> The car then asks you to leave a recorded message explaining why you intervened, and the struggle is to use words instead of screaming over and over.
I suspect self-driving mode will be safer than human drivers only when every car is driving itself. Meat and silicon brains sharing the same road in large chunks of high velocity metal is a scary prospect.
Or disable self-driving in hyper-dense areas such as cities? I know close to nothing about cars and driving but I guess it's an ok thing to have outside of cities?
I imagine it could also make congestion more efficient. I believe a big factor to congestion is human behavior. We at least have good ideas about better ways to drive during congestion.. which humans rarely follow.
If your self-driving car lacks the scene understanding to notice a kid's about to run out from behind that truck, chasing that ball - safer to be on the freeway, where there are no kids chasing balls.
Or if your self-driving car struggles with tight corners, or complex junctions? You won't see many of those on the freeway.
On the other hand, if your self-driving car suffers random failures to stop, unexpected swerving or a propensity to hit into stationary objects - I agree lower speeds would be safer.
Sure but a city is really complicated, you have people crossing, biking, skateboarding. You have delivery trucks blocking the street, construction work, etc.
Another option would be to build driverless road lanes, repurpose the carpool and truck lanes, or designate certain streets. Seems like a no-brainer for improving safety.
I think it also would have been easier/faster to build networked vehicles that can communicate with one another over a standard protocol, but for some reason the industry didn’t opt to standardize things in that way, and now we have a bunch of rogue driverless cars that make independent decisions instead of taking into account each other’s plans.
> Another option would be to build driverless road lanes, repurpose the carpool and truck lanes, or designate certain streets. Seems like a no-brainer for improving safety.
You can call those driverless road lanes "tracks" and put some trains on it.
Given some of the issues we've seen with other cars driving correctly and predictably or negotiating things that aren't cars on the road, I'm not sure taking the human element out of it is enough. It would be safer still if the cars can talk to each other and to the roads.
Tech bros looove to reinvent train over and over again. Let's make self driving, which does not work with other participant, so let's put it on special roads, with special signage and nobody else is allowed to enter such roads. Whoops, train again.
It's full, until it's not. i.e. it does drive the car "fully", but can and does refuse at times if you get too far off where it knows, into terrain it doesn't understand, weather it's not trained on, roads it doesn't like, drivers around you doing things it's not expecting, etc.
This is the genius or fallacy of Tesla's marketing, depending on how you look at it. There IS a standard from the SAE for describing autonomous driving that everyone else uses.
By that standard, FSD is still at Level 2 out of 5. (But probably approaching level 3 in the next few years.)
FSD as Tesla markets it (above the asterisk of course) would be level 5 autonomy where the car can complete a trip to any destination completely independent of any driver intervention. The current tech is not that.
The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions.
> The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions.
Wouldn't this be the case with Tesla's FSD? I make trips that are fully driven by FSD (I'm using it again this month, but I had a 3 month trial when I bought the car), would you consider routinely successful operation within non-prescribed boundaries a "certain area"?
I guess the disconnect between the critics and fans (I am one) is over the marketing; my understanding of "Tesla Full Self Driving" is not level 5 autonomy, it's "can drive better than my teenager most of the time".
I (think I) understand the catastrophic downside risk of computer operated machinery in an uncontrolled environment, but my experience has been very positive. I think I understand the feature for what it is, an amazing and useful if imperfect tool, regardless of what it's called.
(caveat: FSD is the only automated driving I've experienced)
I used it to go from Atlanta to San Diego to Oregon to Ohio and back last fall. On the highways it was like a train on rails, in national parks it was like a slow roller coaster. In cities it was a free Uber driver. I never had to take over for safety, and total ended up manual driving less than 1%.
Tesla's "Full self driving" is a driver assistance system, a.k.a smart cruise control. At no point while using it are you supposed to stop driving, you simply stop providing control inputs to the vehicle.
Systems where the human is not directly operating the vehicle are referred to as autonomous. You may also see them referred to by the SAE level system as L3, L4, or L5, each denoting autonomy in successively larger parts of the driving space.
I, and apparently a lot of other people on the Internet find the latest Tesla FSD update pretty incredible. There's a reason why Tesla gave it as a free trial to everyone. I drove it downtown and back without any interventions this weekend.
Is it 100% perfect? Of course not. But this article is the ultimate in low effort. A person who felt that the car might hit another one but probably not. Yes, real value there.
What’s low effort in sharing your personal experience? It’s very clearly written as an opinion.
Any reader would be reasonable to assume that there are other opinions out there, and that this opinion may be in the minority.
That said, I’m happy to see a dissenting opinion in the comments here! Would be curious to see others thoughts in the sudden appearance of a free trial.
The author went in with a negative attitude opening with hate for the CEO and then proceeded to diss the product based on how it "felt like it was about to" do something bad rather than what it actually did. It seems that the author has already decided that it was bad before trying it and then decided to confirm their bias based on vague feelings.
I find it extremely biased and lacking in substance.
I get it though... Elon does deserve a lot of hate so I guess the HN crowd is gleefully cheering out of schadenfreude whenever someone says something along the lines of "Tesla bad".
My devil’s advocate response for that would be that Tesla as the first mover on the market gets to call their product whatever they want.
Is a “garbage disposal” a device that can dispose of all garbage in your sink? No, all it can handle is light food scraps. But the inventor named it a “garbage disposal” not a “light food waste processing device.”
To me it seems stupid that so much of the debate after all these years is about the name. I think we are beyond the point where the name matters.
They get to call it that when it can drive safely on snow covered roads. Before that happens, it's marketing hype that can't be relied on in all scenarios. When they transitioned to radar-only, they sold "FSD" that needed a whitelist to ignore the sensor input in problematic locations. What other half-baked hacks are in the current implementation?
And yet nobody cares that lottery products have names that imply winning, prizes, pots of gold, etc even though almost nobody wins statistically.
Again, I just think that marketing is marketing and everyone knows that. Everyone knows that a trash bag isn’t indestructible and that a paper towel can’t absorb a tsunami.
I’ve used FSD since the first invite beta and this version has been a step back for me. Multiple break checks on the freeway, incredibly bad path planning through intersections where it just switches lanes mid way through, random turn signals coming on for no reason, list can go on. It’s like they just tweaked some params to reduce the shakiness of the wheel but didn’t actually do much to improve confidence.
And yet, I still get phantom braking daily with autopilot and auto wipers that don't actually seem to understand what rain is. Call me EXTREMELY skeptical that FSD is ever going to be viable when they can't even get basic blocking and tackling right that every other vendor has had solved for a decade.
^^it's horrible, I end up turning them off most of the time because I feel bad. The auto-dim when you're behind another car is about half the distance of every other car I've ever driven.
My least favorite part of the article was where the author complained about the “financial mistake” of the car, about how they were underwater on their car loan.
