The family of the first person killed by that will know who to sue for a punitive trillion dollars.
Depends on the type of stop and go driving. Crawling along at 15mph, sure. But the most dangerous driving scenario - whether human or machine is the driver - is a scenario with large variations in speed between vehicles and also limited visibility.
For example suddenly encountering a traffic jam that starts around a blind corner.
Drivers have tackled this problem by wearing polaroid sunglasses.
I really hope someone asks Tesla how they plan to solve the Sun glare issue.
Why was that OK? Why was it safe to let people use like that without informing them?
If only there was some kinda technology that didn’t rely on optics that could see in pitch dark or when the sun is shining.
Wasted 1 hour each of your 5 co-workers who ended up reviewing unusable slop? Silence.
As with Marmite, I find it very strange to be surrounded by a very big loud cultural divide where I am firmly in the middle.
Unlike Marmite, I wonder if I'm only in "the middle" because of the extremities on both ends…
As far as hallucinations go, it is useful as long as its reliability is above a certain (high) percentage.
I actually tried to come up with a "perceived utility" function as a function of reliability: U(r)=Umax ⋅e^(−k(100−r)^n) with k=0.025 and n=1.5 is the best I came up with, plotted here: https://imgur.com/gallery/reliability-utility-function-u-r-u...
Like why can an LLM create a nicely designed website for me but asking it to do edits and changes to the design is a complete joke. Lots of the time it creates another brand new design (not what i asked all) and it's attempts at editing it LOL. It makes me think it does no design at all rather it just went and grab one from the ethers of the Internet acting like it created it.
Bingo. It just "remembers" one of the many designs it has seen before.
For example, I've had numerous conversations where people will point to safety rating in vehicles to defend their purchasing decisions. Its simple to understand really, I want the safest car for my family/child etc, that is why I refuse to buy an older, used vehicle or prefer a sedan over SUV. Safety becomes cover for preference and defending trends like expanding pickup truck sizes since the 2000s while there is no safety rating or even objective measure of the efficacy of these self-driving systems.
Hopefully I haven't wasted your time, its just a psychological trend that I think exists.
I have training and a great deal of experience with vehicle emissions systems, but not medical training beyond first aid and CPR. I think that mostly the respiration problems are caused by particulates volatile organic compounds, oxides of nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide(which is quite nasty), mostly from diesel emissions. The catalytic converters and emission controls prevent nearly all VoC and like %90 of NOx, so the effect from passenger vehicles seems pretty small there. They do nothing to eliminate SO2, which is why we mandate DEF (diesel emissions fluid) on some diesels.
Brake dust and tire wear is another smaller contributor, though
Tesla, though, is still hyping a technology that seems to have maxed out years ago.
2,000 may be stretching it but it is possible if the driver is trusting enough. Personally many of my disengagements isn't because it is being dangerous, but just sub-optimal such as not driving as aggressive as I want to, not getting into off-ramp lane as early as I like, or just picking weird navigational choices.
Trying to recall but I haven't had a safety involved disengagement in probably a few months across late 13 and 14. I am just one data point and the main criticism I've seen from 14 is: 1) getting rid of fine speed controls in favor of driving style profiles 2) its car and obstacle avoidance being overtuned so it will tap the brakes if, for instance, an upcoming perpendicular car suddenly appears and starts to roll its stop sign.
Personally, I prefer it to be overly protective albeit turn it down slightly and fix issues where it hilariously thinks large clouds of leaves blowing across are obstacles to brake for.
Yeah, trust and a lot of creative accounting of what constitutes successfully driving by itself for that long.
Would you put your child in one and let it cross a large city 100 times unattended?
IMHO, it's okay for the driver profiles to affect everything other than max speed, including aggressiveness of acceleration and propensity to change lanes. But since exceeding speed limits is "technically" breaking the law, the default behaviour of FSD should be to strictly obey speed limits, and drivers should be given a set of sliders to manually override speed limits. Perhaps like a graphic EQ with sliders for every 10 MPH where you can manually input decide how many MPH over that limit is acceptable.
