Joke product from an unserious company. I wouldn't own this and I would never ever buy it for someone I loved.
My old Honda hasn't tried to kill me yet. I suppose the jury is out on the takata airbag recall but that's fixed now and our relationship can continue with a pristine record of zero murder attempts.
It still blows my mind that so many people are okay with beta testing software that controls a several-tonne metal box on wheels moving at 100km/h+ on shared roadways.
We're not okay with it. We are however beaten down by every brainwashed fanboy, marketer, investor and news outlet pushing this bubble along to drive some pissy revenue stream though.
That includes those of us who worked on safety critical engineering years ago and know exactly what the fuck we are talking about.
So? At least they have a driving license. That's not something we can say about this pile of crap. It cost me 2 years of my life, a small fortune at the time and a lot of hassle from the authorities before being allowed to pass so I could join in on this thing called 'traffic' with a vehicle. And I thought that was just fine. Now we get this stuff that is absolutely unverified and that is known to have issues released into traffic as though it is perfectly normal.
Why did it take you two years and a small fortune? It took me some reasonable number of hours over ~6 months (at the time in CA you could get your learner's permit at 15.5 and license at 16) and a couple hundred bucks for a driving instructor.
Yeah, I took a free weekend class in high school, maybe twelve hours total. I barely remember taking the test at age sixteen, yet it’s valid decades later.
I would be pretty surprised if FSD couldn’t outperform me, except for edge cases like “this guy flagging us down, what the heck does he want us to do?”
Because that's what I could afford on my then still meager salary. 45 / hour for lessons, 45 lessons, one every two weeks. In Europe the examinations are a bit more strict than in the United States and at the time you could only start your lessons when you were 18.
A human can be held liable for their actions, and as such, the "average person" might exercise an amount of responsibility equal to the risk of liability. Drive slow around schools, but drive like a hooligan around a racetrack. Etc.
A Tesla, or any robot for that matter, cannot be held liable for it's actions.
Right? I get trying beta ir even alpha versions of inconsequential software, but something that can easily kill me? What are these people thinking? It’s mind boggling.
> It still blows my mind that so many people are okay with easily distracted hairless apes controlling a several-tonne metal box on wheels moving at 100km/h+ on shared roadways.
FTFY. We're socially conditioned to ignore these risks, but it's still objectively insane that I can easily kill myself, my entire family, and another group of innocent bystanders by rotating a steering wheel a few inches in the wrong direction.
(I still don't and would never use Tesla FSD, though.)
Ok, how is this different than, say, the lane assist in a Kia? It fails often (in particular when you're not on a highway) so you have to remain alert.
> Tesla say their thing "<insert arbitrary cherry-picked stat here>" <insert link to Tesla fanboi website here>
No, I don't believe any of those p-hacked/biased stats that conveniently portray something, that is sold as BETA SOFTWARE by a company with a multi-billion market cap and a world-class marketing division, to be "safer" than an average driver.
FWIW I'm also not thrilled with the idea of the average person being permitted to get behind the wheel of a 5 tonne death machine, either.
> So maybe we should worry more about the average American?
As an outsider (Australian) watching the American empire decline so rapidly in recent years, I assure you I'm also quite worried about America, and the average American.
Well yeah, I don't totally trust Tesla either. On the other hand I think it's very likely self driving tech will become safer than human eventually so it'll work out ok.
The guy enables beta version of autopilot software during the night on a highway. Encounters a bug that nearly costs him his life, and... enables the same feature again later. I mean, why...
For downvoters: I mean, for me of course it's a good thing that some people risk their lives in order for me to have a stable feature, but I don't really understand the motivation.
At least you're in the car. I'm not, and I'm also at risk, and so is my family. Proximity to Tesla is fortunately higher for Tesla owners so they are probably at higher risk from FSD than the rest of us but you really should not give control of your car to anything that says 'beta' on the tin and that regulators haven't stepped in yet is a complete mystery to me. Given the amount of requirements a vehicle (and a driver!) has to go through to be allowed into traffic in the first place you'd expect that any kind of mission critical software would be required to be put through its paces in a very stringent test environment as well but that seems to be asking too much.
Besides the fact that the next OTA update may well give you a completely different batch of problems.
I’m all for the personal responsibility thing. In Canada if you do 50km/h over the limit they seize your car roadside, fine you $10k, suspend your license, and likely charge you criminally for dangerous driving. We also have private race tracks where you can take your Civic and put yourself into a wall at 170km/h if you so choose.
I don’t care for arguments about safety statistics or the ends justifying the means. My kids are on these streets. It’s not your autonomy test track.
>I don’t care for arguments about safety statistics
is insane. If it's safer it's safer, and the only way to know is statistics.
The fact that (seemingly) no government department is collecting and publishing safety statistics on every self driving car manufacturer defies belief.
Strongly agree with the sentiment. Note NHSTA in the US recently started publishing incident counts for self-driving vehicles, but its total counts by company, not per-mile, and therefore mostly meaningless
They’re my kids so I just don’t care if using them as a test subject results in longer term safer roads for everyone.
But I think what you’re talking about is if autonomy makes my kids safer in the immediate, and not as an end result of public testing. Yes, I support that. I don’t think this is that yet. The word beta is right there.
They specifically said test track. Once it's proven then put it on the roads. But in it's current state it should be severely restricted. They may need training data but then they can pay for it or pay to construct suitable tests
It's already on the road driving millions of miles. Someone should just count how many accidents it has had, and compare to how many are expected given the number of miles driven under each driving condition.
I think the point is that if it's "proven" safer today, the manufacturer can then make changes and test publicly, and be absolved of responsibility if there are regressions.
Sure this will go fine since it's not like we have a track record of people dying in Teslas, with Tesla taking zero accountability, and withholding the crash data from open scrutiny.
That's not the point. The point is there are many less safe drivers on the roads than people in Teslas supervising FSD. As far as anyone knows there's been like, maybe one crash on FSD and no deaths.
(There are Autopilot/ADAS related deaths, though not a shocking number relatively, but that is not the same type of system and is also deployed on many other vehicles.)
No, they're just your everyday normal drivers. Tens of millions of them. Most people - surprise - actually just follow the rules. That there are also many that do not means you're looking at a venn diagram where only the fraction 'drives a Tesla' and 'would be an unsafe driver' that overlaps is affected positively whereas those that 'drives a Tesla' and 'would be a responsible driver' may well be the larger fragment. And it says nothing at all about the population at large given that a Tesla is an expensive piece of kit.
I'm saying that there are very little of perfect drivers. Even without phone and alcohol, which is a criminal negligence - there's kids, partners, mind wandering, daydreaming, poor vehicle maintenance, crap road designs or surfaces, medical conditions, vision impairments, weather, food, insects, etc which on overall means we are generally very distracted and impaired.
> Do you treat all traffic participants with same scrutiny?
Yes. Many people who've been riding motorcycles more than about 6 months or so (aka and lived), have learned to. A few years on from that, defensive^W paranoid riding is well ingrained.
I still drive like I rode my motorcycle: looking at every car on the road and trying to figure out how they could kill me, and then responding accordingly.
That's the only way. Because it doesn't take a huge percentage of distracted drivers to pose a concrete danger. But I've seen more than one Tesla making weird moves and given how many of those there are here I'm not quite sure whether that is more or less frequent than with other brands but what I do notice is the severity of the moves and they tend to be pretty wild. As in: half a lane wide sudden moves. Of course that could just as easily be Tesla drivers that are themselves in control of their car. But I strongly suspect FSD to be at the root of these, they certainly don't look like the kind of thing a driver would do voluntarily, but as a panic response to a vehicle doing something out of the ordinary it would match just fine.
What really gets me is that people would then not return their vehicle as defective (or never ever again use such a feature). I sold my previous car after it twice false triggered on the auto emergency braking failure and I would expect other car owners to do the same thing.