Depreciation is a normal and expected part of buying a car. If you are financing a car you should be prepared to keep it for a long period of time. While many automakers offer car loans of 5+ years, ideally you should only finance a car for 3 or 4 years and/or put more money down to ensure you are never underwater.
At no point did the author say that the car didn’t do its job as a reliable piece of transportation, but somehow it was a “financial mistake.”
The fact that cars depreciate and cost too much is a feature of all cars.
> Depreciation is a normal and expected part of buying a car
The problem is that Tesla owners are spoiled. I bought my Model Y just before the supply crunch in June of 2021, and within a year used models were selling for 20% more than I paid. They've since come down a ton as demand levelled off, but even now my car has depreciated only about 18% (including inflation!) from the cost of a brand new Y with the same configuration.
It's easy enough to imagine a young Tesla buyer over the last few years getting a very weird picture of the financials of owning a car.
Most car manufacturers take some efforts to try and ensure residuals stay reasonable, otherwise customers will be less keen to repeat buy for obvious reasons. Setting prices correctly at launch is key for this.
What Tesla did, which historically is not a "normal and expected part of buying a car", is repeatedly slash list pricing after launch, thus meaning the used market does not trust valuing them, as so many used car dealers got very badly burned on inventory they paid too high a price for when the new car prices came down, putting them all underwater.
These aren't small or predictable market moves either; they are random swings. The Model S and Model X have been reduced new by as much as 24% at times. This Simply Does Not Happen at most car companies, most of the time, and residuals are more stable as a result.
Imagine you had just taken stock of a used model S, valuing it based on purchase price "n", then tomorrow the manufacturer slashes the price of a new one by 24%. That's very, very hard not to end up underwater.
Similarly, for existing owners - that 24% cut has just shifted the depreciation curve massively, and not in your favor. Existing owners frankly have every right to be pissed.
The flip side of all this is a used Tesla can be a really great option right now for some folks - bulk of depreciation is over, maintenance/running costs are some of the lowest in the industry (ignoring EV insurance costs I guess, but thats another topic...). The traction battery/motors/drivetrains regularly get to 300k miles. I'd have no problem at all recommending a used 3/Y at the right price to someone if EV fits their lifestyle etc.
Probably why I used the word "most" here. Residuals matter, even to the manufacturer.
If residuals plummet too much, their lease accounting can go red too. Lease rates have to account for a future predicted value of the vehicle, and manufacturers strangely like making money on leases.
Also, the huge depreciation on a Maserati isn't a surprise, most of the time. A mass produced vehicle selling in the hundreds of thousands annually seeing double digit list price shifts at random did come as a surprise, and has put car dealers underwater on Tesla inventory before.
Considering you are putting your life, that of your family and everyone on the street around you in the hands of this software, I don't get the nonchalant "sure, it's not perfect" attitude like you were trying out the beta version of a new note taking app. It absolutely has to be 100% perfect before being allowed on the streets.
I use it daily and I would be the first person to agree that it isn't 100% perfect, but not in the way you are assuming. The flaws it has are that it errs on the side of being too cautious.
Being overly cautious on the road is as bad as being reckless. The frequent example about 4-way stops is a perfect one. If a car is behaving unpredictably and stopping when it's their turn to go then it is creating a dangerous situation for everyone at the intersection.
Of course, it's a spectrum. It's nowhere near dangerously over-cautious. I'd describe it as a very prudent new driver. It drives the way most people probably should, but that means there's a little hesitation in low-risk scenarios sometimes. All you need to do is tap the accelerator and it instantly gets the message. We're talking about something that's barely an inconvenience, but it isn't the "100% perfection" the people here seem to blindly demand.
I drove my car downtown and back yesterday 100% perfectly. So while you're happy with not 100% perfect, what about other road users who have no say in whether you turn on your not 100% perfect death machine?
Don't know which utopia you live in, but are you really happy with the other drivers texting, sleepy, high or just completely incompetent at the wheel?
If anything, FSDs are over-cautious and slow down to well below speed limits if they can't make out conditions. So, yes I'd say other drivers shouldn't complain about a system that still requires a human to constantly pay attention and keep their hands on the wheel.
It makes driving a lot more relaxing in a way that you don't appreciate until you get used to it. My feet are off the pedals and can stretch, I don't have to steer so my attention is only partly on the road ( the interior camera monitors to see if you're looking ahead and not on your phone for example ) If I have to change the music I don't have to worry about the car in front of me suddenly braking etc.
I've been using FSD for years now at day and night and I think it's been ready for Level 3 going straight on Interstates/highways for a while now. The latest update significantly improves taking turns along a route.
I commented on this thread elsewhere that I wish there was a standard suite of requirements for all automakers to certify the self-driving levels on their cars. Otherwise, I feel too much of the discussion is being polluted by people who agree or disagree with Elons politics.
If paying full attention to driving is so tiresome to you please don't drive. My impression of this description is that FSD is getting good enough to lull drivers into not paying enough attention. There shouldn't be a product like that either Tesla takes responsibility like Waymo or makes a clearly L2 system that is good at limited things. Blurring the line like this is going to get even more dangerous as FSD gets better
There are lots of cool things that probably shouldn't used by people operating heavy machinery. Phones for example.
From my experience working in this space though, judging quality is extremely difficult. For one thing, different people have different criteria. I've taken rides with other people where we all had different opinions on the quality of the ride at the end. These systems (FSD especially), can also be highly sensitive to specific details of the situation. Two drives in apparently similar conditions have meaningfully different behavior because the system understands them differently. It's very difficult to compare apples to apples outside statistics and simulation.
All this is to say: don't dismiss feelings or intuition about the danger. These are good caution signs and talking about them can help companies improve the product.
> There are lots of cool things that probably shouldn't used by people operating heavy machinery. Phones for example.
I will tell you straight up that a Tesla model Y on FSD 12.3.3 is a safer vehicle operator than a human being using a phone. Period. No qualifications. Under all circumstances.
FWIW, I'm happy to see the "Yeah" there. But regarding the "and", it gets to the sincerity of the discussion. In a world where literally millions of people are texting from the drivers seat of a moving vehicle every day, freaking out on the internet about a handful of robots doing less dangerous stuff seems maybe a little performative.
I have a bit of professional interest here because building these kinds of systems safely is my job, whereas distracted driving isn't something I can meaningfully change as an individual. At the very least, I can explain to others what a safe development process looks like.
I think everyone using this product should be asking themselves why we don't have an objective measure for the quality (or lack thereof!) of the product.
With every new release of FSD, there are people quick to say it's a breakthrough, and amazing, while others lament it doesn't nearly do what it says on the lid.
Why are we putting safety critical systems we can’t adequately measure on our streets?! There are people who confidently state that Tesla's FSD is already better than humans.
Where's the data?! Why isn't it open? Why can't we build an objective measure for effectiveness and safety of each of these releases?
I'd love to see all cars (including Waymo) compete on a standard set of tests with clear gates as to what conditions they'd be allowed to go to Levels 3, 4 or 5.
