By now, most people have probably heard that Tesla's attempt at "Full Self Driving" is really anything but --- after a decade of promises. The vehicle owners manual spells this out.
As I understand it, the contentious issue is the fact that unlike most others, their attempt works mostly from visual feedback.
In low visibility situations, their FSD has limited feedback and is essentially driving blind.
It appears that Musk may be seeking a political solution to this technical problem.
It’s really weird how much you comment about FSD being fake. My Tesla drives me 10+ miles daily and the only time I touch any controls is pulling in and out of my garage. Literally daily. I maybe disengage once every couple days just to be on the safe side in uncertain situations, it I’m sure it’d likely do fine there too.
FSD works. It drives itself fine 99.99% of the time. It is better than most human drivers. I don’t know how you keep claiming it doesn’t or doesn’t exist.
So you agree with Musk, the main problem with FSD is political?
Tesla says on its website its "Full Self-Driving" software in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous.
The claim was about _full_ driving being anything but, ie not _fully_ self-driving, not being completely fake. Disengaging every 10-110 miles is just not "full", it's partial.
And then the gp went into details in which specific situations fsd is especially problematic.
The problem is Tesla and Musk have been lying about full self-driving for years. They have made specific claims of full autonomy with specific timelines and it's been a lie every time: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
Tesla claimed Hardware 3 would be capable of full self-driving. When asked about Hardware 3 at Tesla's recent robotaxi event, Musk didn't want to "get nuanced". That's starting to look like fraud: https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-abo...
Had Tesla simply called it "driver assistance" that wouldn't be a lie. But they didn't do that. They doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the claim that it is "full self-driving" making the car "an appreciating asset" that it would be "financially insane" not to buy:
Most of this is extreme hyperbole and it’s really hard to believe this is a genuine good faith attempt at conversation instead of weird astroturfing, bc these tired inaccurate talking points are what come up in literally every single even remotely associated to Elon. It’s like there’s a dossier of talking points everyone is sharing
The car drives itself. This is literally undeniable. You can test it today for free. Yeah it doesn’t have the last 0.01% done yet and yeah that’s probably a lot of work. But commenting like the GP is exhausting and just not reflective of reality
> bc these tired inaccurate talking points are what come up in literally every single even remotely associated to Elon
You understand that the false claims, the inaccuracies, and the lies come from Elon, right? They're associated with him because he is the source of them.
They're only tired because he's been telling the same lie year after year.
It's similar to when DHH said they were not bundling code in production and all the Javascript bros said "No you can't do that it won't work". DHH was like "yes but I'm doing it"
That's how it feels in FSD land right now. Everyone's saying FSD doesn't work and it'll never be here, but I'm literally using it every day lol.
There are also endless videos of teslas driving into pedestrians, plowing full speed into emergency vehicles parked with flashing lights, veering wildly from strange markings on the road, etc. etc.
"works for me" is a very strange response for someone on Hacker News if you have any coding background - you should realize you are a beta tester unwittingly if not a full blown alpha tester in some cases
All it will take is a non-standard event happening on your daily drive. Most certainly not wishing it on you, quite the opposite, trying to get you to accept that a perfect drive 99 times out of 100 is not enough.
How many miles does it have on the latest software?
Because any miles driven on previous software are no longer relevant.
Especially with that big change in v12.
The miles driven are rising exponentially as the versions improve according to company filings. If the miles driven on previous versions are no longer relevant how can the NHTSA investigation of previous versions impact FSD regulation today?
Given that the performance has improved dramatically over the last 6 months, it is very reasonable to assume that the miles driven to fatality ratio also improving.
Using the value of 1.33 deaths per 100 million miles driven vs 2 deaths in 2 billion miles driven, FSD has saved approximately 24 lives so far.
Considering HN is mostly technologists, the extent of Tesla-hate in here surprises me. My best guess is that it is sublimated Elon-hate. (Not a fan of my former neighbor myself, but let's separate the man from his creations.)
People seem to be comparing Tesla FSD to perfection, when the more fair and relevant comparison is to real-world American drivers. Who are, on average, pretty bad.
Sure, I wouldn't trust data coming from Tesla. But we have government data.
That seems an odd take. This is a technologist website, and a good number of technologists believe in building robust systems that don’t fail in production. We don’t stand for demos, and we have to fight off consultants peddling crapware that demos well but dies in production.
I own a Tesla, despite my dislike of Musk, because it is an insanely fun car. I will never enable FSD, did not even do so when it was free. I see even the best teams have production outages. Until Tesla legally accepts, and the laws allows them to, legal responsibility, and until it’s good enough that it doesn’t disengage, ever, then I’m never using it and nobody else should.
A minimum bar, for societal harm, would be against an identical data set of US drivers. The data for human drivers covers vastly more situations than FSD does. FSD refuses to activate in those situations. So an apples-to-apples comparison doesn't exist. The FSD data is effectively cherry picked for ideal driving conditions. Tesla's claims that FSD is safer than the average driver are not supported by their data, and as others have said, either their statisticians are incompetent or liars. This is basic stuff.
However the minimum bar for me to activate it is "compared to me". I've never come close to driving under a truck or into a divider. I slow down driving into the sunset and use a baseball hat if necessary to make sure I can see.
Yes. And Uber immediately shut down the program in the entire state of Arizona, halted all road testing for months, and then soon later eliminated their self driving unit entirely.
The why is pretty well understood, no investigation needed. I don't like the design but it's because the doors are electronic and people don't know where the manual release is.
In a panic people go on muscle memory, which is push the useless button. They don't remember to pull the unmarked unobtrusive handle that they may not even know exists.
If it was up to me, sure have your electronic release, but make the manual release a big handle that looks like the ejection handle on a jet (yellow with black stripes, can't miss it).
* Or even better, have the standard door handle mechanically connected to the latch through a spring loaded solenoid that disengages the mechanism. Thus when used under normal conditions it does the thing electronically but the moment power fails the door handle connects to the manual release.
Or just use normal handles, inside and outside, like other cars. What they've done is made things worse by any objective metric in exchange for a "huh, nifty" that wears off after a few weeks.
I think this is the way. Light pull does the electronic thing. Hard pull does the mechanical thing. They could have done this with the mechanical handle that's there already (that I have pulled almost every time I've used a Tesla, getting anger and weather stripping inspection from the owner).
I’ve seen an innovative car with a single door release. As you pull it, it first triggers the electronic mechanism (which lowers the window a bit, which is useful in a door with no frame above the window) and then, as you pull it farther, it mechanically unlatches the door.
Tesla should build their doors like this. Oh, wait, the car I’m talking about is an older Tesla. Maybe Tesla should remember how to build doors like this.
About damn time NHTSA opened this full scale investigation. Tesla's "autonowashing" has gone on for far too long.
Per Reuters [1]
"The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.
The preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety."
Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
NHTSA is reviewing the ability of FSD’s engineering controls to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions."
Tesla has, of course, rather two-facedly called its FSD as SAE Level-2 for regulatory purposes, while selling its "full self driving" but also requiring supervision. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No other company has been so irresponsible to its users, and without a care for any negative externalities imposed on non-consenting road users.
I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away whenever I see them on highways.
[FWIW, yes, I work in automated driving and know a thing or two about automotive safety.]
> Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
45000 people die yearly just in the US in auto accidents. Those numbers and timeline you quoted seem insignificant at first glance magnified by people with an axe to grind like that guy running anti Tesla superbowl ads, who makes self driving software like you.
I would like more details. There are definitely situations where neither a car nor a human could respond quickly enough to a situation on the road.
for example, I recently hit a deer. The dashcam shows that I had less than 100 feet from when the deer became visible due to terrain to impact while driving at 60 mph. Keeping in mind that stopping a car in 100 feet at 60 mph is impossible. Most vehicles need more than triple that without accounting for human reaction time.
I've had a person, high on drugs, walk out from between bushes that were along the road. I screeched to a halt in front of them, but 1 second later and physics would have made it impossible, regardless of reaction time (or non-negligible speed).
This is called "overdriving your vision", and it's so common that it boggles my mind. (This opinion might have something to do with the deer I hit when I first started driving...)
On many roads if a deer jumps across the road at the wrong time there’s literally nothing you can do. You can’t always drive at 30mph on back country roads just because a deer might hop out at you.
World of difference between, 30, 40, 50 and 60. Feels like something I have noticed between west and east coast drivers. Latter really send it on country turns and just trust the road. West coast, particularly montana, when vision is reduced, speed slows down. Just too many animals or road obstacles (eg: rocks, planks of wood) to just trust the road.
Yeah, I was a bit glib. My impression is more specifically of the greater northwest vs rest. Perhaps just "the west" vs "the east".
Indiana drivers for example really do send it (in my experience). Which is not east coast of course.
There is a good bit of nuance... I would perhaps say more simply east of Mississippi vs west, but Texas varies by region and so-Cal drivers vary a lot as well, particularly compared to nor-Cal and central+eastern california. (I don't have an impression for nevada and new mexico drivers - I dont have any experience on country roads in those states)
You are responding in a thread about a person saying they were driving at 60 when the deer only became visible "due to terrain" at 100 feet away, and therefore hitting it is no reflection on their skill or choices as a driver.
I suppose we're meant to interpret charitably here, but it really seems to me like there is a big difference between the scenario described and the one you're talking about, where the deer really does fling itself out in front of you.
We will inevitably see "AVs are too cautious! Let me go faster!" complaints as AVs drive in more places. But, really humans just suck at risk assessment. And at driving. Driving like a human is comforting in some contexts, but that should not be a goal when it trades away too much safety.
There is a difference between driving too fast around a corner to stop for something stationary on the road and driving through countryside where something might jump out.
I live in a country with deer but the number of incidences of them interacting with road users is so low that it does not factor in to my risk tolerance.
The risks vary with speed. At 30mph a deer will be injured and damage your car, and you might have to call animal control to find the deer if it was able to get away. At 45mph there is a good chance the deer will impact your windshield. If it breaks through, that's how people die in animal collisions. They get kicked to death by a frantic, panicked, injured animal.
The article explains the investigation is based upon visibility issues... what is your point? I don't think any reasonable person doubts there are circumstances where nothing could adequately respond in order to prevent a crash. It seems a rather odd assumption to reach that these crashes would be in one of those scenarios such that we should be explained to otherwise, no less so when the report facially explains this to not be the case.
> NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021 Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said. Another crash under investigation involved a reported injury
> The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.
This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.
Even that is not good enough, because the "autopilot" usually is not engaged in challenging conditions making any direct comparisons not really reliable. You need similar roads in simila weather and similar time of the day for approximating good comparison.
Those numbers aren't all the fatalities associated with tesla cars; IE, you can't compare the 45K/year (roughly 1 per 100M miles driven) to the limited number of reports.
What they are looking for is whether there are systematic issues with the design and implementation that make it unsafe.
I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal human drivers, although having some level of estimate of accident/injury/death rates (to both the driver, passenger, and people outside the car) with FSD enabled/disabled would be very interesting.
> I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal human drivers
I think our intent should be focused on where the fatalities are happening. To keep things comparable, we could maybe do 40,000 studies on distracted driving in normal cars for every one or two caused by Autopilot / FSD.
Those are good questions. We should investigate to find out. (It'd be different from this one but it raises a good question. What is FSD safe compared to?)
No they're not. And if you do look at human drivers you're likely to see a Pareto distribution where 20% of drivers cause most of the accidents. This is completely unlike something like FSD where accidents would be more evenly distributed. It's entirely possible that FSD would make 20% of the drivers safer and ~80% less safe even if the overall accident rate was lower.
What? Humans are excellent drivers. Humans go ~70 years between injury-causing accidents and ~5,000 years between fatal accidents even if we count the drunk drivers. If you started driving when the Pyramids were still new, you would still have half a millennium until you reach the expected value between fatalities.
The only people pumping the line that human drivers are bad are the people trying to sell a dream that they can make a self-driving car in a weekend, or "next year", if you just give them a pile of money and ignore all the red flags and warning signs that they are clueless. The problem is shockingly hard and underestimating it is the first step to failure. Reckless development will not get you there safely with known technology.
> The agency is asking if other similar FSD crashes have occurred in reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if Tesla has updated or modified the FSD system in a way that may affect it in such conditions.
Those four crashes are just the ones that sparked the investigation.
I don't agree with this comparison. The drivers are licensed, they have met a specific set of criteria to drive on public roads. The software is not.
We are not sure when FSD is engaged with all of these miles driven, and if FSD is making mistakes a licensed human driver would not. I would at the very least expect radical transparency.
I too care more about bureaucratic compliance than what the actual chances of something killing me are. When I am on that ambulance I will be thinking "at least that guy met the specific set of criteria to be licensed to drive on public roads."
Are we really relegating drivers licenses to "bureaucratic compliance"?
If FSD is being used in a public road, it impacts everyone on that road, not just the person who opted-in to using FSD. I absolutely want an independent agency to ensure it's safe and armed with the data that proves it.
What else are they? You jump through hoops to get a piece of plastic from the government that declares you "safe." And then holders of those licenses go out and kill 40,000 people every year just in the US.
> making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison,
that's the wrong comparison
the correct comparison is the number of report crashes and fatalities for __unsupervised FSD__ miles driven (not counting Tesla pilot tests, but actual customers)
That seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem where the software is not allowed to go unsupervised until it racks up a few million miles of successful unsupervised driving.
There's a number of state programs to solve this problem with testing permits. The manufacturer puts up a bond and does testing in a limited area, sending reports on any incidents to the state regulator. The largest of these, California's, has several dozen companies with testing permits.
Tesla currently does not participate in any of these programs.
> making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.
This is exactly what people were saying about the NHTSA Autopilot investigation when it started back in 2021 with 11 reported incidents. When that investigation wrapped earlier this year it had identified 956 Autopilot related crashes between early 2018 and August 2023, 467 of which were confirmed the fault of autopilot and an inattentive driver.
So what? How many miles were driven and what is the record vs human drivers? Also Autopilot is a standard feature that is much less sophisticated than and has nothing to do with FSD.
No, that is not part of a review. They may use some reference aggregated industry data, but it's out of scope to answwer the question I think you're trying to imply.
Whom? Because math is important and so is law, among a variety of other things.
s/ Thankfully the US presidential choices are at least rational, of sound mind, and well rounded people. Certainly no spoiled man children among them. /s
I get where you’re coming from and would also be interested to see, but based on the clips I’ve seen that wouldn’t be enough in this case. Of course the bias is inherent in what people choose to post (not normal and not terrible/litigable), but I think there’s enough at this point to perceive a stable pattern.
Long story short, my argument is this: it doesn’t matter if you reduce serious crashes from 100PPM to 50PPM if 25PPM of those are new crash sources, speaking from a psychological and sociological perspective. Everyone should know that driving drunk, driving distracted, driving in bad weather, and in rural areas at dawn or dusk is dangerous, and takes appropriate precautions. But what do you do if your car might crash because someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was reflecting off another car in an unusual way? Could you really load up your kids and take your hands off the wheel knowing that at any moment you might hit an unexpected edge condition?
Self driving cars are (presumably!) hard enough to trust already, since you’re giving away so much control. There’s a reason planes have to be way more than “better, statistically speaking” — we expect them to be nearly flawless, safety-wise.
> But what do you do if your car might crash because someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was reflecting off another car in an unusual way?
These are -- like drunk driving, driving distract, and driving in bad weather -- things that actually do cause accidents with human drivers.
The point is the choice of taking precaution part that you left out of the quote. The other day I was taking my kid to school, and when we turned east the sun was in my eyes and I couldn't see anything, so I pulled over as fast as I could and changed my route. Had I chosen to press forward and been in an accident, it is explainable (albeit still unfortunate and often unnecessary!). However, if I'm under the impression that my robot car can handle such circumstances because it does most of the time and then it glitches, that is harder to explain.
This language is a bit of a sticking point for me. If you're drunk driving or driving distracted, there's no "accident". You're intentionally doing something wrong and committing a crime.
Indeed, yet humans can anticipate such things and rely on their experience to reason about what's happening and how to react. Like slow down or shift lanes or just move ones head for a different perfective. A Tesla with only two cameras ("because that's all humans need") is unlikely to provably match that performance for a long time.
Tesla could also change its software without telling the driver at any point.
If you're trying to hint at Tesla's own stats, then at this point those are hopelessly, and knowingly, misleading.
All they compare is "On the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions".
There's a reason Tesla doesn't release the raw data.
I have to disengage FSD multiple times a day and I’m only driving 16 miles round trip. And routinely have to stop it from doing dumb things like stopping at green traffic lights, attempting to do a u turn from the wrong turn lane, or switching to the wrong lane right before a turn.
Fatalities per passenger mile driven is the only statistic that would matter. I actually doubt this figure differs much, either way, from the overall fleet of vehicles.
This is because "inattentive driving" is _rarely_ the cause of fatalities on the road. The winner there is, and probably always will be, Alcohol.
They do a disservice by not further breaking down distracted driving by age. Once you see it that way it's hard to accept that distracted driving on it's own is the appropriate target.
Anyways.. NHTSA publishes the FARS. This is the definitive source if you want to understand the demographics of fatalities in the USA.
My Tesla routinely tries to kill me on absolutely normal California roads in normal sunny conditions, especially when there are cars parked on the side of the road (it often brakes thinking I'm about to crash into them, or even swerves into them thinking that's the "real" lane).
Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
> Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
It is very generous that you would selflessly sacrifice your own life so that others might one day enjoy Elon’s dream of robot taxis without steering wheels
I'm not a fan of Elon, Tesla, or "FSD", but for what it's worth, that's absolutely the fault of the person behind you for not maintaining appropriate stopping distance.
You can work backwards from this - the vast majority of people in the US don't agree with that statement. You might be able to get them there, if Americans didn't have to be as car dependent due to their built environment. But because so many people are already car dependent, it's hard to make those changes.
The one theory of change I think is approachable suggests allowing dramatic increases in density in places that are not car dependent - the people who live there are much more likely to agree with us, so letting the number of people who live there 10x or even 100x could lead to this kind of change you propose.
That’s hilariously ironic because I have a pretty standard newish Japanese petrol car (I’m not mentioning the brand because my point isn’t that brand x is better than brand y), and it has no ai self driving functions just pretty basic radar adaptive cruise control and emergency brake assist where it will stop if there’s a car brake hard in front of you… and it does a remarkable job at rejecting cars which are slowing down or stopped in other lanes, even when you’re going around a corner and the car is pointing straight towards the other cars but not actually heading towards them since it’s turning. I assume they are using the steering input to help reject other vehicles and dopler effects to detect differences in speed, but it’s remarkable how accurate it is at matching the speed of the car in front of you and only the car in front of you, even when that car is over 15 seconds in front of you. If teslas can’t beat that, it’s sad
I wonder, how are you "driving"? Are you sitting behind the wheel doing nothing except watch really good everything the car does so you can take over when needed? Isn't that a stressful experience? Wouldn't it be more comfortable to just do everything yourself so you know nothing weird can happen?
Also, if the car does something crazy, how much time do you have to react? I can imagine in some situations you might have too little time to prevent the accident the car is creating.
It's actually really easy and kind of relaxing. For long drives, it dramatically reduces cognitive load leading to less fatigue and more alertness on the road.
My hand is always on the wheel so I can react as soon as I feel the car doing something weird.
Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test unproven technology on the public.
Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
Drive it in larger and larger closed courses. Expand to neighboring areas with consent of the communities involved. Agree on limited conditions until enough data has been gathered to expand those conditions.
That's how all autonomous testing programs currently work around the world. That is, every driverless vehicle system on roads today was developed this way. You're going to have to be more specific when you say that it doesn't work.
There are industry standards for this stuff. ISO 21448, UL-4600, UNECE R157 for example, and even commercial certification programs like the one run by TÜV Süd for European homologation. It's a deliberate series of decisions on Tesla's part to make their regulatory life as difficult as possible.
Any Legislative body can do so. There's no reason to limit this strictly to the federal government. States and municipalities should have a say in this as well. The _citizens_ are the only entity that _decide_ if beta technology can be used or not.
> comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities.
This presupposes the government is naturally capable of performing an adequate job at this task or that the automakers won't sue the government to interfere with the testing regime and efficacy of it's standards.
> aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
According to Wikipedia Euro NCAP is a _voluntary_ organization and describes the situation thusly "legislation sets a minimum compulsory standard whilst Euro NCAP is concerned with best possible current practice." Which effectively highlights the above problems perfectly.
