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Comment by Fernicia | Hacker News Reader

Looks like that intersection could fool a few human drivers too.

Absolutely, but I think what most humans would do is slow down - especially at night - and not go through the intersection at 27 when they were approaching at 30. FSD appears to just make a binary "go/stop" decision and commit fully rather than slowing down when there is decreased confidence as a person would/should.

Definitely poor intersection design though as well. I've seen lights with extensions around the bulb to prevent them from being seen from obtuse angles, I wonder why these lights don't have those? Especially at night it would completely block your vision of the light(s) that don't apply to your road.

If the Tesla's self driving software had to be limited in speed based on it's confidence, it wouldn't be able to driver faster than 15 mph. Tesla's self driving is ENTIRELY based around "Fuck it, I'll probably be fine"

Source: just made it up

Just watched the video. Any driver who cannot correctly tell on an oblique intersection which light is theirs is a driver who should be fined until they can..or have their license taken away. Any programmer can clearly tell why FSD got it wrong (It saw the glow of the other road's green light on the angle) but nonetheless it was wrong and legally wrong.

Whoever is responsible for the intersection should also be fined. Our whole safety culture is based on being as clear as possible with redundancies from the consumer and the provider (i.e., assume the worst, provide the best).

Then the driver of that car should be fined and/or have their licence taken away.

While I agree, I think I need to wait until that package in that car is not called 'Full Self Driving'.

I don't think that what some idiot company names things is an excuse for some idiot driver to risk people's lives.

What about the part about it that says it’s in “beta” and requires the driver to pay full attention at all times?

Yes, the driver was absolutely irresponsible.

But the serious issue with the FSD doesn't become moot because of this.

Could it? There's a lot of signals pointing in different directions but it's pretty hard to miss both the one directly in front or the one right next to the car.

Plus, if you see both red and green lights, your first instinct as a driver (human or not) should be to stop and re-examine more closely, not run through it.

True, but I suspect a human driver would take a moment to assess the situation instead of just continuing on confidently.

If so, why didn't they tap the brake?

I suspect the driver, based on their commentary in the video, was trying to see if this was a one-off fluke or something more consistent (they mention the car already blew through that light once before).

I would hope a driver using FSD or any other system like it would be alert/aware to intervene...but for this video, it looks like they were trying to see how the car would react.

They could have run that same test at like 5-10 mph and accomplished the same thing without possibly causing an accident.

This entirely feels like a manufactured scenario since they simply did not act like a informed driver, and decided to freak out.

Are you stating that they did not have FSD on and simply faked it for the views?

I'm insinuating they they knew they were approaching an intersection that they knew FSD had trouble with, purposefully did not slow down the cruise control to attempt a safe approach, and purposefully did not tap the brakes even when it was obvious the car was not stopping or slowing down in a safe manner, and then reacted on camera insinuating it was entirely surprising to them.

If none of this is true, than they are incredibly shitty drivers that were not paying attention to what was happening and let the car cruise through a red light. The exact same scenario would have occurred with a standard 1990 era cruise control system.

I agree with your first paragraph. They tested the red light issue after experiencing it to make sure it was not a fluke. Their yelling was unnecessary.

Well duh they're shitty drivers with no respect for a public road, they bought Tesla "full self driving" """beta""" and are testing it against unwilling other drivers!

"They're a bad person so this must be fake", or maybe they're a bad person which is exactly why they thought doing something like this is okay

You're saying the driver decided to experiment with this rather than following the law?

...yes? It's pretty clear from the video this was done as a "test." The article mentions the drivers experience working on FSD and they have a YouTube page dedicated to stuff like this linked in the article.

So the test involved letting the car go at 30mph through a live intersection, not taking any emergency steps such as checks notes stepping on the brake when approaching the red light at 25mph, and then cursing about it afterwards and STILL not making any attempts to correct it?

Unfortunately, yeah, seems that way...just like you said "they chose to do nothing" and luckily no one was in/approaching the intersection.

Look I'm all for knowing this information, that something like this can happen. But to be clear, in no way do I condone how it was done. This seems reckless for the sake of clicks.

