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Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

reuters.com

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Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#201

Post by edub »

popz41 wrote: post #158
jdhn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I paid an extra $10,000 for a feature that was promised but still hasn't been fully delivered As far as I'm concerned, that $10k is basically an interest free loan to Tesla. FSD as promised by Elon is going to take decades, and the worst part is that it's not even transferable from one car to another.

Full Self Driving actually counts as deferred revenue to Tesla, and is reported as a liability on the balance sheet. They cant realize that income until the feature is delivered.

>deferred revenue to Tesla, and is reported as a liability on the balance sheet

if it is a liability on their books, then i would agree with OP that it is an interest free loan.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#202

Post by jdofaz »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #130
gauravphoenix wrote: post #58

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

Autopilot is terrifying. I've been a huge admirer of Tesla for years. I've always wanted a Tesla. I test drove a Model 3 a few weeks ago and had a very negative experience. Auto-pilot/FSD are enabled in different ways (one pull of a stalk vs two). It shows up on the center screen as a small blue dot. There were times I wasn't sure if it was engaged, or if I needed to take control. Since the screen is to the right I h…

One pull is regular cruise control

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#203

Post by osmarks »

jonplackett wrote: post #129
dmm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, IMO, it will never happen because it needs a full artificial general intelligence. I think it will happen but only by making many expensive, intrusive changes to our cities and roads to accommodate "self-driving" cars.

I think we still must be missing something very fundamental with the way we’re doing AI. When you look at nature and see a tiny bee or fly navigating perfectly around all sorts of obstacles, including the newspaper I’m trying to swat it with, using just that teeny tiny brain running of mili-watts of power with just compound eyes to guide it. And in 3D space not a nice flat surface. But we still can’t make a car not d…

The fly has a really efficient specialized "computer" for the neural network thing it's running, while human ones are more generalized and don't have the benefit of hundreds of millions of years of power consumption optimization. The human software also has not been iterated on for those hundreds of millions of years.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#204

Post by valine »

wearywanderer wrote: post #197
valine wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the short term for sure. I've been pretty impressed with the FSD beta videos circulating youtube though. It's better than you would expect for a non-geofenced, vision based self driving system.

Better than I would have expected? I guess we didn't watch the same videos. I expected to see the system repeatedly trying to kill people and that's exactly what I saw in those videos.

I guess we haven't seen the same videos. I've watched many hours of FSD beta footage and if anything its excessively cautious.

Not saying it never makes dangerous mistakes, but the mistakes I've seen it make seem solvable. For example it has trouble with unprotected left turns when there are trees or fences obscuring the view. That to me is understandable and could probably be fixed with an update to the vision stack, maybe train the object detector on cars partially obscured by trees.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#205

Post by [deleted] »

mathstuf wrote: post #170
jonplackett wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we still must be missing something very fundamental with the way we’re doing AI. When you look at nature and see a tiny bee or fly navigating perfectly around all sorts of obstacles, including the newspaper I’m trying to swat it with, using just that teeny tiny brain running of mili-watts of power with just compound eyes to guide it. And in 3D space not a nice flat surface. But we still can’t make a car not d…

[ Note: I'm a complete layperson in the AI field, so feel free to correct me. This is mostly based on my penchant for reading topics such as evolutionary biology, Hofstadter, and such. ] If we used genetic algorithms to design the algorithm, it'd probably be able to get something as efficient as that. However, you're also not going to be able to "fix this one thing" because it's more likely to be the result of emerge…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#206

Post by Syonyk »

jonplackett wrote: post #129
dmm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, IMO, it will never happen because it needs a full artificial general intelligence. I think it will happen but only by making many expensive, intrusive changes to our cities and roads to accommodate "self-driving" cars.

I think we still must be missing something very fundamental with the way we’re doing AI. When you look at nature and see a tiny bee or fly navigating perfectly around all sorts of obstacles, including the newspaper I’m trying to swat it with, using just that teeny tiny brain running of mili-watts of power with just compound eyes to guide it. And in 3D space not a nice flat surface. But we still can’t make a car not d…

> Something is off.