Uhh, have you heard of the FDA? It's approved hundreds of chemicals that are put in all of food. And we're not talking about a few deaths, we're talking hundreds of thousands if not millions.
It didn't always say that. It used to be more misleading, and claim that the cars have "Full Self Driving Hardware", with an exercise for the reader to deduce that it didn't come with "Full Self Driving Software" too.
Surely you can understand why “magic” and “fully self driving” have different levels of plausibility?
In 2024 if you tell me a car is “fully self driving” it’s pretty reasonable of me to think it’s a fully self driving car given the current state of vehicle technology. They didn’t say “magic steering” or something clearly ridiculous to take at face value. It sounds like what it should be able to do. Especially with “full” in the name. Just call it “assisted driving” or hell “self driving.” The inclusion of “fully” makes this impossible to debate in good faith.
In a world where nuclear power helped with climate change, would also be a world where Teslas would eliminate a good chunk of harmful pollution by allowing cars to be moved by nuclear, so not sure what point you were trying to make.
Even at this minute, Teslas are moving around powered by nuclear power.
Looking forward Nuclear isn’t moving the needle. Solar grew more in 2023 alone than nuclear has grown since 1995. Worse nuclear can’t ramp up significantly in the next decade simply due to construction bottlenecks. 40 years ago nuclear could have played a larger role, but we wasted that opportunity.
It’s been helpful, but suggesting it’s going to play a larger role anytime soon is seriously wishful thinking at this point.
That just goes to show how incredibly short sighted humanity is. We new about the risk of massive CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels but just ignored it while irrationally demonizing nuclear energy because it is scawy. If humans were sane and able to plan earth would be getting 100% of all electricity from super-efficient 7th generation nuclear reactors.
CO2 issues aside, it's just outright safer than all forms of coal and gas and about as safe as solar and wind, all three of which are a bit safer than hydro (still very safe).
I agree costs could have dropped significantly, but I doubt 100% nuclear was ever going to happen.
Large scale dams will exist to store water, tacking hydroelectric on top of them is incredibly cost effective. Safety wise dams are seriously dangerous, but they also save a shocking number of lives by reducing flooding.
History is a great reference, but it doesn't solve our problems now. Just because hydro has prevented more CO2 until now doesn't mean that plus solar are the combination that delivers abundant, clean energy. There are power storage challenges and storage mechanisms aren't carbon neutral. Even if we assume that nuclear, wind, and solar (without storage) all have the same carbon footprint - I believe nuclear is less that solar pretty much equivalent to wind - you have to add the storage mechanisms for scenarios where there's no wind, sun, or water.
All of the above are significantly better than burning gas or coal - but nuclear is the clear winner from an CO2 and general availability perspective.
Seriously scaling nuclear would involve batteries. Nuclear has issues being cost effective at 80+% capacity factors. When you start talking sub 40% capacity factors the cost per kWh spirals.
The full cost of operating a multiple nuclear reactor for just 5 hours per day just costs more than a power plant at 80% capacity factor charging batteries.
I meant even if you’re operating nuclear as baseload power looking forward the market rate for electricity looks rough without significant subsidies.
Daytime you’re facing solar head to head which is already dropping wholesale rates. Off peak is mostly users seeking cheap electricity so demand at 2AM is going to fall if power ends up cheaper at noon. Which means nuclear needs to make most of its money from the duck curve price peaks. But batteries are driving down peak prices.
Actually cheap nuclear would make this far easier, but there’s no obvious silver bullet.
We’ve made dams long before we knew about electricity. At which point tacking hydropower to a dam that would exist either way has basically zero environmental impact.
Pure hydropower dams definitely do have significant environmental impact.
I just don't get the premise of your argument. Are you honestly saying that stopping the normal flow of water has no negative impact on the ecosystem? What about the area behind the dam that is now flooded? What about the area in front of the dam where there is now no way to traverse back up stream?
Maybe your just okay and willing to accept that kind of change. That's fine, just as some people are okay with the risk of nuclear, the use of land for solar/wind. But to just flat out deny that it has impact is just dishonest discourse at best
It’s the same premise as rooftop solar. You’re building a home anyway so adding solar panels to the roof isn’t destroying pristine habitat.
People build dams for many reasons not just electricity.
Having a reserve of rainwater is a big deal in California, Texas, etc. Letting millions of cubic meters more water flow into the ocean would make the water problems much worse in much of the world. Flood control is similarly a serious concern. Blaming 100% of the issues from dams on Hydropower is silly if outlawing hydropower isn’t going to remove those dams.
I wasn’t imply it would, just covering the very short term.
Annual production from nuclear is getting passed by wind in 2025 and possibly 2024. So just this second it’s possibly #1 among wind, solar and nuclear but they are all well behind hydro.
Not Tesla exactly, but Musk has gone all-in trying to get a man elected to be US President who consistently says climate change is a hoax, or words to that effect.
US oil production under the current administration is at 13.5M barrels per day. The highest ever. The US is shitting the bed on the energy transition. Meanwhile global solar cell production is slated to hit 2TW/year by the end of 2025 @ under 10cents/watt. China, the land of coal, is on track to hit net zero before the US. Both parties and all levels of government have a disgraceful record on climate change.
PS: For context 2TW of solar can generate about 10% of global electricity. Production capacity will not stop at 2TW. All other forms of electricity are basically doomed, no matter what the GOP says about climate change.
Both parties have a disgraceful record on climate change, but the GOP is still clearly much worse. High as US oil production is, Republicans complain that it should be higher. And Trump making the hoax claim dogma for his followers is incredibly damaging.
As opposed to all the other execs whose companies aren’t a force to combat climate change and still fly their private jets.
But don’t get me wrong, anyone and everyone can fly their private jets if they can afford such things. They will already have generated enough taxes at that point that they’re offsetting thousands or millions of Prius drivers.
Other execs fly as needed because they recognize that in this wondrous age of the internet that teleconferencing can replace most in-person meetings. Somehow, only a supposed technology genius like Elon Musk thinks that in-person meetings required for everything.
Other execs also don't claim to be trying to save the planet while doing everything in their power to exploit its resources or destroy natural habitats.
As I understand, electric cars are more polluting than non-electric, because first of all manufacturing and resources footprint is larger, but also because they are heavier (because of the batteries), the tires wear down much faster, needing more tire replacement, which is so significantly much that their emission free-ness doesn't compensate for it.
Besides, electric vehicles still seem to be very impractical compared to normal cars, because they can't drive very far without needing a lengthy recharge.
So I think the eco-friendliness of electric vehicles is maybe like the full self-driving system: nice promises but no delivery.
That has been falsified by more studies than I can keep track of. And yes, if you charge your electric with electricity produced by oil, the climate effect will be non-optimal.
It’s really unfortunate that puffery survived as a common law defence. It’s really from an earlier era, when fraud was far more acceptable and people were more conditioned to assume that vendors were outright lying to them; it has no place in modern society.
Also, that’s investors, not consumers. While the rise of retail investing has made this kind of dubious, investors are generally assumed to be far less in need of protection than consumers by the law; it is assumed that they take care about their investment that a consumer couldn’t reasonably take around every single product that they buy.
Our non-Tesla has steering assist. In my 500 miles of driving before I found the buried setting that let me completely disable it, the active safety systems never made it more than 10-20 miles without attempting to actively steer the car left-of-center or into another vehicle, even when it was "turned off" via the steering wheel controls.
When it was turned on according to the dashboard UI, things were even worse. It'd disengage less than every ten miles. However, there wasn't an alarm when it disengaged, just a tiny gray blinking icon on the dash. A second or so after the blinking, it'd beep once and then pull crap like attempt a sharp left on an exit ramp that curved to the right.
I can't imagine this model kills fewer people per mile than Tesla FSD.
I think there should be a recall, but it should hit pretty much all manufacturers shipping stuff in this space.
Ive had similar experience with a Hyundai with steering assist. It would get confused by messed road lining all the time. Meanwhile it had no problem climbing a road curb that was unmarked. And it would try to constantly nudge the steering wheel meaning I had to put force into holding it in place all the time since it which was extra fatigue.
Oh and it was on by default, meaning I had to disable it every time I turned the car on.
My Hyundai is a 2021 and I have to turn on the steering assist every time which I find annoying. My guess is that you had an earlier model where the steering assist was more liability than asset.
It's understandable that earlier versions of this kind of thing wouldn't function as well, but it is very strange that they would have it on by default.
Not 100% sure which year since it wasn't mine I think around 2018 +-2y. It was good at following bright painted white lines and nothing else. I didn't mind the beeping and the vibration when I stepped on a line but it wanted to actively steer the wheel which was infuriating. I wouldn't mind it if it was just a suggestion.
And is, well, entirely contradictory. An absolute absurdity; what happens when the irresistible force of the legal department meets the immovable object of marketing.
Prior to that, FSD was labeled ‘Full Self Driving (Beta)’ and enabling it triggered a modal that required two confirmations explaining that the human driver must always pay attention and is ultimately responsible for the vehicle. The feature also had/has active driver monitoring (via both vision and steering-torque sensors) that would disengage FSD if the driver ignored the loud audible alarm to “Pay attention”. Since changing the label to ‘(Supervised)’, the audible nag is significantly reduced.
The problem is not so much the lack of disclaimers, it is the adberitising. Tesla is asking for something like 15 000 dollars for access to this "beta", and you don't get two modal dialogs before you sign up for that.
This is called "false advertising", and even worse - recognizing revenue on a feature you are not delivering (a beta is not a delivered feature) is not GAAP.
> The problem is not so much the lack of disclaimers, it is the adberitising.
I agree; the entire advertising industry is well known to be misleading and/or dishonest; it’s annoying and often hurts consumers.
> Tesla is asking for something like 15 000 dollars for access to this "beta",
The cost of FSD is $8000 for the life of the vehicle, $5000 for 3 years (includes free supercharging and premium connectivity), or as a no-contract, a la carte option for $99/month—which IMO is pretty cheap if you just want to try it out or if you only want/need it during special occasions.
> and you don't get two modal dialogs before you sign up for that.
Depends on how you purchase FSD; if done from the vehicle, you get the dialogs. If done at the time of vehicle purchase you get plenty of disclaimers and documentation about its capabilities—though not as obviously prominent and scary as modal dialogs. I haven’t witnessed a subscription purchase so I’m not sure if the dialogs are present during the subscription process; perhaps that’s where the scam lies but I doubt it.