This would be an inelegant interface, and intentionally so. Drivers should be fully in control of the decision to exceed the speed limit, and by how much. FSD should drive like a hard-nosed driving instructor unless the driver gives unambiguous permission to do otherwise.
[0] Note that I am describing this based on my understanding of the US environment. I am Australian, and our speed limits are strictly enforced at the posted speed, without exception. On any road, you should expect a fine if going 3—6 km/h [2—4 MPH] and caught by a fixed or mobile camera. This applies literally anywhere, including highways. By contrast in the USA, I understand that 5—10 MPH on highways has been socially normalised, and law enforcement generally disregards it.)
I've heard this so many times it's starting to be a meme. The system was claimed to be very capable from the beginning, then every version was a massive improvement, and yet we're always still in very dangerous, and honestly underwhelming territory.
Teslas keep racking up straight line highway miles where every intervention probably counts at most as 1 mile deducted from the total in the stats. Have one cross a busy city without interventions or accidents like a normal human driver is expected to.
> You are judging past tech by 2025 standards.
That's very presumptuous of you. Every single person I know driving a Tesla told me the FSD (not AP) is bad and they would never trust it to drive without very careful attention. I can tell Teslas on FSD in traffic by the erratic maneuvers that are corrected by the driver, and that's a bad thing.
I really don't believe this because everyone I know who drives a Tesla tells me the opposite. I tend to think this is an artifact of people who just irrationally hate Tesla because IRL every negative thing I hear about Teslas comes from people who don't own the cars and hate Elon Musk.
> they would never trust it to drive without very careful attention
Of course, because the product is not designed to drive without human supervision.
> I can tell Teslas on FSD in traffic by the erratic maneuvers that are corrected by the driver, and that's a bad thing.
I don't believe you actually can because I don't notice any difference in the quality of driving between Tesla's or any other car on the road. (In fact the only difference I can notice between drivers of different cars is large trucks). So, again, I write off such statements as more of the same emotionally driven desire to see a pattern were there isn't one.
> I don't believe
> this is an artifact of people who just irrationally hate Tesla
> more of the same emotionally driven desire to see a pattern
Don't you find it curious that every opinion you don't like must be from irrational people hating Tesla, but opinions you do like are all rational and objective? It's as if we didn't define the sunk cost fallacy for exactly this. You're a rational person, if Tesla was confident in the numbers wouldn't we have an avalanche of independently verifiable stats? Instead we're here playing this "nuh-uh" games with you pretending you're speaking with an authority nobody else has. Does any other company go to such lengths to bury the evidence of their success? The evidence that supports their claims?
And of course I can tell FSD drivers, literally nobody else on the street will so often brake hard with absolutely no reason, or veer abruptly then correct and straighten out so hard it wobbles, both on highways and in the city. If it's not the car then it must be the drivers but they wouldn't make such irrational moves.
P.S. The internet is full of video evidence of FSD making serious and unjustified mistakes. Every version brings new evidence. How do you explain those? Irrational haters inventing issues? Car misbehaving only for them? Because you see, even if you film 10 times and get the mistake only once it's still very serious.
I mean, I love my Tesla autopilot. It made my cross-country trips so much more enjoyable. I have several thousand hours on autopilot at this point.
That being said, I don't use it on regular city streets. Because it's just bad, in all kinds of ways. "Full self-driving" it is not.
Maybe the manufacturer should try the next version. And test it. And then try the next version. And test it. And then continue until they have something that actually works.
And there's no guarantee it'll be meaningfully better, if I'm being honest. Why would I believe that all the issues are fixed? For me to be interested, every single problem that I'd encountered needs to be resolved. Why would I even consider accepting anything less? It's not "partial" self driving. An incremental improvement is useless.
That's the crux of it, and where traffic education mostly fails in the USA: the lack of consideration that the road is about safety for all users involved, the notion you are operating dangerous machinery around other people.
I had a party at my house a couple months ago, mostly SF tech people. I found the Tesla owners chatting together, and the topic was how much FSD sucks and they don’t trust it.
