US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
reuters.com
reuters.com
Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel and your foot ready for the brake. When it goes off the rails, it usually does so in surprising ways with little warning and little time to correct. And since it's so good much of the time, you can get lulled into complacence.
I never really understand the comments from people who think it's the greatest thing ever and makes their drive less stressful. Does the opposite for me. Entertaining but exhausting to supervise.
I still find it shockingly bad, especially in the way it reacts, or doesn’t, to the way things change around the car (think a car on the left in front of you who switches on indicators to merge in front of you) or the way it makes the most random lane changing decisions and changes it’s mind in the middle of that maneuver.
Those don’t count as disengagements, but they’re jarring and drivers around you will rightfully question your behavior.
And that’s all over just a few miles of driving in an easy environment if interstate or highway.
I totally agree that it’s an impressive party trick, but it has no business being on the road.
My experience with Waymo in SF couldn’t have been more different.
This happened to me during my first month of trialing FSD last year and was a big contributing factor for me not subscribing. I did NOT appreciate the mess the vehicle made in this type of situation. If I saw another driver doing the same, I'd seriously question if they were intoxicated.
I have said it before, I will say it again. It seems that this software does not posses permanence, neither object nor decision.
That car is signaling an intention to merge into your lane once it is safe for them to do so. What does the Tesla do (or not do) in this case that's bad?
I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.
I spent over a decade working on production computer vision products. You think you can do this, and for some percentage of failures you can. The thing is, there will ALWAYS be some percentage of failure cases where you really can't perceive anything different from a success case.
If you want to trust your life to that, fine, but I certainly wouldn't.
Good enough that the average user will stop paying attention, but not actually good enough to be left alone.
And when the machine goes to do something lethally dumb, you have 5 seconds to notice and intervene.
I'm thinking of how every SaaS product I ever have to use regularly breaks my workflow to make 'improvements'.
*vocabulary use is for a broad stroke explanation.
2016 folks... Even with today's FSD which is several orders of magnitude better than the one in the video, you would still probably have a serious accident within a week (and I'm being generous here) if you didn't seat in the driver's seat.
How Trevor Milton got sentenced for fraud and the people responsible for this were not is a mystery to me.
I like the idea of FSD, but I think we should have a serious talk about how the safety implications of making this more broadly available and also compatibility with making a mesh network so FSD vehicles can communicate. I’m not well versed in the tech but I feel like it would be safer if you have like say have more cars on the road that can communicate and making decisions together than separate cars existing in a vacuum having to make a decision.
- It failed with a cryptic system error while driving
- It started making a left turn far too early that would have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually intervene.
- In my opinion, the default setting accelerates way too aggressively. I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver and it is too aggressive for my taste.
- It tried to make way too many right turns on red when it wasn't safe to. It would creep into the road, almost into the path of oncoming vehicles.
- It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto the highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system should have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first place.
- It would switch lanes to go faster on the highway, but then missed an exit on at least one occasion because it couldn't make it back into the right lane in time. Stupid.
After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith that this is a reasonable system. Hell, even autopilot does dumb shit on a regular basis. I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year.
There’s a simple answer to this. As soon as it’s good enough for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if Tesla doesn’t trust it, why should I?
Less capable driver assistance type systems might help the driver out (e.g. adaptive cruise control), but leave no doubt that the human is still driving. Tesla though goes far enough that it takes over driving from the human but it isn't reliable enough that the human can stop paying attention and be ready to take over at a moment's notice. This seems like the worst of all possible worlds since you are both disengaged by having to maintain alertness.
Autopilots in airplanes are much the same way, pilots can't just turn it on and take a nap. But the difference is that nothing an autopilot is going to do will instantly crash the plane, while Tesla screwing up will require split second reactions from the driver to correct for.
I feel like the real answer to your question is that having reasonable confidence in self-driving cars beyond "driver assistance" type features will ultimately require a car that will literally get from A to B reliably even if you're taking a nap. Anything close to that but not quite there is in my mind almost worse than something more basic.
This is what bugs me about ordinary autopilot. Autopilot doesn't switch lanes, but I like to slow down or speed up as needed to allow merging cars to enter my lane. Autopilot never does that, and I've had some close calls with irate mergers who expected me to work with them. And I don't think they're wrong.
Just means that when I'm cruising in the right lane with autopilot I have to take over if a car tries to merge.
That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly, the rate of improvement in the past two months has been much faster than before.
Yesterday I spent an hour in the car over three drives and did not have to turn the steering wheel at all except for parking. That never happened on 12.3. And I don't even have 12.6 yet, this is still 12.5; others report that 12.6 is a noticeable improvement over 12.5. And version 13 is scheduled for release in the next two weeks, and the FSD team has actually hit their last few release milestones.
People are right that it is still not ready yet, but if they think it will stay that way forever they are about to be very surprised. At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good within a year and in two or three I could see it actually reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.
When I did the trial on my Tesla, I also noted these kinds of things and felt like I had to take control.
But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter.
When I feel as safe as I do sitting in the back of a Waymo.
I'm curious, what is the alternative that you are considering? I've been delaying an upgrade to electric for some time. And now, a car manufacturer that is contributing to the making of another Jan 6th, 2021 is not an option, in my opinion.
This is puzzling. It’s as if it was said without apology. How about not endangering others on the road with manual driving before trying out self driving?
We all know that some humans are sometimes terrible drivers!
We also know what that looks like: Driving too fast or slow relative to surroundings. Quickly turning every once in a while to stay in their lane. Aggressively weaving through traffic. Going through an intersection without spending the time to actually look for pedestrians. The list goes on..
Bad human driving can be seen. Bad automated driving is invisible. Do you think the people who were about to be hit by a Tesla even realized that was the case? I sincerely doubt it.
I’ve been pretty skeptical of FSD and didn’t use the last version much. Today I used the latest test version, enabled yesterday, and rode around SF, to and from GGP, and it did really well.
