Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there is a lot of variation in interpretation here. I'm farther along the spectrum still: I'm on FSD essentially 100% of the time in highway environments now because I absolutely trust the car's attentiveness and precision more than my own.

Think back on how many times you've started a lane change and aborted because there was a car there, how many times you've looked down to navigate and hit the rumble strip, how many times you've had to rely on ABS to avoid hitting the car you didn't notice stopping in front of you, etc... Not once in almost three years and 40k miles in my Model Y has it done something like this. That's not to say it's never going to, but 100%, for sure, it's better than I am.

View on HN

I don't want to criticize your driving but these are not common occurences for me (ie. the answer to most is 'never'), and I would be quite concerned if they were. Most are solved by maintaining awareness around you (including checking blind spots) and follow distance ahead of you.

This is BS. It takes a couple seconds to check a blindspot. Same with most other things you look at, navigation, radio, whatever. The rest of traffic doesn’t wait around while you are focused on that one thing.

I think his point was that the time to check the lane over is before you initiate a lane change, not after. About the only reason to initiate a lane change without pre-checking where you're going is if there's an emergency (like the incident we're discussing) and then it's questionable whether it's better to do the lane change anyway...

Let's just say I've been astoundingly impressed at the quality of drivers on this forum. Come on, everyone stomps on their brakes for unexpected stuff, or has to jump back into the lane when it wasn't as clear as you thought[1]. You just code it, like almost all drivers do, as "someone else's fault", so it doesn't get filed away in your brain as something automation can fix. But it is, and I'm telling you straight up that it does.

[1] Seriously, you see this happen around you hourly (or frankly more often) in urban traffic. You really think none of those drivers count?

I think the answer for all this is one, and it's because a tire from the person ahead of me popped and he started swerving left, into my lane.

And I'm a bad driver (or an extremely careful/stressed one if you want to be charitable). All this should almost never happen.

Opinion: most of the replies to this comment are missing the bigger picture: FSD is trustworthy enough for highway WITH supervision.

I also use FSD on highways, and often on streets too. I find it’s very good when you adjust expectations. You still need to watch and be aware; but it’s absolutely less draining than driving yourself.

Excluding turns, I almost never interrupt FSD.

Turns, it’s not confident enough to go. Hoping 12 helps but I expect a few more years to fully solve. Even without turns it’s 100% worth it - I’m more attentive over the span of the drive with the car handling basics.

Jesus Christ.

If _any_ of those things happen to you regularly, please do something about changing that before you kill someone.

There are two kinds of drivers: drivers who know they're fallible, and fallible drivers who don't. Maybe you're an outlier who doesn't make these mistakes, and if so I applaud your skill. But most likely you're just like the rest of us, and have the added handicap of self-censoring your mistakes as "someone else's fault". Data filtering is a hell of a drug, as it were.

I’ve had ABS activate like twice in my entire life. Agree with the person you’re responding to: if ABS activates regularly when you’re driving then you may not be a safe driver.

I think for this person FSD might actually be an improvement.

Your inappropriate mockery notwithstanding, that was exactly my point. I'm happy you agree.

Yes, I do agree. The hope is that full-self-driving systems will help people who should really not be on the road, negligent drivers, the elderly, those with impaired capacity from drugs and alcohol, etc.

ABS regularly engages if you drive anywhere icey.

It's not a skill issue if the ground friction is basically 0.

There's only one kind of bad driver: one who's convinced all their mistakes are normal reasonable mistakes that everyone makes occasionally.

I’m someone that checks my side mirror when I make a turn just to collect data on whether my tire touches the line.

So I agree with OP. If you consider mistakes like “not checking your blind spot and aborting a lane change” as a part of normal driving, I would have to say that you are not a good driver.

You don’t get to a point where you become proud of your work without keeping track of your mistakes and improving on them.

Well said. I try to be 100% attentive (spoiler: am not perfect) and rather than losing interest in “boring” driving situations I play a game of trying to guess what other drivers will do, and being very conscious of whether I am right.

It’s mostly a way to maintain alertness, but it’s also helped discover patterns. Like, on city streets, if someone pulls out in front of you unreasonably and makes you get on the brakes, odds are good they will are only going a short distance and will turn, likely necessitating braking.

But yeah, just throwing up hands and declaring that everyone probably makes the mistake is no way to improve, at anything.

Those things you listed are not "oopsie daisy" mistakes everyone makes, those are situations that arise from negligent driving.

I'm not a _good_ driver - the rumble strip one will happen to me about once a year - but I haven't had an "ABS prevented a crash" in well over a decade.

Agreed. I've been driving for 30 years and I have never hit a rumble strip I didn't expect to, or had ABS activate. That is not normal!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com