It is funny, isn't it, that every single person that thought that some lives had to be sacrificed now for the greater good or something later somehow managed to exclude their own life, and that of their loved ones, out of that equation.
For all the criticisms of Elon Musk you could level (and there are many), this is a weird choice in that it's demonstrably wrong - he livestreamed himself driving using the newest version of FSD Beta very recently.
So Musk will end this whole FSD Beta testing on the roads, disable the feature on sold cars via OTA (at least one sensible use case for that in cars beyond map updates) and stop advertizing and / or selling it while reimbursing those who paid for it?
I remember when Tesla demoed FSD and it was all faked. Given the company’s track record of fraud and his personal track record of over promising and under delivering on this very product, why should anyone believe his video is what he says it is?
Like, wouldn't be too many deaths and accidents set back the goal? And wouldn't a previously acquired bad reputation slow down adoption when it's finally working?
And why not sacrifice short term gains by having say, LIDAR and better hardware at the start, to have the best performing system as fast as possible, and then gradually trim things down once everything works perfectly?
This will never work. They are still fucking around changing vehicle configurations, sensor configurations, computers, throwing more compute at it, everything after nearly a decade now. It's a hack job death march, reminiscent of half-assed software crap companies I've worked for, surrounded by hype, marketing and rabid fanboyism. I've never seen customers at this scale who are happy being experimented on like lab rats.
The real problem is that roads are vastly unconstrained systems. An analogy is you can't take a sieve and fill all the holes in it with AI because it has no determinism and you don't know what all the constraints/holes are in the first place. Humans can actually reason in these situations fairly competently, even the stupid ones.
Give up, produce a half decent low price car with basic features that a human drives that frees us from the insane EV pricing jump and perhaps the world will be changed. Self driving cars are not important other than for a few exec egos and companies who want rid of the cost of a human workforce.
This is another fucking race to the bottom and the only innovation is getting people to think it's important.
Self=driving cars could be important, if we used them in ways that didn't play to the traditional car narratives. An always-connected vehicle could start to deliver some of the "system intelligence" we see in more controlled public-transit platforms.
Self-driving cars should be smart enough to say "You specified a destination downtown. I will wait 4 minutes 23 seconds before departure because we'll have a peak cohort of people driving downtown, and can maximize fuel economy by drafting and traveling as a convoy." Potentially we even get to the point where the cars couple together and form transient "trains" to to spread the wear on the drive systems.
We could even have controls like "A parade/diplomatic mission/emergency vehicle is travelling down XYZ Street; to ensure their security, a two-block radius around it been flagged as no-go for any autonomous vehicles."
See now you're getting to the point but the point is that public transport is broken so we're patching it with cars. Perhaps we should be fixing that instead?
This “we” you speak of is non-existent. It’s about individuals taking actions to fix the injustices and errors they see in the system. For all his faults Elon Musk does not sit on the sidelines. What you see as a transgression by him is nonetheless action, and it will not be fixed until you, or some other individual brings it upon themselves to fix it.
I've seen this objection a lot and I don't really understand where it comes from. The only people who can fix public transit are the government and the public. Autonomous vehicles aren't being developed by either of these groups and in no way prevent them from fixing transit.
What's the argument then? Is everyone expected to wait around until public transit is fixed before they work on something else?
AVs are complementary to public transit. You're not going to take a robotaxi from SF to SJ. You might take one to the Caltrain station on either end and avoid needing a personal vehicle at all.
AVs aren't complementary to public transit, though. From the customer perspective, the only difference between an AV car service and a taxi service is that one of them has a human driver. Why would any taxi customer take a three-leg trip from SF to SJ with two robotaxis and the Caltrain when they could have a single-shot transportation solution door to door?
Because the robotaxi journey is $80 (current Uber price) vs $20 ($10.50 Caltrain + $10 in taxis) one-way. Also the trains have bathrooms, faster, and for a lot of people, you can walk at one end.
public transit simply cannot go in the direction everybody needs it, when they need it in a straight route. It used to take me approx 3 hours a day, sometimes more to get to an from a job that was a 25 minute drive away.10 hours more time for myself a week is freedom to me.
To maximize the value of public transit, you need a strongly integrated economy.
It would help if local leadership could say "You're building a business that has high flexibility in where you site it, so you should place it near a transport hub, rather than off in a suburb that causes a longer average commute for everyone."
Yes, you can't do this for every business-- some have natural dependencies on specific site characteristics, but those seem likely to shape the rest of the city's transport decisions (how many cities have major thoroughfares that parallel existing heavy rail, for example)
The promise of autonomous vehicles DOES tend to prevent "fixing transit". It reinforces the narrative of individual car ownership. In American society, you are seen as a bit lesser if you don't have an individual vehicle.
Autonomous vehicles promise to expand individual car ownership to some groups that would normally be forced to rely on public transit (people disabled in a way that prevents them from driving, or repeat drunk drivers, for example). For the able-bodied, they promise the relaxed luxury of "someone/thing else is driving and I can work/read/relax" that public transport offers, without having to actually build public transport.
This means the people with the strongest vested interests in public transit are already relatively outcast and underclass, and it will only get worse.
Make the rich and powerful have to take a bus, and suddenly it will become a significant political concern that the schedule is a loose suggestion at best, and that nobody has cleaned the bus since George VI was on the throne.
It would be interesting to expand on your last point-- an AV fleet that compliments public transit as a last-mile offering-- but it doesn't seem to be the model we're seeing sold right now. It's the same old vehicle designs clearly intended for single-family use, long trip times, and low duty cycle. I would imagine an AV system built as a "compliment" might involve small, slow vehicles, almost glorified bumper cars, with like 25km battery range, since the target application is to drive from the train station to a home/office, then return to the station for a battery swap and service. While each trip is a light task, a single vehicle might go on dozens of trips per day and as a result get a completely different wear pattern than your typical Hyundai.
Current AVs look like consumer vehicles because they are. All of the operating fleets are the remnants from testing platforms built out of retrofitted consumer vehicles. The next generation, vehicles like the cruise origin and zoox L5, don't follow that design at all.
I ride Cruise daily– I think it's entirely a scoping problem and what they decide to finalize as "FSD".
From my exp autonomous driving seems entirely plausible within large cities at slower speeds that don't instantly kill you or others, and outside that just as good a lane assist + cruise control as you can get– the rest is branding FSD and walking back a claim or two around it. It all seems very malleable.
Of course the position is malleable. The ideal end game would be a constrained system. So I mean if you put the cars on rails and gave them a dedicated space to run in, which would solve most of the determinism problems that'd be good. And you could possibly stuck a few of them together to increase overall capacity and efficiency too. We might then have a solution that's possible to execute FSD reliably on.
Cruise was finally hit with blame over someone's death after blocking in an ambulance. I'm not sure they're such a good example of autonomous driving done right.
As for instantaneous death, a collision between a person an automobile at 25 mph is enough to do serious damage to the person. What you've described is autonomous driving at a walking pace, and somehow that doesn't sound so appealing.
Cruise says the ambulance left as soon as the person was loaded and the pedestrian was hit by a human driven car so hard to put 100% of the blame on Cruise.
Assuming Cruise is being truthful, sure. But that's like the fourth attempt that Cruise has made to shift the blame. First it was "there was room", then it was "but the police were also blocking the ambulance in" – ignoring that police on official business generally have reason to park haphazardly. Then it was "only one Cruise vehicle was legitimately stuck, the other moved ASAP". But so far they've shared their video with one local news outlet, but are prohibiting the video from being disclosed publicly (hmm).
Where one party is motivated by profit and the other is not, I'm inclined to believe the latter. Having seen Cruise vehicles get wedged in traffic first hand I'm inclined to believe the fire department.