Waymo well? Almost. But whereas I haven’t ridden Waymo on the highway yet, FSD got me from Hunters Point to the east bay with no disruptions.
The biggest improvement I noticed was its optimizations on highway progress.. it’ll change lanes, nicely, when the lane you’re in is slower than the surrounding lanes. And when you’re in the fast/passing lane it’ll return to the next closest lane.
Definitely better than the last release.
This is probably the worst way to evaluate self-driving for society though, right?
I have no illusions about Tesla's ability to deliver an unsupervised self-driving car any time soon. However, as far as I understand, their autosteer system, in spite of all its flaws, is still the best out there.
Do you have any reason to believe that there actually is something better?
I've been on the receiving end of this with the offender being a Tesla so many times that I figured it must be FSD.
This is a idiosyncrasy of the US (maybe other places too?) and I wonder if it's easier to do self driving at junctions, in countries without this rule.
May I ask how this initial trust was established?
Despite it being called "Full Self-Driving."
Tesla should be sued out of existence.
When it was turned on according to the dashboard UI, things were even worse. It'd disengage less than every ten miles. However, there wasn't an alarm when it disengaged, just a tiny gray blinking icon on the dash. A second or so after the blinking, it'd beep once and then pull crap like attempt a sharp left on an exit ramp that curved to the right.
I can't imagine this model kills fewer people per mile than Tesla FSD.
I think there should be a recall, but it should hit pretty much all manufacturers shipping stuff in this space.
Motorway driving sure, there it's closer to fancy cruise control. But around town, no thank you. I regularly drive through some really crappily designed bits of road, like unlabelled approaches to multi-lane roundabouts where the lane you need to be in for a particular exit sorta just depends on what the people in front and to the side of you happen to have chosen. If it's difficult as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to work it out.
The roads here are also in a terrible state, and the lines on them even moreso. There's one particular patch of road where the lane keep assist in my car regularly tries to steer me into the central reservation, because repair work has left what looks a bit like lane markings diagonally across the lane.
There will be a large number of non-participating vehicles on the road for at least another 50 years. (The average age of a car in the US is a little over 12 years and rising. I doubt we'll see a comms-based standard emerge and be required equipment on new cars for at least another 20 years.)
I've been kind of amazed how much younger people take some newer technologies for granted, the ability of humans to adapt to changes is marvelous.
You could certainly never rely on them alone.
Most likely, every self-driving car company will send drivers down every road in the country, recording everything they see. Then they'll have human labellers figure out any junctions where the road markings are ambiguous.
They've had sat nav maps covering every road for decades, and the likes of Google Street View, so to have a detailed map of every junction is totally possible.
It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.
If it's "fully self driving" Tesla should be liable for when its vehicles kill people. If it's not fully self driving and Tesla keeps using that name in all its marketing, regardless of any fine print, then Tesla should be liable for people acting as though their cars could FULLY self drive and be sued accordingly.
You don't get to lie just because you're allegedly safer than a human.
The price of insurance is baked into the price of a car. If the car is as safe as I am, I pay the same price in the end. If it's safer, I pay less.
From my perspective:
1) I would *much* rather have Honda kill someone than myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on myself would be horrible. In the city I live in, I dread ageing; as my reflexes get slower, I'm more and more likely to kill someone.
2) As a pedestrian, most of the risk seems to come from outliers -- people who drive hyper-aggressively. Replacing all cars with a median driver would make me much safer (and traffic, much more predictable).
If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa. The market works everything else out.
But my stress levels go way down, whether in a car, on a bike, or on foot.
Except that we know that it doesn't work like that. Train drivers are ridden with extreme guilt every time "their" train runs over someone, even though they know that logically there was absolutely nothing they could have done to prevent it. Don't see why it would be any different here.
>>If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa
In what way? In the EU the minimum covered amount for any car insurance is 5 million euro, it has had no impact on the safety of cars. And of course the recent increase in payouts(due to the general increase in labour and parts cost) has led to a dramatic increase in insurance premiums which in turn has lead to a drastic increase in the number of people driving without insurance. So now that needs increased policing and enforcement, which we pay for through taxes. So no, market doesn't "work everything out".
But it's almost certainly going to be more traumatic and more guilt-inducing if you are driving.
If I only had two choices, I would much rather my car kill someone than I kill someone with my car. I'm gonna feel bad about it either way, but one is much worse than the other.
It's not binary. Someone dying -- even with no involvement -- can be traumatic. I've been in a position where I could have taken actions to prevent someone from being harmed. Rationally not my fault, but in retrospect, I can describe the exact set of steps needed to prevent it. I feel guilty about it, even though I know rationally it's not my fault (there's no way I could have known ahead of time).
However, it's a manageable guilt. I don't think it would be if I knew rationally that it was my fault.
> So no, market doesn't "work everything out".
Whether or not a market works things out depends on issues like transparency and information. Parties will offload costs wherever possible. In the model you gave, there is no direct cost to a car maker making less safe cars or vice-versa. It assumes the car buyer will even look at insurance premiums, and a whole chain of events beyond that.
That's different if it's the same party making cars, paying money, and doing so at scale.
If Tesla pays for everyone damaged in any accident a Tesla car has, then Tesla has a very, very strong incentive to make safe cars to whatever optimum is set by the damages. Scales are big enough -- millions of cars and billions of dollars -- where Tesla can afford to hire actuaries and a team of analysts to make sure they're at the optimum.
As an individual car buyer, I have no chance of doing that.
Ergo, in one case, the market will work it out. In the other, it won't.
What's an acceptable number/financial cost is also just an indirect approximated way of implementing a more direct/scientific regulation. Not everything needs to be reduced to money.
Perhaps one approach would be to declare that automated systems are responsible for determining the position/speed of everything around them using regular sensors, but may elect to take hints from anonymous "notice me" marks or beacons.