For the same reason they shouted in fake surprise anger, despite clearly anticipating this would happen.

Not true. This is very obviously a red light for that lane.

There is a green light literally right next to it. I was also initially confused as to which lane either was pointing at. They are not offset angle wise very much.

In general I agree, but yesterday I saw a car blow through a stop sign at an intersection and then honk at the cars going perpendicularly through the intersection (they had no stop signs) :/ people are pretty happy to be confidently wrong.

And that's fine, but if you had a button to sell that exact person's driving to everyone as "full self driving", and you pressed it, I hope you understand most people would consider that a problem.

Amusingly the driver also mistook it for green initially. Indeed a confusing intersection

It’s an extremely common pattern for the lights for one direction of an intersection to be visible from the other (usually at an angle). Very few human drivers would confuse the two. At the very least they would slow down until they were able to confirm rather than driving full speed ahead like this car seemed to do.

not anywhere i've lived in the US

Everyone always gets upset at me when I bring this up. The infamous fatal "autopiloted" Model X crash in the Bay Area happened because the road lanes were painted to drive the car into the narrow side of a jersey barrier. The next day a near fatal accident happened in the exact same spot, likely because Caltrans as an organization has little to no liability and generally doesn't stay on top of freeway conditions.

There is an intersection in Houston that is one of the most dangerous in the USA that kills a dozen people a year due to poor design and planning from TxDOT. There are probably hundreds of intersections like this around the country that will need to be fixed.

If I go paint road lines into a wall painted like a tunnel, are the drivers who hit the tunnel wall responsible, or is it me who painted the road lines?

I drove past the location of the model X crash shortly afterwards.

The white lines of the two adjacent lanes made it look like there was a well-defined lane there, with the barrier right in the center.

Here's a pretty good picture of what it looked like then:

https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/m...

You can see there is no hatching to make it obvious it was a non-drivable area.

I would have expected something like this might have made a difference:

https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png

(that said, why didn't radar help?)

I don't buy any of the excuses, honestly. If the software can be that easily fooled by slightly broken white lines, it's not ready for release. That area of 101 simply isn't that difficult to parse (for humans). If it can't deal with that, how can it driven in places where the roads are truly awful? Lots of places in the USA alone with much worse road conditions than anything CalTrans is responsible for.

Also, there's a huge yellow and black chevron block visible in that picture that any human driver paying attention would have seen and easily avoided. Crosshatching is unnecessary if you're paying the least bit of attention to what's in front of you. What was the software's issue here?

It is absolutely a problem with the Tesla software that it wasn't able to parse that area properly. Doesn't necessarily mean the human driver wasn't at fault.

The crash arrester was missing when the Tesla crashed there, which is also part of the reason it was a fatal accident.

That is not true. It was not missing. Here's a photo showing it was clearly there: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2018/...

I do think that it had already stopped at least one, maybe multiple crashes since it has been last replaced.

The discussion here though is about visibility, and the attenuator would have been quite obvious there.

There are a dozen news articles that say it was missing, and even your picture looks like it's just the mount point, not the crash arresting system itself.

I'm not sure I believe the claims of dozens of news articles that say it was missing, but it doesn't really matter. Here's a link to the ntsb report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

Page 2 (which is actually the 22nd page of the pdf) shows an image of the pre-crash state of the attenuator. It is present, but non-operational due to a previous crash. While that crash affected it's usefulness, it's visibility is only marginally reduced.

Sure, if you take a picture cutting out the context that makes it clear it's not a lane, then maybe it looks like a lane. I drove by that every day for years and never thought there was a lane there... Because it's absolutely obvious from the painted lines diverging from a point that it's not a lane. Now, can we make things even more obvious for distracted drivers and shitty AI, sure, and I'm all for that.

Thing is, a lot of exit lanes have white lines you have to cross, which I've wondered about as a driver. Usually you have to cross a white line to get into the hov lane, like an cloverleaf/onramp usually around a meter.

You aren't serious, are you?

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