The data isn't open because it's not required to be. Every manufacturer is either making a good faith effort to collect that data (to their own standards) or they probably shouldn't be on the road. Regulators, NHTSA especially, don't have the expertise, time, or mandate to get it from them, analyze it, and make it available. That could (and should) change though.
As an unrelated aside, measuring safety performance is hard. Doing it accurately without putting vehicles on the street is probably impossible. Simulation is not a fully adequate replacement for road testing and many companies are already looking at cutting the latter because of the expense. It'd be nice for regulators to outline an acceptable road test framework that better balances the goal of public safety from unsafe vehicles against ensuring safety can be demonstrated in real world environments.
Of course Tesla is not participating - the real numbers would make them look disastrous.
Regarding objective measures for the quality - the famous standards for level 1-5 etc. Objectively speaking, Tesla's system is Level 2. There are other companies at level 3, and some others operating fully autonomous vehicles.
As to why Tesla chooses to base all their claims on purely subjective and highly cherry-picked numbers and videos ? We all know the answer to this question.
There are several reasons - for some it's about security, for other about truth.
I find it fascinating that a guy become the richest person in the world, by convincing 'investors' that a Level 2 system is 'almost ready' for a Robotaxi operation and will make them infinite money. To give him credit, he also did mention that Tesla is worthless if it doesn't solve FSD.
Elon is missing a huge opportunity by not hiring his flight attendants from this website. Wouldn't have to buy any horses and probably wouldn't even have to ask.
calling opinions "low effort" seems to suggest that everyone needs to be an expert in anything they talk about. I keep coming across this in technical circles and I find it discourages honest sharing and harms psychological safety
I don't think it's low effort at all. In fact, I totally see where the author is coming from despite loving FSD and using it often.
Driving is a very personal activity. There are nearly infinitely many variables driving every decision during every drive, and the default experience that people will want from something like this is "someone that mostly drives like me and never makes mistake because computers".
FSD is not that. It will be a while before it is that. Until then, I can totally understand someone "never using this again" (for a while) over a few fumbles that FSD made that they would not have (in most cases).
Tesla has to know this because they also know that if even 10k Tesla buyers decide to subscribe to FSD, that's an extra $2M/month that can be (mostly) shoveled back into training infrastructure!
> So would I pay the money for it? Fear on this level seems like a pretty poor use of $12,000 or $199 a month. You can rent a horror movie for $2.99, and paying attention to America is free.
I like the way the author writes this. Interesting to hear unfiltered thoughts from a first-time user of the software.
To be clear: the author wrote it because they knew you'd like it, and interpret their florid prose as "unfiltered". The rest of us using boring English to tell you that it's been driving us around for almost two years now don't get the same kind of click traffic.
Meh. Believe what you want; read what you want; fear what you want. Whether it "works" or not is a question susceptible to factual analysis, not vocabulary.
Actually, articles like this can kneecap the service using regulatory pressure if enough people don’t want to even wait for “factual analysis” since that’s actual human lives on the line.
HN talks a lot about “we need FDA to preemptively block chemicals that seem like they’d be dangerous”. This is the logical extension of that.
It is a hilarious way of writing but it is quite common to find people who are fearful of new technology. In the 1890s I'm sure that people fearful of motor vehicles would consider it a "pretty poor use of money" to buy a "horseless carriage".
Sure and people fearful of horseless carriages in the 1890s are rightfully fearful of dying since:
* horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
* the greater speed of horseless carriages in the 1890s without modern safety infrastructure like signs and traffic lights does greatly increase the risk of injury
Not sure what the point is here? My point is that OP is not afraid of new tech per-se, but instead doesn't like where it is now and finds it dangerous.
I'm sure in time the technology will evolve and there won't be a new car on the road that wouldn't support FSD - just like it did with "horseless carriages". It will take some more time though and not all companies will be equally advanced. From what I've heard (from other sources too) I wouldn't want to be driven by a Tesla FSD at the moment.
> * horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
Off topic, but interesting - if you think about it, we actually already had mostly-FSD in the 1890s. It just ate a whole lot of grass.
My point is that OP's post which espouses a common fear, even if it may be justified for some, is not really interesting. I don't want to gatekeep HN, but personally I do not enjoy this type of content.
A secondary implied point is that new technologies which may seem dangerous can still be safe and useful when used properly, such as driving horseless carriages carefully in the 1890s or using FSD (Supervised) with proper supervision as directed.
True, every bad technology is just ford's car, wright brother's plane, more than 256MB of RAM, and the internet. From blockchain to generative ai to FSD. No don't think about all the other bad technologies that have a similar profile to these and never went anywhere (or worse), only think about the extreme edge cases that don't have a similar profile.
Yeah… I have to intervene frequently when my mother is driving - she frequently turns to talk to me or whoever the passenger is, and while I’d in principle trust her judgment, she’s had a head-on with another car and driven off the road twice while doing this, and that’s only the times I have been present.
My wife does this too, and has fishtailed on the highway when she has suddenly realised she’s drifted across two lanes while not looking at the road. She frequently decides to read and write messages while driving, with me and our infant daughter in the car.
I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers.
> I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers.
Further compounded by entitlement of freedom, imo. Yes, we all want freedom, but our ability to reduce public safety should be earned i suspect. We are very lax with driving safety and requirements (in the US at least). I mean hell, what percentage of people actually drive the speed limit, anyway?
I don't know if competence is overestimated compared to the willingness to persistently pay attention and simultaneously remember that it takes approximately 3 seconds to go from happily driving along to stopped in the highway in a wreckage wondering if your family is still alive or if you'll ever walk again.
Which is to say, the risks of driving have become so sanitized, that we think it's something that is easy to automate. Arguably, if all road lanes were made 18 inches more narrow, we'd have a lot of the same effects. You have to pay a lot more attention in a narrow lane than one that is super wide. Generally though, humans are very competent drivers when paying attention and patient.
The other part, it's hard to be patient given how much time is spent travelling via car and stuck in traffic jams. People get used to zooming around at 40 ~ 70mph, combined with the over-confidence of from the illusion of safety (all the road signs, extra wide lanes, road markers, obstructions removed from the road)...
I think it just combines to a place where humans are poor drivers because they become impatient and stop paying attention all the time. It's like that first day of work, where everything you do - you have to think about incredibly hard. Eventually it all becomes 'auto-pilot', and this is encouraged by the road infrastructure; even to the extent that we think it's an easy problem to automate.
"Better than many human drivers" is not good enough. "Better than 99.99% of human drivers" might be
I can't wait to remove the entire "fell asleep and hit a tree", "drunkenly drove through a stop sign and killed a kid" class of accidents, but that alone is not enough
> But usage of the feature has been low, perhaps in part because if you’ve spent $40-90,000 on a car, spending another five figure sum is annoying, and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love.
<s>Pssh. These people are letting the emotions of humans keep them from innovating, disrupting, and generally becoming certified Silicon Valley sharks.</s>
For people who have not been following FSD closely it is important to understand this is the equivalent of GPT-3. The RoboTaxi will be running the equivalent of GPT-5.