> This is called "false advertising", and even worse - recognizing revenue on a feature you are not delivering (a beta is not a delivered feature) is not GAAP.
Perhaps in your opinion but, well… that’s not how the world works, nor the law. For decades orgs have been delivering revenue-generating products, marketed and labeled as “beta”; a product being incomplete doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Heck, most of the software we use is ever changing and often considered a beta release—but they still (usually) offer value. Remember, FSD is software, not hardware; I suspect folks are uncomfortable with what appears to be the new paradigm of cars that change their capabilities over time even while they demand regular new capabilities in other products like their phone or computer.
For what it’s worth, here’s the FSD disclaimer currently present on the Tesla website:
“Full Self-Driving (Supervised)
Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention.
Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on development and regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions.”
Do they have warnings as big as "full self driving" texts in advertisements? And if it is NOT actually full self driving, why call it full self driving?
That's just false advertising. You can't get around that.
I can't believe our current laws let Tesla get away like that.
> Do they have warnings as big as "full self driving" texts in advertisements?
Tesla doesn’t advertise; they rely entirely on word of mouth, storefronts (both online and physical), and publicity/news coverage. But the answer to your question is that, on their website at least, the text disclaimers for the FSD option are the same sizes as the disclaimers for other options like the Tow Package (the disclaimer for which says “Tow up to 3,500 lbs with a class II steel tow bar”) or the wheels (the disclaimer for which shows range estimates depending on the chosen wheel diameter).
> And if it is NOT actually full self driving, why call it full self driving?
To me, this is like asking why ISPs offer “Unlimited Data” plans that have very strict limits on what constitutes “unlimited”.
It’s important to remember that the phrase “Full Self Driving” has no legal or industry-standard definition. For the sake of this discussion, and as far as I’m aware, the FSD product has never been available for purchase or subscription without a parenthetical designation, e.g. “Full Self Driving (Beta)” or “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” which, to me, suggests Tesla is acting in good faith—well, at least as far as good-faith acts exist in our marketing-driven culture. It’s only been within the last year or so that Musk has talked about “Full Self Driving (Unsupervised)” which is, I believe, the designation for what will ultimately become the Level 4/5 autonomy product.
FSD is currently classified as Level 2 autonomy by SAE. While a Level 3 autonomy product is available in the US, it is:
- only available in the Mercedes Drive Pilot product,
- only available in CA or NV,
- limited to 40mph on pre-approved roads,
- only available during daylight/good weather conditions.
The difference between the real-world capabilities of Drive Pilot and FSD is quite stark; while FSD is not officially classified as Level 3 autonomy, it’s dramatically closer to what I believe most consumers would consider “autonomous driving” than is the Mercedes product. I only got to try it for a few days so it wasn’t a detailed comparison but my own experience with Mercedes product was disappointing when compared to Tesla’s product. IOW, while perhaps not semantically accurate, the product name “Full Self Driving” is far more accurate than any other available product offering.
> That's just false advertising. You can't get around that.
Product names are very rarely subject to scrutiny for being “false advertising”. Again, the phrase “Full Self Driving” has no legal or official definition. Should it have a legal definition? I don’t know, but I do know that the “Unlimited Data” plans from carriers and ISPs are widely understood not to be “unlimited”; I don’t love those kinds of product naming schemes but I’m not sure how the FSD case is any different from a legal perspective.
> I can't believe our current laws let Tesla get away like that.
Get away with what? IME, Tesla (and pretty much every org on the planet) carefully skirt the boundaries of the law. Sometimes, if they cross a legal boundary, they’ll become subject to investigation and possibly consequences but, in the case of FSD, the court has already dismissed the lawsuit claiming Tesla lied about its capabilities. They “get away like that” by not breaking the law. Until laws change, orgs will continue to be incredibly and often overly optimistic when discussing their products.
It's called "Full Self-Driving (Supervised) Beta" and you agree that you understand that you have to pay attention and are responsible for the safety of the car before you turn it on.
So the name of it is a contradiction, and the fine print contradicts the name. "Full self driving" (the concept, not the Tesla product) does not need to be supervised.
Come on, you know it's an oxymoron. "full" and "supervised" don't belong to the same sentence. Ask any 10 year old or a non native English speaker who only learned the language from textbooks for 5 years can tell you that. Just... stop defending Tesla.
It's a name that accurately describes the ultimate goal of the technology. It's not there yet, and Tesla makes it clear that this is the case. I don't see an issue with it and it works exceptionally well as is.
I love how the image in the article has a caption that says it tells you to pay attention to the road, but I had to zoom in all the way to figure out where that message actually was.
I’d expect something big and red with a warning triangle or something, but it’s a tiny white message in the center of the screen.
Ah yes, red with a warning like “WARNING: ERROR: THE SITUATION IS NORMAL!”
Some cars that have cruise control but an analog gauge cluster that can’t display WARNING ERRORs even hide stuff like “you still have to drive the car” in a manual you have to read yet nobody cares about that.
Honestly driving a car should require some sort of license for a bare minimum of competence.
Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable places to invest.
Nobody needs to hear your nonsense rants. A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like garbage.
In all the hype of AI etc, if you think about it then the foundational problem is that even Computer Vision is not a solved problem at the human level of accuracy and that's at the heart of the issue of both Tesla and that Amazon checkout.
Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout".
> Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout".
I don’t think this would actually work, as silly a thought experiment as it is.
The problem isn’t the vision, it’s state management and cost. It was very easy (but expensive) to see and classify via CV if a person picked something up, it just requires hundreds of concurrent high resolution streams and a way to stitch the global state from all the videos.
A little 1 inch person on each shelf needs a good way to communicate to every other tiny person what they say, and come to consensus. If 5 people/cameras detect person A picking something up, you need to differentiate between every permutation within 5 discrete actions and 1 seen 5 times.
In case you didn’t know, Amazon actually hired hundreds of people in India to review the footage and correct mistakes (for training the models). They literally had a human on each shelf. And they still had issues with the state management. With people.
Yeah - that's exactly is my point that humans were required to recognize and computer vision is NOT a solved problem regardless of tech bros misleading techno optimism.
Distributed communication and state management on the other hand is a solved problem already mostly with known parameters. How else do you think thousand and thousands of Kubernetes work in the wild.
Automate the transfer yards, shipping docks, and trucking terminals. Make movement of cargo across these limited use areas entirely automated and as smooth as butter. Queue drivers up and have their loads automatically placed up front so they can drop and hook in a few minutes and get back on the road.
I honestly think that's the _easier_ problem to solve by at least two orders of magnitude.
This automation is inevitable. The ports are a choke point created by unnatural monopoly and a labor union is the incorrect solution. Particularly because their labor actions have massive collateral damage to other labor interests.
I believe that if trucking were properly unionized the port unions would be crushed. They're not that powerful they've just outlived this particular modernization the longest out of their former contemporaries.
Promising. I'm actually more familiar with the actual transportation and logistics side of the operation and strictly within the USA. I haven't seen anything new put into serious operation out here yet but I'll definitely be watching for them.
I'm astonished at how long Musk has been able to keep his autonomous driving con going. He has been lying about it to inflate Tesla shares for 10 years now.
When is the market going to realize Tesla is NEVER going to have real level 4 autonomy where Tesla takes legal liability for crashes the way Waymo has?
It "works" if you mean often does incredibly stupid and dangerous things and requires a person to be ready to take over for it at any moment to prevent a crash. So far no Tesla car has ever legally driven even a single mile without a person in the driver's seat.
It's possible to physically get in a Tesla and have it drive you from point A to point B. That's a self-driving car. You're saying it's unreliable, makes mistakes, and can be used illegally. That doesn't mean the car can't drive itself, just that it doesn't do a very good job at "self-driving"
Because since 2014 he has made wildly unrealistic claims that he is smart enough to know were BS.
December 2015: “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
January 2016
In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY
June 2016: “I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans.”
October 2016
By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.
"A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer."
January 2017
The sensor hardware and compute power required for at least level 4 to level 5 autonomy has been in every Tesla produced since October of last year.
March 2017: “I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a Tesla] in about two years.”
May 2017
Update on the coast to coast autopilot demo? - Still on for end of year. Just software limited. Any Tesla car with HW2 (all cars built since Oct last year) will be able to do this.
March 2018
I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person.
February 2019
We will be feature complete full self driving this year. The car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I'm certain of that. That is not a question mark. It will be essentially safe to fall asleep and wake up at their destination towards the end of next year
April 2019
We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year.
May 2019
We could have gamed an LA/NY Autopilot journey last year, but when we do it this year, everyone with Tesla Full Self-Driving will be able to do it too
December 2020
I'm extremely confident that Tesla will have level five next year, extremely confident, 100%
January 2021
FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021
"safer than a human driver for years" can be misleading, since the system is supervised - it assists the human driver. So what we're comparing is human+FSD vs avg car (with whatever driver assist it has).
The claim that FSD+human is safer than an average car is old and has since been debunked: if instead of comparing vs all cars (old and new, with and without driver assistance) you compare like for like: other cars of similar price also with cruise control and lanekeeping assistance, then the Tesla cars are as safe as the others.
And to be clear, none of those are autonomous. There is a certification process for autonomous cars, followed by Waymo Mercedes and others. Tesla has not even started this process.
Just because it has taken 10 years longer than promised doesn't mean that it will never happen. FSD has made huge improvements this year and is on track to keep up the current pace so it actually does seem closer than ever.
The current vision-only system is a clear technological dead-end that can't go much more than 10 miles between "disengagements". To be clear, "disengagements" would be crashes if a human wasn't ready to take over. And not needing a human driver is THE ENTIRE POINT!
I will admit Musk isn't a liar when Tesla has FSD at least as good as Waymo's system and Tesla accepts legal liability for any crashes.
No Tesla vehicle has legally driven even a single mile with no driver in the driver's seat. They aren't even trying to play Waymo's game. The latest FSD software's failure rate is at least 100 times higher than it needs to be.
Waymo uses a learned planner and is far from "hardcoded". In any case, imo both of these can be true:
* Tesla FSD works surprisingly well and improving capabilities to hands free actual autonomy isn't as far fetched as one might think.
* Waymo beat them to robotaxi deployment and scaling up to multiple cities may not be as hard as people say.
