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I thought the title meant the software crashed, but it was the car that crashed: "They didn’t make it out of California without crashing into easily avoidable road debris that badly damaged the Tesla Model Y ... In the video, you can see that the driver doesn’t have his hands on the steering wheel. The passenger spots the debris way ahead of time. There was plenty of time to react, but the driver didn’t get his hands on the steering wheel until the last second."
> Tesla’s EV business is in decline and the stock price depends entirely on the self-driving and robot promises

I don't think that's right; I think the stock price entirely depends on people seeing it a vehicle to invest in Musk. If Musk died tomorrow, but nothing else changed at Tesla, the stock price would crater.

It's so clear, dry, perfect lighting, no traffic or anything. That's shocking.
Two more years guys, just give him two more years, a few more billion, a bit more political power and I promise he'll give you your fancy self driving toy. (Repeat from 2012 ad infinitum)
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I use Tesla FSD 99% of the time. I recently drove from Austin to Florida and back.

The only time I had to take over was for road debris on the highway. Off the highway it’s very good about avoiding it. My guess is Tesla has not been focusing on this issue as it's not needed for robotaxi for phase one.

It’s an accident that could also happen to an inattentive human driver. (Ask me how I know :( )

But, if you watch the car’s display panel, it looks as if the car didn’t see anything and just went full speed ahead. That’s not great.

It should have slowed down and alerted the driver that something was there. I didn’t watch the complete video so maybe there’s more.

"is a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires constant supervision by a human driver" - the reason for human supervision might have something to do with uncommon situations (debris in road being such a situation).

Elon's estimates have always been off but it is irresponsible to see an obstacle up ahead and assume the computer would do something about it while the driver and passenger debate on what the said obstacle is. I am not sure if they were trying to win a Darwin Award and I say that as no particularly fan of Musk!

I honestly don’t know if I would have seen and avoided that, it came up really fast. And based on the video it looked like a cardboard box or something not worth avoiding until it was within 2-3 seconds range.
A friend of mine who loves Tesla watched this video and said "many humans would have hit that". I feel we'll be hearing a lot of that excuse.
Tangentially - If you as a European happen to drive on US highways, you will noticed that they are heavily littered with fallen cargo, aluminum ladders, huge amount of shredded tires and occasionally a trailer without a towing car... It has been so bizarre for me to observe this. Nobody is cleaning that?
I got my first Tesla last year and my first trip with FSD was just after the launch of V13, so I could not compare it to earlier versions. But I was shocked by how good it was. I completed a 800 miles trip with a handful of interventions, most or all of them likely unnecessary. Even with rain the system worked well. I don’t understand how the system was not able to see this obstacle and slow down or change lanes. Did they have traffic tailgating? I can see some edge cases where there’s really no way to avoid something like this safely. In any case it’s pretty unfortunate and it will make me be even more cautious when using FSD.
I've been using FSD lately on trips from CT to NYC and back (and the car performed well). My biggest fear has been debris (like shown in the video), or deer.
What is the point of "testing" something that everyone knows doesn't work and only exists because a serial liar said so? If Musk says you will survive a fall from a 90-stories high-rise... don't test it.
Would lidar detect such debris?
A lot of apologists say that "a human would have hit that".

That's kind of irrelevant, this technology is meant to be safer and held to a higher standard.

Comparing to a human is not a valid excuse...

Anecdotal: I am surprised how the basic Tesla autopilot often cannot even read the speed limit signs correctly. In perfect lighting conditions. It just misses a lot of them. And it does not understand the traffic rules enough to know when the speed limit ends.

I know that the basic autopilot is a completely different system than the so-called FSD.

But equipped with that experience from the basic autopilot, it does not surprise me that a large debris on the road was completely missed by the FSD.

It is unclear if it can even read signs at all. FSD, not Autopilot, on the current version can not read “Do Not Enter” and “Road Closed” signs and will entirely ignore them. It would be reasonable to assume it can not read any signs at all. But it will be safer than a human driver in just negative 9 years.
I would try to pass it between the wheels and would crash the same.

At least for me there was nothing indicating there is not enough clearance.

One of my biggest criticisms of Elon is that he rarely takes accountability for his words and nobody ever holds him accountable by asking directly. This isn't a high bar to clear, but some people continuously excuse him as being "overly-eager" in his predictions. If that was the case, he could still provide reasonable updates when a predicted date is missed along with an explanation, even if it's just: "Hey, it turns out this problem was much more difficult than we initially expected and it'll take longer". A lot of the problems that he's trying to solve are actually quite difficult, so it's understandable that predictions will be imprecise... But when you realize that your predictions are going to be wrong, you should have the basic decency to update people.

When you're wielding immense amounts of money, power, and influence I think it's worth trying to do the bare-minimum to hold people accountable for their words and claims. Otherwise your words are meaningless.

Props to the article for including a gif of the crash so we don’t have to give these people any more views on youtube.
I rant about Elon a lot but can someone just explain to me how this keeps going on ? FSD is almost completely a solved problem by the likes of Waymo etc. Why does anyone care what Tesla is failing to do with FSD? Is this all about, "how can we invent FSD without lidar"? Why are we bothering, because cybertruck owners don't want a dorky box on top of their truck? Does their truck already not look ridiculous?
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Guy in the video calls it a "girder", but it is almost certainly a trailer ramp: https://www.proxibid.com/lotinformation/54574457/2006-murray...

That was my hunch, but Google Lens was able to ID it. Possible that Waymo vehicles can do this too, but that must take some serious compute and optimization to do at highway speeds.