Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

I don't understand how something this broken is allowed to operate on public roads.

If I drove like Tesla's FSD seems to based on the videos I've seen, I'd be pulled out of my car and arrested on (well founded) suspicions of "driving while hammered."

After a decade of work, it's not capable of doing much beyond "blundering around a city mostly without hitting stuff, but pay attention, because it'll try to hit the most nonsensical thing it doesn't understand around the next corner." It drives in a weirdly non-human way - I've seen videos of it failing to navigate things I'm sure I could get my 6 year old to drive through competently. Except, I don't actually let her drive a car on the road.

I'm out in a rural area, and while "staying in the lane" is perfectly functional (if there are lanes, which isn't at all the case everywhere on public roads), there's a lot of stuff I do on a regular basis that I've not seen any evidence of. If there's a cyclist on a two lane road, I typically get over well over the center line if there's no oncoming traffic to make room. If there is oncoming traffic, typically one person will slow down to allow the other car to get over, or the lanes just collectively "shift over" - the oncoming traffic edges the side of the road so I can get myself on or slightly over the centerline to leave room for the bike. And that's without considering things like trailers that are a foot or two into the road, passing a tractor with a sprayer (they don't have turn signals, so be careful where you try to pass), etc.

If they've got any of this functionality, I'd love to see it, because I've not seen anything that shows it off.

At this point, I think we can reasonably say that it's easier to land people on the moon than teach a car to drive.

A license that allows you to operate a motor vehicle with a beta self-driving feature. It's very similar to a regular motor vehicle, but has different failure modes.

A motorcycle is similar to an automobile, but has different failure modes, and needs a special license. A >5 tonne truck is very similar to an automobile, but has different failure modes, and needs a special license. An automobile that usually drives itself, but sometimes tries to crash itself has different failure modes from an automobile that does not try to drive itself.

> I don't understand how something this broken is allowed to operate on public roads.

Also out in a rural area. Running out to pickup lunch a few minutes ago, a young man flipped their old pickup truck on its side in an intersection, having hit the median for some reason. I too don't understand how humans are allowed to operate on public roads. Most of them are terrible at it. About 35k people a year die in motor vehicle incidents [1], and millions more are injured [2]. Total deaths while Tesla Autopilot was active is 7 [3].

I believe the argument is the software will improve to eventually be as good or better than humans, and I have a hard time not believing that, not because the software is good but because we are very bad in aggregate.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/winnablebattles/report/motor.html

[3] https://www.tesladeaths.com/

The history of human machine interactions makes it clear that if you have the human as the primary control (in the main decision loop, operating things) and the automation watching over their shoulders, it works pretty well.

The opposite - where the automation handles the common case, with the human watching, simply does not work. It's not worked in aviation, it's not worked in industrial systems, it's not worked in self driving cars. This isn't a novel bit of research, this is well understood.

"I'll do 99.90% of it correctly, you watch and catch the 0.1% when I screw up!" style systems that rely on the human to catch the mistakes shouldn't be permitted to operate in any sort of safety critical environment. It simply doesn't work.

I live in a place with fairly snowy winters, which seems like a huge problem for self-driving cars. I completely agree with this thought that we should work on making our roads help the self-driving cars. If we had started that effort several years back, we would likely have a lot of road miles that could safely handle self-driving vehicles. If we start now, in several years we'll have a bunch of road miles ready for them.

Granted that the US has a lot of road-miles, but doing this work incrementally is the way to go. I have a feeling it will be faster to outfit the roads than to build reliable self-driving software. I will also grant that this is a "feeling" and I'm sure someone has done actual research :)

If this capability could be used to help hasten the move to electric vehicles, we could even get a climate change win in at the same time.