How good can it be if it rear ends motorcycles?
People arguing over base rates of motorcycle accidents as if Tesla didn't get fooled by a loony tunes wall. If Waymo had killed 5 motorcyclists in SF we would know. But they operate there without an incident for years.
Meanwhile, Tesla just after releasing autopilot to the world a man is decapitated because the system is deficient. Then it happened again in 2016 under eerily similar circumstance. Then we observe Teslas hitting broad objects like fire trucks and busses.
The correct response to that is not to say "Well what's the base rate for decapitations and hitting broad objects?"
No, you find out the reason for this thing happening. And the reason is known: a deficient sensor suit that it prone to missing objects clearly in its field of view.
So with the motorcycle situation, we already know what the problem is. This isn't a matter of a Tesla just interfacing with the statistical reality of getting rear-ended by a car. Because we know Teslas have a deficient sensor suit.
Important distinction: FSD didn't get fooled by a looney tunes wall. Legacy Autopilot did.
But other people have tried to reproduce the experiment with FSD, and it wasn't fooled.
TEST 1 (FSD): https://youtu.be/9KyIWpAevNs?feature=shared&t=112
"Show FSD is activated on video, we did that... Here we go feet aren't touching, hands aren't touching.... it's going to hit the wall!" *slams on breaks, ends up about 2 meters from the wall* "Cannot see the wall" *inches forward until the car can see the wall* "Only sees the wall when I'm barely touching it"
"Self drive, not touching anything." *manually slams on breaks, stops a few meters short* "That was gonna hit the wall" *inches forward* "Car... does... not... see... now it does." *only inches from the wall* "That would have been too late" (ya think??)
"Does not see the wall... does not see the wall.... does not see the wall...." *manually slams on breaks to avoid hitting the wall*
Maybe sometimes the FSD is not fooled by the cartoon wall trick. But the results show that even in ideal conditions - full light, no weather, clean course - the thing can still fail.
Research prototypes from two decades ago would not be fooled by this. The sophomores in my intro to robotics class could build a robot that would not be fooled by this. And yet Elon Musk and the geniuses at Tesla can't build a car that isn't fooled.
Sidenote: It's amazing to me that we can't look up data and see the extensive government reports on the safety and capabilities of these systems. We are literally just deploying them on public streets and relying on random youtube celebrities to conduct these evaluations, because Musk has fully captured the people who would do this kind of regulation.
Watching how fast these things accelerate and how close they have to be to a literal wall to see it is terrifying.