Both names are ridiculous, for different reasons. Nothing called a “beta” should be tested on public roads without a trained employee supervising it (i.e. being paid to pay attention). And of course it was not “full”, it always required supervision.
And “Full Self Driving (supervised)” is an absurd oxymoron. Given the deaths and crashes that we’ve already seen, I’m skeptical of the entire concept of a system that works 98% of the time, but also needs to be closely supervised for the 2% of the time when it tries to kill you or others (with no alerts).
It’s an abdication of duty that NHTSA has let this continue for so long, they’ve picked up the pace recently and I wouldn’t be surprised if they come down hard on Tesla (unless Trump wins, in which case Elon will be put in charge of NHTSA, the SEC, and FAA)
No, that's not how it works. The driver and the driver's insurer are on the hook when something bad happens. The owner is not, except when the owner is also the one driving, or if the owner has been negligent with maintenance, and the crash was caused by mechanical failure related to that negligence.
If someone else is driving my car and I'm a passenger, and they hurt someone with it, the driver is liable, not me. If that "someone else" is a piece of software, and that piece of software has been licensed/certified/whatever to drive a car, why should I be liable for its failures? That piece of software needs to be insured, certainly. It doesn't matter if I'm required to insure it, or if the manufacturer is required to insure it.
Tesla FSD doesn't fit into this scenario because it's not the driver. You are still the driver when you engage FSD, because despite its name, FSD is not capable of filling that role.
This is why you are required to have insurance for the cars you own. You may from time to time be driving cars you do not own, and the owners of those cars are required to have insurance for those cars, not you.
Imagine if self-driving is 10x safer on freeways, but on the other hand is 3x more likely to run over your dog in the driveway.
Or it's 5x safer on city streets overall, but actually 2x worse in rain and ice.
We're fundamentally wired for loss aversion. So I'd say it's less about what the total improvement rate is, and more about whether it has categorizable scenarios where it's still worse than a human.
But it's not. It requires constant supervision, and drivers sometimes have to take control (without the system disengaging on its own) in order to correct it from doing something unsafe.
If we had stats for what the casualty rate would be if every driver using it never took control back unless the car signaled it was going to disengage, I suspect that casualty rate would be much worse than the median human driver. But we don't have those stats, so we shouldn't trust it until we do.
This is why Waymo is safe and tolerated and Tesla FSD is not. Waymo test drivers record every time they have to take over control of the car for safety reasons. That was a metric they had to track and improve, or it would have been impossible to offer people rides without someone in the driver's seat.
The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root cause is found and eliminated.
>> It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.
I really don't like this argument, because we could already prevent literally all automotive deaths tomorrow through existing technology and legislation and yet we are choosing not to do this for economic and social reasons.
I think we should start allowing autonomous driving when the "driver" is at least as safe as the median driver when the software is unsupervised. (Teslas may or may not be that safe when supervised, but they absolutely are not when unsupervised.)
But once we get to that point, we should absolutely ratchet those standards so automobile safety over time becomes just as safe as airline safety. Safer, if possible.
> It's stupid to hold automotive autopilots to the same standard as a plane's autopilot when a third of fatalities in cars are caused by the pilots being drunk.
That's a weird argument, because both pilots and drivers get thrown in jail if they fly/drive drunk. The standard is the same.
If autopilot is 10x safer then preventing its use would lead to more preventable deaths and injuries than allowing it.
I agree that it should be regulated and incidents thoroughly investigated, however letting perfect be the enemy of good leads to stagnation and lack of practical improvement and greater injury to the population as a whole.
And yet whenever there is a problem with any plane autopilot it's preemptively disabled fleet wide and pilots have to fly manually even though we absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt know that it's less safe.
If an automated system makes a wrong decision and it contributes to harm/death then it cannot be allowed on public roads full stop, no matter how many lives it saves otherwise.
Autopilot didn't prevent slamming into a mountain? Not a problem as long as it wasn't designed to.
Crashed on landing? No problem, the manual says not to operate it below 500 feet.
Runaway pitch trim? The manual says you must constantly be monitoring the autopilot and disengage it when it's not operating as expected and to pull the autopilot and pitch trim circuit breakers. Clearly insufficient operator training is to blame.
just because we do something dumb in one scenario isn't a very persuasive reason to do the same in another.
> then it cannot be allowed on public roads full stop, no matter how many lives it saves otherwise.
ambulances sometimes get into accidents - we should ban all ambulances, no matter how many lives they save otherwise.
If people like you were in charge of anything, we'd still be hitting rocks for fire in caves.
Do you decide to keep using the machine, or do you order it turned off until that defect can be fixed? Why yes or why not? Why does the same argument apply/not apply in the discussion about self driving cars?
(And in case you haven't heard about it - the Therac radiotherapy machine fault was a real thing, it's being used as a cautionary tell for software development but I sometimes wonder if it should be used in philosophy classes too)
But they do not listen to ATC. They do not know where other planes are. They do not keep themselves away from other planes. Or the ground. Or a flock of birds. They do not handle emergencies. They make only the most basic control-loop decisions about the control surface and power (if even autothrottle equipped, otherwise that's still the meatbag's job) changes needed to follow the magenta line drawn by the pilot given a very small set of input data (position, airspeed, current control positions, etc).
The next nearest airplane is typically at least 3 miles laterally and/or 500' vertically away, because the errors allowed with all these components are measured in hundreds of feet.
None of this is even remotely comparable to a car using a dozen cameras (or lidar) to make real-time decisions to drive itself around imperfect public streets full of erratic drivers and other pedestrians a few feet away.
What it is a lot like is what Tesla actually sells (despite the marketing name). Yes it's "flying" the plane, but you're still responsible for making sure it's doing the right thing, the right way, and not and not going to hit anything or kill anybody.
There is one exception - Garmin Safe Return. That's strictly an emergency system. If it activates, the plane is squawking emergency to ATC and and demanding that airspace and a runway be cleared for it.[1] This has been available since 2019 and does not seem to have yet been activated in an emergency.