> An internal San Francisco Fire Department report said a Cruise autonomous vehicle delayed an ambulance from transporting Davis to hospital, contributing to his death.
> Now, the fire chief says the report was inaccurate in a joint statement with the SFMTA in which they call Davis' death "an all-around heartbreaking and tragic incident."
> "The San Francisco Fire Chief has not attributed this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs," the statement said. "The city sends our deepest condolences to [the] family and friends of the victim."
The burden of proof is that something is possible not that it is not impossible. There is no evidence to suggest at this point that it is cost effective, safe or possible.
Cost effective, I don't know what this means in this context. Development costs, rider costs? I don't see why this matters.
Safety is easy to measure. Just measure crash rates.
If your concern is can we engineer a self-driving car with acceptable safety performance, there is only one way to figure that out and it's to try to build one. You're not going to somehow prove it out on paper before trying it.
> Are you suggesting that AI driving is impossible?
Seems like it'll be impossible for Tesla. It's less clear for others though, as some of them (Mercedes?) seem to be taking a more responsible development approach.
Looking at Mercedes is foolish IMO. There's no reason to think they have any expertise in this domain. They have some press releases but very little technology to show for themselves. Cruise and Waymo are the other major players here.
Yes, far as I can tell, it's mostly a marketing gimmick. I think it works below 40mph in stop-and-go traffic on Nevada freeways, and doesn't do any navigation and just stays in its lane. They can put out a press release about "L3" all they want, but there's nothing to suggest this is more than an off-the-shelf ADAS/LKAS with some additional driver monitoring. This is not the type of technology or strategy you see anyone serious about self-driving working on.
Mercedes is taking legal liability for all actions of the car while it is in L3 autonomous mode, which Mercedes calls "Drive Pilot." That feels like more than a marketing gimmick, especially since no other automakers have assumed liability like this (that I know of). I am in stop-and-go traffic on the highway all the time during rush hour, it would still be beneficial to just read a book or work on my laptop while the car drives, even in that limited circumstance.
And taking legal liability in very narrow (essentially useless) circumstances is exactly why it’s a marketing thing. It’s to make it seem like they have an advanced system when there is no evidence of them having it or having any realistic path forward.
At Elon's insistence, Tesla is pursuing camera-only autonomy. That's what might not be possible. If that's not a viable approach, Tesla has also given up the advantage of 3D LIDAR mapping the environment in which their cars operate and will have to start over, years behind other AV technology.
Most car sales are second hand and that's a different proposition.
However on new cars, £28k for a car with 149 miles range or £20k for a car with 400 mile range that the difference in price buys you 77,000 miles of fuel?
Yes, as I said if you want the cheapest car on the market to be an EV you'll have to keep waiting. You can also buy a used EV for under $10k right now, but obviously it's still a tiny market compared to used ICE cars.
Literally the main reasons for the push for self-driving cars are to drive operating costs down for private taxi services by removing humans and to have a marketable feature that can be upsold on luxury vehicles. These are a net negative for society as they drive up unemployment and consumption.
It's ego because it's a gold rush revenue source if it plays off and various CEOs have been pushing because while stock price is rising for the bubble, they're earning.
Is there a technology that doesn't automate work and isn't sold to consumers for money?
Self driving cars could potentially end car accidents outright, saving 40,000 lives in just the US per year. But that would put some mechanics out of business.
No, the main reason is to free up millions of man years of time for other more more desirable activities, and to reduce the tens of thousands of people killed in daily carnage on our roads.
In the US it is very difficult, due to low density, road design, and use patterns, to make transit service, especially bus lines, both economical and pleasant to use at rush hour. AVs can enable surge capacity for bus service, and a mix of vehicle sizes. It can enable smooth transfers, more lines with more stops, and higher frequency of service in a lot of places that have really bad mass transit. Guangzhou already has a few autonomous bus lines. Compared to the cost of a bus, a conservative approach to an AV sensor suite is cheap.
Why not? Public mass transit is far more efficient. The push for cars keeps car owners (in the corp and profit sense) alive. Only. Add in the pretend notion that cars equal freedom and it’s just a cycle of energy wasting nonsense.
If we (tech fans) really wanted to help alleviate the problems roads have (traffic, accidents, etc) - public mass transit is the way to go.
But I guess .. where’s the immediate hype-based profit in that? (think: “omg blockchain… I mean nft… I mean ai!!1!!”)
I don't think I've ever heard of self-driving cars as a freedom-promoting technology. In fact, I remember self-driving car fans of a decade ago being very enthusiastic about the prospect of banning human drivers.
> Roads may have problems but the alternative you're proposing is far worse.
Sorry, but "far worse" is simply excessive.
Living in a large European city, namely Paris, and having experienced both car and mass transit, I prefer the second option a lot, to the point I sold my car without replacement about 6 years ago after 2 years of barely using it.
There is of course the ecological aspects, but even in terms of quality of life, I much prefer public transports: it's cheaper, it's less stressful, it's more predictable and I'm able to do other things like reading while transiting.
By comparison, in this context (dense urban area), cars, with their needs (maintenance, parking, etc) are actually more constrain than freedom.
And that's not like I'm a unique case, most of my colleagues either use public transports or (e)bikes, car users are a minority (~20%).
In Paris, there is even a large proportion of the population who didn't even have a driving license at all.
Doesn't it means that mass transit is the perfect solution? no. But in dense urban area, it's probably the best compromise.
Agreed, I find it much more freeing not to have to drive and deal with the various stresses and expenses involved.
I think mostly people are talking at cross purposes though. I too live in a large European city and getting around by car is incredibly constraining (traffic, parking, other drivers etc) while using the public transport system, while not perfect, is smooth in comparison.
However, for less dense areas, eg going on holiday somewhere in the countryside, it is much more convenient to have a car and I suspect that many people are coming from this angle. In those circumstances, I will rent a car as necessary. It doesn’t happen often so I still save in comparison with the cost of owning a car.
Living in sparse suburbs is probably hell without a car. This is partly because of poor town planning but also, I imagine, because a certain set of people want to have that much space. The trouble is that the externalities of the car travel are generally concentrated elsewhere, so it’s a bit unfair.
no because the logistics simply don't add up to get everybody where they need to be when they need to be there. Most particularly retail and restuarant workers.
I used to commute to Chicago from the suburbs and the train was a much more reliable way to arrive at work on time than driving, where traffic made travel time highly variable.
only very big cities have trains and again they are only convenient if they are going in your direction. I lived in Montreal for six years without a car. I could walk to work in 45 minutes. It would take 1/12 hours to get to work by subway and or bus.
I don't see how it's pretend. Sure its not true freedom in the sense there's no cost or rules, but cars allow for spontaneity and a way to easily go off the beaten track.
Cars are liberating in the same way a horse would have been hundreds of years ago. A car allows me to go where I want, when I want and that's worth any cost.
They make the average person's life better and I wouldn't want to live in a world where I couldn't drive.
I like the idea that the ability to use both hands to eat chicken nuggets while operating a motor vehicle at speed is so inherently and universally valuable that a person couldn’t possibly believe otherwise.
One could confidently put the makeup on without being annoyingly interrupted every couple of hundreds meters by having to drive up to the next red light!
Currently, Americans spend about 100 billion hours driving every year, which is about 11 million man-years.
If you can't see the transformative impacts of freeing up that much time for people to enjoy any other activities, whether it be doing work, reading a book, sleeping, or eating chicken nuggets, then I honestly have no idea what to say.
It might be easier to free up some of those man-years by planning and constructing towns/cities such that people don’t have to drive in them, than developing self driving cars. The two things aren’t even mutually exclusive, you could have a happy, mostly non-car based existence, and then supplement it with a self driving car on the occasion that you really need it (assuming it’s ever achieved).
Ha! Maybe not, at the scale of the US it might well be intractable. That said, the Netherlands made such a transition over the 80’s and 90’s so it is possible to some degree. You do need a population willing to undergo the transition though. And it’s not something that’s done overnight of course.