There are places with accessible taxis, Ubers, and public transit where people with DUIs still have their license. Not that a suspended license would prevent them from driving anyway.
That's a bad analogy because not only is autonomous driving not generative AI / LLM based, but the problem space, objective, and risk profile is fundamentally different.
Possibly, but this has kind of been the summary of each FSD software update over the years. I recall similar amazed comments when FSD v9 came out 3 years ago, and transitioned from radar to vision for depth perception.
Each release likely has gotten measurably better, and more usable, but at this point I seriously doubt that V12 is "the one".
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 11 times and I'm just going to buy a Mercedes EV.
You can’t trust those Tesla influencer YouTubers. Tesla is well aware of the popular channels and go out of their way to fix their specific problems with their routes. They even sent a team out to fix chucks left turn.
Nah, random Youtubers aren't at all a representative sample. Much better to just try it out, since it's now deployed on a large number of cars.
We have it on our Y, we're in suburban America, and its average number of attempted very-obvious moving violations per 15 minute trip seems to be about 2, and 1 attempt at curbing the wheels or something similar.
It doesn't seem to have any concept of things like conditional school zone speed limits (it consistently ignores those), school busses with their stop signs out, or any unusual scenario like that. I'm not willing to try it in anything dicier at the moment, like taking turns at an all-way stop. Even multi-lane left turns are hair raising, because it doesn't seem to consistently stay in its own turn lane, instead drifting toward the car next to us.
This experiment has ended for us for now, it's much too stressful to actually use, like being driven around by a bottom-percentile drivers' ed student. It's an incredibly impressive bit of technology, but simultaneously nowhere near good enough to not be an incredible liability.
I'm biased for them, if anything - I’ve been a shareholder since before the Model S launch - but it's not there.
Except the vast majority of the videos of FSD posted are absolutely not random.
There is an entire army of influencers who are both - shareholders and Tesla owners - and who promote FSD and everything Tesla pretty much as a full time job now. Whole Mars Blog is probably the most prolific one.
Regardless of safety, I won't use FSD because it is too embarrassing when it takes forever to figure out it can safely go. It also drops down to 2mph in my neighborhood to go over a small pot hole, that everyone else would just go around.
A shame the author doesn't mention what FSD release the car he used was on? There is significant differences in performance now, especially the cars on the 12.3.x branches that have the new end-to-end route planner etc. It would be my first question to anyone reporting on an FSD experience.
Someone trying an 11.x version and someone on 12.x will have significantly different experiences at the moment, with 12.x having some of the biggest advancements we've seen since Tesla began doing this. 12.x is still rolling out to fleet now, with only ~40% of cars on it if the online Tesla fleet version trackers can be believed.
I'm not suggesting it might change the author's feelings completely if he was on a 12.x branch of FSD, but the jump from 11 to 12 has been siginificant.
EDIT: not sure why the downvotes - its a legitimate question the original article doesn't answer...
I'd guess the author of the post is on v12.3.3. Their experience with the automatic update and auto engaged FSD demo appears identical to my experience the past two weeks on v12.3.3.
While I think there is far to go in development terms, and I wouldn't recommend buying it either, my experiences on 12.3.3 are not identical to this at all.
Looks like the free trial cars are currently split across v12.3.2.1/12.3.3 depending on OS update.
“Hi! Welcome to the volunteer program for Tesla’s QA division. Thank you for doing for free and without any risks (for us) something that would cost us millions of dollars and a lot of headache. Our mini… ehm, customers are the best! Please don’t forget to leave a detailed description of why you had to intervene 18 times during your 10-minute ride to your kids’ school earlier today. Remember: your feedback means a safer system (otherwise, no updates!)”
TLDR They drove down narrow 1-lane streets and had to disengage once. While this sounds quite impressive, the article spends a lot of time focused on fear of FSD. There's even a hypothetical comment that he will surely be hit by an FSD enabled car.
> It was silly. Can we just accept that? Okay, thank you. Moving on.
For what it's worth one of my clients installs charging stations and after meeting maybe hundreds of Tesla owners I assure you(anecdotally) that 19 out of 20 don't mention the CEO at all. Most Americans don't even have a twitter account(less than a third do) so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Most are non car people(as in, they wouldn't have bought a BMW or Mercedes, they were happy with a toyota) just excited about the tech that goes into the car. It means no more to the average driver on the road than what Henry Fords' opinions were(and they were worse)
> so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online.
Maybe true about Twitter or Elon specifically, but i suspect if we ignore "on Twitter" specifically, far too many people are "chronically online" or chronically drinking news cycle drama.
Ie i generally agree that people often think e-drama is more real than it is, but i also suspect we shouldn't undersell how many humans are addicted to tube fed drama. Fear sells, and we've got a lot of industries that focus on this.
That applies to SAE levels 3, 4, and 5, which would ban useful and safe robotaxis like Waymo but not Tesla FSD (Supervised), which is a level 2 driver assist system that requires constant supervision.
Regardless of how good FSD turns out to be in any manufacturer's vehicles, I can't help but think that there are better ways to tackle transportation than giving every single person their own car that they have to pay for.
I live in a city with an unusually high number of highway miles per capita. I have to drive 24 miles each way to and from work. AI that can complete this task for me, safely, is pretty cool, but still largely hypothetical and not available to most people. What I'd really like is public transit and an honest national conversation about urban sprawl. My metro area is more-or-less three Manhattans placed side-by-side, but with 2.5 million in population. That's insane. Another automotive technology isn't going to solve that.
The solution to traffic is definitely not self driving cars. If truly self driving cars became available which cost no more than comparable (non self driving) cars, then the total cost of driving would go down. Here in “total cost” I’m including the obvious costs like insurance and gas/electricity as well as the total physical energy required driving. With true self driving (i.e. not Tesla FSD in which many are left stressed wondering if it will work right), the act of driving will be easier. In fact, the cost of sitting in traffic will be lower since you can space out while the car does the work. The natural consequence is that the amount of traffic on roads will _increase_ and overall traffic will increase.
The solution to traffic is the same as it’s always been: increase throughput on fewer vehicles. In other words, you should take the bus or the train or increase carpooling or really anything that gets fewer vehicles out of the transportation network. Most importantly the solution is to be less individualistic and more focused on the problem as a collective. Self driving cars are the opposite of that solution.
The problem is that car-dependence is a problem with a lot of hysteresis to it:
If everyone already has cars, it takes a lot to get people out of cars --- if someone already has a car, taking the bus to go somewhere slower than driving is completely out of the question. Conversely, if everyone doesn't have cars, it takes a lot to get people to drive cars due to the upfront cost of car ownership.
