A friend of mine who loves Tesla watched this video and said "many humans would have hit that". I feel we'll be hearing a lot of that excuse.
Another thing to keep in mind is that video footage is much lower quality than what we can see with our human eyeballs. At no point in the video can I clearly identify what the debris is, but it's clearly evident that the humans in the car can, because they're clearly reacting to it seconds before it's even visible to us in the dash-cam-quality footage. I will freely accept that many drivers are in fact bad drivers, but a carcass (I think?) on a lane visible for >10 seconds away is something that anyone who can't avoid needs to have their license revoked.
The person you replied to didn't do that, though:
> But a self-driving system worth its salt should always be alert, scanning the road ahead, able to identify dangerous debris, and react accordingly. So, different pair of shoes...
Sad to see HN to give up to mob mentality.
If it can't see something like that in ideal conditions, then god knows what else it'd miss in less ideal conditions.
Contrast with Tesla's "vision-only" system, which uses binocular disparity along with AI to detect obstacles, including the ground plane. It doesn't have as good a range, so with a low- profile object like this it probably didn't even see it before it was too late. Which seems to me a theme for Tesla autonomy.
This is why FSD is still shit in late 2025 and drives like it's drunk.
The car reacted the opposite a human would. If you saw something unidentifed ("road kill?") in the distance then you'd be focusing on it and prepared to react according to what it was. With an empty lane beside you I think most drivers would be steering around it just based on size, even before they realized exactly what it was (when emergency braking might be called for).
Do they? "Many humans" would hit that? The humans in the car spotted the debris at least 8s before the impact. I don't think any humans would hit that in broad daylight unless they were asleep, completely drunk, or somehow managed to not look at the road for a full 10s. These are the worst drivers, and there aren't that many because the punishment can go up to criminal charges.
The argument that "a human would have made that mistake" backfires, showing that every Tesla equipped with the "safer than a human driver" FSD is in fact at best at "worst human driver" level. But if we still like the "humans also..." argument, then the FSD should face the same punishment a human would in these situations and have its rights to drive any car revoked.
All that to say that I don't feel this is a fair criticism of the FSD system.
Yes it is because the bar isn't whether a human would detect it, but whether a car with LiDAR would. And without a doubt it would, especially given those conditions: clear day, flat surface, protruding object is a best case scenario for LiDAR. Tesla's FSD was designed by Musk who is not an engineer nor an expert in sensors or robotics, and therefore fails predictably in ways that other systems designed by competent engineers do not.
Imagine there was a human driver team shadowing the Tesla, and say they got T-boned after 60 miles. Would we claim that human drivers suck and have the same level of criticism? I don't think that would be fair either.
This is a cross-country trip. LA to New York is 2776 miles without charging. It crashed the first time in the first 2% of the journey. And not a small intervention or accident either.
How you could possibly see this as anything other than FSD being a total failure is beyond me.
>They made it about 2.5% of the planned trip on Tesla FSD v13.9 before crashing the vehicle.
This really does need to be considered preliminary data based on only one trial.
And so far that's 2.5% as good as you would need to make it one way, one time.
Or 1.25% as good as you need to make it there & back.
People will just have to wait and see how it goes if they do anything to try and bring the average up.
That's about 100:1 odds against getting there & back.
One time.
Don't think I would want to be the second one to try it.
If somebody does take the risk and makes it without any human assistance though, maybe they (or the car) deserve a ticker-tape parade when they get there like Chas Lindbergh :)
Statistically yes, but look at the actual facts of the case.
A large object on the road, not moving, perfect visibility. And the Tesla drives straight into it.
Not hitting static objects in perfect visibility is pretty much baseline requirement #1 of self driving. And Tesla fails to meet even this.
I really couldn't justify 1000:1 with such "sparse" data, but I do get the idea that these are some non-linear probabilities of making it back in one piece.
It seems like it could easily be 1,000,000:1 and the data would look no different at this point.
Roboticists in 2016: "Tesla's sensor technology is not capable of this."
Tesla in 2025: coast-to-coast FSD crashes after 2% of the journey
Roboticists in 2025: "See? We said this would happen."