I just found it somewhat ironic that instead of considering alternatives, people would rather hold out for self driving cars, which may never happen, to reduce time wasted in driving.
I first had that thought when carpooling with a coworker that listened to Rush Limbaugh. One time we're in stop and go traffic and he's ranting about how liberals are coming for your car because they hate freedom. I thought I don't feel very free right now.
Before the damn'demic had the thought that the reason people commute long distance is partly because company VIP's all like to live a) close to work. b) next to each other. Which due to suburbanization forces everyone else to commute. This seems like an incredible waste of societies resources whose costs are born by poor and middle class people. I think the whole work from home thing is a rebellion against that basic unfairness.
This makes sense. Why didn’t the man in the car attempting to do a 70mph u turn on a freeway consider the possible saved man hours for society?
If you think about it getting misted because your car plows into oncoming traffic is actually not that bad because some day others will be able to pay $15,000 for DLC in their car that unlocks “road head”. It’s basically on the same level as antibiotics or the Haber-Bosch process in its necessity for the flourishing of mankind
You can try to minimize it all you want, but indeed it would be transformative.
Somehow, when we build a $2 billion Central Subway in San Francisco, through some of the very densest neighborhoods in all of America, with a realized daily ridership of ~3,000, there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
Far too many people are so selfish that they get hung up on questions like “Could this cause death or grevious bodily harm to me or others on the road?” and do not have the ethical fortitude or wherewithal to focus on “What could the abstract concept of ‘transformative’ mean at an unknown point in the future?”
> there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
This is a good point. There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Your original assertion that I took issue with was that "self driving cars are not important other than for a few exec egos."
I'll happily admit there are problems with autonomous vehicles today, and that is not what I dispute. What I dispute is that autonomous vehicles are not important. And of course they are. They would free up more human time than any other invention on the horizon.
However, to the non sequitur point about safety, we are not designing a system from scratch. The existing system has two million crashes per year in the US alone. If the new system has one million crashes, that's a massive improvement.
> There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Once again, you've quickly switched the point to something different. The question was if an astronomically expensive train that carries a mere 3,000 riders a day is also worthy of derision, since few people use it, and all it does is replace walking, freeing them up to play Wordle during their commute.
I like how you began this thread by saying that a person could not possibly believe that self driving cars aren’t very important, which is a statement about the nature of reality and the limits of human rationality, and are now sort of saying that you think that self driving cars are important, which is a different topic.
I also liked how you brought up trains and then said I’ve switched the point when I responded to your point about a train.
I concede that your point about San Francisco’s train ridership is unassailable proof that self driving cars are as important as water treatment and germ theory. Since it is the only train in the world and has less than stellar ridership, it is proof positive that the very concept is worse than a car that drives itself into oncoming traffic.
It is a shame that the author of the article did not take a moment to consider ridership numbers of the San Francisco rail project as his car was attempting a u turn on the freeway. A small minded person could find themself thinking about impending death and not specific train projects worthy of derision.
I'm sure I'm just naive because I don't work in this space, but I keep wondering why they don't do machine learning from a satellite perspective. Yes, the cars need to notice and react to things in front of them. However, a lot of problem areas and odd navigation can be identified from space. I'm surprised they don't do some massive slow exposure shots from a satellite and see how traffic flows across the entire US. I want a car that can react in realtime to new problems, but it has a massive amount of storage so it can probably be told ahead of time what roads, interchanges, freeway onramps, etc.. are problems, and what should guide its decision making.
How would satellite imagery help at night, during cloudy/stormy weather? What sort of latency does the imagery have? Can commercial imagery even resolve things like painted lane markers, construction detour signage, etc?
There’s also a much easier method - just get the delta of every Tesla on the road to the speed limit and you can see how well traffic flows. All the navigation apps already do that
Part of the problem is reacting in real-time. The part I'm talking about: Is you can "tell" the car what to expect at this interchange, and still react in real-time to present conditions. You hear all the time about Teslas driving off a ramp or not changing lanes quick enough due to odd paint stripes on the road, and I keep thinking you can see this from space. Why isn't there a database of known "this is a road, this is not a road" that it looks at first before looking at surrounding cameras outside the car? You can see how traffic moves -> from space. Part of these conditions are known well ahead of time on any present day regardless of the weather.
There is such a database, but Tesla relies on camera images for the data while nearly everyone else uses LIDAR to create a 3D model in addition to camera images (which can be mapped onto the 3D point cloud, enhancing their value). Camera-only is a bet-the-company move considering the large slice of Tesla'a valuation based on future robotaxi revenue.
In a way, FSD hype is brilliant. Cathie Wood attributes a majority of Tesla's valuation to robotaxi revenue. That means a multi-year zero-revenue business has pushed down Tesla's cost of capital to a fraction of the incumbents. That, in turn, has made Tesla a segment leader in the game for the long run. It also made SpaceX and X possible.
The main problem is lack of restraint: "Give me $15,000 non-refundable and someday I will deliver the means to make a profit on the car you bought. It already has the hardware." is building up a big potential liability. But, even if forced to refund that FSD money, it's still been cheap capital to grow Tesla.
I do not understand how a large number of software vendors have
managed to turn "beta testing" into a desirable way to spend
time.
People even compete to be allowed to perform free beta testing.
Great from a business perspective, saves a lot of money on QA.
I prefer to use the software once it has been fully released and
has been out for a while for the vendor to iron out any major issues.
To freely chose to beta test the self-driving feature of a huge automobile
travelling at high speed on public roads (not a test track) is nearly
impossible for me to understand.
Where it the upside to it?
Being able to blog about how you nearly died?
Had it gone a bit farther this would have been a good candidate
for a Darwin award.
We've passed the point we can blame Elon Musk for this: We need to be asking why the federal government has been completely absent in putting a stop to it. Tesla's marketing around their cruise control is getting people killed.
The government needs to give Tesla a week to remove all Autopilot and FSD terms from their products or recall the entirety of the product line. People who paid extra for this unlock should get full refunds for it.
My Kia can provide an amount of self-steering in cruise control which is truly impressive and smoothes the driving experience, but nobody sells it as driving itself, much less charges an extra ten grand for the privilege.
With Tesla, everyone can have the experience of being a driving instructor, but unfortunately not everyone is good at it. IMHO it takes even more attention to supervise it than just being in control all the time, since taking over when it tries to do something stupid is the most difficult part.
For this reason, I always stay clear of Teslas on the road.
You have to be absolutely insane to beta test Tesla FSD, it’s very dangerous and full of bugs, nowhere close to ready. The only reason it’s out on public roads is because Musk is in charge, and he’s happy to take massive risks and kill people to get to market a bit faster.
Waymo, on the other hand, is actually very good. Waymo is (IMO) actually a bit better/safer than the average human driver, Tesla FSD is way, WAYYYYYYY worse than a human.
I’ve spoken with a number of ppl who’ve taken rides in both Tesla FSD and Waymo, and the reviews are unanimous. Tesla FSD makes major mistakes very regularly, you have to be taking control a lot, it’s a terrifying experience. Waymo actually drives safely and correctly, in a confidence inspiring way, with no need for human intervention.
Fingers crossed that both regulators and the general public can differentiate between very good tech rolled out very carefully (like Waymo, or to a lesser extent Cruise) and very buggy tech rolled out very recklessly (like Tesla FSD). Hard to predict public and government reactions, it honestly could go either way.
Tesla gets a lot of Flak, but all driving assistance systems in commercial cars today that I tried are wayyy more terrible.
My long term rental Nissan Rogue lane following system tries to kill me multiple times a day, and only disconnects with an alarm 2seconds+ after leaving the lanes.