I think more transit-oriented city development is definitely the way to go. But nibbling away at the problem is going to take a long time. I think robotaxis are definitely going to play a part in this: by being compatible with existing car-dependent infrastructure and providing a similar speed and flexibility as privately owned cars, existing car owners are more likely to give up personal car ownership. Once people stop owning cars, they would be more amenable to development that gets rid of parking spots, improves walkability, increases density, implements mass transit, and so on.
Why do you say robotaxis specifically here, compared to taxis, or rideshare apps, public transit, etc.? It seems like the benefits you list for robotaxis apply to the others too.
You are right that the benefits for robotaxis applies to the others too. Personally, I'm rooting for robotaxis because it's simply cheaper without needing the human driver. Theoretically, this also makes it more equitable. Just like maids and servants, I think that human-driven rideshare is only viable by exploiting a lower paid underclass. If the rideshare drivers were paid more, then it becomes too expensive for most people to use for daily transportation.
As for buses, they have many of the same drawbacks as personal cars (gets stuck in traffic) while having more disadvantages like slower speed, making them an unattractive option for people who already own cars. Buses are incredibly good for already dense cities where people aren't already car-dependent, however, and some of these drawbacks can also be overcome with dedicated lanes and other tricks.
In my opinion, the king of urban transportation is undoubtedly the grade separated subway or elevated train, which, if implemented properly, can have a speed advantage over cars in some cases since they are immune to traffic and weather conditions despite needing to have many stops. Of course, this is also expensive to build and requires high density to be viable.
> You are right that the benefits for robotaxis applies to the others too. Personally, I'm rooting for robotaxis because it's simply cheaper without needing the human driver.
Hence they would increase traffic and slow down commutes. Maybe we’re fine with that, but we should at least be honest with ourselves.
My opinion: if you look at what the average American pays to have their own vehicle (fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance, financing), I think you can make the argument people are literally willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month instead of sitting next to people on public transit.
Would this be the case if public transit was better? Not sure which is obviously your point. I guess I'm trying to argue "the demand for not-public-transit is there, so maybe that's why public transit isn't improved upon"
If you look at the history of American city design, you'll find that it's not free market demand that has brought us to this point, but pretty heavy lobbying and more from the automotive industry (which also has seeded this idea that public transit is inherently inferior). Elon Musk is also guilty of this by seeding the hyperloop idea in order to try and stop efforts around high speed rail. Public transit really works when it's done well, and benefits everybody. If we actually design and invest in it well, it will be used.
True, though as wages continue to remain flat in the face of rising costs, I think you'll see a heightened interest in not being held to owning or leasing a car.
The US had a vigorous middle class when the Interstate Highway System was implemented. A family of four could own a home in the suburbs on one income, and it was fine to spend 15 minutes driving from said suburban home to the office. None of that is true any longer.
Those same Americans travel to Switzerland and are amazed at the level of good public transit.
Americans who have never left this country (the vast majority) have no idea how competently ran government services can look like.
We also have a party in the US that actively adds more regulatory pressure IFF the government is the main stakeholder in a project. For example, environmental protections are significantly stricter (arguably, to a fault) if the project is being led by the government.
Also, for example, the government is not really allowed to negotiate Medicaid medication prices. Something private insurance does not need to deal with.
I don't think any manufacturer or buyer would tell you that's one of the problems they are trying to solve. People buy cars for status, comfort, fun, and convenience. A distant notion of a carless world that most people can't imagine is never going to get any traction in the United States if it's positioned as an alternative to cars.
I believe FSD is step one in abolition of personal vehicle is urban areas.
I also believe FSD cars that actually can go on any dirt road are still at least ten years away, maybe decades.
Then we still need to have a park of shared FSD vehicles big enough to become a reliable mean of transportation. This is also going to take a couple of decades. I won’t see this for sure.
I tried this FSD beta for the model X in a 30-minute test drive recently. I used local street to test. It failed pretty hard when encountering the 4-way stop. The FSD couldn't decide whether to go or not and just stuck in the drive-n-brake cycle for a few times. I didn't want to piss off the drivers behind me so I had to disengage the FSD to get over the 4-way stop. After that, it was able to drive itself to the dealership parking lot. This feature is $8000 for that car. I'm pretty sure not going to pay that much for it.
> and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love
Simple solution, get an even heavier tank. Where it starts getting tricky is when you are dealing with people who also value lives on the wrong side of the windscreen.
Our first Model 3 from 2019 was leased with FSD, which was definitely underwhelming enough to barely ever turn it on. We drove from southern Germany to Venice Italy without even thinking of using it once.
When the leasing contract came to an end, we got the refreshed model 3 from 2024, this time without any driving assistant, just the plain normal car. And I haven't missed any of it, just the park assistant was nice because now I can't park it on the side of the small European streets first try, but I'll learn eventually.
It was a horrible deal back then for 5000€, now it's more expensive and hasn't gotten any better.
What a crap article - I couldn't disagree more with his fearful conclusion.
FSD on my Model Y is fun. There's no reason to fear because it's extremely intuitive to take over if it makes a poor decision - any resistance on the steering wheel immediately disengages Full Self Driving.
I've used FSD for thousands of both highway and city miles, and like any new experience, you shouldn't judge it based off of your first few tries.
After a short time, you learn which scenarios it handles with ease (highway driving, clearly marked roads with other traffic it can follow), and which scenarios it struggles with (dips in roads, emergency vehicles on shoulder, large open intersections without clear markings, construction zones).
FSD is basically magic. I'm a software guy, and I'm shocked how well FSD handles an insane variety of situations.
In my local town, I feel I'm quite a bit better driver than my FSD. However, when I visit an unfamiliar city, FSD often handles new situations better than I would have. We're living in the future.
Also, there's several comments here about how timid FSD can be merging or at a four-way-stop or similar; very true! Yet you just tap the gas pedal to let it know it's safe to proceed, and FSD takes it from there. Or just manually accelerate, and FSD will happily handle the steering while I handle the speed.
I've been using it this month (I own a Model 3 and do not like Musk's behaviour but don't really care, I like car), and it's been great. I have a 30-minute commute with moderate traffic and lots of lights, occasional aggressive jerks, and it's been (mostly) predictable and useful.
Caveats: I don't let it make left turns in traffic, too stressful. It's sketchy around yellow lights (go through, please). It can aggressively brake for cars getting out of the road.
It makes me a more relaxed, less aggressively driver, er, supervisor, and it's quirks are pretty easily mitigated by taking over the accelerator or just reclaiming control.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadLol
Or if your self-driving car struggles with tight corners, or complex junctions? You won't see many of those on the freeway.
On the other hand, if your self-driving car suffers random failures to stop, unexpected swerving or a propensity to hit into stationary objects - I agree lower speeds would be safer.
I think it also would have been easier/faster to build networked vehicles that can communicate with one another over a standard protocol, but for some reason the industry didn’t opt to standardize things in that way, and now we have a bunch of rogue driverless cars that make independent decisions instead of taking into account each other’s plans.
You can call those driverless road lanes "tracks" and put some trains on it.
I would say that is obviously not full self driving - but I suppose I'll never succeed in marketing with an attitude like that.