I asked and no-one said they would buy a Tesla again. Distrust because they felt suckered by FSD was a reason, but several also just said Elon’s behavior was a big negative.
We're on the cusp of trading the Tesla in for a Rivian most likely. I should be Tesla's target customer, but instead I'm exactly who you described:
- I don't like the brand. I don't like Elon. I don't like the reputation that the car attaches to me.
- I don't trust the technology. I've gotten two FSD trials, both scared the shit out of me, and I'll never try it again.
- I don't see any compelling developments with Tesla that make me want to buy another. Almost nothing has changed or gotten better in any way that affects me in the last four years.
They should be panicking. The Cybertruck could have been cool, but they managed to turn it into an embarrassment. There are so many alternatives now that are really quite good, and Tesla has spent the last half a decade diddling around with nonsense like the robot and the semi and the Cybertruck and the vaporware roadster instead of making cars for real people that love cars.
I'm sure they would be if the stock price had ever showed any signs of being based in reality.
But for now Elon can keep having SpaceX and xAI buy up all the unsold Teslas to make number go up.
If that ever stops working, just spin up a new company with a hyper-inflated valuation and have it acquire Tesla at some made up number. Worked for him once, why not try it again.
And at this point he can get even fraudier, with the worst possible realistic outcome being that he might get forced to pay a relatively small bribe and publicly humiliate himself for Trump a bit.
But there's really no more consequences to any sort of business fraud (for now) as long as you can afford the tribute.
#WorldLibertyFinancial
IIRC the deposit was 250K, and I know people who signed up on the first day. Can you imagine a more dedicated fan?
How do you not deliver to that group? How big an own-goal is that?
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/202x-roadster-delay-...
Whoosh. They've been saying Tesla is an AI company for nearly a decade. AI has been propping up entire US economy for last few years. EV bandwagon has left long time ago.
Saying all that I wouldn't mind even cheaper Tesla - small screen, 1 camera instead of 11, fully offline, fully stainless steel, fully open source - basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.
What you describe would probably cost more money, not less. The market is small and analog tech is actually more expensive to produce with than digital tech.
But:
> basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.
Kind of implies it.
Tech is used to lower prices, not raise them, if you want minimize tech, and you want to make it as maintainable by end user or relatively cheap mechanics, and you want it to last as long as possible, that is going to cost a lot. Or you basically want a Lada Laika, the old ones, that could be repaired super easily. Anything with microchips is going to suffer if those chips die, and they aren't going to be easy to repair.
AFAIK Tesla is already moving towards that direction with unboxed manufacturing - it's where same chip can be either window controller or brake controller. Having single chip + open source firmware would eliminate this issue.
Like, what are they _doing_? Do they still have R&D at all?
Mine has been an extremely well done vehicle and I was (and kind of am) bullish on FSD as a driver assistance technology, but a car is a 6-7 year investment for me and I have big doubts about their direction. They seem to have abandoned the idea of being a car company, instead chasing this robotaxi idea.
Up until 2023/2024 was fine for my 6-7 year car lifecycle. Tesla was really cool when they let you do all sorts of backwards-compatible upgrades, but they seemed to have abandoned that.
I’ve found it incredibly disappointing seeing their flailing direction now.
Rivian seems to still have a lot of the magic that Tesla had. They’re definitely a strong contender for my next vehicle in a year or two.
Tesla FSD 12 -> 13 was a massive jump that happened earlier this year. 14 is still rolling out.
Testing out 13 this weekend, it drove on country roads, noticed a road closure, rerouted, did 7 miles on non divided highways, navigated a town and chose a parking space and parked in it with zero interruptions. It even backed out of the driveway to start the trip. I didn't like the parking job and reparked; other than that, no hands, no feet, fully autonomous. Unlike 12, I had no 'comments' on the driving choices - rotaries were navigated very nicely, road hazards were approached and dealt with safely and properly. It was genuinely good.
Dislike Elon all you want, but Tesla FSD is improving rapidly, and to my experienced eyes adding 9s. Probably two or three more 9s to go, but it's not a maxed out technology.
> It was genuinely good.
