For automated tools like CNC machines, there is a reason it’s just ‘emergency stop’ for instance, not ‘tap the correct thing we should do instead’.

But doing an e-stop on a road at speed is a very dangerous action as well, which is why that isn’t an option here either.

They want to pretend you'll only need to actually intervene in 'edge case' situations, but here we have an example of perfect conditions requiring intervention. Regardless of the buzzwords they can attach to whatever methods they are using, it doesn't feel like it works.

Elon can't levitate TSLA and other valuations by himself. There has to be at least the appearance of substance. That appearance is wearing thin. While I'm going to observe the caution that the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, once reality assert itself, Elon will be powerless to recreate the illusion.

I get that it’s way over hyped, but they have real results that can’t be denied

The trillion dollar pay package will make it happen, that's what was missing.

> Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, page 40

Anything "could" happen, but it would take an inordinately inattentive driver to be this bad.

They had 7-8 seconds of staring and talking about the debris before hitting it (or perhaps more, the video starts the moment the guy says "we got eh, a something", but possibly he saw it some instants before that).

So a person would need to be pretty much passed out to not see something with so much time to react.

Also of course you're avoiding an unknown object that large, especially when there's plenty of space to go around it on either side.

If you still don't think you can avoid something like that, please get off the road for everyone's safety.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

From what I understand, in the USA when a truck tire wears down they put a new layer of tread on it. But it doesn't seem to work very well as it eventually peels off.

Have you compared distances?

Around here anything big enough to matter gets reported, the cops fling it to the side of the road and it gets picked up on a schedule because they always pick things up a few weeks before they mow (presumably because hitting garbage isn't great for the mowers).

But yes there are folks whose job it is to clean that stuff up.

In the linked video highway patrol comes out to remove the debris just a few minutes after they hit it. (highway patrol had been called out prior them hitting it)

I recall I was completely flabbergasted by all the cars just ditched along the highway. There were lots of them, just off the road into the grass on the side or whatever.

I asked my buddy about it and he said it was usually tires, as it was cheaper to buy another car than get new tires... Well that didn't help my blown mind one bit.

Mind you, on the way to his house I passed a Kia dealer which literally had a huge "buy one car - get one free" sign outside...

Your rake is much less likely to fall out of a van than out of the bed of a pickup.

So if stuff can't fall out, it won't get cleaned up.

Second, this is a metal ramp used to load vehicles on a trailer (think bobcat-like).

To tow a trailer like that in Europe requires additional licenses, which comes with training around tying down EVERYTHING and double checking.

In the USA you are allowed to drive with this with the same license you need to drive a Smart Car.

That they can today doesn't mean they can do the same route 10,000 times without a safety-critical intervention. In fact, public tracking indicates Tesla's numbers are MUCH lower than that.

No. If you continue to watch the video after the collision, it's clear that there was no traffic tailgating. They even slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. No other cars.

You shouldn’t take pills a stranger gives you at a music festival without checking them for loads of things, for example. Even if you don’t ever intend on consuming them it’s nice to have specific accusations with evidence.

I don't think that is the case. We will judge FSD whether you make more or less accidents than humans, not necessarily in the same situations. The computer is allowed to make mistakes that a human wouldn't, if in reverse the computer makes a lot less mistakes in situations where humans would.

Given that >90% of accidents are easily avoidable (speeding, not keeping enough safety distance, drunk/tired driving, distraction due to smartphone usages) I think we will see FSD be safer on average very quickly.

This was really best possible driving conditions - bright day, straight dry road, no other cars around, and still it either failed to see it, or chose to run over it rather than steering around it or stopping. Of all the random things that could happen on the road, encountering a bit of debris under ideal driving conditions seems like it should be the sort of thing it would handle better.

And yet Tesla is rolling out robo taxis with issues like this still present.

True, but not even relevant to this specific example. Since the humans clearly saw it and would not have hit it, so we have a very clear example where Tesla is far inferior to humans.

It’s a huge chuck metal well over a foot long in the middle of a lane. The center of a lane is usually higher than sides and an uneven patch of road can cause a slight bounce before it, further reducing clearance. I’d worry about my RAV4 (8 inches) clearing it safely.

At first, I thought it was possibly a tire tread, which tend to curl up.

For self driving, he simply decided X is right and talked about exponentials and no matter how many time it fails, there is no reflection what so ever.

Not to get too political, but the last I've heard of Elon Musk is that he was speaking to/mobilizing right wing extremists at a big protest in London. I am also pretty sure he has been trying to do similar things in other European nations (for whatever reason).

It seems to me that it is a bit late to plead for "basic decency" at this moment.

But at the same time let me ask you, what has he got to lose? What financial or reputational risk is he taking by not taking any accountability?

I know because I’m one of them. FSD paid in full almost seven years ago, still does absolutely nothing in Europe. A five-year-old would do a better job at driving because the Tesla can’t even see speed limit signs correctly.

Tesla takes no responsibility for their misleading marketing and years of lies. Most recently Musk promised in early 2025 that these old cars would get a hardware update that will finally enable the paid-for FSD (as if…) The company itself pretends to know nothing about this latest promise made by its CEO.

It’s insane that a business with a trillion-dollar market cap operates like this. It seems to be more of a cult than a real company.

On one hand, I agree with you that this is maddening.

On the other hand this is, as the kids would say, "the meta" in 202X for business and politics.

Lying at scale and never taking responsibility for anything obviously works exceptionally well, and not just for Elon. I wish it didn't, but it does.

I've written off pretty much everything he says since sometime before 2020, too many lies about self-driving to count.

But I'm not someone with any influence (nor do I really want that kind of attention).

"How do we get self-driving into millions of regular consumer cars without doubling the price by adding expensive sensors and redesigning the vehicle around huge chunky sensors"

Waymo is focused on Taxis for a reason because it's likely going to be unaffordable, except to people driving Lambos. But that also may be fine for a big chunk of the public who don't want to own cars (or want to rent their own as a service).

Some consumer car companies are experimenting with adding smaller LIDAR sensors like recent Volvo Ex90 which costs ~$100k. But they aren't as sophisticated as Waymo

https://www.proxibid.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimage...

It's huge, far bigger than it looks in the video. You would have to be asleep at the wheel to miss it.

Waymo has achieved Level 4, with hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week and a stellar safety record. But they're not technically a manufacturer I guess.