I’m still perplexed by the utter lack of regulatory action in both the U.S. and Canada with FSD. Its inconsistency and Tesla’s “seat of the pants” approach to safety have gotten enough people injured to where I’d have expected someone to take notice by now. Don’t get me wrong, when it works, it’s amazing but there’s no way to reliably establish that it works on the same route twice.
As time goes on, Tesla's fiasco becomes more and more embarrassing. Waymos are all over the place in the cities they serve, doing pretty much what they're supposed to do. Nuro has some fully autonomous vehicles running around. Baidu's Apollo Go is deployed in 16 cities in China, although they use remote driving as a backup.
Tesla, though, is still hyping a technology that seems to have maxed out years ago.
I just had a thought - a Waymo car costs $200k (maybe more) from a quick google search. YoY returns of $200k on S&P are about 10%, while an Uber driver takes home about $40-$50k - so in terms of cost, they are about 2x-2.5x of each other, with the Waymore likely needing expensive maintenance/support infrastructure, bringing the total much closer.
Which means if Tesla can really build that Cybercab - with an underpowered motor, small battery, plastic body panels, just cameras (which I think they promised to sell under $20k) - they'll be able to hit a business expense level and profitability that Waymo will only be able, in say, 10 years.
Even if you don't want to talk about non-existing hardware, a Model 3's manufacturing cost is surely much lower than a Waymo.
Once (if) they make self driving work at any point in time before Waymo gets to the same level of cost - they'll be the more profitable business.
Not only that, they'll be able to enter markets where the cost of Waymo and what you can charge for taxi rides is so far apart that it doesn't make sense for them - in this sense, they'll have a first mover advantage.
It's like being a loan guarantor. If the loan gets paid off, the lender/borrower get the benefits. You get 0. If the loan goes delinquent, you are on the hook.
Having driven Tesla FSD and coded with Claude/Codex, it suffers from the exact same issues- Stellar performance in most common contexts, but bizarrely nonsensical behavior sometimes when not.
Which is why I call it "thunking" (clunky thinking) instead of "thinking". And also why it STILL needs constant monitoring by an expert.
I mean, obviously. A significant part entire economy runs on plausible deniability. Amazon is a great example of this, by keeping similar products or different vendors in the same bin. Regulations are to keep out competitors, etc.
> So, for example, when a Florida driver on Autopilot drops his phone and blows through a stop sign, hitting a car which then hits two pedestrians, killing one, Tesla will claim “this driver was solely at fault.” In that case, a judge agreed that the driver was mostly at fault, but still assigned 33% of blame to Tesla, resulting in a $243 million judgment against the company.
His foot was on the gas though
Looking at this author's other articles, he seems more than a bit unhinged when it comes to Tesla: https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ Has Hacker News fallen for clickbait? (Don't answer)
is there any blame to be associated to Tesla for its feature? what's the right percent for you? 20%? 10%? 5%? 0%?
If the wheels of the car fell off, whould Tesla have any blame for that? If we had laid wires all along the road to allow for automatic driving, and Tesla's software misread that and caused a crash, would it be to blame?
When is Autopilot safe to use? Is it ever safe to use? Is the fact that people seem to be able to entirely trick the Autopilot to ignore safety attention mechanisms relevant at all?
If we have percentage-based blame then it feels perfectly fine to share the blame here. People buy cars assuming that the features of the car are safe to use to some extent or another.
Maybe it is just 0%. Like cruise control is a thing that exists, right? But I'm not activating cruise control anywhere near any intersection. Tesla calls their thing autopilot, and their other thing FSD, right? Is there nothing there? Maybe there is no blame, but it feels like there's something there.
Ultimately, anecdotes and testimonials of a product like this are irrelevant. But the public discourse hasn't caught up with it. People talk about it like it's a new game console or app, giving their positive or negative testimonials, as if this is the correct way to validate the product.
Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.
This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"
10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.
We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.
If there was actually a rate of one life threatening accident per 10,000 miles with FSD that would be so obvious it would be impossible to hide. So I have to conclude the cars are actually much safer than that.
It can be misleading to directly compare disengagements to actual catastrophic incidents.
The human collision numbers only count actual incidents, and even then only ones which have been reported to insurance/authorities. It doesn't include many minor incidents such as hitting a bollard, or curb rash, or bump-and-run incidents in car parks, and even vehicle-on-vehicle incidents when both parties agree to settle privately. And the number certainly excludes ALL unacceptably close near-misses. There's no good numbers for any of these, but I'd be shocked if minor incidents weren't an of magnitude more common, and near misses another order of magnitude again.
Whereas an FSD disengagement could merely represent the driver's (very reasonable) unwillingness to see if the software will avoid the incident itself. Some disengagements don't represent a safety risk at all, such as when the software is being overly cautious, e.g. at a busy crosswalk. Some disengagements for sure were to avoid a bad situation, though many of these would have been non-catastrophic (such as curbing a wheel) and not a collision which would be included in any human driver collision statistics.