By that standard, FSD is still at Level 2 out of 5. (But probably approaching level 3 in the next few years.)
FSD as Tesla markets it (above the asterisk of course) would be level 5 autonomy where the car can complete a trip to any destination completely independent of any driver intervention. The current tech is not that.
The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions.
Wouldn't this be the case with Tesla's FSD? I make trips that are fully driven by FSD (I'm using it again this month, but I had a 3 month trial when I bought the car), would you consider routinely successful operation within non-prescribed boundaries a "certain area"?
I guess the disconnect between the critics and fans (I am one) is over the marketing; my understanding of "Tesla Full Self Driving" is not level 5 autonomy, it's "can drive better than my teenager most of the time".
I (think I) understand the catastrophic downside risk of computer operated machinery in an uncontrolled environment, but my experience has been very positive. I think I understand the feature for what it is, an amazing and useful if imperfect tool, regardless of what it's called.
(caveat: FSD is the only automated driving I've experienced)
Systems where the human is not directly operating the vehicle are referred to as autonomous. You may also see them referred to by the SAE level system as L3, L4, or L5, each denoting autonomy in successively larger parts of the driving space.
Is it 100% perfect? Of course not. But this article is the ultimate in low effort. A person who felt that the car might hit another one but probably not. Yes, real value there.
What’s low effort in sharing your personal experience? It’s very clearly written as an opinion.
Any reader would be reasonable to assume that there are other opinions out there, and that this opinion may be in the minority.
That said, I’m happy to see a dissenting opinion in the comments here! Would be curious to see others thoughts in the sudden appearance of a free trial.
I find it extremely biased and lacking in substance.
I get it though... Elon does deserve a lot of hate so I guess the HN crowd is gleefully cheering out of schadenfreude whenever someone says something along the lines of "Tesla bad".
I hate to break it to you, but that's going to be a lot of people. He's made himself extremely hateable by the general public.
Hell, I'd argue they shouldn't be able to call it that legally.
Is a “garbage disposal” a device that can dispose of all garbage in your sink? No, all it can handle is light food scraps. But the inventor named it a “garbage disposal” not a “light food waste processing device.”
To me it seems stupid that so much of the debate after all these years is about the name. I think we are beyond the point where the name matters.
I wouldn’t.
A self driving system that only works during good weather is still useful and has non-zero value.
If you want to use an arbitrary name, use one, if you pick a descriptive name and don't do as described, it's just false advertising.
Again, I just think that marketing is marketing and everyone knows that. Everyone knows that a trash bag isn’t indestructible and that a paper towel can’t absorb a tsunami.
Especially for a device that has health impacts.
Typically the FTC regulates truth in advertising by (1) Is it an unequivocal statement? & (2) Does it have a health impact?
Depreciation is a normal and expected part of buying a car. If you are financing a car you should be prepared to keep it for a long period of time. While many automakers offer car loans of 5+ years, ideally you should only finance a car for 3 or 4 years and/or put more money down to ensure you are never underwater.
At no point did the author say that the car didn’t do its job as a reliable piece of transportation, but somehow it was a “financial mistake.”
The fact that cars depreciate and cost too much is a feature of all cars.
The problem is that Tesla owners are spoiled. I bought my Model Y just before the supply crunch in June of 2021, and within a year used models were selling for 20% more than I paid. They've since come down a ton as demand levelled off, but even now my car has depreciated only about 18% (including inflation!) from the cost of a brand new Y with the same configuration.
It's easy enough to imagine a young Tesla buyer over the last few years getting a very weird picture of the financials of owning a car.
What Tesla did, which historically is not a "normal and expected part of buying a car", is repeatedly slash list pricing after launch, thus meaning the used market does not trust valuing them, as so many used car dealers got very badly burned on inventory they paid too high a price for when the new car prices came down, putting them all underwater.
These aren't small or predictable market moves either; they are random swings. The Model S and Model X have been reduced new by as much as 24% at times. This Simply Does Not Happen at most car companies, most of the time, and residuals are more stable as a result.
Imagine you had just taken stock of a used model S, valuing it based on purchase price "n", then tomorrow the manufacturer slashes the price of a new one by 24%. That's very, very hard not to end up underwater.
Similarly, for existing owners - that 24% cut has just shifted the depreciation curve massively, and not in your favor. Existing owners frankly have every right to be pissed.
+ Parts availability woes
In short, buying a Tesla is a terrible decision from a financial perspective.
Maybe from a fun or cool perspective!
But if you're interested in maintaining $-value-over-time, there are much better options (Corollas, Accords, Tacomas, Subarus, etc).
lol, walk me through the process at Maserati.
If residuals plummet too much, their lease accounting can go red too. Lease rates have to account for a future predicted value of the vehicle, and manufacturers strangely like making money on leases.
Also, the huge depreciation on a Maserati isn't a surprise, most of the time. A mass produced vehicle selling in the hundreds of thousands annually seeing double digit list price shifts at random did come as a surprise, and has put car dealers underwater on Tesla inventory before.
Because those are two things that Tesla is doing that nobody else is doing at all or very well.
https://www.tesla.com/support/infotainment
At daytime or ar night?
What about the weather conditions?
Considering you are putting your life, that of your family and everyone on the street around you in the hands of this software, I don't get the nonchalant "sure, it's not perfect" attitude like you were trying out the beta version of a new note taking app. It absolutely has to be 100% perfect before being allowed on the streets.
How about hardware? Is it all 100% safe? IIRC USA doesn't even require yearly warrant of fitness / MOT.
Are the roads perfectly designed and in perfect conditions? How about weather? Do you stop driving when there's blizzard outside?
If anything, FSDs are over-cautious and slow down to well below speed limits if they can't make out conditions. So, yes I'd say other drivers shouldn't complain about a system that still requires a human to constantly pay attention and keep their hands on the wheel.
It makes driving a lot more relaxing in a way that you don't appreciate until you get used to it. My feet are off the pedals and can stretch, I don't have to steer so my attention is only partly on the road ( the interior camera monitors to see if you're looking ahead and not on your phone for example ) If I have to change the music I don't have to worry about the car in front of me suddenly braking etc.
I've been using FSD for years now at day and night and I think it's been ready for Level 3 going straight on Interstates/highways for a while now. The latest update significantly improves taking turns along a route.
I commented on this thread elsewhere that I wish there was a standard suite of requirements for all automakers to certify the self-driving levels on their cars. Otherwise, I feel too much of the discussion is being polluted by people who agree or disagree with Elons politics.
I hope you don't hurt someone.
From my experience working in this space though, judging quality is extremely difficult. For one thing, different people have different criteria. I've taken rides with other people where we all had different opinions on the quality of the ride at the end. These systems (FSD especially), can also be highly sensitive to specific details of the situation. Two drives in apparently similar conditions have meaningfully different behavior because the system understands them differently. It's very difficult to compare apples to apples outside statistics and simulation.
