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Comment by goalonetwo | Hacker News Reader

I worked in this industry. No, FSD is not almost there. Not even close. What matters is the long tails of events.

You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.

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We need to compare against the real human error rate (including drunk drivers, sleepy drivers etc). What is that error rate?

Also, fault tolerance error rates don’t work that way - difficulty increases exponentially as you increase fault. In other words, it’s much more difficult than three orders of magnitude to go from 3 9s to 6 9s - it’s easily 5-6 orders of magnitude.

When you're playing candy crush and FSD kills someone, whether or not it's drives better than the average driver is not something the judge and prosecutor are going to consider.

First, that’s because FSD is legally only L2 and thus legally you are required to pay attention. It has nothing to do with the engineering realities of the impact on improving safety.

When L5 becomes available then this becomes a different calculus. And it’s honestly questionable about how good the characterization actually is since Tesla’s L2 FSD seems to outperform Mercedes’s L3 and it’s more a matter of the liability the manufacturer is willing to take on vs objective measurements of quality.

yes, the long tail of difficult event is exponentially more difficult to handle. That's why I said above that people "feel" it is ready but it is nowhere to be even close to ready.

The average crash rate for human is one every 500k miles.

I disagree with you. Glad you worked in the industry, I am using FSD daily, it is really excellent.

Drive 100 miles in your sleep.

You'd trust your partner or parent to do that for you ...

Got it. differing expectations. Im not expecting 'unsupervised' out of the system, I dont think I would trust any system to transport me or loved ones un-piloted. Even when being driven in a taxi, I am still supervising despite not having much recourse beyond barking at the driver.

That said, based on my experience with FSD, I'd be tempted to take a nap if it let me, reinforcing my initial statement that it's very darn close.

If you drove with a very very bad driver that crashes every 50k miles (average is every 500k miles), you would have exactly the same feeling and you would also be tempted to take a nap.

100 Miles literally don't matter. Even 1000. On average accidents happens every 500k miles.

Are you ready to have your tesla drive FSD with you sleeping in it for 500k? You are letting your feeling dictate that FSD is ready. The math is more complicated.

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