It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and is guaranteed to fail. In reality, it is very unclear as both strategies have their merits and only time will tell in the long run.
" Tesla FSD works surprisingly well and improving capabilities to hands free actual autonomy isn't as far fetched as one might think"
Except FSD doesn't work surprisingly well and there is no way it will get as good as Waymo using vision-only.
"It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and is guaranteed to fail."
I'm not being tribal, I'm being realistic based on the very public performance of both systems.
If Musk was serious about his Robotaxi claims then Tesla would be operating very differently. Instead it is pretty obvious it all a con to inflate Tesla shares beyond all reason.
The difference is that Waymo has a very well engineered system using vision, LIDAR, and millimeter wave RADAR that works well enough in limited areas to provide tens of thousands of actual driver-less rides. Tesla has a vision only system that sucks so bad a human has to be ready to take over for it at any time like a parent monitoring a toddler near stairs.
NO. Waymo cars are never remote-controlled. Remote controlling cars in traffic is too dangerous do to latency severely limited. What Waymo does is have operators provide hints. At no time is the autonomous system ever disabled. Just another example of how much better engineered Waymo is than Tesla's FSD scam.
Who said anything about Waymo? Waymo is building a very high cost commercial grade system intended for use on revenue generating vehicles. Tesla is building a low cost system intended for personal vehicles where Waymo's system would be cost prohibitive. Obviously Waymo's system is massively more capable. But that is about as surprising as the fact that a Ferrari is faster than a Ford Ranger.
But this is all irrelevant to my point. You said a Tesla is not capable of driving itself for a mile. I have personally seen one do it. Whether a person is sitting in the driver's seat, or the regulators will allow it, has nothing to do with the fact that the vehicle does, in fact, have that capability.
Honestly LLMs were a big step towards AGI, and gaming on Linux is practically flawless now. Just played through Black Myth Wukong with no issues out of the box.
I can seem LLMs serving as a kind of memory for an AGI but something fundamentally different will be needed for true reasoning and continues self-improvement.
"I'm a technologist, I know a lot about computers," Musk told the crowd during the event. "And I'm like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it's just too easy to hack."
Each version has improved. FSD is realistically the hardest thing humanity as ever tried to do. It involves an enormous amount of manpower, compute power and human discoveries, and has to work right in billions of scenarios.
Building a self flying plane is comically easy by comparison. Building Starship is easier by comparison.
Ah ok, first it is possible within 2 years, and now it is humanity's hardest problem? If it's really that hard I think we better put our resources into something more useful, like new energy solutions, seems we have an energy crisis.
It concerns me that these Tesla's can suddenly start acting differently after a software update. Seems like a great target for a cyber attack. Or just a fail from the company. A little bug that is accidentally spread to millions of cars all over the world.
And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on the road, and then Tesla adds a new fancy feature to their software and rolls out an update. How are we to be confident that it's safe?
Imagine all Teslas doing a full left right now. And full right in left steer countries.
OTA updates and auto updates in general is just a thing that should not be in vehicles. The ecu:s should have to be air gaped to the internet to be considered road worthy.
I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates to your car like vscode does.
Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback comes back, they start sending it out wider.
Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that. Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case, yes they should be held accountable.
These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things, there is an actual process to this.
For whatever it's worth, Teslas with Autopilot enabled crash about once every 4.5M miles driven, whereas the overall rate in the US is roughly one crash every 70K miles driven. Of course, the selection effects around that stat can be debated (people probably enable autopilot in situations that are safer than average, the average tesla owner might be driving more carefully or in safer areas than the average driver, etc), but it is a pretty significant difference. (Those numbers are what I could find at a glance; DYOR if you'd like more rigor).
We have a lot of traffic fatalities in the US (in some states, an entire order of magnitude worse than in some EU countries), but it's generally not considered an issue. Nobody asks, "These agents are crashing a lot; are they really competent to drive?" when the agent is human, but when the agent is digital it becomes a popular question even with a much lower crash rate.
> Gaps in Tesla's telematic data create uncertainty regarding the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage. Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes.3 A review of NHTSA's 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments.
This is an interesting point and definitely an adjustment that should be made to the interpretation of the data. That would still put the estimate far below the national average (assuming an 18% deployment rate, from 4.5M to 25M).
> The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul Garcia, public information officer for the department.
Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.
In the US it seems you'd do it with a gun, but in Germany it's cars.
There was this elderly driver who mowed down a family in a bike lane waiting to cross the road in Berlin, driving over the barriers between the bike lane and the car lane because the cars in the car lane were too slow. Released without conviction - it was an unforeseeable accident.
I have no idea what the conditions were like for this incident, but I’ve blown through a 4-way stop sign when the sun was setting. There’s only so much sunglasses can do.
You shouldn't be on the road then? If you can't see, you should slow down. If you can't handle driving in given conditions safely for everyone involved, you should slow down or stop. If everybody would drive like you, there'd be a whole lot more death on the roads.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If I can't see because of rain, hail, intense sun reflections, frost re-forming on my windshield, etc. then I pull over and put my flashers on until the problem subsides. Should I have kept the 4700 lb vehicle in fifth gear at 55 mph without the ability to see in front of me in each of these instances? I submit that I should not have and that I did the right thing.
I know right? Once I got something in my eye so I couldn't see at all, but I decided that since I couldn't do anything about it the best thing was to keep driving. I killed a few pedestrians but... eh, what was I going to do?
Your license should be suspended. If conditions don't allow you to see things like that, you slow down until you can. If you still can't, then you need to pull over and wait until conditions make it safe to drive again.
Not to mention that when you can't see, you slow down? Does the self-driving system do that sufficiently in low visibility? Clearly not if it hit a pedestrian with enough force to kill them.
The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving systems to be better than humans? Secondly, humans don't just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.
I think one of the reasons they focus only on vision is basically the entire transportation infra is designed using human eyes a primary way to channel information.
Useful information for driving are communicated through images in form of road signs, traffic signals etc.
I dunno, knowing the exact relative velocity of the car in front of you seems like it could be useful and is something humans can’t do very well.
I’ve always wanted a car that shows my speed and the relative speed (+/-) of the car in front of me. My car’s cruise control can maintain a set distance so obviously it’s capable of it but it doesn’t show it.
Yes, that’s true, but I don’t see how that relates to my comment at all.
I said the relative speed. If the car is going the same speed as me then the relative speed is 0mph. I want to see that when I’m not using cruise control.
I said one of the reasons. They probably did some cost analysis and realised it's not worth spending engineering effort on other modes when human drivers are able to drive around pretty much using only vision.
I didn't say it was the only reason. Re-read my comment.
> They probably did some cost analysis and realised it's not worth spending engineering effort on other modes when human drivers are able to drive around pretty much using only vision.
Humans and cars aren't equal so this is just incredibly misguided as a principle.
Unfortunately there is also an AI training problem embedded in this. As Mobileye says, there are a lot of driver decisions that are common, but wrong. The famous example is rolling stops, but also failing to slow down for conditions is really common.
It wouldn't shock me if they don't have nearly enough training samples of people slowing appropriately for visibility with eyes, much less slowing for the somewhat different limitations of cameras.
Negligence is negligence but people tend to view vehicle collisions as "accidents", as in random occurrences dealt by the hand of fate completely outside of anyone's control. As such, there is a chronic failure to charge motorists with negligence, even when they have killed someone.
If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay. I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it got prosecutor's discretion.
Negligence is the failure to act with the level of care that a reasonable person would exercise in a similar situation; if a reasonable person likely would have done the things that led to that person’s death, they’re not guilty of negligence.
That sounds like the justice system living up to its ideals. If the 12 jurors know they would have done the same in your situation, as would their family and friends, then they can't in good conscience convict you for negligence.
It sounds like the kind of narcissism that perverts justice. People understand things they could see themselves doing, don't understand things that they can't see themselves doing, and disregard the law entirely. It makes non-doctors and non-engineers incapable of judging doctors and engineers, rich people incapable of judging poor people, and poor people incapable of judging rich people.
It's just a variation of letting off the defendant that looks like your kid, or brutalizing someone whose victim looks like your kid, it's no ideal of justice.
I can agree with you in many cases. But for convicting someone due to negligence, they have to, by definition, have conducted themselves in a way that competent people engaged in that activity wouldn't usually. If all drivers drive a certain way, even if it's dangerous, then you're not negligent by the standards of the law for driving that same way.
Yeah, I have a couple of mirrors placed around my car that reflect light into my face so that I can get out of running into someone. Tbh I understand why they do this. Someone on HN explained it to me: Yield to gross tonnage. So I just drive where I want. If other people die, that’s on them: the graveyards are full of people with the right of way, as people say.
When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun, polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.
The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.
First of all, polarization is irrelevant when looking at the sun. It only affects light that is reflected off things like other cars' windows, or water on the street. In fact, it's often recommended not to use polarized sunglasses while driving because you can miss wet or icy patches on the road.
Secondly, standard sunglasses don't let you look directly at the sun, even a setting one. The sun is still dangerously bright.
I’m not looking directly at the sun I am looking at the road. Either way it makes a big difference and you don’t get much black ice here in sunny southern california.
But the scenario we're talking about is when the sun is just a few degrees away from the road. It's still entering your eyeball directly. It's still literally blinding, so I just... don't understand how you can do that? Like, I certainly can't. Sunglasses -- polarized or otherwise -- don't make the slightest difference. It's why sun visors exist.
Also, I'm assuming you get rain in SoCal at least sometimes, that then mostly dries up but not completely? Or leaking fire hydrants and so forth? It's the unexpected wet patches.
When we get rain in socal its a deluge. The first couple months of 2024 we had more rain than seattle. That being said there is a big difference wearing sunglasses and not. Actually I was in a parking garage today and thought of this very thread, because the sun was shining on the cement ground through the side and was literally blinding. To my naked eye it was like a blown out photograph, just pure light on the ground. I put the sunglasses on that were around my neck and what do you know. Not only did the glare go down it went down to the point I could now make out the little half rainbow streaks the cement pavers added to the floor. Same thing happens on our cement highways or when you get bad glare off of someones relatively freshly waxed car. I had a period of two weeks where I lost my polarized glasses and it was like I was disabled going outside in the day; I had to squint to even stand it because of how many white painted or cement surfaces we have here in socal. I grew up in the midwest where I did not really own sunglasses at all fwiw. Here it is mandatory for the amount of unclouded sunlight coupled with the usually white or light grey surface treatment on a lot of things.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadAs I understand it, the contentious issue is the fact that unlike most others, their attempt works mostly from visual feedback.