Which means if Tesla can really build that Cybercab - with an underpowered motor, small battery, plastic body panels, just cameras (which I think they promised to sell under $20k) - they'll be able to hit a business expense level and profitability that Waymo will only be able, in say, 10 years.
Even if you don't want to talk about non-existing hardware, a Model 3's manufacturing cost is surely much lower than a Waymo.
Once (if) they make self driving work at any point in time before Waymo gets to the same level of cost - they'll be the more profitable business.
Not only that, they'll be able to enter markets where the cost of Waymo and what you can charge for taxi rides is so far apart that it doesn't make sense for them - in this sense, they'll have a first mover advantage.
Any realistic mass deployment will use cheaper cars, more suitable for taxi service.
The core problem with Waymo’s model is its lack of (economically rational) scalability. Shipping finished vehicles to a second facility to strip and rebuild them as robotaxis is inherently inefficient, and cannot be made efficient by scaling up. To achieve meaningful volume, Waymo would need to contract an automaker to build finished robotaxis, ideally domestically or where tariffs are sufficiently low.
Obviously Tesla's solution only works if their vision-only strategy bears fruit. Assuming it does (a wildly controversial assumption in this space, but let's go with it for now) the economics are utterly wild. It's difficult to imagine how any competitor could come close to competing on cost or scale. And that's assuming the Model Y, ignoring the as-yet hypothetical Cybercab.
I suppose Alphabet could buy the corpse of Canoo. I suspect that if it had a plausible manufacturing ramp, they would have been snapped up quickly. Automotive-scale manufacturing is a crucible, and it destroys most who attempt it. In fact most die long before they begin frfr.
Isn't Waymo going with Ioniq 5 vehicles built for them in the US by Hyundai, with all the vehicle sheet metal and other mods installed at the factory? That was the story a few months ago.
Having driven Tesla FSD and coded with Claude/Codex, it suffers from the exact same issues- Stellar performance in most common contexts, but bizarrely nonsensical behavior sometimes when not.
Which is why I call it "thunking" (clunky thinking) instead of "thinking". And also why it STILL needs constant monitoring by an expert.
His foot was on the gas though
Looking at this author's other articles, he seems more than a bit unhinged when it comes to Tesla: https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ Has Hacker News fallen for clickbait? (Don't answer)
The driver admitted he looked down after dropping his phone and blew a stop sign; Tesla argues his foot was on the accelerator, but the jury still assigned partial fault because Autopilot was allowed to operate off limited-access highways and the company didn’t do enough to prevent foreseeable misuse. The driver had already settled separately.
If the wheels of the car fell off, whould Tesla have any blame for that? If we had laid wires all along the road to allow for automatic driving, and Tesla's software misread that and caused a crash, would it be to blame?
When is Autopilot safe to use? Is it ever safe to use? Is the fact that people seem to be able to entirely trick the Autopilot to ignore safety attention mechanisms relevant at all?
If we have percentage-based blame then it feels perfectly fine to share the blame here. People buy cars assuming that the features of the car are safe to use to some extent or another.
Maybe it is just 0%. Like cruise control is a thing that exists, right? But I'm not activating cruise control anywhere near any intersection. Tesla calls their thing autopilot, and their other thing FSD, right? Is there nothing there? Maybe there is no blame, but it feels like there's something there.
A foot on the gas overrides braking on autopilot and causes it to flash up a large message up on the screen that "Autopilot will not break / Accelerator pedal is pressed"
My 2015 Tesla S brakes if it detects something in its path using radar and usually correctly identifies the object type (truck, car, motorcycle, cyclist, pedestrian) using the camera.
1) didn't they drop the radar?
2) clearly didn't work in this case
It can't be healthy to be so obsessed with something/someone you dislike.
And by the way - I have heard big tech folks repeat that phrase, not really understanding the moral of that Steve Jobs story.
Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.
This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"
10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.
We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.
100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal.
The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in as much as it can get away with, to be on the driver, effectively level 2.
The legal standing doesn't care what tech it is behind it. 1000 monkeys for all it matters. The point is level 3 is the most dangerous level because neither the public nor the manuf properly operates in this space.