The reason the robot crashed doesn't come down to "it was just unlucky". The reason it crashed is because it's not sufficiently equipped for the journey. You can run it 999 more times, that will not change. If it's not a thing in the road, it's a tractor trailer crossing the road at the wrong time of day, or some other failure mode that would have been avoided if Musk were not so dogmatic about vision-only sensors.
> The video does not give me that information as a prospective Tesla customer.
If you think it's just a fluke, consider this tweet by the person who is directing Tesla's sensor strategy:
https://www.threads.com/@mdsnprks/post/DN_FhFikyUE/media
Before you put your life in the hands of Tesla autonomy, understand that everything he says in that tweet is 100% wrong. The CEO and part-time pretend engineer removed RADAR thinking he was increasing safety, when really he has no working knowledge of sensor fusion or autonomy, and he ended up making the system less safe. Leading to predictable jury decisions such as the recent one: "Tesla found partly to blame for fatal Autopilot crash" (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93dqpkwx4xo)
So maybe you don't have enough information to put your life in the hands of one of these death traps, but controls and sensors engineers know better.
This argument makes no sense. I take it that you're saying that if we provide the Tesla a road which contains nothing to hit, it won't hit anything?
Well, sure. Also, not interesting.
In a real world drive of almost 3000 miles there will nearly always be things to avoid on the way.
Not quite. I am saying that basing the judgment on a rare anomaly is a bit premature. It's a sample size of 1, but I base this on my own driving record of 30 years and much more than 3000 miles where I never encountered an obstacle like this on a highway.
> Also, not interesting
I would have liked to see the planned cross-country trip completed; I think that would've provided more realistic information about how this car handles with FSD. The scenario of when there is a damn couch or half an engine on the highway is what's not interesting to me, because it is just so rare. Seeing regular traffic, merges, orange cones, construction zones, etc. etc. now that would have been interesting.
https://abc13.com/post/loose-spool-involved-in-crash-near-be...
This was the 5th time in two months.
Now 2018 might have been a record year, but there have been a number of others since then.
Fortunately for us all, drivers don't have to go through Houston to get from CA to NY, but you're likely to encounter unique regional obstacles the further you go from where everything is pre-memorized.
As we know 18-wheelers are routinely going between Houston and Dallas most of the way autonomously, and a couple weeks ago I was walking down Main and right at one of the traffic lights was one of the Waymos, who are diligently memorizing the downtown area right now.
I'll give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, but they are not yet in the same league as some other companies.
How is that relevant? You may not personally encountered this precise circumstance but that doesn't mean anything.
If you were to encounter this same scenario, however, it is a near certainty that you wouldn't crash into it. And yet the self-driving did. That's what matters.
> I would have liked to see the planned cross-country trip completed
I mean once the car significantly damaged itself, it's not like it can continue.
Big credit to the people running the experiment for letting it run and show failure. Many vloggers might've just interfered manually to avoid the accident and edited that part of the video out in order to continue and claim success.
Now you can certainly argue that "objects in the road" is a category of failure mode you don't expect to happen often enough to care about, but it's still a technical flaw in the FSD system. I'd also argue it points to a broader problem with FSD because it doesn't seem like it should have been all that hard for the Tesla to see and avoid the object since the humans saw it in plenty of time. The fact that it didn't raises questions for me about how well the system works in general.
But also, I doubt you would break your swaybar running over some retreads
Probably good parable for Waymo vs Tesla here. One is generalized approach for entire world while another is carefully pre-mapped for a small area.
More likely you simply drove around the debris and didn't register the memory because it's extremely unlikely that you've never encountered dangerous road debris in 30 years of driving.
Really? The people in the video clearly identify a large stationary object in the road a good 7 seconds before hitting it. You don't exactly need lightning quick reflexes to avoid hitting something in that scenario. Maybe more importantly, the Tesla did not seem to see the object at all at any distance. Even if you don't think you could have avoided it, do you think you would have entirely failed to see it and driven right into it at full speed? Because that's what the Tesla did.
Such an event might not be super common, but that doesn't make it an unfair criticism of Telsa's self-driving. Even if they've never seen a large object in the road before or react the wrong way, humans are generally capable of recognizing it when it happens and at least considering it's something they should take action on. The fact that Tesla can't do the same makes this an area where FSD is categorically worse than humans, and "avoiding stuff in the road" feels like an area where that's not a good deficit even if there generally isn't stuff in the road.
