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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims

I'm sceptical of Robotaxi/Cybercab. I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.

Where I live isn't particularly challenging to drive (rural Washington), but I'm constantly disengaging FSD for doing silly and dangerous things.

Most notably my driveway meets the road at a blind y intersection, and my Model 3 just blasts out into the road even though you cannot see cross traffic.

FSD stresses me out. It's like I'm monitoring a teenager with their learners permit. I can probably count the number trips where I haven't had to take over on one hand.

Do you have HW3 or HW4?

The newest FSD on HW4 was very good in my opinion. Multiple 45min+ drives where I don’t need to touch the controls.

Still not paying $8k for it. Or $100 per month. Maybe $50 per month.

It's your sanity (and money) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HW3, unfortunately. Missed the HW4 refresh by a couple of months.

it's edging into the intersection to get a better view on the camera. it's further than you would normally pull out, but it will NOT pull into traffic.

The software probably has a better idea of their car’s dimensions than a human driver, so will be able to get a better view of traffic by pulling out at just the right distance.

It's not edging; it enters the street going a consistent speed (usually >10mph) from my driveway. The area is heavily wooded, and I don't think it "sees" the cross direction until it's already in the road. Or perhaps the lack of signage or curb make it think it has the right of way.

My neighbor joked that I should install a stop sign at the end of my driveway to make it safer.

Or just manually drive in your own driveway.

The fact that it does't handle some specific person's driveway well is far from a condemnation of the system. I'm far more concerned about it mishandling things on "proper" roads at speed.

> I'm constantly disengaging FSD for doing silly and dangerous things.

You meant “I disable FSD because it does silly things”

I read “I disable FSD so I can do silly things”

Exactly. Every bad situation I’ve been in with FSD was when I misread the situation and disengaged it during a maneuver that it was handling safely

It feels unlikely that blindly entering cross traffic, as described in the previous post, is going to be a safe maneuver, though.

I use it for 90% of my driving in Austin and it’s incredible

Having handed over control of my vehicles to FSD many times, I’ve yet to come away from the experience feeling that my vehicle was operating in a safer regime for the general public than within my own control.

I think you greatly overestimate humans

The problem IMO is the transition period. A mostly safe system will make the driver feel at ease, but when an emergency occurs and the driver must take over, it's likely that they won't be paying full attention.

We aren’t talking about the average human here.

On average you include sleep deprived people, driving way over the speed limit, at night, in bad weather, while drunk, and talking to someone. FSD is very likely situationally useful.

But you can know most of those adverse conditions don’t apply when you engage FSD on a given trip. As such the standard needs to be extremely high to avoid increased risks when you’re sober, wide awake, the conditions are good, and you have no need to speed.

> On average you include sleep deprived people, driving way over the speed limit, at night, in bad weather, while drunk, and talking to someone. FSD is very likely situationally useful.

Are those people also able to suprevise FSD like the law and Tesla expects them to? That's also a question.

FSD will pull over and stop if it detects the driver has passed out. Can the law do that automatically?

> you greatly overestimate humans

Tesla's FSD still goes full-throttle dumbfuck from time to time. Like, randomly deciding it wants to speed into an intersection despite the red light having done absolutely nothing. Or swerving because of glare that you can't see, and a Toyota Corolla could discern with its radars, but which hits the cameras and so fires up the orange cat it's simulating on its CPU.

Yeah even corollas have better sensors than a Tesla for driving in fog. It's embarrassing.

Keeping a 1-2 car's length stopping distance is likely over a 50% reduction in at fault damages.

You can get this with just a fairly dumb radar cruise control system, though.

> I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.

I'm very skeptical that the average human driver properly supervises FSD or any other "full" self driving system.

Supervised FSD — automating 99.9% of driving and expecting drivers to be fully alert for the other .1% — appears to go against everything we know about human attention.

this ^^

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