Airliners don't have this, but they have a 2nd pilot. A real-world activation needs a single-pilot operation where they're incapacitated, in one of the maybe few hundred nice-but-not-too-nice private planes it's equipped in, and a passenger is there to push it.
But this is all still largely using the current magenta line AP system, and that's how it's verifiable and certifiable. There's still no cameras or vision or AI deciding things, there are a few new bits of relatively simple standalone steps combined to get a good result.
- Pick a new magenta line to an airport (like pressing NRST Enter Enter if you have filtering set to only suitable fields)
- Pick a vertical path that intersects with the runway (Load a straight-in visual approach from the database)
- Ensure that line doesn't hit anything in the terrain/obstacle database. (Terrain warning system has all this info, not sure how it changes the plan if there is a conflict. This is probably the hardest part, with an actual decision to make).
- Look up the tower frequency in DB and broadcast messages. As you said it's telling and not asking/listening.
- Other humans know to get out of the way because this IS what's going to happen. This is normal, an emergency aircraft gets whatever it wants.
- Standard AP and autothrottle flies the newly prescribed path.
- The radio altimeter lets it know when to flare.
- Wheel weight sensors let it know to apply the brakes.
- The airport helps people out and tows the plane away, because it doesn't know how to taxi.
There's also "auto glide" on the more accessible G3x suite for planes that aren't necessarily $3m+. That will do most of the same stuff and get you almost, but not all the way, to the ground in front of a runway automatically.
I think it will also activate if the pilot is unconscious, for solo flights. It has something like a driver alertness detection system that will alarm if the pilot does nothing for too long. The pilot can reset the alarm, but if they do nothing, the auto return system takes over and lands the plane someplace.
Yes they do. It's called TCAS.
> Or the ground.
Yes they do. It's called Auto-GCAS.
They are warning systems that humans respond to. For a TCAS RA the first thing you're doing is disengaging the autopilot.
If you tell the autopilot to fly straight into the path of a mountain, it will happily comply and kill you while the ground proximity warnings blare.
Humans make the decisions in planes. Autopilots are a useful but very basic tool, much more akin to cruise control in a 1998 Civic than a self-driving Tesla/Waymo/erc.
Aircraft designer here, this is not true. We typically certify to <1 catastrophic failure per 1e9 flight hours. Not zero.
> ”If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root cause is found and eliminated.”
This would literally cost millions of needless deaths in a situation where AI drivers had 1/10th the accident injury rate of human drivers.
It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving.
> Accidents caused by human drivers
Are there any other types of drivers?
> are one of the largest causes of injury and death
More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on this. Impaired people cannot drive well. Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better.
> technology that could save lives
There is absolutely zero evidence this is true. Everyone is basing this off of a total misunderstanding of the source of fatalities and a willful misapprehension of the technology.
That raises the question - how many impaired driver-miles are being baked into the collision statistics for "median human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the drunk driver population, after all.
Once you dig into the data you see that almost every crash, at this point in history, is really a mini-story detailing the confluence of several factors that turned a basic accident into something fatal.
Also, and I only saw this once, but if you literally have a heart attack behind the wheel, you are technically a roadway fatality. The driver was 99. He just died while sitting in slow moving traffic.
Which brings me to my final point which is the rear seats in automobiles are less safe than the front seats. This is true for almost every vehicle on the road. You see _a lot_ of accidents where two 40 to 50 year old passengers are up front and two 70 to 80 year old passengers are in back. The ones up front survive. One or both passengers in the back typically die.
Waymo says yes, there are.
Even if we optimistically assume no "gotchas" in the statistics [0], distilling performance down to a casualty/injury/accident-rate can still be dangerously reductive, when the have a different distribution of failure-modes which do/don't mesh with our other systems and defenses.
A quick thought experiment to prove the point: Imagine a system which compared to human drivers had only half the rate of accidents... But many of those are because it unpredictably decides to jump the sidewalk curb and kill a targeted pedestrian.
The raw numbers are encouraging, but it represents a risk profile that clashes horribly with our other systems of road design, car design, and what incidents humans are expecting and capable of preventing or recovering-from.
[0] Ex: Automation is only being used on certain subsets of all travel which are the "easier" miles or circumstances than the whole gamut a human would handle.
How often does that happen? We have no idea. Tesla can certainly tell when a driver intervenes, but they can't count every occurrence as safety-related, because a driver might take control for all sorts of reasons.
This is why we can make stronger statements about the safety of Waymo. Their software was only tested by people trained and paid to test it, who were also recording every time they had to intervene because of safety, even if there was no crash. That's a metric they could track and improve.
Were the Teslas driving under all weather conditions at any location like humans do or is it just cherry picked from the easy travelling conditions?
But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold.
(The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised -- would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to be supervised to be safer than the median human driver, assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver is going to be equally good at supervising it.)
The question is whether you want to outlaw automatic driving just because the system is, say, "only" 50% safer than us.
It’s a net positive, saving lives right now.
Tesla markets FSD like it’s a silver bullet, and the name is truly misleading. The fine print says you need attention and all that. But again, people read “Full Self Driving” and all the marketing copy and think the system is assuming responsibility for the outcomes. Then a crash happens, Tesla throws the driver under the bus, and everyone gets a bit more skeptical of the system. Plus, doing that to a person rubs people the wrong way, and is in some respects a barrier to sales.
Which leads to the other point: People are tallying up all the accidents and treating the system like a person, and wondering why this dangerous driver is still on the road. Most accidents with dead pedestrian start with someone doing something stupid, which is when they assume all responsibility, legally speaking. Drunk, speeding, etc. Normal drivers in poor conditions slow down and drive carefully. People see this accident, and treat FSD like a serial drunk driver. It’s to the point that I know people that openly say they treat teslas on roads like they’re erratic drivers just for existing.
