As someone who works in the autonomous driving space, it is absolutely mind boggling to me how much blind faith Tesla fans put into FSD. When you compare it to any true L4 system it’s not even close and very unlikely to get close any time soon.
I rode in a Model Y last year and just could not believe the mistakes it was making. Disappearing and reappearing cars; the semi in front of us was apparently straddling the lane line for a few miles; somehow an early-2000s Dodge Ram was classified as a small sedan – the list goes on, and this was only a ~10-minute ride. I would be absolutely mortified if a product of mine ended up in front of a customer in that state.
That said, would I ever trust my life to a system like that? No.
But the display itself serves basically no purpose besides looking cool, and it just fails pretty badly at that. Also yeah, it made me maybe a little more nervous about being on the road with a Tesla than it should’ve…
If anything, if you've got self-driving on in a Tesla, you're not being nervous enough. :)
It has limited accuracy due to the poor processing power of the Intel Atom chips they used to put in the infotainment screen - they didn't even have anti-aliasing on the car models due to the poor processing power, they needed to make sure the rest of the infotainment experience remained snappy. (note this is not the same chip as what the FSD computer uses).
The "park assist" visuals[0] are closer to what the system actually knows about its surroundings from the cameras, but they're only enabled at low speeds for now (likely still due to processing power of the infotainment screen).
That a car can disappear and reappear in the autopilot's knowledge of the world is really weird to me. I would have thought that each car would be tagged as an object that has physical attributes such as "can't teleport".
To see what FSD is actually seeing see the new parking system that shows the voxels, the backend is like that but they cant afford the budget on the CPU to render that at high speed for visualization
After years of rhetoric, most people still believe that cars will be fully autonomous because they just don't understand the limitations.
It's also quite amazing to me we, the so called smart ones, ever believed level 5 was happening but those were the good old days, huh.
At the same time I feel like people are ignoring how well self-driving works RIGHT NOW, the rate of accidents is still less than with human drivers. So I'm still pretty optimistic.
I have slightly a different opinion. I think you can easily guesstimate how difficult something will be by listing the "new" stuff. But I think you can't easily estimate how easy something will be because you can't list everything, so anything you miss could easily delay.
Said another way: We should have known it would take at least a decade, but should never have said it will take at most two decades. (as technologists).
And yeah - agree - lvl 3 is pretty good, feature-wise.
Toyota was put under a microscope after the Prius crashes....do you think anything has changed since? Do you think the software running the cars has gotten any better?
VW cheated on emissions, they payed civil and criminal fines and a couple engineers got charged. No one from managment....Since then, it has come out that almost everyone was cheating. Cummins was most recently caught and it is now a civil fine(also being called record breaking in the news, at 1.6B where VW was 1.5B civil but 4.3B total...)
We normalize the behavior and decrease the penalties.
You don't debug humans, you train them.
Yes, the training is imperfect and doesn't always stick. Which is why we have yet another imperfect system of checking and certifying the training has been done before release. And then we have yet another system of bug catchers that patrol around making sure that the training is being adhered to. And then a system to revoke certification if we detect to many issues with the driver.
I would like to trust a self driving car, however it has also been programed by the very same humans that we don't want to trust. And I doubt that the review is nearly as robust as it should be.
Also the code is not open so I can't review it even if I wanted to because "trade secrets" which might just translate to "we are way to embarrassed to let others see this code because of how shitty it is".
Not being easy to upgrade might be a feature in this case; Right now I don't have to deal with a pushed update that makes all 2024 model Chevy SUV platform encounter a race condition that adversely affects lane keeping after being passed on the left side while in a turn on my morning commute.
Of course, it won't work on regular streets - just freeways, but maybe that's for the best, considering how inconsistent FSD is.
So... I guess I repeat the question: where are you seeing "Tesla fans" using FSD unsupervised?
I mean the linked article is almost unique in that it seems to have happened. And why? Well, it's buried but it turns out the driver was on autopilot because he was absolutely hammered:
> Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit
One of the biggest Tesla influencers using FSD without his hands on the wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFW4e0Pkz_Y
This is explicitly disallowed by FSD terms and conditions. He does this all the time.
In particular, do you genuinely feel that driving an FSD car with your hands in your lap constitutes the kind of inattention we were actually talking about (driving with a .26 BAC!).
I mean, you don't freak out if you see someone using cruise control without their foot hovering over the brake, do you? Objectively and largely inarguably, braking control latency is more important to safety than steering latency.
And the reason for having that requirement, which is crux of the problem, is that the system is incomplete and incapable of safe operation.
Couple of days ago I passed a Tesla going 75mph down the highway and the driver was rummaging around in the back seat. And I don't mean just the lean over and reach for something on the seat, no he was unbuckled and halfway in the back row of the car looking for something.
It was only a few moments, and I am sure that some system or other in the Tesla eventually noticed and warned the driver to take over, but at those speeds, it only takes a few seconds of inattention to end up in disaster. And personally, I've never, ever seen drivers of cars without some sort of self-driving capability do that.
Some of "you" actually are literally napping in the car.