Hacker News Reader

Comment by tahoeskibum | Hacker News Reader

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

View on HN

I paid for a month of FSD over the summer to try it out, and it was an extremely stressful experience.

It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour.

Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.

So do your regular drives just not include any tree lined roads, or have they done some mapping to fix phantom braking in your area?

And that’s a serious question, because the stress of trying to anticipate the next phantom brake event completely defeats the purpose in my mind. I’d much rather just drive myself.

I never experience phantom braking in FSD Beta on HW4.

Phantom braking has been almost entirely eliminated in the past year. Plenty of others have noted the same experience.

Used to happen to me once every ~100 miles. This year, it only happened once the whole year, and the drop was maybe ~10mph.

Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving)

Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.

Tesla doesn't have self driving though. Its level 2. Mercedes has level 3 cars on the road where the driver can legally watch a movie or read a book. Level matters but it dictates what the driver can legally do. Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving, Tesla makes the driver 100% liable. There's a huge difference.

> Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving

That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...

Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does).

Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.

Anecdotes are not data. “Exceedingly few safety interventions” doesn’t matter when the number is non-zero. That number is exactly zero for driverless vehicles. So their interventions are not the same as Tesla’s interventions.

If Cruise had a fallback driver all the time, it would “operate everywhere” too. That’s not really saying much. The entire problem is about how to remove the driver, which Tesla is nowhere close to in any geographic area. A dead giveaway is how they’re reluctant to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel.

Do you have a source of this data? Is Tesla releasing all their interventions. Cruise interventions are all submitted to the state of California as part of their self driving certification.

It revealed that a human operator engages with the car in some way every 4-5 miles, and the (ex) CEO explained that this metric was stupid because human operators were always fully assigned.

His suggested metric is cars/operator, which was ~20 IIRC.

For Tesla, for the near future, that number is 1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com