Until Elon figures out how to fix his perception problem, the calls for investigations and to keep his robotaxis is off the road will only grow.
Eventually, manual driving should come with a lot more scrutiny. Because once it becomes a choice rather than an economic necessity, other people on the road will want to be sure that you are not needlessly endangering them. So, stricter requirements for getting a drivers license with more training and fitness/health requirements. This too will be driven by insurers. They'll want to make sure you are fit to drive.
And of course when manual driving people get into trouble, taking away their driving license is always a possibility. The main argument against doing that right now is that a lot of people depend economically on being able to drive. But if that argument goes away, there's no reason to not be a lot stricter for e.g. driving under influence, or routinely breaking laws for speeding and other traffic violations. Think higher fines and driving license suspensions.
It's pretty simple: as good as it can be given available technologies and techniques, without sacrificing safety for cost or style.
With AVs, function and safety should obviate concerns of style, cost, and marketing. If that doesn't work with your business model, well tough luck.
Airplanes are far safer than cars yet we subject their manufacturers to rigorous standards, or seemingly did until recently, as the 737 max saga has revealed. Even still the rigor is very high compared to road vehicles.
And AVs do have to be way better than people at driving because they are machines that have no sense of human judgement, though they operate in a human physical context.
Machines run by corporations are less accountable than human drivers, not at the least because of the wealth and legal armies of those corporations who may have interests other than making the safest possible AV.
Indeed, like this: the more cars sold that claim fully autonomous capability, and the more affordable they get, the higher the standards should be compared to their AV predecessors, even if they have long eclipsed human driver's safety record.
If this is unpalatable, then let's assign 100% liability with steep monetary penalties to the AV manufacturer for any crash that happens under autonomous driving mode.
The biggest gap in these studies: I have yet to see a comparison with human drivers that filters out DUIs, reckless speeding, or mechanical failures. Without doing this it is simply not a fair comparison, because:
1) Self-driving cars won't end drunk driving unless it's made mandatory by outlawing manual driving or ignition is tied to a breathalyzer. Many people will continue to make the dumb decision to drive themselves home because they are drunk and driving is fun. This needs regulation, not technology. And DUIs need to be filtered from the crash statistics when comparing with Waymo.
2) A self-driving car which speeds and runs red lights might well be more dangerous than a similar human, but the data says nothing about this since Waymo is currently on their best behavior. Yet Tesla's own behavior and customers prove that there is demand for reckless self-driving cars, and manufacturers will meet the demand unless the law steps in. Imagine a Waymo competitor that promises Uber-level ETAs for people in a hurry. Technology could in theory solve this but in practice the market could make things worse for several decades until the next research breakthrough. Human accidents coming from distraction are a fair comparison to Waymo, but speeding or aggressiveness should be filtered out. The difficulty of doing so is one of the many reasons I am so skeptical of these stats.
3) Mechanical failures are a hornets' nest of ML edge cases that might work in the lab but fail miserably on the road. Currently it's not a big deal because the cars are shiny and new. Eventually we'll have self-driving clunkers owned by drivers who don't want to pay for the maintenance.
And that's not even mentioning that Waymos are not self-driving, they rely on close remote oversight to guide AI through the many billions of common-sense problems that computets will not able to solve for at least the next decade, probably much longer. True self-driving cars will continue to make inexplicably stupid decisions: these machines are still much dumber than lizards. Stories like "the Tesla slammed into an overturned tractor trailer because the AI wasn't trained on overturned trucks" are a huge problem and society will not let Tesla try to launder it away with statistics.
Self-driving cars might end up saving lives. But would they save more lives than adding mandatory breathalyzers and GPS-based speed limits? And if market competition overtakes business ethics, would they cost more lives than they save? The stats say very little about this.
Even intentional juking aside, you can't really compare the two.
Waymo cars drive completely autonomously, without a supervising driver in the car. If it does something unsafe, there's no one there to correct it, and it may get into a crash, in the same way a human driver doing that same unsafe thing might.
With Tesla FSD, we have no idea how good it really is. We know that a human is supervising it, and despite all the reports we see of people doing super irresponsible things while "driving" a Tesla (like taking a nap), I imagine most Tesla FSD users are actually attentively supervising for the most part. If all FSD users stopped supervising and started taking naps, I suspect the crash rate and fatality rate would start looking like the rate for the worst drivers on the road... or even worse than that.
So it's not that they're juking their stats (although they may be), it's that they don't actually have all the stats that matter. Waymo has and had those stats, because their trained human test drivers were reporting when the car did something unsafe and they had to take over. Tesla FSD users don't report when they have to do that. The data is just not there.
In some parts of the world. Perhaps some countries should look deeper into why and why self-driving cars might not be the No. 1 answer to reduce traffic accidents.
Probably closer to the latter. The "skin in the game" (physically) argument makes me more willing to accept drunk drivers than greedy manufacturers when it comes to making mistakes or being negligent.
You cannot put a waymo in a new city before that. With Tesla, what you get is universal.
(Not sure if this is true for the production system or the one they're still working on.)
Tesla FSD is just everywhere, without any accountability or trained testing on all the roads people use them on. We have no idea how often Tesla FSD users have to take control from FSD due to a safety issue.
Waymo is objectively safer, and their entire approach is objectively safer, and is actually measurable, whereas Tesla FSD's safety cannot actually be accurately measured.
It won't operate everywhere, but it will gradually expand to cover large areas and it will keep expanding till it's near ubiquitous.
I'm dubious that the Tesla approach will actually ever work.
Are you sure? Right now FSD is active with no one actually knowing its casualty rate, and the for the most part the only people upset about it are terminally online people on twitter or luddites on HN.
Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.
The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving systems to be better than humans? Secondly, humans don't just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.
If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay. I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it got prosecutor's discretion.
When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun, polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.
The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.
https://apnews.com/article/car-crash-tesla-france-fire-be8ec...