Yes. The fundamental assumptions about how brains work are wrong.

I see, far too often, the dismissive interpretation of brains as "A couple crappy cameras tied to a neural network" - which leads to the "Well, we have better cameras and we know how to do neural networks, so it can't be hard!" Throw in some dismissive statements about how awful humans are at driving and such, and you're set for the trap.

Human/animal vision systems are way more optimized than that sort of handwaving dismissal. The "cameras" are well optimized for what's needed, and have some pretty darned impressive scanning features to make a very small central cone of resolution do everything that's needed - without flooding the brain with HD video in places that don't matter. It's an optimized system for making a fairly narrow feed cover everything that's needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

And, yes, there are some weird quirks of vision systems - optical illusions and such. But once you get past the eyes, the rest of the "Make sense of the 3D world around us" system is insanely optimized, and exceedingly power efficient. It works well enough and reliably enough to handle absolutely absurd changes in the operating environments. Humans did not come born with "supersonic low level flight" built into the system, yet... our brains can work with it. It just takes some learning and brain adjustments.

And the whole rest of the system following is similarly impressive.

There's a typically paired arrogance you also see: "We are like gods in the synthetic world of the internet, because we know code and manage 99.995% API success rates, therefore we can use code to solve reality." Reality is infinitely more creative at throwing wrenches into things than we are at solving them with code, and while it doesn't really matter on the internet, it very much does matter at 75mph.

When you dismiss all that as "crappy cameras and a neural network, we know code, we can do that!" - you end up failing in the predictable ways we see with the self driving cars.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#207

Post by andrewmcwatters »

The full self-driving capabilities at $10,000 seem to be a poor value when you compare it to the fact that you could just... pay a person to drive you around.

I mean, hopefully no one is financing or leasing these cars when you're purchasing FSD, right? It only makes sense to me if you buy the car in cash. You could literally just set aside the $10,000 to occasionally have a professional driver chauffeur you, provide drinks in the car, etc.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#208

Post by wumpus »

nemothekid wrote: post #85
gauravphoenix wrote: post #58

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

If you are in the Bay Area, I think I know exactly what intersection you are talking about and I'm surprised it hasn't been fix. Someone died in a Model X at that intersection a couple years ago. https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/03/23/car-fire-closes-lanes-o...

There's a continuous median in that area.

One Bay-area example where the median disappears to allow a left turn lane is C-17 going to Santa Cruz.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#209

Post by amalcon »

notJim wrote: post #167
chronic83027 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meaning if you don’t have a Tesla you either simply can’t make trips beyond a single-charge round-trips You’re overestimating how many people make road trips > 200 miles. Most Americans never leave their hometown, with an even higher percentage who never left their state. For the middle class family who drives to visit grandma once a year in a different state, they’ll just use their ICE car.

> Most Americans never leave their hometown This can't possibly be right. Maybe they never move away , but never leave a radius of 200 miles from their home town? Do you have a cite for that?

Yeah, 200 miles is under a 4hr drive. That's just not considered very far in the US. Most people don't make a trip like that every day, but not even once?

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#210

Post by osmarks »

wearywanderer wrote: post #179
wpietri wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We surely are missing a lot. But nature has picked easier problems with a fly. They are small enough to be very robust; flying into things is no problem. They're also cheap to build and incredibly numerous. Flies, well, drop like flies. If we had a similar tolerance for car crashes, existing levels of automation would be fine.

Even human brains, with all their capabilities, get the job done for 20 watts (or something in that order of magnitude.) Who even knows how much power we'd need for equivalent results from the best specialized silicon we have? I think you might burn a hundred gigawatts and still not get comparable results. Something is clearly wrong with our approach. It should be possible to do much more with much less, but there is…

The brain has hyperspecialized and hyperoptimized single-purpose hardware. Human AI systems run on more general-purpose machines with a few decades spent improving the hardware. Blaming the software is silly.
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