All this is to say: don't dismiss feelings or intuition about the danger. These are good caution signs and talking about them can help companies improve the product.
I will tell you straight up that a Tesla model Y on FSD 12.3.3 is a safer vehicle operator than a human being using a phone. Period. No qualifications. Under all circumstances.
With every new release of FSD, there are people quick to say it's a breakthrough, and amazing, while others lament it doesn't nearly do what it says on the lid.
Why are we putting safety critical systems we can’t adequately measure on our streets?! There are people who confidently state that Tesla's FSD is already better than humans.
Where's the data?! Why isn't it open? Why can't we build an objective measure for effectiveness and safety of each of these releases?
I'd love to see all cars (including Waymo) compete on a standard set of tests with clear gates as to what conditions they'd be allowed to go to Levels 3, 4 or 5.
As an unrelated aside, measuring safety performance is hard. Doing it accurately without putting vehicles on the street is probably impossible. Simulation is not a fully adequate replacement for road testing and many companies are already looking at cutting the latter because of the expense. It'd be nice for regulators to outline an acceptable road test framework that better balances the goal of public safety from unsafe vehicles against ensuring safety can be demonstrated in real world environments.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
Of course Tesla is not participating - the real numbers would make them look disastrous.
Regarding objective measures for the quality - the famous standards for level 1-5 etc. Objectively speaking, Tesla's system is Level 2. There are other companies at level 3, and some others operating fully autonomous vehicles.
As to why Tesla chooses to base all their claims on purely subjective and highly cherry-picked numbers and videos ? We all know the answer to this question.
Which I'm happy with. I do 95% of driving on Autopilot already. Add another 4% for FSD that I'm happy to babysit and I'd be very happy.
For some reason people are so caught up on naming choice and what it implies...
I find it fascinating that a guy become the richest person in the world, by convincing 'investors' that a Level 2 system is 'almost ready' for a Robotaxi operation and will make them infinite money. To give him credit, he also did mention that Tesla is worthless if it doesn't solve FSD.
Driving is a very personal activity. There are nearly infinitely many variables driving every decision during every drive, and the default experience that people will want from something like this is "someone that mostly drives like me and never makes mistake because computers".
FSD is not that. It will be a while before it is that. Until then, I can totally understand someone "never using this again" (for a while) over a few fumbles that FSD made that they would not have (in most cases).
Tesla has to know this because they also know that if even 10k Tesla buyers decide to subscribe to FSD, that's an extra $2M/month that can be (mostly) shoveled back into training infrastructure!
I like the way the author writes this. Interesting to hear unfiltered thoughts from a first-time user of the software.
Meh. Believe what you want; read what you want; fear what you want. Whether it "works" or not is a question susceptible to factual analysis, not vocabulary.
HN talks a lot about “we need FDA to preemptively block chemicals that seem like they’d be dangerous”. This is the logical extension of that.
* horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
* the greater speed of horseless carriages in the 1890s without modern safety infrastructure like signs and traffic lights does greatly increase the risk of injury
I'm sure in time the technology will evolve and there won't be a new car on the road that wouldn't support FSD - just like it did with "horseless carriages". It will take some more time though and not all companies will be equally advanced. From what I've heard (from other sources too) I wouldn't want to be driven by a Tesla FSD at the moment.
> * horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
Off topic, but interesting - if you think about it, we actually already had mostly-FSD in the 1890s. It just ate a whole lot of grass.
A secondary implied point is that new technologies which may seem dangerous can still be safe and useful when used properly, such as driving horseless carriages carefully in the 1890s or using FSD (Supervised) with proper supervision as directed.
On the other hand, horseless carriages also don't spook.
I've yet to have my car buck because it didn't like how something looked or sounded.
But maybe FSD will bring back that "fun"!
My wife does this too, and has fishtailed on the highway when she has suddenly realised she’s drifted across two lanes while not looking at the road. She frequently decides to read and write messages while driving, with me and our infant daughter in the car.
I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers.
Further compounded by entitlement of freedom, imo. Yes, we all want freedom, but our ability to reduce public safety should be earned i suspect. We are very lax with driving safety and requirements (in the US at least). I mean hell, what percentage of people actually drive the speed limit, anyway?
Which is to say, the risks of driving have become so sanitized, that we think it's something that is easy to automate. Arguably, if all road lanes were made 18 inches more narrow, we'd have a lot of the same effects. You have to pay a lot more attention in a narrow lane than one that is super wide. Generally though, humans are very competent drivers when paying attention and patient.
The other part, it's hard to be patient given how much time is spent travelling via car and stuck in traffic jams. People get used to zooming around at 40 ~ 70mph, combined with the over-confidence of from the illusion of safety (all the road signs, extra wide lanes, road markers, obstructions removed from the road)...
I think it just combines to a place where humans are poor drivers because they become impatient and stop paying attention all the time. It's like that first day of work, where everything you do - you have to think about incredibly hard. Eventually it all becomes 'auto-pilot', and this is encouraged by the road infrastructure; even to the extent that we think it's an easy problem to automate.
I can't wait to remove the entire "fell asleep and hit a tree", "drunkenly drove through a stop sign and killed a kid" class of accidents, but that alone is not enough
<s>Pssh. These people are letting the emotions of humans keep them from innovating, disrupting, and generally becoming certified Silicon Valley sharks.</s>
We know well at this point that progress, especially when it comes to AI, is anything but linear
Each release likely has gotten measurably better, and more usable, but at this point I seriously doubt that V12 is "the one".
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 11 times and I'm just going to buy a Mercedes EV.
If you want to get an accurate picture of FSD 12, watch random youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+12.3
The majority of people are over the moon about how good the latest version is.
We have it on our Y, we're in suburban America, and its average number of attempted very-obvious moving violations per 15 minute trip seems to be about 2, and 1 attempt at curbing the wheels or something similar.
It doesn't seem to have any concept of things like conditional school zone speed limits (it consistently ignores those), school busses with their stop signs out, or any unusual scenario like that. I'm not willing to try it in anything dicier at the moment, like taking turns at an all-way stop. Even multi-lane left turns are hair raising, because it doesn't seem to consistently stay in its own turn lane, instead drifting toward the car next to us.
This experiment has ended for us for now, it's much too stressful to actually use, like being driven around by a bottom-percentile drivers' ed student. It's an incredibly impressive bit of technology, but simultaneously nowhere near good enough to not be an incredible liability.
I'm biased for them, if anything - I’ve been a shareholder since before the Model S launch - but it's not there.
There is an entire army of influencers who are both - shareholders and Tesla owners - and who promote FSD and everything Tesla pretty much as a full time job now. Whole Mars Blog is probably the most prolific one.
Someone trying an 11.x version and someone on 12.x will have significantly different experiences at the moment, with 12.x having some of the biggest advancements we've seen since Tesla began doing this. 12.x is still rolling out to fleet now, with only ~40% of cars on it if the online Tesla fleet version trackers can be believed.