True they are so basic it’s sad, but on a flip side warnings are so obnoxious on Tesla plus it’s kinda easy to accidentally disable autosteer without noticing only to discover you are drifting over into other lane.
Wonder if Tesla could somehow allow to drive with less steering wheel resistance but also autosteer reliably.
The biggest difference is that with pretty much every car that's not a Tesla, the driver still needs to drive the car. That's true for the Tesla, too, but "full self-driving" makes it sound like it's different.
Mercedes brought out their first actual self-driving car a few months ago. Unlike driver assistance, where the driver is expected to retain control at all times, it will give at least ten seconds notice -- so you're allowed to take your hands off the wheel, read a book, or watch a video. But it will only let you turn it on in very restricted circumstances.
I don't understand how its possibly legal for tesla, or anyone for that matter, to be able to push out beta life critical software to the general public.
Say for example a utility company pushed out an update that flipped the power contactor between you and the grid too many times that it caught fire, the company would be taken to court.
I simply just don't understand how Tesla can get away with it.
I don’t get it either. While they’re at it, why not give DeepMind and OpenAI access to military resources to see whether their models can keep peace better than an army. At least that’s not on civilian territory.
I don't understand how they keep marketing this as "Full Self Driving" or "Autopilot" and then wink and say "oh lol not really, you're supposed to be driving the whole time". The very name of the product is a lie.
(And that's not even counting the "Elon Mode" we've since learned is hidden in the firmware.)
The "beta" means you're supposed to be supervising it! The non-beta version would be the one that you don't have to pay attention to.
The "Elon Mode" thing is an internal-only flag that nobody has been able to activate outside Tesla, and is not actually called that it's just what some guy on Twitter called it.
I think you could argue that it isn't life-critical software because it requires active driver monitoring. What makes it different from lane-keeping assist in other vehicles? Or bog-standard cruise control? The fact that it attempts to do more things does not necessarily make it more dangerous. Your cruise control can drive you into a truck or off the road, but we accept that it is the driver's responsibility to not let that happen. FSD will actually attempt to stop for other vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, etc. What is the difference here other than the system is _less likely_ to kill you because it is smarter?
The fact that it attempts to do more things can, in fact, make it more dangerous in the specific situations where a human interrupt is needed. Human attention works better the more it is needed, so if you need a human in the loop, you're best off with a system where their input is needed fairly often compared to a system where their input is needed once every long while.
The other factor is that human attention may be needed in a situation where it is very hard to actively fix the situation if you're not already in the OODA loop. If you suddenly realize you need to override the car, and you're in the middle of a complex merge and the reason you need to override the car is because someone else screwed up, it may not be possible to solve the problem with the extra cost of your attention spinning up.
I understand what you're saying, but if you're not already in the OODA loop then you aren't actively monitoring the car. You could say, well, maybe the system lulls you into not being in that loop by taking most of the driving tasks away. I would say that having driven thousands of miles with it, it certainly doesn't feel like that to me. I'm still very, instinctively aware of how the car should be acting and even minor deviations from what I would do myself are very conspicuous and cause me to actively double-check its behavior. Also, in its current state, input is needed quite frequently.
And the empirical data available (which could definitely be higher fidelity, granted) appears to suggest that the actual safety record is quite good.
So we're left with a trade-off: there are some scenarios where a more featureful system could elevate risk, but there are other scenarios where it lowers them. It's not obvious on paper how to balance them, and the empirical (and, for me, experiential) data indicates the trade-off is a reasonable one.
Perhaps a large amount of the concern around this comes from people not being aware of what it's like to operate a car in this mode. Maybe people think you really don't have to pay attention? It knows when you've got hands on the wheel, it knows when you're looking at your watch or your phone or the car's display, and it will pretty aggressively prevent you from getting complacent. Not only will it beep, it might lock you out from using it entirely. (Lockouts never happens to me, but I have seen tweets from it happening to others.) There was an old pre-Waymo Google talk about how partial driving assistance was dangerous for this reason, and I bought that argument but I no longer find it convincing having used such a system a lot.
Yet it doesn't disengage when you take your hands off the wheel
> What makes it different from lane-keeping assist in other vehicles?
lane assist, assists you in keeping in the lane. It doesn't pretend to be able to drive for you. It also, as far as I can see, doesn't attempt to fling you into cars you're overtaking. (unless you don't use your indicators....)
> bog-standard cruise control?
That again isn't pretending to drive for you. The instructions are generally very clear, like on my car it says in huge text "this aid will not break for you, you must maintain distance as you normally would". Also, it doesn't attempt to steer you into a central reservation. There are shit cruise controls out there, like on the VW golf. That stops you if you attempt to drive past much slower traffic.
> we accept that it is the driver's responsibility to not let that happen.
Yes, because they have been told in no uncertain terms that if you obliterate someone in your car, its your fault and you're going to jail. More over, you were the one driving, so its down to you to not do it. Tesla are shipping untested systems and telling you, as an untrained roboticist supervisor: "don't worry, its safe, it drives it's self!" give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention.
> What is the difference here other than the system is _less likely_ to kill you because it is smarter?
Its not that system. I will fully endorse a safe, tested, verifiable level 4 autonomous driving system. I will not endorse a barely credible level 2 system who's QA system involves YOLO deploying shit to unqualified customers.
> Yet it doesn't disengage when you take your hands off the wheel
Well you don't want it to immediately disengage, which would be insanely dangerous, but it knows if your hands are on the wheel. It will progressively alert you more prominently if it hasn't felt wheel torque from your hands. It will then begin beeping loudly and stop and lock you out from using Autopilot. It also knows whether you are looking at the road from an internal camera and will beep if you are looking at your phone, watch, or the car's screen. This system works quite well.
> lane assist, assists you in keeping in the lane. It doesn't pretend to be able to drive for you. It also, as far as I can see, doesn't attempt to fling you into cars you're overtaking. (unless you don't use your indicators....)
"Pretending to drive for you" is meaningless. It's a feature that takes over driving functions that requires active supervision and that if you do not pay attention can cause a crash. The conditions of how it might cause that crash are not particularly important conceptually. What matters is that there is an expectation you pay attention or you might crash. The primary difference is cruise control is worse at driving.
> Yes, because they have been told in no uncertain terms that if you obliterate someone in your car, its your fault and you're going to jail. More over, you were the one driving, so its down to you to not do it. Tesla are shipping untested systems and telling you, as an untrained roboticist supervisor: "don't worry, its safe, it drives it's self!" give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention.
This is also the case with FSD. You're told its your fault. You're told it's your responsibility. They do not say "don't worry it drives itself" or give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention. In fact it says the following, among other things you must explicitly accept, enable, and agree to:
> Full Self-Driving is in early limited access Beta and must be used with additional caution. It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent. When FSD is enabled your Model 3 will make lane changes off highway, select forks to follow your navigation route, navigate around other vehicles and objects, and make left and right turns. Use FSD in limited Beta only if you will pay constant attention to the road, and be prepared to act immediately, especially around blind corners, crossing intersections, and in narrow driving situations. Cabin Camera is used to detect driver attentiveness while FSD Beta is in-use to provide you with audible alerts, reminding you to keep your eyes on the road.
> I will not endorse a barely credible level 2 system who's QA system involves YOLO deploying shit to unqualified customers.
I'm not looking for your endorsement, I was trying to explain why the system is legal and probably less dangerous than you think. Also obviously they QA it before it goes out to "unqualified" customers.
Aside from questioning self driving cars and Tesla’s misleading marketing stories in particular; “you don’t even have skin in the game anymore” (so who still has then?)
Why - in this highly safety critical domain - is there ever anything close to “beta” software accessible to end-users? What about all other participants in traffic? This “perpetual beta” approach hasn’t been industry best practice for most of its existence.
There used to be years long development and testing procedures, all happening outside of common traffic.