As a robotaxi, yes. That's why Teslas rollout is relatively small/slow, has safety monitors, etc...
FSD, what most people use, is ADAS, even if it performs a lot of the driving tasks in many situations, and the driver needs to always be monitoring it, no exceptions.
The same applies to any ADAS. If it doesn't work for in a situation, the driver has to take over.
My question about the safety of "FSD" or whatever autonomous cars is -- how much safety reputation can you burn in a new market that offers huge convenience? Which is more important, being first or being best?
Apple's famous for not being first, but being best to a well established market and cleaning up.
People certainly don't remember de havilland, who was first to the market of "passenger jet airliner".
I certainly won't be putting my kids in any of these, and especially not in a vehicle operated by a company with a "devil may care" approach to safety.
Sure, it works fine in Arizona or Texas; let's see it work okay with a snow storm in Boston.
This is a bit of an off topic but I'm sorta interested in a general survey of how other manufacturers stack up compared to big 2, particularly Mercedes from Europe, who're said to have a pretty good solution and all the Chinese brands - it's not uncommon to see even mid-range Chinese cars with lidar integrated, wonder how good they are.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadThe family of the first person killed by that will know who to sue for a punitive trillion dollars.
Drivers have tackled this problem by wearing polaroid sunglasses.
I really hope someone asks Tesla how they plan to solve the Sun glare issue.
Tesla, though, is still hyping a technology that seems to have maxed out years ago.
Which means if Tesla can really build that Cybercab - with an underpowered motor, small battery, plastic body panels, just cameras (which I think they promised to sell under $20k) - they'll be able to hit a business expense level and profitability that Waymo will only be able, in say, 10 years.
Even if you don't want to talk about non-existing hardware, a Model 3's manufacturing cost is surely much lower than a Waymo.
Once (if) they make self driving work at any point in time before Waymo gets to the same level of cost - they'll be the more profitable business.
Not only that, they'll be able to enter markets where the cost of Waymo and what you can charge for taxi rides is so far apart that it doesn't make sense for them - in this sense, they'll have a first mover advantage.
Having driven Tesla FSD and coded with Claude/Codex, it suffers from the exact same issues- Stellar performance in most common contexts, but bizarrely nonsensical behavior sometimes when not.
Which is why I call it "thunking" (clunky thinking) instead of "thinking". And also why it STILL needs constant monitoring by an expert.
His foot was on the gas though
Looking at this author's other articles, he seems more than a bit unhinged when it comes to Tesla: https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ Has Hacker News fallen for clickbait? (Don't answer)
If the wheels of the car fell off, whould Tesla have any blame for that? If we had laid wires all along the road to allow for automatic driving, and Tesla's software misread that and caused a crash, would it be to blame?
When is Autopilot safe to use? Is it ever safe to use? Is the fact that people seem to be able to entirely trick the Autopilot to ignore safety attention mechanisms relevant at all?
If we have percentage-based blame then it feels perfectly fine to share the blame here. People buy cars assuming that the features of the car are safe to use to some extent or another.
Maybe it is just 0%. Like cruise control is a thing that exists, right? But I'm not activating cruise control anywhere near any intersection. Tesla calls their thing autopilot, and their other thing FSD, right? Is there nothing there? Maybe there is no blame, but it feels like there's something there.
It can't be healthy to be so obsessed with something/someone you dislike.
And by the way - I have heard big tech folks repeat that phrase, not really understanding the moral of that Steve Jobs story.
Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.
This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"
10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.
We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.
The human collision numbers only count actual incidents, and even then only ones which have been reported to insurance/authorities. It doesn't include many minor incidents such as hitting a bollard, or curb rash, or bump-and-run incidents in car parks, and even vehicle-on-vehicle incidents when both parties agree to settle privately. And the number certainly excludes ALL unacceptably close near-misses. There's no good numbers for any of these, but I'd be shocked if minor incidents weren't an of magnitude more common, and near misses another order of magnitude again.
Whereas an FSD disengagement could merely represent the driver's (very reasonable) unwillingness to see if the software will avoid the incident itself. Some disengagements don't represent a safety risk at all, such as when the software is being overly cautious, e.g. at a busy crosswalk. Some disengagements for sure were to avoid a bad situation, though many of these would have been non-catastrophic (such as curbing a wheel) and not a collision which would be included in any human driver collision statistics.
FSD, what most people use, is ADAS, even if it performs a lot of the driving tasks in many situations, and the driver needs to always be monitoring it, no exceptions.
The same applies to any ADAS. If it doesn't work for in a situation, the driver has to take over.
wonder what driving force behind this, because at somepoint money didnt matters
Apple's famous for not being first, but being best to a well established market and cleaning up.
People certainly don't remember de havilland, who was first to the market of "passenger jet airliner".
I certainly won't be putting my kids in any of these, and especially not in a vehicle operated by a company with a "devil may care" approach to safety.
Sure, it works fine in Arizona or Texas; let's see it work okay with a snow storm in Boston.