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Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

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Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#111

Post by close04 »

rob74 wrote: post #43
agildehaus wrote: post #30

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.

Well, I have to admit that your friend has a point. Humans are bad at reacting quickly and correctly to unexpected situations, and some debris large enough to damage your car showing up from out of nowhere after several hours of boring driving along a largely straight highway with little traffic is definitely one of these situations. But a self-driving system worth its salt should always be alert, scanning the road a…

> I have to admit that your friend has a point

Do they? "Many humans" would hit that? The humans in the car spotted the debris at least 8s before the impact. I don't think any humans would hit that in broad daylight unless they were asleep, completely drunk, or somehow managed to not look at the road for a full 10s. These are the worst drivers, and there aren't that many because the punishment can go up to criminal charges.

The argument that "a human would have made that mistake" backfires, showing that every Tesla equipped with the "safer than a human driver" FSD is in fact at best at "worst human driver" level. But if we still like the "humans also..." argument, then the FSD should face the same punishment a human would in these situations and have its rights to drive any car revoked.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#112

Post by Coffeewine »

anonymars wrote: post #45
lazide wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with ‘driver in the loop only for emergencies’ is that it’s harder for someone to be prepared to react only occasionally (but still promptly and correctly) when outlier behavior happens, not easier. For automated tools like CNC machines, there is a reason it’s just ‘emergency stop’ for instance, not ‘tap the correct thing we should do instead’. But doing an e-stop on a road at speed is a very dangerous acti…

There's sort of an analogous conundrum with Airbus-style automation: the system has various levels of automation and protection (e.g. preventing you from stalling the plane) And then when something goes wrong, you are unceremoniously handed a plane with potentially some or all of those protections no longer active. As an analogy, imagine your FSD car was trying to slow down for something, but along the way there is s…

I’ll defend airbus a little - there are flight laws that more or less provide at any given moment as much automation as is possible given the state of the sensors and computers. So it doesn’t just go ‘oops, a sensor failed, now you have direct control of the plane.’

It does have the same problem - if 99.999% of your flight time is spent in normal law you are not especially ready to operate in one of the alternate laws or god forbid direct law, which is similar to the case of a driver who perhaps accustomed to the system forget how to drive.

But I think we have a ways before we get there. If the car could detect issues earlier and more gradually notify the driver that they need to take control, most every driver at present retains the knowledge of how to directly operate a car with non-navigational automation (abs as you mentioned, power stearing, etc)

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#113

Post by tedggh »

agildehaus wrote: post #30

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.

The question is if avoiding the obstacle or breaking was the safest thing to do. I did not watch the entire test, but they are definitely cases where a human will suddenly break or change lanes and cause a very unsafe condition for other drivers. Not saying that was the case here, but sometimes what a human would do is not a good rule for what the autonomous system should do.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#114

Post by bananapub »

petermcneeley wrote: post #61
coreyh14444 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debris is pretty close to the color of the road. Seems like a good case for radar/lidar ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And yet the humans detected it without lidar?

they're making fun of Tesla, which stopped putting radar (ed: I misremembered, thanks to the commenter below) in their cars during the pandemic when it got expensive and instead of saying "we can't afford it", claimed it's actually better to not have lidar and just rely on cameras

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#115

Post by duxup »

general1465 wrote: post #50

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?

It greatly depends on where you are.

But yes there are folks whose job it is to clean that stuff up.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#116

Post by sandworm101 »

agildehaus wrote: post #30

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.

Yes. Humans would. Which is why the car should be able to handle the impact. My honda civic has had worse without issue. The suspension should be beefy enough to absorb the impact with, at worst, a blown tire. That the car has broken suspension says to me that teslas are still too fragile, biuld more like performance cars than everyday drivers.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#117

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

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.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#118

Post by __alexs »

comrade1234 wrote: post #58
general1465 wrote: post #50

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 just got back from a trip to the USA where I spent about five days driving around Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin and the number of shredded truck tires on the highways was flabbergasting. From what I understand, in the USA when a truck tire wears down they put a new layer of tread on it. But it doesn't seem to work very well as it eventually peels off.

Retredding like this is also entirely normal in Europe. I guess they just have more trucks?

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#119

Post by [deleted] »

general1465 wrote: post #50

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?

[deleted]
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