In low visibility situations, their FSD has limited feedback and is essentially driving blind.
It appears that Musk may be seeking a political solution to this technical problem.
FSD works. It drives itself fine 99.99% of the time. It is better than most human drivers. I don’t know how you keep claiming it doesn’t or doesn’t exist.
Tesla says on its website its "Full Self-Driving" software in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
And then the gp went into details in which specific situations fsd is especially problematic.
In 2016 a video purporting to show full self-driving with the driver there purely "for legal reasons" was staged and faked: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel...
In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
Musk claimed there would be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road in 2020. That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Tesla claimed Hardware 3 would be capable of full self-driving. When asked about Hardware 3 at Tesla's recent robotaxi event, Musk didn't want to "get nuanced". That's starting to look like fraud: https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-abo...
Had Tesla simply called it "driver assistance" that wouldn't be a lie. But they didn't do that. They doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the claim that it is "full self-driving" making the car "an appreciating asset" that it would be "financially insane" not to buy:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/elon-musk-any-other-car-than...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/03/cars/musk-tesla-cars-valu...
It's not even bullshit artistry. It's just bullshit.
Lying is part of the company culture at Tesla. Musk keeps lying because the lies keep working.
The car drives itself. This is literally undeniable. You can test it today for free. Yeah it doesn’t have the last 0.01% done yet and yeah that’s probably a lot of work. But commenting like the GP is exhausting and just not reflective of reality
Kinda like repeated claims of "Full Self Driving" for over a decade.
You understand that the false claims, the inaccuracies, and the lies come from Elon, right? They're associated with him because he is the source of them.
They're only tired because he's been telling the same lie year after year.
That's how it feels in FSD land right now. Everyone's saying FSD doesn't work and it'll never be here, but I'm literally using it every day lol.
https://youtu.be/Kswp1DwUAAI?si=rX4L5FhMrPXpGx4V
"works for me" is a very strange response for someone on Hacker News if you have any coding background - you should realize you are a beta tester unwittingly if not a full blown alpha tester in some cases
All it will take is a non-standard event happening on your daily drive. Most certainly not wishing it on you, quite the opposite, trying to get you to accept that a perfect drive 99 times out of 100 is not enough.
The US average is 1.33 deaths/100 million miles. Tesla on FSD is easily 10x safer.
Every day it gets safer.
Given that the performance has improved dramatically over the last 6 months, it is very reasonable to assume that the miles driven to fatality ratio also improving.
Using the value of 1.33 deaths per 100 million miles driven vs 2 deaths in 2 billion miles driven, FSD has saved approximately 24 lives so far.
People seem to be comparing Tesla FSD to perfection, when the more fair and relevant comparison is to real-world American drivers. Who are, on average, pretty bad.
Sure, I wouldn't trust data coming from Tesla. But we have government data.
I'll say it again: "compared to what?"
However the minimum bar for me to activate it is "compared to me". I've never come close to driving under a truck or into a divider. I slow down driving into the sunset and use a baseball hat if necessary to make sure I can see.
I see where you're coming from. That's totally fair.
As a highly-informed (about health) consumer, I feel the same way about most nutrition advice.
But the parameters for government policy decision-making are different. AND I get your point about cherry-picked data. I'd like to have better data.
Not legally and not according to Tesla either --- because Tesla's FSD is not "Fully Self Driving" --- unlike Waymo.
is that also true if the investigation determines elon saying tesla's having full self-driving capabilities is fraud?
https://apnews.com/article/car-crash-tesla-france-fire-be8ec...
In a panic people go on muscle memory, which is push the useless button. They don't remember to pull the unmarked unobtrusive handle that they may not even know exists.
If it was up to me, sure have your electronic release, but make the manual release a big handle that looks like the ejection handle on a jet (yellow with black stripes, can't miss it).
* Or even better, have the standard door handle mechanically connected to the latch through a spring loaded solenoid that disengages the mechanism. Thus when used under normal conditions it does the thing electronically but the moment power fails the door handle connects to the manual release.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-manually-open-tesla-d...
> Exton said he followed the instructions for the manual release to open the door, but that this "somehow broke the driver's window."
Tesla should build their doors like this. Oh, wait, the car I’m talking about is an older Tesla. Maybe Tesla should remember how to build doors like this.
Per Reuters [1] "The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles. The preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety."
Roughly 2.4 million Teslas in question, with "Full Self Driving" software after 4 reported collisions and one fatality.
NHTSA is reviewing the ability of FSD’s engineering controls to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions."
Tesla has, of course, rather two-facedly called its FSD as SAE Level-2 for regulatory purposes, while selling its "full self driving" but also requiring supervision. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No other company has been so irresponsible to its users, and without a care for any negative externalities imposed on non-consenting road users.
I treat every Tesla driver as a drunk driver, steering away whenever I see them on highways.
[FWIW, yes, I work in automated driving and know a thing or two about automotive safety.]
[1] https://archive.is/20241018151106/https://www.reuters.com/bu...
45000 people die yearly just in the US in auto accidents. Those numbers and timeline you quoted seem insignificant at first glance magnified by people with an axe to grind like that guy running anti Tesla superbowl ads, who makes self driving software like you.
Would you rather drive near a drunk driver using Tesla's FSD, or one without FSD?
for example, I recently hit a deer. The dashcam shows that I had less than 100 feet from when the deer became visible due to terrain to impact while driving at 60 mph. Keeping in mind that stopping a car in 100 feet at 60 mph is impossible. Most vehicles need more than triple that without accounting for human reaction time.
Here is the public database of all ADAS crashes: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
Drive according to the conditions, folks.
Montana is not "West coast".
Indiana drivers for example really do send it (in my experience). Which is not east coast of course.
There is a good bit of nuance... I would perhaps say more simply east of Mississippi vs west, but Texas varies by region and so-Cal drivers vary a lot as well, particularly compared to nor-Cal and central+eastern california. (I don't have an impression for nevada and new mexico drivers - I dont have any experience on country roads in those states)
I suppose we're meant to interpret charitably here, but it really seems to me like there is a big difference between the scenario described and the one you're talking about, where the deer really does fling itself out in front of you.
incidentally, i’ve also had the tesla dodge a deer successfully!
autopilot has improved in BIG ways over the past 2 years. went 700 miles in one day on autopilot thru the mountains. no issues at all.
that said expecting perfection from a machine or a human is a fools errand.
I live in a country with deer but the number of incidences of them interacting with road users is so low that it does not factor in to my risk tolerance.
> The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.
This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.
What they are looking for is whether there are systematic issues with the design and implementation that make it unsafe.
Certainly not to normal human drivers in normal cars. Those are killing people left and right.
I think our intent should be focused on where the fatalities are happening. To keep things comparable, we could maybe do 40,000 studies on distracted driving in normal cars for every one or two caused by Autopilot / FSD.
Alas, that's not where our priorities are.
The only people pumping the line that human drivers are bad are the people trying to sell a dream that they can make a self-driving car in a weekend, or "next year", if you just give them a pile of money and ignore all the red flags and warning signs that they are clueless. The problem is shockingly hard and underestimating it is the first step to failure. Reckless development will not get you there safely with known technology.
Those four crashes are just the ones that sparked the investigation.
We are not sure when FSD is engaged with all of these miles driven, and if FSD is making mistakes a licensed human driver would not. I would at the very least expect radical transparency.
If FSD is being used in a public road, it impacts everyone on that road, not just the person who opted-in to using FSD. I absolutely want an independent agency to ensure it's safe and armed with the data that proves it.
that's the wrong comparison
the correct comparison is the number of report crashes and fatalities for __unsupervised FSD__ miles driven (not counting Tesla pilot tests, but actual customers)
Tesla currently does not participate in any of these programs.
This is exactly what people were saying about the NHTSA Autopilot investigation when it started back in 2021 with 11 reported incidents. When that investigation wrapped earlier this year it had identified 956 Autopilot related crashes between early 2018 and August 2023, 467 of which were confirmed the fault of autopilot and an inattentive driver.
Making these arguments from the standpoint of an engineer is counterproductive.
s/ Thankfully the US presidential choices are at least rational, of sound mind, and well rounded people. Certainly no spoiled man children among them. /s
Long story short, my argument is this: it doesn’t matter if you reduce serious crashes from 100PPM to 50PPM if 25PPM of those are new crash sources, speaking from a psychological and sociological perspective. Everyone should know that driving drunk, driving distracted, driving in bad weather, and in rural areas at dawn or dusk is dangerous, and takes appropriate precautions. But what do you do if your car might crash because someone ahead flashed their high beams, or because the sun was reflecting off another car in an unusual way? Could you really load up your kids and take your hands off the wheel knowing that at any moment you might hit an unexpected edge condition?
Self driving cars are (presumably!) hard enough to trust already, since you’re giving away so much control. There’s a reason planes have to be way more than “better, statistically speaking” — we expect them to be nearly flawless, safety-wise.
These are -- like drunk driving, driving distract, and driving in bad weather -- things that actually do cause accidents with human drivers.
Tesla could also change its software without telling the driver at any point.
All they compare is "On the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions".
There's a reason Tesla doesn't release the raw data.
This is because "inattentive driving" is _rarely_ the cause of fatalities on the road. The winner there is, and probably always will be, Alcohol.
I'd imagine mobile device use will overtake alcohol soon enough
Alcohol is at 13384 in 2021 [2].
Although you're right that alcohol does claim more lives, distracted driving is still highly dangerous and isn't all that rare.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/alcohol...
Anyways.. NHTSA publishes the FARS. This is the definitive source if you want to understand the demographics of fatalities in the USA.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
How does it do X, Y, ooh Z works, etc...
> Elon's Unsupervised FSD dreams are a good bit off. I do hope they happen though.
It is very generous that you would selflessly sacrifice your own life so that others might one day enjoy Elon’s dream of robot taxis without steering wheels
Is that your fault or the car's?
I would bet that since it's your car, and you're using a knowingly unproven technology, it would be your fault?
The one theory of change I think is approachable suggests allowing dramatic increases in density in places that are not car dependent - the people who live there are much more likely to agree with us, so letting the number of people who live there 10x or even 100x could lead to this kind of change you propose.