This is all a big marketing racket attempted to as “efficiently as possible” transfer most of risks and costs on masterfully deceived consumers and the ever unquestioned public.
The mistake to make here is to blame Tesla. They’re just pushing their luck within the regulation, else their competitors will overtake them. The blame for this lies with the regulators.
Model Y w/HW3 + FSD Beta loves to take those turnoff lanes on 2-lane 55 mph highways, thinking that the road just went to 4 lanes. Unfortunately (for me), those turnoff lanes abruptly stop in a 90 degree right turn. I leave audio comments when it happens when prompted asking why I disabled FSD by yanking the wheel left, but I don't know what else to do.
My question would be if you've witnessed it perform dangerous behaviors, why would you continue to use it. That's what else you can do; stop using the automated death software.
I rented a Tesla a couple years ago for a day trip a few states away. Mostly highway driving, which I would assume would be easier than random city streets. And that's how I spent a day with Tesla's FSD beta constantly trying to murder me. I'm surprised the body count isn't higher.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadMy old Honda hasn't tried to kill me yet. I suppose the jury is out on the takata airbag recall but that's fixed now and our relationship can continue with a pristine record of zero murder attempts.
That includes those of us who worked on safety critical engineering years ago and know exactly what the fuck we are talking about.
I would be pretty surprised if FSD couldn’t outperform me, except for edge cases like “this guy flagging us down, what the heck does he want us to do?”
As someone living in the US, I wish they were stricter here - I see lots of frankly dangerous behavior on the road.
A Tesla, or any robot for that matter, cannot be held liable for it's actions.
FTFY. We're socially conditioned to ignore these risks, but it's still objectively insane that I can easily kill myself, my entire family, and another group of innocent bystanders by rotating a steering wheel a few inches in the wrong direction.
(I still don't and would never use Tesla FSD, though.)
So maybe we should worry more about the average American?
No, I don't believe any of those p-hacked/biased stats that conveniently portray something, that is sold as BETA SOFTWARE by a company with a multi-billion market cap and a world-class marketing division, to be "safer" than an average driver.
FWIW I'm also not thrilled with the idea of the average person being permitted to get behind the wheel of a 5 tonne death machine, either.
> So maybe we should worry more about the average American?
As an outsider (Australian) watching the American empire decline so rapidly in recent years, I assure you I'm also quite worried about America, and the average American.
Besides the fact that the next OTA update may well give you a completely different batch of problems.
I don’t care for arguments about safety statistics or the ends justifying the means. My kids are on these streets. It’s not your autonomy test track.
>I don’t care for arguments about safety statistics
is insane. If it's safer it's safer, and the only way to know is statistics.
The fact that (seemingly) no government department is collecting and publishing safety statistics on every self driving car manufacturer defies belief.
But I think what you’re talking about is if autonomy makes my kids safer in the immediate, and not as an end result of public testing. Yes, I support that. I don’t think this is that yet. The word beta is right there.
If FSD has more accidents then ban it.
You can do something wrong but if it works out, hey, it’s fine right?
This also creates a wonderfully sloppy veil. Hey it’s proven safe. So we’re going to go ahead and fuck with the settings more.”
This experiment is sure to be unbiased.
The claim here is that an overnight minor update from v11.4.4 to v11.4.7 caused a significant regression.
I’d rather have distracted driver on autopilot over distracted driver in a car with crude ADAS.
(There are Autopilot/ADAS related deaths, though not a shocking number relatively, but that is not the same type of system and is also deployed on many other vehicles.)
I'm saying that there are very little of perfect drivers. Even without phone and alcohol, which is a criminal negligence - there's kids, partners, mind wandering, daydreaming, poor vehicle maintenance, crap road designs or surfaces, medical conditions, vision impairments, weather, food, insects, etc which on overall means we are generally very distracted and impaired.
Yes. Many people who've been riding motorcycles more than about 6 months or so (aka and lived), have learned to. A few years on from that, defensive^W paranoid riding is well ingrained.
What really gets me is that people would then not return their vehicle as defective (or never ever again use such a feature). I sold my previous car after it twice false triggered on the auto emergency braking failure and I would expect other car owners to do the same thing.
> half a lane wide sudden moves
In 10k autopilot km's I've never seen that. Yes there is some breaking sometimes, but no swerves yet.
And yes panic breaking pisses me off and lane departure alarms almost caused to rage and return the car.
Also, Musk is very capabale of doing stupid things. Especially when it comes to social media likes. I mean he spent 44 billion for that same reason...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/17/tech/tesla-self-driving-video...
What are lawsuits and fines to someone who buys 40B companies out of boredom / like we comment on HN.
Responsibility and repercussions must become much clearer and more sharply felt to any so called “leadership”.
This is one, if not the main malaise of our times.
Like, wouldn't be too many deaths and accidents set back the goal? And wouldn't a previously acquired bad reputation slow down adoption when it's finally working?
And why not sacrifice short term gains by having say, LIDAR and better hardware at the start, to have the best performing system as fast as possible, and then gradually trim things down once everything works perfectly?
The real problem is that roads are vastly unconstrained systems. An analogy is you can't take a sieve and fill all the holes in it with AI because it has no determinism and you don't know what all the constraints/holes are in the first place. Humans can actually reason in these situations fairly competently, even the stupid ones.
Give up, produce a half decent low price car with basic features that a human drives that frees us from the insane EV pricing jump and perhaps the world will be changed. Self driving cars are not important other than for a few exec egos and companies who want rid of the cost of a human workforce.
This is another fucking race to the bottom and the only innovation is getting people to think it's important.
Self-driving cars should be smart enough to say "You specified a destination downtown. I will wait 4 minutes 23 seconds before departure because we'll have a peak cohort of people driving downtown, and can maximize fuel economy by drafting and traveling as a convoy." Potentially we even get to the point where the cars couple together and form transient "trains" to to spread the wear on the drive systems.
We could even have controls like "A parade/diplomatic mission/emergency vehicle is travelling down XYZ Street; to ensure their security, a two-block radius around it been flagged as no-go for any autonomous vehicles."
He sits on the sidelines for all the billions of problems which are not heavily subsidised by the government in one way or another.
The fearless QB who only takes the field when the team has a 48 points lead and for Uncle Sam's team with uncapped salary ceiling.
A true underdog story. Move over Kurt Warner. Not.
This absurdist comparison isn't to say Musk is as bad as ISIS, but rather action shouldn't be confused with helping.
What's the argument then? Is everyone expected to wait around until public transit is fixed before they work on something else?
AVs are complementary to public transit. You're not going to take a robotaxi from SF to SJ. You might take one to the Caltrain station on either end and avoid needing a personal vehicle at all.
It would help if local leadership could say "You're building a business that has high flexibility in where you site it, so you should place it near a transport hub, rather than off in a suburb that causes a longer average commute for everyone."
Yes, you can't do this for every business-- some have natural dependencies on specific site characteristics, but those seem likely to shape the rest of the city's transport decisions (how many cities have major thoroughfares that parallel existing heavy rail, for example)
Autonomous vehicles promise to expand individual car ownership to some groups that would normally be forced to rely on public transit (people disabled in a way that prevents them from driving, or repeat drunk drivers, for example). For the able-bodied, they promise the relaxed luxury of "someone/thing else is driving and I can work/read/relax" that public transport offers, without having to actually build public transport.
This means the people with the strongest vested interests in public transit are already relatively outcast and underclass, and it will only get worse.
Make the rich and powerful have to take a bus, and suddenly it will become a significant political concern that the schedule is a loose suggestion at best, and that nobody has cleaned the bus since George VI was on the throne.
