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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

I got a 2026 model Y recently and tried out FSD. It made enough errors in the first few trips that I am surprised it's being touted as a "robotaxi".

For example: travelling West on 15th street in SF, at Guerrero the leftmost lane turns into left turn only and the Tesla happily continued straight through.

That jolted me out of complacence and the next time it was in the wrong lane, I quickly took over and corrected it. It's happened a few times and I don't use FSD that much.

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I'm unsurprised by that. I'm really hoping it quickly improves now that more people are using it

I've come to the conclusion that a big part of the difference between Waymo and other AVs is that Google has so much more geospatial data than anyone else that they know where that left turn lane begins and what it means in the context of that part of that road.

You're "unsurprised" by that? ... You wankers really will excuse anything at the feet of your dear leaders. It's excruciatingly cringe.

You have to let it crash a few times so it can trigger an internal review of the route. /s

Having zero control of the software update process will stop me from ever owning a Tesla.

I'm curious, what does having control over the update process give you? Isn't it replacing one unauditable black box system for another? Are you concerned about a regression and don't want to be in the vanguard cohort?

Well, there is the "my car has been disabled in an inconvenient time/location" problem for one. It would be nice to have more audibility but I use iOS/macOS/etc so it would be disingenuous to claim that as a show-stopper.

If by "vanguard cohort" you mean "in the first wave to test the new software," then yes; I don't want to be in that group.

I feel like being concerned about your car being disabled at an inconvenient time, but not being as concerned about your phone/laptop isn't disingenuous.

They're entirely different products, costs, use cases, risk profiles.

For the most part, yes. I do fly with ForeFlight though. Losing it mid-flight would not be a disaster in its own right but the tech has saved my life a few times.

The ForeFlight team will send out a message giving an "all clear" or a "wait for us to update the app before updating to the next iOS/iPadOS release."

My car/motorcycle/skateboard doesn't need over the air updates. It used to be, and still is in some cases, that a vehicle (electronic control modules and all) was sold as a finished product. Your engine control module or speed controller didn't need random firmware updates because it was a finished product that worked as intended upon delivery. Now people are clamoring to drive software licenses and I want no part of it. This isn't about auditing the code, this is about complexity creep and having ownership.

My Mercedes has the opposite problem. It will notify me there's an OTA update and ask if I want to do it now, or not. If I just turned the car on, I probably don't want to do it now, so the question is silly. It's unclear if the "Later" option actually applies the update after I've turned the car off, or if it just means it'll nag me again later and the cycle repeats. At least it does map updates automatically.

As you observed, lane selection is basically the one thing that FSD is completely incapable of. But other things it does well. It's important to note this is completely incompatible with the narrative spun by Tesla haters, that it all comes down to LiDAR. LiDAR cannot help with lane selection.

How does Waymo compare in these situations?

Why does Waymo not have a problem with it? It did really well in dense streets with people barely pulling over to stop and run into a storefront or picking people up from a restaurant. It would pause for a second, put on turning signals, and then pull around the stopped car. It did this several times, in fact in spots where I would have waited because its estimation of distance and obstacles in a 360deg around the vehicle is flat out better than me as a human. I was really impressed.

Waymos stop in the middle of the street several times a day, behavior I've never seen or even heard of from FSD. And I'm not sure what it has to do with lane selection.

FSD goes around stopped vehicles without any problem too.

You're not sure what moving into a different lane has to do with lane selection?

Waymo seems to do a lot of detailed mapping in the areas where they operate. They probably have the lanes all marked out in the cars memory.

And that means they know what lane they need to be in 100, 200, 500 ft down the road. Tesla has map data but it's so poor that they can't get the lanes right.

I haven't really seen the narrative that it all comes down to lidar. I mean it's one sensor type amongst vision, lidar, gps, ultrasonics, sound and radar. For whatever reason Tesla has chosen to go a bit minimalist there.

TBF the Ford CEO, in an interview, said lidar is the difference. But I can't blame him for going with the sound bite in that context. No doubt he knows there are lots of differences. My favorite underappreciated difference is that Google has crazy amounts of geospatial data.

I had a look at the interview (it's https://youtu.be/zIUfbpK3yBQ?t=1367)

I wouldn't really call him a hater but yeah, he says he thinks it's much better to have lidar.

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