Why on earth would you continue to use it? If it does succeed someday that's on you
They’d be dead, doubt it’s a concern at that point.
Also, if the car does something crazy, how much time do you have to react? I can imagine in some situations you might have too little time to prevent the accident the car is creating.
It's actually really easy and kind of relaxing. For long drives, it dramatically reduces cognitive load leading to less fatigue and more alertness on the road.
My hand is always on the wheel so I can react as soon as I feel the car doing something weird.
Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
China and Russia do it too. It's not an excuse, but definitely not just the US.
Asbestos products are a good example of this. A more recent one is Teflon made with PFOAs or engineered stone like Caesarstone.
Any Legislative body can do so. There's no reason to limit this strictly to the federal government. States and municipalities should have a say in this as well. The _citizens_ are the only entity that _decide_ if beta technology can be used or not.
> comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities.
This presupposes the government is naturally capable of performing an adequate job at this task or that the automakers won't sue the government to interfere with the testing regime and efficacy of it's standards.
> aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
According to Wikipedia Euro NCAP is a _voluntary_ organization and describes the situation thusly "legislation sets a minimum compulsory standard whilst Euro NCAP is concerned with best possible current practice." Which effectively highlights the above problems perfectly.
Despite it being called "Full Self-Driving."
Tesla should be sued out of existence.
https://electrek.co/2024/10/15/tesla-needs-to-come-clean-abo...
Fully self driving cars are real. Just not made by Tesla.
In 2024 if you tell me a car is “fully self driving” it’s pretty reasonable of me to think it’s a fully self driving car given the current state of vehicle technology. They didn’t say “magic steering” or something clearly ridiculous to take at face value. It sounds like what it should be able to do. Especially with “full” in the name. Just call it “assisted driving” or hell “self driving.” The inclusion of “fully” makes this impossible to debate in good faith.
Teslas run great on nuclear power, unlike fossil fuel ICE cars.
https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
Even at this minute, Teslas are moving around powered by nuclear power.
Looking forward Nuclear isn’t moving the needle. Solar grew more in 2023 alone than nuclear has grown since 1995. Worse nuclear can’t ramp up significantly in the next decade simply due to construction bottlenecks. 40 years ago nuclear could have played a larger role, but we wasted that opportunity.
It’s been helpful, but suggesting it’s going to play a larger role anytime soon is seriously wishful thinking at this point.
She's made the same baseless argument for a long time: "Nuclear power is slow, expensive — and wildly dangerous"
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#:~:text=The%20key%....
CO2 issues aside, it's just outright safer than all forms of coal and gas and about as safe as solar and wind, all three of which are a bit safer than hydro (still very safe).
Large scale dams will exist to store water, tacking hydroelectric on top of them is incredibly cost effective. Safety wise dams are seriously dangerous, but they also save a shocking number of lives by reducing flooding.
It’s still not clear today what effect CO2 or fossil fuel usage has on us.
All of the above are significantly better than burning gas or coal - but nuclear is the clear winner from an CO2 and general availability perspective.
The full cost of operating a multiple nuclear reactor for just 5 hours per day just costs more than a power plant at 80% capacity factor charging batteries.
I assume you mean that sub 80% capacity nuclear has issues being cost effective (which I agree is true).
You could pair the baseload nuclear with renewables during peak times and reduce battery dependency for scaling and maintaining higher utilization.
Daytime you’re facing solar head to head which is already dropping wholesale rates. Off peak is mostly users seeking cheap electricity so demand at 2AM is going to fall if power ends up cheaper at noon. Which means nuclear needs to make most of its money from the duck curve price peaks. But batteries are driving down peak prices.
Actually cheap nuclear would make this far easier, but there’s no obvious silver bullet.
done harm to the ecosystems where they are installed. This is quite often overlooked and brushed aside.
There is no single method of generating electricity without downsides.
Pure hydropower dams definitely do have significant environmental impact.
Maybe your just okay and willing to accept that kind of change. That's fine, just as some people are okay with the risk of nuclear, the use of land for solar/wind. But to just flat out deny that it has impact is just dishonest discourse at best
People build dams for many reasons not just electricity.
Having a reserve of rainwater is a big deal in California, Texas, etc. Letting millions of cubic meters more water flow into the ocean would make the water problems much worse in much of the world. Flood control is similarly a serious concern. Blaming 100% of the issues from dams on Hydropower is silly if outlawing hydropower isn’t going to remove those dams.
However you are conflating dam building with hydro generation.
Hydro is not evenly distributed and mostly tapped out outside of a few exceptions. Hydro literally can not solve the issue.
Even less so as AGW starts running meltwater sources dry.
Annual production from nuclear is getting passed by wind in 2025 and possibly 2024. So just this second it’s possibly #1 among wind, solar and nuclear but they are all well behind hydro.
Remember that every time you get in your Tesla that you're just a carbon offset for a spoiled billionaire.
So if Elon lives in a jet that flys 24/7 you're only very wrong. Since that's obviously not the case you're colossally and completely wrong.
Remember that the next time you try to make an argument that Tesla is not an incredible force for decarbonization.
PS: For context 2TW of solar can generate about 10% of global electricity. Production capacity will not stop at 2TW. All other forms of electricity are basically doomed, no matter what the GOP says about climate change.
But don’t get me wrong, anyone and everyone can fly their private jets if they can afford such things. They will already have generated enough taxes at that point that they’re offsetting thousands or millions of Prius drivers.
Yes, actually.
Other execs fly as needed because they recognize that in this wondrous age of the internet that teleconferencing can replace most in-person meetings. Somehow, only a supposed technology genius like Elon Musk thinks that in-person meetings required for everything.
Other execs also don't claim to be trying to save the planet while doing everything in their power to exploit its resources or destroy natural habitats.
Besides, electric vehicles still seem to be very impractical compared to normal cars, because they can't drive very far without needing a lengthy recharge.
So I think the eco-friendliness of electric vehicles is maybe like the full self-driving system: nice promises but no delivery.
Completely different from e.g. consumers, of whom less such understanding is expected.
Also, that’s investors, not consumers. While the rise of retail investing has made this kind of dubious, investors are generally assumed to be far less in need of protection than consumers by the law; it is assumed that they take care about their investment that a consumer couldn’t reasonably take around every single product that they buy.
When it was turned on according to the dashboard UI, things were even worse. It'd disengage less than every ten miles. However, there wasn't an alarm when it disengaged, just a tiny gray blinking icon on the dash. A second or so after the blinking, it'd beep once and then pull crap like attempt a sharp left on an exit ramp that curved to the right.
I can't imagine this model kills fewer people per mile than Tesla FSD.
I think there should be a recall, but it should hit pretty much all manufacturers shipping stuff in this space.
If you believe their steering assist kills more people than Tesla FSD then you're welcome, encouraged even, to file a report with the NHTSA here [1].
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
Oh and it was on by default, meaning I had to disable it every time I turned the car on.
My Hyundai is a 2021 and I have to turn on the steering assist every time which I find annoying. My guess is that you had an earlier model where the steering assist was more liability than asset.
It's understandable that earlier versions of this kind of thing wouldn't function as well, but it is very strange that they would have it on by default.
Not 100% sure which year since it wasn't mine I think around 2018 +-2y. It was good at following bright painted white lines and nothing else. I didn't mind the beeping and the vibration when I stepped on a line but it wanted to actively steer the wheel which was infuriating. I wouldn't mind it if it was just a suggestion.
This is called "false advertising", and even worse - recognizing revenue on a feature you are not delivering (a beta is not a delivered feature) is not GAAP.
I agree; the entire advertising industry is well known to be misleading and/or dishonest; it’s annoying and often hurts consumers.
> Tesla is asking for something like 15 000 dollars for access to this "beta",
The cost of FSD is $8000 for the life of the vehicle, $5000 for 3 years (includes free supercharging and premium connectivity), or as a no-contract, a la carte option for $99/month—which IMO is pretty cheap if you just want to try it out or if you only want/need it during special occasions.
> and you don't get two modal dialogs before you sign up for that.
Depends on how you purchase FSD; if done from the vehicle, you get the dialogs. If done at the time of vehicle purchase you get plenty of disclaimers and documentation about its capabilities—though not as obviously prominent and scary as modal dialogs. I haven’t witnessed a subscription purchase so I’m not sure if the dialogs are present during the subscription process; perhaps that’s where the scam lies but I doubt it.
> This is called "false advertising", and even worse - recognizing revenue on a feature you are not delivering (a beta is not a delivered feature) is not GAAP.
Perhaps in your opinion but, well… that’s not how the world works, nor the law. For decades orgs have been delivering revenue-generating products, marketed and labeled as “beta”; a product being incomplete doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Heck, most of the software we use is ever changing and often considered a beta release—but they still (usually) offer value. Remember, FSD is software, not hardware; I suspect folks are uncomfortable with what appears to be the new paradigm of cars that change their capabilities over time even while they demand regular new capabilities in other products like their phone or computer.
For what it’s worth, here’s the FSD disclaimer currently present on the Tesla website:
“Full Self-Driving (Supervised)
Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention.
Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on development and regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions.”
Seems pretty clear to me.
That's just false advertising. You can't get around that.
I can't believe our current laws let Tesla get away like that.
Tesla doesn’t advertise; they rely entirely on word of mouth, storefronts (both online and physical), and publicity/news coverage. But the answer to your question is that, on their website at least, the text disclaimers for the FSD option are the same sizes as the disclaimers for other options like the Tow Package (the disclaimer for which says “Tow up to 3,500 lbs with a class II steel tow bar”) or the wheels (the disclaimer for which shows range estimates depending on the chosen wheel diameter).
> And if it is NOT actually full self driving, why call it full self driving?
To me, this is like asking why ISPs offer “Unlimited Data” plans that have very strict limits on what constitutes “unlimited”.
It’s important to remember that the phrase “Full Self Driving” has no legal or industry-standard definition. For the sake of this discussion, and as far as I’m aware, the FSD product has never been available for purchase or subscription without a parenthetical designation, e.g. “Full Self Driving (Beta)” or “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” which, to me, suggests Tesla is acting in good faith—well, at least as far as good-faith acts exist in our marketing-driven culture. It’s only been within the last year or so that Musk has talked about “Full Self Driving (Unsupervised)” which is, I believe, the designation for what will ultimately become the Level 4/5 autonomy product.