It would be interesting to expand on your last point-- an AV fleet that compliments public transit as a last-mile offering-- but it doesn't seem to be the model we're seeing sold right now. It's the same old vehicle designs clearly intended for single-family use, long trip times, and low duty cycle. I would imagine an AV system built as a "compliment" might involve small, slow vehicles, almost glorified bumper cars, with like 25km battery range, since the target application is to drive from the train station to a home/office, then return to the station for a battery swap and service. While each trip is a light task, a single vehicle might go on dozens of trips per day and as a result get a completely different wear pattern than your typical Hyundai.
From my exp autonomous driving seems entirely plausible within large cities at slower speeds that don't instantly kill you or others, and outside that just as good a lane assist + cruise control as you can get– the rest is branding FSD and walking back a claim or two around it. It all seems very malleable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway
So, what speed would that be that is safe for pedestrians?
And how useful is FSD that only drives at that speed?
See where this is going?
As for instantaneous death, a collision between a person an automobile at 25 mph is enough to do serious damage to the person. What you've described is autonomous driving at a walking pace, and somehow that doesn't sound so appealing.
https://ktla.com/news/california/company-refutes-claim-that-...
Where one party is motivated by profit and the other is not, I'm inclined to believe the latter. Having seen Cruise vehicles get wedged in traffic first hand I'm inclined to believe the fire department.
> An internal San Francisco Fire Department report said a Cruise autonomous vehicle delayed an ambulance from transporting Davis to hospital, contributing to his death.
> Now, the fire chief says the report was inaccurate in a joint statement with the SFMTA in which they call Davis' death "an all-around heartbreaking and tragic incident."
> "The San Francisco Fire Chief has not attributed this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs," the statement said. "The city sends our deepest condolences to [the] family and friends of the victim."
https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/muni-bus-killed-san-franci...
Cost effective, I don't know what this means in this context. Development costs, rider costs? I don't see why this matters.
Safety is easy to measure. Just measure crash rates.
If your concern is can we engineer a self-driving car with acceptable safety performance, there is only one way to figure that out and it's to try to build one. You're not going to somehow prove it out on paper before trying it.
Seems like it'll be impossible for Tesla. It's less clear for others though, as some of them (Mercedes?) seem to be taking a more responsible development approach.
And taking legal liability in very narrow (essentially useless) circumstances is exactly why it’s a marketing thing. It’s to make it seem like they have an advanced system when there is no evidence of them having it or having any realistic path forward.
After reading that, it's hard to tell what Mercedes is doing. :/
Hopefully it's not just marketing bullshit, but I guess we'll all only find out over time.
If they're taking a measured approach, and it's working, then it seems like they've either bought in the expertise or managed to develop it. :)
That is my new favourite expression and describes 85% of startups.
However on new cars, £28k for a car with 149 miles range or £20k for a car with 400 mile range that the difference in price buys you 77,000 miles of fuel?
This is where you really go off the rails. You can't possibly believe this.
It's ego because it's a gold rush revenue source if it plays off and various CEOs have been pushing because while stock price is rising for the bubble, they're earning.
Self driving cars could potentially end car accidents outright, saving 40,000 lives in just the US per year. But that would put some mechanics out of business.
If we (tech fans) really wanted to help alleviate the problems roads have (traffic, accidents, etc) - public mass transit is the way to go.
But I guess .. where’s the immediate hype-based profit in that? (think: “omg blockchain… I mean nft… I mean ai!!1!!”)
It is freedom. Life is "energy wasting" too, but don't let that get in the way of ideological virtue-signaling...
Those working in the mass transit industry call passengers "cattle" for a reason.
Roads may have problems but the alternative you're proposing is far worse.
Yes, one can get into the car and drive and live “the way of the road” like Ricky’s dad on TPB but again:
How is that freedom?
“Freedom” is american marketing.
Sorry, but "far worse" is simply excessive.
Living in a large European city, namely Paris, and having experienced both car and mass transit, I prefer the second option a lot, to the point I sold my car without replacement about 6 years ago after 2 years of barely using it.
There is of course the ecological aspects, but even in terms of quality of life, I much prefer public transports: it's cheaper, it's less stressful, it's more predictable and I'm able to do other things like reading while transiting.
By comparison, in this context (dense urban area), cars, with their needs (maintenance, parking, etc) are actually more constrain than freedom.
And that's not like I'm a unique case, most of my colleagues either use public transports or (e)bikes, car users are a minority (~20%).
In Paris, there is even a large proportion of the population who didn't even have a driving license at all.
Doesn't it means that mass transit is the perfect solution? no. But in dense urban area, it's probably the best compromise.
I think mostly people are talking at cross purposes though. I too live in a large European city and getting around by car is incredibly constraining (traffic, parking, other drivers etc) while using the public transport system, while not perfect, is smooth in comparison.
However, for less dense areas, eg going on holiday somewhere in the countryside, it is much more convenient to have a car and I suspect that many people are coming from this angle. In those circumstances, I will rent a car as necessary. It doesn’t happen often so I still save in comparison with the cost of owning a car.
Living in sparse suburbs is probably hell without a car. This is partly because of poor town planning but also, I imagine, because a certain set of people want to have that much space. The trouble is that the externalities of the car travel are generally concentrated elsewhere, so it’s a bit unfair.
I don't see how it's pretend. Sure its not true freedom in the sense there's no cost or rules, but cars allow for spontaneity and a way to easily go off the beaten track.
Cars are liberating in the same way a horse would have been hundreds of years ago. A car allows me to go where I want, when I want and that's worth any cost.
They make the average person's life better and I wouldn't want to live in a world where I couldn't drive.
Currently, Americans spend about 100 billion hours driving every year, which is about 11 million man-years.
If you can't see the transformative impacts of freeing up that much time for people to enjoy any other activities, whether it be doing work, reading a book, sleeping, or eating chicken nuggets, then I honestly have no idea what to say.
I just found it somewhat ironic that instead of considering alternatives, people would rather hold out for self driving cars, which may never happen, to reduce time wasted in driving.
Before the damn'demic had the thought that the reason people commute long distance is partly because company VIP's all like to live a) close to work. b) next to each other. Which due to suburbanization forces everyone else to commute. This seems like an incredible waste of societies resources whose costs are born by poor and middle class people. I think the whole work from home thing is a rebellion against that basic unfairness.
If you think about it getting misted because your car plows into oncoming traffic is actually not that bad because some day others will be able to pay $15,000 for DLC in their car that unlocks “road head”. It’s basically on the same level as antibiotics or the Haber-Bosch process in its necessity for the flourishing of mankind
Somehow, when we build a $2 billion Central Subway in San Francisco, through some of the very densest neighborhoods in all of America, with a realized daily ridership of ~3,000, there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
Far too many people are so selfish that they get hung up on questions like “Could this cause death or grevious bodily harm to me or others on the road?” and do not have the ethical fortitude or wherewithal to focus on “What could the abstract concept of ‘transformative’ mean at an unknown point in the future?”
> there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
This is a good point. There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
I'll happily admit there are problems with autonomous vehicles today, and that is not what I dispute. What I dispute is that autonomous vehicles are not important. And of course they are. They would free up more human time than any other invention on the horizon.
However, to the non sequitur point about safety, we are not designing a system from scratch. The existing system has two million crashes per year in the US alone. If the new system has one million crashes, that's a massive improvement.
> There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Once again, you've quickly switched the point to something different. The question was if an astronomically expensive train that carries a mere 3,000 riders a day is also worthy of derision, since few people use it, and all it does is replace walking, freeing them up to play Wordle during their commute.
I also liked how you brought up trains and then said I’ve switched the point when I responded to your point about a train.
I concede that your point about San Francisco’s train ridership is unassailable proof that self driving cars are as important as water treatment and germ theory. Since it is the only train in the world and has less than stellar ridership, it is proof positive that the very concept is worse than a car that drives itself into oncoming traffic.
It is a shame that the author of the article did not take a moment to consider ridership numbers of the San Francisco rail project as his car was attempting a u turn on the freeway. A small minded person could find themself thinking about impending death and not specific train projects worthy of derision.