I worry that when it gets to 10,000 mile per incident reliability that it's going to be hard to remind myself I need to pay attention. At which point it becomes a de facto unsupervised system and its reliability falls to that of the autonomous system, rather than the reliability of human + autonomy, an enormous gap.
Of course, I could be wrong. Which is why we need some trusted third party validation of these ideas.
You use professional trained operators with knowledge of the system design and operation using a designed safety plan to minimize prototype risks. At no point should your test plan increase danger to members of the public. Only when you fix problems faster than that test procedure can find do you expand scope.
If you follow the standard automotive pattern, you then expand scope to your untrained, but informed employees using monitored systems. Then untrained employees, informed employees using production systems. Then informed early release customers. Then once you stop being able to find problems regularly at all of those levels do you do a careful monitored release to the general public verifying the safety properties are maintained. Then you finally have a fully released “safe” product.
I've made this comparison before but student drivers under instructor supervision (with secondary controls) also rarely crash. Are they the best drivers?
I am not a plane pilot but I flew a plane many times while supervised by the pilot. Never took off, never landed, but also never crashed. Am I better than a real pilot or even in any way a competent one?
So much for "Full Self" whatever.
The fact of the technology is that while imperfect, it is absolutely a marvel, and incredibly useful. I will never drive home again after having a beer after work, or when I'm tired after a long day. I can only attribute the angry skepticism in the comments to willful ignorance or lack of in-the-seat experience. I use it everyday, it drives me driveway to parking with only occasional interventions (per week!).
I'll throw in that my wife hates it (as a passenger or driver), but she has a much lower tolerance for any variance from expected human driving behaviour (eg. lane choices, overly cautious behaviour around cars waiting to enter traffic, etc).
Let's hope you never become statistic.
I am happy that FSD is not permitted where I live. I would be concerned to drive close to one. Call it willful ignore if you prefer.
Next to "the latest version really fixed it, for realsies this time", the "anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant or has irrational hate for Tesla" must be the second most sung hymn among a small but entirely too vocal group of Tesla owners. Nothing brings down a conversation as quickly as someone like you, trying to justify your purchase by insulting everyone who doesn't agree with your sunk-cost-fallacy-driven opinions.
I don't have any sunk cost in FSD. The car, sure, but it's a fine electric car that I got when there weren't many options (especially at a reasonable price).
I felt I was being generous. My inclination is that animosity to Musk's odious politics clouds the rational judgement of many critics (and they've mostly have no first-hand experience with FSD for any length of time).
The human collision numbers only count actual incidents, and even then only ones which have been reported to insurance/authorities. It doesn't include many minor incidents such as hitting a bollard, or curb rash, or bump-and-run incidents in car parks, and even vehicle-on-vehicle incidents when both parties agree to settle privately. And the number certainly excludes ALL unacceptably close near-misses. There's no good numbers for any of these, but I'd be shocked if minor incidents weren't an of magnitude more common, and near misses another order of magnitude again.
Whereas an FSD disengagement could merely represent the driver's (very reasonable) unwillingness to see if the software will avoid the incident itself. Some disengagements don't represent a safety risk at all, such as when the software is being overly cautious, e.g. at a busy crosswalk. Some disengagements for sure were to avoid a bad situation, though many of these would have been non-catastrophic (such as curbing a wheel) and not a collision which would be included in any human driver collision statistics.
FSD, what most people use, is ADAS, even if it performs a lot of the driving tasks in many situations, and the driver needs to always be monitoring it, no exceptions.
The same applies to any ADAS. If it doesn't work for in a situation, the driver has to take over.
wonder what driving force behind this, because at somepoint money didnt matters
Apple's famous for not being first, but being best to a well established market and cleaning up.
People certainly don't remember de havilland, who was first to the market of "passenger jet airliner".
I certainly won't be putting my kids in any of these, and especially not in a vehicle operated by a company with a "devil may care" approach to safety.
Sure, it works fine in Arizona or Texas; let's see it work okay with a snow storm in Boston.
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