In a panic people go on muscle memory, which is push the useless button. They don't remember to pull the unmarked unobtrusive handle that they may not even know exists.
If it was up to me, sure have your electronic release, but make the manual release a big handle that looks like the ejection handle on a jet (yellow with black stripes, can't miss it).
* Or even better, have the standard door handle mechanically connected to the latch through a spring loaded solenoid that disengages the mechanism. Thus when used under normal conditions it does the thing electronically but the moment power fails the door handle connects to the manual release.
The driver I had just overtaken, although he wasn't very close anymore slowed right down to get away from me and I didn't blame him.
That manoeuvre in another car likely would have put it on two wheels.
They say FSD crashes less often than a human per mile driven, but I can only use FSD on roads like motorways, so I don't think it's a fair comparison.
I don't trust FSD, I still use it occasionally but never in less than ideal conditions. Typically when doing something like changing the music on a motorway.
It probably is safer than just me driving alone, when it's in good conditions on a straight road with light traffic with an alert driver.
Fundamentally driving consists of a set of fairly clear cut rules with a ridiculous amount of "it depends" cases.
American FSD is a completely different beast, usable on every road and street, so your anecdote is actually not relevant to the thread
"Two vehicles collided on the freeway, blocking the left lane. A Toyota 4Runner stopped, and two people got out to help with traffic control. A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one of the people who exited from it. "
edit: Parent article was changed... I was referring to the title of the NPR article.
What's misleading? The full quote:
"A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one of the people who exited from it. A 71-year-old woman from Mesa, Arizona, was pronounced dead at the scene."
If you exit a vehicle, and are on foot, you are a pedestrian.
I wouldn't expect FSD's object recognition system to treat a human who has just exited a car differently than a human walking across a crosswalk. A human on foot is a human on foot.
However, from the sound of it, the object recognition system didn't even see the 4Runner, much less a person, so perhaps there's a more fundamental problem with it?
Perhaps this is something that lidar or radar, if the car had them, would have helped the OR system to see.
Which seems like a reasonable description of the type of failure involved in the final few seconds before impact.
The Model 3 had every opportunity in the world to brake and it didn’t, we were probably only going 25mph. I know this is about FSD here, but that moment 100% made me realize Tesla has awful obstacle avoidance.
I just happen to be looking forward and it was a very plain and clear T-Bone avoidance, and at no point did the car handle or trigger anything.
Thankfully everyone was ok, but the front lip got pretty beat up from driving up the curb. Of course the driver at fault that caused the whole incident drove off.
Obstacle avoidance and automatic braking can easily be switched on or off by the driver.
And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on the road, and then Tesla adds a new fancy feature to their software and rolls out an update. How are we to be confident that it's safe?
I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates to your car like vscode does.
Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback comes back, they start sending it out wider.
Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that. Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case, yes they should be held accountable.
These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things, there is an actual process to this.
OTA updates and auto updates in general is just a thing that should not be in vehicles. The ecu:s should have to be air gaped to the internet to be considered road worthy.
Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
China and Russia do it too. It's not an excuse, but definitely not just the US.
Any Legislative body can do so. There's no reason to limit this strictly to the federal government. States and municipalities should have a say in this as well. The _citizens_ are the only entity that _decide_ if beta technology can be used or not.
> comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities.
This presupposes the government is naturally capable of performing an adequate job at this task or that the automakers won't sue the government to interfere with the testing regime and efficacy of it's standards.
> aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
According to Wikipedia Euro NCAP is a _voluntary_ organization and describes the situation thusly "legislation sets a minimum compulsory standard whilst Euro NCAP is concerned with best possible current practice." Which effectively highlights the above problems perfectly.
Asbestos products are a good example of this. A more recent one is Teflon made with PFOAs or engineered stone like Caesarstone.
for example, I recently hit a deer. The dashcam shows that I had less than 100 feet from when the deer became visible due to terrain to impact while driving at 60 mph. Keeping in mind that stopping a car in 100 feet at 60 mph is impossible. Most vehicles need more than triple that without accounting for human reaction time.
Here is the public database of all ADAS crashes: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
Drive according to the conditions, folks.
As I understand it, the contentious issue is the fact that unlike most others, their attempt works mostly from visual feedback.
In low visibility situations, their FSD has limited feedback and is essentially driving blind.
It appears that Musk may be seeking a political solution to this technical problem.
FSD works. It drives itself fine 99.99% of the time. It is better than most human drivers. I don’t know how you keep claiming it doesn’t or doesn’t exist.
Both cars are running 12.5 -- and I agree that it's dramatically improved over 12.3.
I really enjoy driving. I've got a #vanlife Sprinter that I'll do 14 hour roadtrips in with my kids. For me, the Tesla's self-driving capability is a "nice to have" -- it sometimes drives like a 16 year old who just got their license (especially around braking. Somehow it's really hard to nail the "soft brake at a stop sign" which seems like it should be be easy. I find that passengers in the car are most uncomfortable when the car brakes like this -- and I'm the most embarrassed because they all look at me like I completely forgot how to do a smooth stop at a stop sign).
Other times, the Tesla's self-driving is magical and nearly flawless -- especially on long highway road trips, like up to Tahoe. Even someone like me who loves doing road trips really appreciates the ability to relax and not have to be driving.
But here's one observation I've had that I don't see quite sufficiently represented in the comments:
The other person in my family with the 2021 Model Y does not like to drive like I do, and they really appreciate that the Tesla is a better driver than they feel themselves to be. And as a passenger in their car, I also really appreciate that when the Tesla is driving, I generally feel much more comfortable in the car. Not always, but often.
There's so much variance in us as humans around driving skills and enjoyment. It's easy to lump us together and say "the car isn't as good as the human." And I know there's conflicting data from Tesla and NHTSA about whether in aggregate, Teslas are safer than human drivers or not.
