certainly false.
I don’t think SpaceX is a failure in general, and Tesla seems to sell a lot of EVs, I feel like 10 years ago their were many comments on HN that both were impossible achievements.
Not really a fan of musk, I bought a BMW i4 instead of a Tesla (although not for dislike of Musk), but the Musk haters seem to have a worse track record on their predictions than the Musk fanboys.
I do take issue with this because I don't really see how a company that essentially leeches off Uncle Sam's bottomless pockets can tell its workers they need to be more "hardcore" or face bankruptcy if Starship doesn't work by EOY 2023
I get the idea that Musk is like Bezos or early Gates, it’s a management style that I wouldn’t like to work under, but it’s a style that can get results for some things. Anyways, engineers can easily vote with their feet.
The fact that any contractor comes close to bankruptcy proves that they are completely unable to continue providing these launches at the prices they agreed. And that's not even factoring in this wild `Mars 2029` delusion.
Elon looking at his company's balance sheet or 1y forecast = hopefully there can't be too many things wrong in there, there is more reason to trust/believe statements regarding this.
Not 4D chess.
IMHO the biggest potential for self-driving cars is in suburbs and exurbs where mass transit is inherently less efficient.
I mean, I'll be happy if massive adoption of driverless cars will materialize the money to regularly maintain the pavement of all roads but I don't believe it.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/06/the-death-of-self-drivi...
> But it’s hard to judge the risk of something that’s never happened.
That isn't even a Black Swan; it's a known unknown.
The main paths in big cities already go pretty close to big venues, and we could set up these paths in such a way that the pickup and dropoff point is at most a few minutes walk away from people's true destinations.
It would serve as a replacement for public transport instead of a way of having your car drive itself (which isn't that big of a help considering the biggest issue with city driving is parking).
The main downsides I can think of being it would requiring walking to your final destination from the bus stop/station (but for public transit prices instead of Uber prices I’m sure that’d be an appealing option to many), and requires new (or at least dedicated) infrastructure which is a harder sell to companies and cities.
Most people seem to prefer driving to being a passenger, particularly the passenger of some broken half-baked tech (the kind of semi-broken tech all consumer computing systems seem to say is OK to bring to market)
Are we at diminishing marginal returns and not getting closer?
Do we need a 'leap' in AI? Or is this just a matter of grinding it out?
There are a handful of highly publicised deaths associated with Tesla drivers that misused adaptive cruise control and lane centring features. Such features are available on most new cars sold today. It is unclear whether the death rate from cruise control misuse is actually higher with Tesla vehicles, or if the apparent difference is from differing levels of media attention.
There's no downside, no-one is going to be put in prison, they'll just pay the fine which will be less than a month of profit.