FSD is currently classified as Level 2 autonomy by SAE. While a Level 3 autonomy product is available in the US, it is: - only available in the Mercedes Drive Pilot product, - only available in CA or NV, - limited to 40mph on pre-approved roads, - only available during daylight/good weather conditions.
The difference between the real-world capabilities of Drive Pilot and FSD is quite stark; while FSD is not officially classified as Level 3 autonomy, it’s dramatically closer to what I believe most consumers would consider “autonomous driving” than is the Mercedes product. I only got to try it for a few days so it wasn’t a detailed comparison but my own experience with Mercedes product was disappointing when compared to Tesla’s product. IOW, while perhaps not semantically accurate, the product name “Full Self Driving” is far more accurate than any other available product offering.
> That's just false advertising. You can't get around that.
Product names are very rarely subject to scrutiny for being “false advertising”. Again, the phrase “Full Self Driving” has no legal or official definition. Should it have a legal definition? I don’t know, but I do know that the “Unlimited Data” plans from carriers and ISPs are widely understood not to be “unlimited”; I don’t love those kinds of product naming schemes but I’m not sure how the FSD case is any different from a legal perspective.
> I can't believe our current laws let Tesla get away like that.
Get away with what? IME, Tesla (and pretty much every org on the planet) carefully skirt the boundaries of the law. Sometimes, if they cross a legal boundary, they’ll become subject to investigation and possibly consequences but, in the case of FSD, the court has already dismissed the lawsuit claiming Tesla lied about its capabilities. They “get away like that” by not breaking the law. Until laws change, orgs will continue to be incredibly and often overly optimistic when discussing their products.
I’d expect something big and red with a warning triangle or something, but it’s a tiny white message in the center of the screen.
That's much better. When AP functionality was introduced, the alarm was fifteen MINUTES.
Some cars that have cruise control but an analog gauge cluster that can’t display WARNING ERRORs even hide stuff like “you still have to drive the car” in a manual you have to read yet nobody cares about that.
Honestly driving a car should require some sort of license for a bare minimum of competence.
Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable places to invest.
GM ignition switch deaths 124
https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ig...
>A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like garbage.
This is a nonsense rant in my opinion.
Otherwise as thought experiment, imagine just a tiny 1 Inch tall person glued to the grocery trolley and another sitting on each shelf - just these two alone are all you need for "automated checkout".
I don’t think this would actually work, as silly a thought experiment as it is.
The problem isn’t the vision, it’s state management and cost. It was very easy (but expensive) to see and classify via CV if a person picked something up, it just requires hundreds of concurrent high resolution streams and a way to stitch the global state from all the videos.
A little 1 inch person on each shelf needs a good way to communicate to every other tiny person what they say, and come to consensus. If 5 people/cameras detect person A picking something up, you need to differentiate between every permutation within 5 discrete actions and 1 seen 5 times.
In case you didn’t know, Amazon actually hired hundreds of people in India to review the footage and correct mistakes (for training the models). They literally had a human on each shelf. And they still had issues with the state management. With people.
Distributed communication and state management on the other hand is a solved problem already mostly with known parameters. How else do you think thousand and thousands of Kubernetes work in the wild.
This is important. The autonomous driving problem and the grocery store problem are both about trade-offs, one isn't clearly better than the other.
Never rode in one once for a reason.
I honestly think that's the _easier_ problem to solve by at least two orders of magnitude.
Solving the problem might not be as easy as you suggest as long as their are powerful unions involved
I believe that if trucking were properly unionized the port unions would be crushed. They're not that powerful they've just outlived this particular modernization the longest out of their former contemporaries.
And what exactly will the truckers be trucking if the ports are crushed?
* Outrider: https://www.outrider.ai/
* Cyngn: https://www.cyngn.com/
* Fernride: https://www.fernride.com/
Any ideas what other ones are out there?
It's possible to physically get in a Tesla and have it drive you from point A to point B. That's a self-driving car. You're saying it's unreliable, makes mistakes, and can be used illegally. That doesn't mean the car can't drive itself, just that it doesn't do a very good job at "self-driving"
Because since 2014 he has made wildly unrealistic claims that he is smart enough to know were BS.
December 2015: “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
January 2016 In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY
June 2016: “I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans.”
October 2016 By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.
"A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer."
January 2017 The sensor hardware and compute power required for at least level 4 to level 5 autonomy has been in every Tesla produced since October of last year.
March 2017: “I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a Tesla] in about two years.”
May 2017 Update on the coast to coast autopilot demo? - Still on for end of year. Just software limited. Any Tesla car with HW2 (all cars built since Oct last year) will be able to do this.
March 2018 I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person.
February 2019 We will be feature complete full self driving this year. The car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I'm certain of that. That is not a question mark. It will be essentially safe to fall asleep and wake up at their destination towards the end of next year
April 2019 We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year.
May 2019 We could have gamed an LA/NY Autopilot journey last year, but when we do it this year, everyone with Tesla Full Self-Driving will be able to do it too
December 2020 I'm extremely confident that Tesla will have level five next year, extremely confident, 100%
January 2021 FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021
There is absolutely no way this can safely drive a car without supervision.
According to Tesla.
The claim that FSD+human is safer than an average car is old and has since been debunked: if instead of comparing vs all cars (old and new, with and without driver assistance) you compare like for like: other cars of similar price also with cruise control and lanekeeping assistance, then the Tesla cars are as safe as the others.
And to be clear, none of those are autonomous. There is a certification process for autonomous cars, followed by Waymo Mercedes and others. Tesla has not even started this process.
Musk is now moving the FSD work to xAI, taking what supposedly makes the public company Tesla valuable and placing it into his private ownership: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e...
Seems like a good way to privatize shareholder capital.
You should explore your bias and where it’s coming from.
The current Tesla FSD fails so often that a human HAS to be in the driver seat ready to take over at any moment.
You really don't understand the enormous difference between the current crappy level 2 Tesla FSD and Waymo's level 4 system?
I never really got why people bring Waymo up every time Tesla’s FSD is mentioned. Waymo isn’t competing with Tesla’s vision.
* Tesla FSD works surprisingly well and improving capabilities to hands free actual autonomy isn't as far fetched as one might think.
* Waymo beat them to robotaxi deployment and scaling up to multiple cities may not be as hard as people say.
It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and is guaranteed to fail. In reality, it is very unclear as both strategies have their merits and only time will tell in the long run.
Except FSD doesn't work surprisingly well and there is no way it will get as good as Waymo using vision-only.
"It seems that self driving car fans are way too tribal and seem to be convinced that the "other side" sucks and is guaranteed to fail."
I'm not being tribal, I'm being realistic based on the very public performance of both systems.
If Musk was serious about his Robotaxi claims then Tesla would be operating very differently. Instead it is pretty obvious it all a con to inflate Tesla shares beyond all reason.
But this is all irrelevant to my point. You said a Tesla is not capable of driving itself for a mile. I have personally seen one do it. Whether a person is sitting in the driver's seat, or the regulators will allow it, has nothing to do with the fact that the vehicle does, in fact, have that capability.
as
A ladder is to getting to orbit.
I can seem LLMs serving as a kind of memory for an AGI but something fundamentally different will be needed for true reasoning and continues self-improvement.
Building a self flying plane is comically easy by comparison. Building Starship is easier by comparison.
There are tons of companies and governments working on energy solutions, there is ample time for Tesla to work on self driving.
Also, do we really have an energy crisis? Are you experiencing rolling blackouts?
And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on the road, and then Tesla adds a new fancy feature to their software and rolls out an update. How are we to be confident that it's safe?
OTA updates and auto updates in general is just a thing that should not be in vehicles. The ecu:s should have to be air gaped to the internet to be considered road worthy.
I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates to your car like vscode does.
Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback comes back, they start sending it out wider.
Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that. Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case, yes they should be held accountable.
These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things, there is an actual process to this.
We have a lot of traffic fatalities in the US (in some states, an entire order of magnitude worse than in some EU countries), but it's generally not considered an issue. Nobody asks, "These agents are crashing a lot; are they really competent to drive?" when the agent is human, but when the agent is digital it becomes a popular question even with a much lower crash rate.
Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.
There was this elderly driver who mowed down a family in a bike lane waiting to cross the road in Berlin, driving over the barriers between the bike lane and the car lane because the cars in the car lane were too slow. Released without conviction - it was an unforeseeable accident.
For everything else, you have brakes.
Gross.
The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving systems to be better than humans? Secondly, humans don't just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.
Useful information for driving are communicated through images in form of road signs, traffic signals etc.
I’ve always wanted a car that shows my speed and the relative speed (+/-) of the car in front of me. My car’s cruise control can maintain a set distance so obviously it’s capable of it but it doesn’t show it.
I said the relative speed. If the car is going the same speed as me then the relative speed is 0mph. I want to see that when I’m not using cruise control.
The models that drive these cars clearly either have some more evolution to do or for us to design the world more to their liking.
> They probably did some cost analysis and realised it's not worth spending engineering effort on other modes when human drivers are able to drive around pretty much using only vision.
Humans and cars aren't equal so this is just incredibly misguided as a principle.
It wouldn't shock me if they don't have nearly enough training samples of people slowing appropriately for visibility with eyes, much less slowing for the somewhat different limitations of cameras.
If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay. I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it got prosecutor's discretion.
It's just a variation of letting off the defendant that looks like your kid, or brutalizing someone whose victim looks like your kid, it's no ideal of justice.
When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun, polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.
The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.
First of all, polarization is irrelevant when looking at the sun. It only affects light that is reflected off things like other cars' windows, or water on the street. In fact, it's often recommended not to use polarized sunglasses while driving because you can miss wet or icy patches on the road.
Secondly, standard sunglasses don't let you look directly at the sun, even a setting one. The sun is still dangerously bright.
Also, I'm assuming you get rain in SoCal at least sometimes, that then mostly dries up but not completely? Or leaking fire hydrants and so forth? It's the unexpected wet patches.
Yes, sunglasses are necessary because the white cement is blinding. That situation is literally what sunglasses are for.
But polarized sunglasses are no better than regular sunglasses in this regard. Polarization does nothing extra for rough surfaces like cement.
And you're talking entirely about reflected sunlight, which is what sunglasses are designed for.
But the topic was direct sunlight straight into your eyeball while driving, and sunglasses provide no help or safety here. Polarized or not.