But what I definitely know from my experience is that the Tesla is already a better driver than many humans are -- especially those that don't enjoy driving. And as @modeless points out, the rate of improvement is now vastly accelerating.
> Even someone like me who loves doing road trips really appreciates the ability to relax and not have to be driving.
Pardon the nitpick (and please excuse me if I'm interpreting your comment wrong here) but if someone is using whatever maximum capability self driving functionality is available, they are in fact still driving and should not be 'relaxed' as if they're a passenger.
I would posit that your observation about your relative and the variance in driving skills is not commonly discussed because there's no self driving cars that can actually replace a driver yet, and an unsafe driver relying on 'self driving' software is still an unsafe driver who should not drive.
I realise that there's many understandable reasons people can't just give up their cars and carry on like normal. Helping people to stay mobile, connected, and independent is important, but an unsafe driver is, well, unsafe. It kinda terrifies me that people might be encouraging the elderly people (for example) in their lives to get teslas to keep them driving when they aren't capable of driving safely any more because it's still unsafe.
Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable places to invest.
GM ignition switch deaths 124
https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ig...
I’d expect something big and red with a warning triangle or something, but it’s a tiny white message in the center of the screen.
Some cars that have cruise control but an analog gauge cluster that can’t display WARNING ERRORs even hide stuff like “you still have to drive the car” in a manual you have to read yet nobody cares about that.
Honestly driving a car should require some sort of license for a bare minimum of competence.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
This report does not include fatalities, which seems to be the key point in question. Unless the above report has some bias or is false, Teslas in autopilot appear 10 times safer than the US average.
Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
And otherwise, if the stats say it is safer, why is there any debate at all?
IMO, the challenge for NHTSA is that they can get tremendous detail from Tesla but not from other makes. This will make it very difficult for them to get a solid baseline for collisions due to glare in non-FSD equipped vehicles.
- It is safe to assume that the vast majority of autopilot miles are on highways (although Tesla don't release this information).
- By far the safest roads per mile driven are highways.
- Autopilot will engage least during the most dangerous conditions (heavy rain, snow, fog, nighttime).
Welcome to Tesla.
The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to FSD mode: the conditions, weather, road, location, traffic all have to meet a certain quality threshold before the system will be enabled (or not disable itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear spring day to Pittsburgh December nights.
There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers, all conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all traffic.
It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are not that stupid, so it's willfully misleading.
> This report does not include fatalities
It also doesn't consider any incident where there was not airbag deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially reasonable until you consider:
- first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision exceeds threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety systems consider duration of impact, speeds, G-forces, amount of intrusion, angle of collision, and a multitude of other factors before deciding what, if any, systems to fire (seatbelt tensioners, airbags, etc.) So hit something at 30mph with the right variables? Tesla: "this is not an accident".
- Tesla also does not consider "incident was so catastrophic that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an accident, because "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella could also include egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", as also not an accident and also "not counted".
> Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
They do not.
They also refuse to give the public much of any data beyond these carefully curated numbers. Hell, NHTSA/NTSB also mostly have to drag heavily redacted data kicking and screaming out of Tesla's hands.
Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
> Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
It is very generous that you would selflessly sacrifice your own life so that others might one day enjoy Elon’s dream of robot taxis without steering wheels
Why on earth would you continue to use it? If it does succeed someday that's on you
Also, if the car does something crazy, how much time do you have to react? I can imagine in some situations you might have too little time to prevent the accident the car is creating.
Is that your fault or the car's?
I would bet that since it's your car, and you're using a knowingly unproven technology, it would be your fault?
Long story short, my argument is this: it doesn’t matter if you reduce serious crashes from 100PPM to 50PPM if 25PPM of those are new crash sources, speaking from a psychological and sociological perspective. Everyone should know that driving drunk, driving distracted, driving in bad weather, and in rural areas at dawn or dusk is dangerous, and takes appropriate precautions. But what do you do if your car might crash because someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was reflecting off another car in an unusual way? Could you really load up your kids and take your hands off the wheel knowing that at any moment you might hit an unexpected edge condition?
Self driving cars are (presumably!) hard enough to trust already, since you’re giving away so much control. There’s a reason planes have to be way more than “better, statistically speaking” — we expect them to be nearly flawless, safety-wise.
This is because "inattentive driving" is _rarely_ the cause of fatalities on the road. The winner there is, and probably always will be, Alcohol.
All they compare is "On the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions".
There's a reason Tesla doesn't release the raw data.
Making these arguments from the standpoint of an engineer is counterproductive.
Per Reuters [1] "The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles. The preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety."
Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
NHTSA is reviewing the ability of FSD’s engineering controls to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions."
Tesla has, of course, rather two-facedly called its FSD as SAE Level-2 for regulatory purposes, while selling its "full self driving" but also requiring supervision. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No other company has been so irresponsible to its users, and without a care for any negative externalities imposed on non-consenting road users.
I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away whenever I see them on highways.
[FWIW, yes, I work in automated driving and know a thing or two about automotive safety.]
[1] https://archive.is/20241018151106/https://www.reuters.com/bu...
45000 people die yearly just in the US in auto accidents. Those numbers and timeline you quoted seem insignificant at first glance magnified by people with an axe to grind like that guy running anti Tesla superbowl ads, who makes self driving software like you.
Would you rather drive near a drunk driver using Tesla's FSD, or one without FSD?
OK, the lane-keeping isn’t quite there, but I feel like that’s solvable.
Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout".
I don’t think this would actually work, as silly a thought experiment as it is.
The problem isn’t the vision, it’s state management and cost. It was very easy (but expensive) to see and classify via CV if a person picked something up, it just requires hundreds of concurrent high resolution streams and a way to stitch the global state from all the videos.
A little 1 inch person on each shelf needs a good way to communicate to every other tiny person what they say, and come to consensus. If 5 people/cameras detect person A picking something up, you need to differentiate between every permutation within 5 discrete actions and 1 seen 5 times.