I dont think FSD has the intelligence to navigate this
This was not one of those situations.
and some debris large enough to damage your car showing up from out of nowhere after several hours of boring driving along a largely straight highway with little traffic is definitely one of these situations.
Again, this was definitely not one of those situations. It was large, it was in their lane, and they were even yapping about it for 10 seconds.
> But a self-driving system worth its salt should always be alert, scanning the road ahead, able to identify dangerous debris, and react accordingly. So, different pair of shoes...
This is what humans already (and if we didn't do it, we'd be driving off the road). Based on what you're saying, I question that you're familiar with driving a car, or at least driving on a highway between cities.
I read this comment before seeing the video and thought maybe the debris flies in with the wind and falls on the road a second before impact, or something like that.
But no, here we have bright daylight, perfect visibility, the debris is sitting there on the road visible from very far away, the person in the car doing commentary sees it with plenty of time to leisurely avoid it (had he been driving).
Nothing unexpected showed up out of nowhere, it was sitting right there all along. No quick reaction needed, there was plenty of time to switch lanes. And yet Tesla managed to hit it, against all odds! Wow.
My impression of Tesla's self driving is not very high, but this shows it's actually far worse than I thought.
However, I'm sure a human driver in the loop would have reacted. The driver sitting there watching a machine do it's thing 99% of the time and being expected to step in to save that situation though is a horrific misreading of human nature.
By the way, playing a lot of racing videogames is a great training for dealing with that sort of stuff, except maybe getting good at mirrors. I've been in a few dangerous situations and they were only the 10th thousand averted crash. Nothing to think, only reflexes.
It's one of the best ways to figure out what it feels like to drive at the limits of your car and how you and it react in a very safe and controlled environment.
Even if they did not understand what it is, in the real world when you see something on the road you slow down or do a maneuver to avoid it, no matter if it is a harmless peace of cloth or something dangerous like this. People are very good at telling if something is off, you can see it in the video.
[Cut, google ai provided wrong numbers]
A company actively covering up things that egregious can only be assumed to be doing things even worse regularly.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
The very same video demonstrates this is not true, since the human in the video sees the debris from far away and talks about it, as the self-driving Tesla continues obliviously towards it. Had that same human been driving, it would've been a non-issue to switch to the adjacent lane (completely empty).
But as you said, the friend loves Tesla. The fanboys will always have an excuse, even if the same video contradicts that.
The best time was a very badly designed speed bump that I didn't even hit at high speed but one side was ridiculously inclinded vs. the other so the entire civic's frontend just smashed right into the pavement and dragged for 3 feet. I wouldn't be surprised if I went into a body shop and find the frontend tilted upwards by a few centimeters. lol
That's not to say that there aren't many drivers who shouldn't be driving, so both can be true at once, but this is certainly not a bar against which to gauge autonomous driving.
Not sure how to take this reply.
They saw it, called it out, and very deliberately let the car (not) deal with it because that was the point of what they were doing.
They did not "miss" anything.
But it doesn’t help disprove that it’s entirely the computers fault. They could have taken action if they were a rational driver.
From my perspective I think many people would have failed to take action. Swerving or hard breaking at those speeds is very dangerous. And many things on the road like roadkill or bags can be driver over
You said the driver and car both missed it.
I say the fact that you can hear them discuss the object well before hitting it yet clearly not try to avoid it means they did not actually "miss it", which is also why my first comment in this thread was in response to the notion that "a human did hit that..."
These drivers hitting the object while intentionally not intervening does not actually provide information as to whether other drivers not running the same "experiment" would've hit it.
Listen to the audio in the video. The humans do see it and talk about it for a long time before the car hits it. Had a human been driving, plenty of time to avoid it without any rush.
They do nothing to avoid it presumably because the whole point of the experiment was to let the car drive, so they let it drive to see what happens. Turns out Tesla can't see large static objects in clear daylight, so it drives straight into it.
Hopefully we get there. Waymo hasn’t even started highway testing yet but maybe they will be sufficiently better that cameras in cheaper cars simply aren’t worth it. Or maybe a driver will always be in the loop and cross country FSD only is dumb