I'm not suggesting it might change the author's feelings completely if he was on a 12.x branch of FSD, but the jump from 11 to 12 has been siginificant.
EDIT: not sure why the downvotes - its a legitimate question the original article doesn't answer...
Looks like the free trial cars are currently split across v12.3.2.1/12.3.3 depending on OS update.
For what it's worth one of my clients installs charging stations and after meeting maybe hundreds of Tesla owners I assure you(anecdotally) that 19 out of 20 don't mention the CEO at all. Most Americans don't even have a twitter account(less than a third do) so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Most are non car people(as in, they wouldn't have bought a BMW or Mercedes, they were happy with a toyota) just excited about the tech that goes into the car. It means no more to the average driver on the road than what Henry Fords' opinions were(and they were worse)
Maybe true about Twitter or Elon specifically, but i suspect if we ignore "on Twitter" specifically, far too many people are "chronically online" or chronically drinking news cycle drama.
Ie i generally agree that people often think e-drama is more real than it is, but i also suspect we shouldn't undersell how many humans are addicted to tube fed drama. Fear sells, and we've got a lot of industries that focus on this.
Wonder what studies test this, outcomes, etc.
Self driving cars have recently been banned in British Columbia. I wonder if this applies to Tesla FSD?
I live in a city with an unusually high number of highway miles per capita. I have to drive 24 miles each way to and from work. AI that can complete this task for me, safely, is pretty cool, but still largely hypothetical and not available to most people. What I'd really like is public transit and an honest national conversation about urban sprawl. My metro area is more-or-less three Manhattans placed side-by-side, but with 2.5 million in population. That's insane. Another automotive technology isn't going to solve that.
The solution to traffic is the same as it’s always been: increase throughput on fewer vehicles. In other words, you should take the bus or the train or increase carpooling or really anything that gets fewer vehicles out of the transportation network. Most importantly the solution is to be less individualistic and more focused on the problem as a collective. Self driving cars are the opposite of that solution.
If everyone already has cars, it takes a lot to get people out of cars --- if someone already has a car, taking the bus to go somewhere slower than driving is completely out of the question. Conversely, if everyone doesn't have cars, it takes a lot to get people to drive cars due to the upfront cost of car ownership.
I think more transit-oriented city development is definitely the way to go. But nibbling away at the problem is going to take a long time. I think robotaxis are definitely going to play a part in this: by being compatible with existing car-dependent infrastructure and providing a similar speed and flexibility as privately owned cars, existing car owners are more likely to give up personal car ownership. Once people stop owning cars, they would be more amenable to development that gets rid of parking spots, improves walkability, increases density, implements mass transit, and so on.
As for buses, they have many of the same drawbacks as personal cars (gets stuck in traffic) while having more disadvantages like slower speed, making them an unattractive option for people who already own cars. Buses are incredibly good for already dense cities where people aren't already car-dependent, however, and some of these drawbacks can also be overcome with dedicated lanes and other tricks.
In my opinion, the king of urban transportation is undoubtedly the grade separated subway or elevated train, which, if implemented properly, can have a speed advantage over cars in some cases since they are immune to traffic and weather conditions despite needing to have many stops. Of course, this is also expensive to build and requires high density to be viable.
Hence they would increase traffic and slow down commutes. Maybe we’re fine with that, but we should at least be honest with ourselves.
My opinion: if you look at what the average American pays to have their own vehicle (fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance, financing), I think you can make the argument people are literally willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month instead of sitting next to people on public transit.
Would this be the case if public transit was better? Not sure which is obviously your point. I guess I'm trying to argue "the demand for not-public-transit is there, so maybe that's why public transit isn't improved upon"
I know it's popular with left wing Youtubers to say the car lobby did it.
But it didn't: people wanted cars and governments built roads.
Why does everything have to be a goddamn conspiracy?
The US had a vigorous middle class when the Interstate Highway System was implemented. A family of four could own a home in the suburbs on one income, and it was fine to spend 15 minutes driving from said suburban home to the office. None of that is true any longer.
Americans who have never left this country (the vast majority) have no idea how competently ran government services can look like.
We also have a party in the US that actively adds more regulatory pressure IFF the government is the main stakeholder in a project. For example, environmental protections are significantly stricter (arguably, to a fault) if the project is being led by the government.
Also, for example, the government is not really allowed to negotiate Medicaid medication prices. Something private insurance does not need to deal with.
I also believe FSD cars that actually can go on any dirt road are still at least ten years away, maybe decades.
Then we still need to have a park of shared FSD vehicles big enough to become a reliable mean of transportation. This is also going to take a couple of decades. I won’t see this for sure.
of course that doesn't include 1000+ serious accidents without death via FSD
only the Mercedes has real Level 3 Autonomy certification, everyone else is just using you as an alpha tester
(It was genuinely scary though!)
Simple solution, get an even heavier tank. Where it starts getting tricky is when you are dealing with people who also value lives on the wrong side of the windscreen.
When the leasing contract came to an end, we got the refreshed model 3 from 2024, this time without any driving assistant, just the plain normal car. And I haven't missed any of it, just the park assistant was nice because now I can't park it on the side of the small European streets first try, but I'll learn eventually.
It was a horrible deal back then for 5000€, now it's more expensive and hasn't gotten any better.
FSD on my Model Y is fun. There's no reason to fear because it's extremely intuitive to take over if it makes a poor decision - any resistance on the steering wheel immediately disengages Full Self Driving.
I've used FSD for thousands of both highway and city miles, and like any new experience, you shouldn't judge it based off of your first few tries.
After a short time, you learn which scenarios it handles with ease (highway driving, clearly marked roads with other traffic it can follow), and which scenarios it struggles with (dips in roads, emergency vehicles on shoulder, large open intersections without clear markings, construction zones).
FSD is basically magic. I'm a software guy, and I'm shocked how well FSD handles an insane variety of situations.
In my local town, I feel I'm quite a bit better driver than my FSD. However, when I visit an unfamiliar city, FSD often handles new situations better than I would have. We're living in the future.
Also, there's several comments here about how timid FSD can be merging or at a four-way-stop or similar; very true! Yet you just tap the gas pedal to let it know it's safe to proceed, and FSD takes it from there. Or just manually accelerate, and FSD will happily handle the steering while I handle the speed.
Caveats: I don't let it make left turns in traffic, too stressful. It's sketchy around yellow lights (go through, please). It can aggressively brake for cars getting out of the road.
It makes me a more relaxed, less aggressively driver, er, supervisor, and it's quirks are pretty easily mitigated by taking over the accelerator or just reclaiming control.
Underappreciated observation. The "interstate-only FSD on vehicles it's uniquely suited for" seems like much better risk-reward.
A less complex and variable environment, on a vehicle with greater need for it: freight trucks, long distance buses, and RVs.
Hell, I'm pretty sure the only reason Tesla didn't just buy Greyhound/Megabus was because the stricter scrutiny from CDL regulators (FMCSA?).