Tesla's Autopilot, Full Self-Driving linked to 100s of crashes, deaths

I know people are retorting “non assisted drivers are dangerous too, you know” and that’s true. But:

> In 59 crashes examined by NHTSA, the agency found that Tesla drivers had enough time, “five or more seconds,” prior to crashing into another object in which to react. In 19 of those crashes, the hazard was visible for 10 or more seconds before the collision. Reviewing crash logs and data provided by Tesla, NHTSA found that drivers failed to brake or steer to avoid the hazard in a majority of the crashes analyzed.

If an unassisted driver had reactions like they'd be arrested for reckless driving at minimum.

Tesla’s systems are obviously not safe. I suspect naming them things like “autopilot” and “full self drive” really don’t help perceptions and the systems themselves are clearly not able to get a useful gauge of driver attention. They’re overselling ability and under checking driver compliance.

Tesla gave me, totally out of the blue, a one-month free trial for Full Self-Driving for my Model Y. I have it until the end of April.

My thoughts:

- It feels like a very cool tech demo.

- It feels like a very stupid driver.

- I have to watch the road, because the cabin camera tracks my eyes, and my car will scream at me if I look away for more than a few seconds.

FSD feels absolutely magical to me: I'm in a car! Driving itself! It's making lane changes, putting on blinkers, stopping for pedestrians, dynamically reacting to traffic. Unbelievably cool. Totally feels like the future.

At the same time: I would not trust this thing to drive me to the grocery store down the street without supervision. It's both dangerously cautious and foolhardy. It once stopped for a red light 3 feet past an intersection stop line. It has also spent 30 seconds waiting to make a left turn, with no cross traffic, only to abruptly make the turn right in front of an oncoming car.

My verdict overall: it is nowhere close to replacing a human. It will cause dangerous situations if left to drive without human interferance. *AND YET:* it's a great technology when supervised, it is probably safer to drive FSD + human than just human alone, and it is absolutely & inevitably the future for all driving.

> In 59 crashes examined by NHTSA, the agency found that Tesla drivers had enough time, “five or more seconds,” prior to crashing into another object in which to react. In 19 of those crashes, the hazard was visible for 10 or more seconds before the collision. Reviewing crash logs and data provided by Tesla, NHTSA found that drivers failed to brake or steer to avoid the hazard in a majority of the crashes analyzed.

This tells you everything about autonomous driving. It is either working 100% all the time, or it does not work at all. Problem here is that if human brain is not in the driving loop, it will just disconnect. You can have open eyes and watching road, but you will just stop processing what is going on around you.

Just open a YouTube video of some boring long dashcam drive on highway and see how long you will manage to keep alerted and able to intervene by just watching. 5 minutes? 10 minutes?

All of these articles on Autopilot and FSD are hit pieces.

Every single other LKAS/ADAS out there today doesn't disengage at traffic signals, road obstacles or vulnerable road users, like cyclists or pedestrians, yet is more than happy to disengage at the slighest bit of road curvature, usually with minimal or no warning.

Said differently, these systems will happily run over people if they detect lanes and AEB (if equipped!) fails or veer you straight into a median/ditch when the road curves.

While they are more insistent about asking for driver input, these systems can easily be defeated. FSD will lock drivers out of using the system if the in-cabin camera detects phone use (which it is very good at doing according to @greentheonly's videos on the feature that were uploaded earlier last year). This code was merged into production Autopilot code last year, so non-FSD users are given the same treatment.

Meanwhile, you can buy a current model year Volvo XC90 or Porsche Taycan or whatever whose ADASes don't have cameras at all and are more than happy to let you keep thirsting on X or Insta as long as you tap the wheel every so often.

I'm not saying that these reports are wrong. FSD has a lot of work to do. Mine was within an inch of hitting a car in a parking lot the other day (I intervened). I'm saying that if we're going to roast Autopilot/FSD for not being attentive enough, let's also make sure that every other automaker's take on autonomy gets the same treatment.

Importantly, FSD has had very aggressive cabin monitoring for years, while autopilot gained this feature from a recall sometime last year.

This article notes that the NHTSA will launch a new investigation to see if the new driver monitoring features are sufficient.

Part of the problem with investigations that take many years to complete is that the conclusion is meaningless due to over-the-air updates, as this issue was solved at least last year.

A lot of cars have similar features now. I’m apathetic towards Tesla but am curious how this compares to other manufacturers.

As a Tesla owner, for me Autopilot refers to highway / freeway driver assistance and Full Self Driving ( Supervised ) is for local streets. The only thing FSD provided previously was auto lane changing.

You know what’s linked to millions of deaths…. Human drivers lol

@dang, these articles come up every few days and turn into flame wars, can you flag?

What is the point of this article?

Tens of thousands of people die from cars every year. Yet we are not attacking Ford or Toyota.

Pretty sure not using Full Self-Driving is linked to thousands of crashes and deaths too

For some context, my brother won't even use FSD because the driver monitoring system nags him SO much. It literally tracks his eyes and if he's not paying attention for a few seconds (even glancing out the window, looking down at his phone at all), it has a loud annoying alert.

Feels hard to say their being complacent with their messaging. You still need to pay attention all the time.

The question is how that compares to human drivers.

Imagine everyone would have been using autopilot in the past and steering wheels would have been introduced just recently. We would see horrifying reports about humans causing deaths by speeding, driving drunk, falling asleep etc. It would seem as if letting humans drive is an insane idea.

But would that really mean we have to return to autopilot immediately?

We don't know until we have some numbers. Like miles driven per fatal crash. For humans and for software.

Wikipedia says:

    For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

In Teslas latest investor update, they state that FSD has driven about 1.2 billion miles:

https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...

But I think that does not include autopilot?

So I'm not sure if there is enough public data for a comparison.