In case you didn’t know, Amazon actually hired hundreds of people in India to review the footage and correct mistakes (for training the models). They literally had a human on each shelf. And they still had issues with the state management. With people.
Sure way less traffic deaths but the spike in depression especially among males would be something very big. Life events are much outside of our control, having a 5000lbs thing that can get to 150mph if needed and responds exactly to the accelerator, brake and steering wheel input...well that makes people feel in control and very powerful while behind the aforementioned steering wheel.
Also productivity...I don't know...people think a whole lot and do a whole lot of self reflection while they are driving and when they arrive at destination they just implement the thoughts they had while driving. The ability to talk on the phone has been there for quite some time now too, so thinking and communicating can be done while driving already, what would FSD add?
Building a self flying plane is comically easy by comparison. Building Starship is easier by comparison.
Never rode in one once for a reason.
I honestly think that's the _easier_ problem to solve by at least two orders of magnitude.
> The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.
This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.
This is exactly what people were saying about the NHTSA Autopilot investigation when it started back in 2021 with 11 reported incidents. When that investigation wrapped earlier this year it had identified 956 Autopilot related crashes between early 2018 and August 2023, 467 of which were confirmed the fault of autopilot and an inattentive driver.
What they are looking for is whether there are systematic issues with the design and implementation that make it unsafe.
We are not sure when FSD is engaged with all of these miles driven, and if FSD is making mistakes a licensed human driver would not. I would at the very least expect radical transparency.
Those four crashes are just the ones that sparked the investigation.
that's the wrong comparison
the correct comparison is the number of report crashes and fatalities for __unsupervised FSD__ miles driven (not counting Tesla pilot tests, but actual customers)
I will -never- own a self driving car unless the firmware is open source, reproducible, remotely attestable, and built/audited by several security research firms and any interested security researchers from the public before all new updates ship.
It is the only way to avoid greedy execs from cutting corners to up profit margins like VW did with faking emissions tests.
Proprietary safety tech is evil, and must be made illegal. Compete with nicer looking more comfortable cars with better miles-to-charge, not peoples lives.
"Firmware" can be open source and secure, but how does this translate to driving performance at all? Why does it matter if the firmware is validated by security researchers, who presumably don't know anything about motion planning, perception, etc? And this is even assuming that the code can be reasonably verified statically. You probably need to to run that code on a car for millions of miles (maybe in simulation) in an uncoutable number of scenarios to run through every edge case.
The other main problem with what you're asking is that most of the "alpha" of these self driving companies is in proprietary _models_, not software. No one is giving up their models. That is a business edge.
As someone who has been at multiple AV companies, no one is cutting corners on "firmware" or "sensors" (apart from making it reasonably cost effective so normal people can buy their cars). Its just that AV is a really really really difficult problem with no closed form solution.
Your normal car has all the same pitfalls of "unverified software running on a safety critical system," except that its easier to verify that straightforward device firmware works vs a very complex engine whose job is to ingest sensor data and output a trajectory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
They’re up there with Dodge Ram drivers.
Sold Tesla investments. The company is on an unprofitable downward spiral trajectory. The CEO is a total clown. Reinvested on advise in Diamler, after Mercedes-Benz and Diamler Trucks North America demonstrated their research and work into creating true autonomous technology and safe global industry standardizations.
So it's marketed with a nod and wink, as if the supervision requirement is just a peel away disclaimer to satisfy old and stuffy laws that are out of step with the latest technology. When in reality it really does need active supervision.
But the nature of the technology is this approach invites the driver to distraction, because what's the use in "full self driving" if one needs to have their hands on the wheel and feet near the pedals ready to take control at a moments notice? Worsening this problem is that the Teslas have shown themselves to drive erratically at unexpected times such as phantom braking or misidentifying natural phenomena for traffic lights.
One day people will look back on letting FSD exist in the market and roll their eyes in disbelief of the recklessness.
This is incorrect. Teslas have driver monitoring software, and if the driver is detected using a phone while driving, will almost immediately give a loud warning and disable FSD.
Like this one, who ran over and killed a woman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
While not fully being the driver's fault, during the investigation they were found to have watched TV on their smartphone at the time of the accident and the driver-facing camera clearly showed them not even looking at the road! Such attentiveness.
On the other hand, I'd hate for the result of all this to be to throw the ADAS out with the bathwater. The first thing I noticed even with the early "autopilot" is that it made long road trips much more bearable. I would arrive at my destination without feeling exhausted, and I attribute a lot of that to not having to spend hours actively making micro adjustments to speed and steering. I know everyone thinks they're a better driver than they are, and it's those other people who can't be trusted, but I do feel that when I have autopilot/FSD engaged, I am paying attention, less fatigued, and actually have more cognitive capacity freed up to watch for dangerous situations.
I had to pick someone up at LaGuardia Airport yesterday, a long annoying drive in heavy NYC-area traffic. I engaged autosteer for most of the trip both ways (and disengaged it when I didn't feel it was appropriate), and it made it much more bearable.
I'm neither fanboying nor apologizing for Tesla's despicable behavior. But I would be sad if, in the process of regulating this tech, it got pushed back too far.
Lidar is goated and if tesla didn’t want that they can pursue a different perception solution, allowing for innovation
But just visual cameras aiming to replicate us, ban that
This is going to be another extremely biased investigation.
1. A 2021 Model Y is not on HW4.
2. FSD in November 2023 is not FSD 12.5, the current version. Any assessment of FSD on such outdated software is not going to be representative of the current experience.
FSD in Nov 2023 is not latest but it’s not that old, I guess it’s not in the 12 series which is much better but no need to not investigate this.
We have a lot of traffic fatalities in the US (in some states, an entire order of magnitude worse than in some EU countries), but it's generally not considered an issue. Nobody asks, "These agents are crashing a lot; are they really competent to drive?" when the agent is human, but when the agent is digital it becomes a popular question even with a much lower crash rate.