The main problem is lack of restraint: "Give me $15,000 non-refundable and someday I will deliver the means to make a profit on the car you bought. It already has the hardware." is building up a big potential liability. But, even if forced to refund that FSD money, it's still been cheap capital to grow Tesla.
People even compete to be allowed to perform free beta testing. Great from a business perspective, saves a lot of money on QA.
I prefer to use the software once it has been fully released and has been out for a while for the vendor to iron out any major issues.
To freely chose to beta test the self-driving feature of a huge automobile travelling at high speed on public roads (not a test track) is nearly impossible for me to understand.
Where it the upside to it? Being able to blog about how you nearly died?
Had it gone a bit farther this would have been a good candidate for a Darwin award.
The government needs to give Tesla a week to remove all Autopilot and FSD terms from their products or recall the entirety of the product line. People who paid extra for this unlock should get full refunds for it.
My Kia can provide an amount of self-steering in cruise control which is truly impressive and smoothes the driving experience, but nobody sells it as driving itself, much less charges an extra ten grand for the privilege.
True accountability should hone in on the “natural person”. This needs to change.
For this reason, I always stay clear of Teslas on the road.
Waymo, on the other hand, is actually very good. Waymo is (IMO) actually a bit better/safer than the average human driver, Tesla FSD is way, WAYYYYYYY worse than a human.
I’ve spoken with a number of ppl who’ve taken rides in both Tesla FSD and Waymo, and the reviews are unanimous. Tesla FSD makes major mistakes very regularly, you have to be taking control a lot, it’s a terrifying experience. Waymo actually drives safely and correctly, in a confidence inspiring way, with no need for human intervention.
My long term rental Nissan Rogue lane following system tries to kill me multiple times a day, and only disconnects with an alarm 2seconds+ after leaving the lanes.
Wonder if Tesla could somehow allow to drive with less steering wheel resistance but also autosteer reliably.
I just stopped using it.
Mercedes brought out their first actual self-driving car a few months ago. Unlike driver assistance, where the driver is expected to retain control at all times, it will give at least ten seconds notice -- so you're allowed to take your hands off the wheel, read a book, or watch a video. But it will only let you turn it on in very restricted circumstances.
Say for example a utility company pushed out an update that flipped the power contactor between you and the grid too many times that it caught fire, the company would be taken to court.
I simply just don't understand how Tesla can get away with it.
(And that's not even counting the "Elon Mode" we've since learned is hidden in the firmware.)
The "Elon Mode" thing is an internal-only flag that nobody has been able to activate outside Tesla, and is not actually called that it's just what some guy on Twitter called it.
The other factor is that human attention may be needed in a situation where it is very hard to actively fix the situation if you're not already in the OODA loop. If you suddenly realize you need to override the car, and you're in the middle of a complex merge and the reason you need to override the car is because someone else screwed up, it may not be possible to solve the problem with the extra cost of your attention spinning up.
And the empirical data available (which could definitely be higher fidelity, granted) appears to suggest that the actual safety record is quite good.
So we're left with a trade-off: there are some scenarios where a more featureful system could elevate risk, but there are other scenarios where it lowers them. It's not obvious on paper how to balance them, and the empirical (and, for me, experiential) data indicates the trade-off is a reasonable one.
Perhaps a large amount of the concern around this comes from people not being aware of what it's like to operate a car in this mode. Maybe people think you really don't have to pay attention? It knows when you've got hands on the wheel, it knows when you're looking at your watch or your phone or the car's display, and it will pretty aggressively prevent you from getting complacent. Not only will it beep, it might lock you out from using it entirely. (Lockouts never happens to me, but I have seen tweets from it happening to others.) There was an old pre-Waymo Google talk about how partial driving assistance was dangerous for this reason, and I bought that argument but I no longer find it convincing having used such a system a lot.
Yet it doesn't disengage when you take your hands off the wheel
> What makes it different from lane-keeping assist in other vehicles?
lane assist, assists you in keeping in the lane. It doesn't pretend to be able to drive for you. It also, as far as I can see, doesn't attempt to fling you into cars you're overtaking. (unless you don't use your indicators....)
> bog-standard cruise control?
That again isn't pretending to drive for you. The instructions are generally very clear, like on my car it says in huge text "this aid will not break for you, you must maintain distance as you normally would". Also, it doesn't attempt to steer you into a central reservation. There are shit cruise controls out there, like on the VW golf. That stops you if you attempt to drive past much slower traffic.
> we accept that it is the driver's responsibility to not let that happen.
Yes, because they have been told in no uncertain terms that if you obliterate someone in your car, its your fault and you're going to jail. More over, you were the one driving, so its down to you to not do it. Tesla are shipping untested systems and telling you, as an untrained roboticist supervisor: "don't worry, its safe, it drives it's self!" give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention.
> What is the difference here other than the system is _less likely_ to kill you because it is smarter?
Its not that system. I will fully endorse a safe, tested, verifiable level 4 autonomous driving system. I will not endorse a barely credible level 2 system who's QA system involves YOLO deploying shit to unqualified customers.
Well you don't want it to immediately disengage, which would be insanely dangerous, but it knows if your hands are on the wheel. It will progressively alert you more prominently if it hasn't felt wheel torque from your hands. It will then begin beeping loudly and stop and lock you out from using Autopilot. It also knows whether you are looking at the road from an internal camera and will beep if you are looking at your phone, watch, or the car's screen. This system works quite well.
> lane assist, assists you in keeping in the lane. It doesn't pretend to be able to drive for you. It also, as far as I can see, doesn't attempt to fling you into cars you're overtaking. (unless you don't use your indicators....)
"Pretending to drive for you" is meaningless. It's a feature that takes over driving functions that requires active supervision and that if you do not pay attention can cause a crash. The conditions of how it might cause that crash are not particularly important conceptually. What matters is that there is an expectation you pay attention or you might crash. The primary difference is cruise control is worse at driving.
> Yes, because they have been told in no uncertain terms that if you obliterate someone in your car, its your fault and you're going to jail. More over, you were the one driving, so its down to you to not do it. Tesla are shipping untested systems and telling you, as an untrained roboticist supervisor: "don't worry, its safe, it drives it's self!" give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention.
This is also the case with FSD. You're told its your fault. You're told it's your responsibility. They do not say "don't worry it drives itself" or give you the impression that you don't really need to pay that much attention. In fact it says the following, among other things you must explicitly accept, enable, and agree to:
> Full Self-Driving is in early limited access Beta and must be used with additional caution. It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent. When FSD is enabled your Model 3 will make lane changes off highway, select forks to follow your navigation route, navigate around other vehicles and objects, and make left and right turns. Use FSD in limited Beta only if you will pay constant attention to the road, and be prepared to act immediately, especially around blind corners, crossing intersections, and in narrow driving situations. Cabin Camera is used to detect driver attentiveness while FSD Beta is in-use to provide you with audible alerts, reminding you to keep your eyes on the road.
> I will not endorse a barely credible level 2 system who's QA system involves YOLO deploying shit to unqualified customers.
I'm not looking for your endorsement, I was trying to explain why the system is legal and probably less dangerous than you think. Also obviously they QA it before it goes out to "unqualified" customers.
Why - in this highly safety critical domain - is there ever anything close to “beta” software accessible to end-users? What about all other participants in traffic? This “perpetual beta” approach hasn’t been industry best practice for most of its existence.
There used to be years long development and testing procedures, all happening outside of common traffic.
This is all a big marketing racket attempted to as “efficiently as possible” transfer most of risks and costs on masterfully deceived consumers and the ever unquestioned public.
Regulation is a trailing thing, we need people not to be default evil for us to have a society.
Also, the time it take to charge your EV compared to filling your gas car is silly after spending $50k to $200k!.
You could get rid of the car...