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When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

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Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above I was talking more generally about full autonomy. I agree the combined human + fsd system can be at least as safe as a human driver, perhaps more, if you have a good driver. As a frequent user of FSD, it's unreliability can be a feature, it constantly reminds me it can't be fully trusted, so I shadow drive and pay full attention. So it's like having a second pair of eyes on the road. I worry that when it gets t…

Yeah, I agree with that. There's a potentially dangerous attention gap that could just play into the fundamental weakness of the human brain's ability to pay attention for long periods of time with no interaction. Unfortunately I don't see any possible way to validate this without letting the tech loose. You can't get good data on this without actual driving in real road conditions.

At a certain point you do need to test in real road conditions. However, there is absolutely no need to jump straight from testing in lab conditions and “testing” using unmonitored, untrained end users.

You use professional trained operators with knowledge of the system design and operation using a designed safety plan to minimize prototype risks. At no point should your test plan increase danger to members of the public. Only when you fix problems faster than that test procedure can find do you expand scope.

If you follow the standard automotive pattern, you then expand scope to your untrained, but informed employees using monitored systems. Then untrained employees, informed employees using production systems. Then informed early release customers. Then once you stop being able to find problems regularly at all of those levels do you do a careful monitored release to the general public verifying the safety properties are maintained. Then you finally have a fully released “safe” product.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single person I know driving a Tesla told me the FSD (not AP) is bad I really don't believe this because everyone I know who drives a Tesla tells me the opposite. I tend to think this is an artifact of people who just irrationally hate Tesla because IRL every negative thing I hear about Teslas comes from people who don't own the cars and hate Elon Musk. > they would never trust it to drive without very carefu…

> I really don't believe this because everyone I know who drives a Tesla tells me the opposite. I mean, I love my Tesla autopilot. It made my cross-country trips so much more enjoyable. I have several thousand hours on autopilot at this point. That being said, I don't use it on regular city streets. Because it's just bad, in all kinds of ways. "Full self-driving" it is not.

Yeah, that's the type of feedback I absolutely do believe. Sounds like something someone would say about their car to me IRL. That's basically the standard I apply to internet comments.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but while I am a happy Waymo user, this is overblown and just incorrect. Waymo has datacenter oversight. (which, who cares, the product is great). Tesla FSD 12 -> 13 was a massive jump that happened earlier this year. 14 is still rolling out. Testing out 13 this weekend, it drove on country roads, noticed a road closure, rerouted, did 7 miles on non divided highways, navigated a town and chose a parking space a…

> It was genuinely good. You lack data to draw this conclusion. The most important factor is deaths per mile, which is sparse, so it requires aggregating data from many drivers before you have enough statistical power.

Qualitative reactions matter. I didn't say it was genuinely safe. I can say that it was smooth, reacted better than most adult drivers to the situations I witnessed, and was significantly better at those things than the prior version. Safety is sparse, but steering, acceleration, decision making happen at like 60hz, and I would say I can make a qualitative judgment on it.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried fsd 13/14 yet? I just upgraded to 13 from 12 and it's a massssive improvement. Not sure what 14 s like. It's definitely added a 9 in the last year.

I tried 12 and 13. My car hasn't gotten 14 and I'm not interested in finding out if it'll get it, because at this point I'm simply not interested even if it's decent. And there's no guarantee it'll be meaningfully better, if I'm being honest. Why would I believe that all the issues are fixed? For me to be interested, every single problem that I'd encountered needs to be resolved. Why would I even consider accepting a…

Meh. I do a lot of beta testing, and enjoy it. I think it's fun to watch the evolution of this tech over the last seven or eight years. But you don't have to feel that way.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#115
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.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This scam is true for all AI technologies. It only "works" as far as we interpret it as working. LLMs generate text. If it answers our question, we say that the LLM works. If it doesn't, we say that it is "hallucinating".

Im sorta beginning to think some LLM/AI stuff is the Wizard of Oz(a fake it before you make it facade). Like why can an LLM create a nicely designed website for me but asking it to do edits and changes to the design is a complete joke. Lots of the time it creates another brand new design (not what i asked all) and it's attempts at editing it LOL. It makes me think it does no design at all rather it just went and grab…

> it does no design at all rather it just went and grab one from the ethers of the Internet

Bingo. It just "remembers" one of the many designs it has seen before.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#117
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would at least like to use it for stop and go traffic, which is about the only thing I trust FSD for.

> Would at least like to use it for stop and go traffic, which is about the only thing I trust FSD for. Depends on the type of stop and go driving. Crawling along at 15mph, sure. But the most dangerous driving scenario - whether human or machine is the driver - is a scenario with large variations in speed between vehicles and also limited visibility. For example suddenly encountering a traffic jam that starts around…

Dangerous for some humans. If a self-driving system is taking a blind corner, I would expect it to be approaching it at a more appropriate speed.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#118
post #10

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 underpowe…

Not to mention, Waymo is moving from Jaguar to Zeekr for its next-gen fleet, meaning 100% import tariffs on those Chinese-built base vehicles before it even begins the expensive retrofit process.

The core problem with Waymo’s model is its lack of (economically rational) scalability. Shipping finished vehicles to a second facility to strip and rebuild them as robotaxis is inherently inefficient, and cannot be made efficient by scaling up. To achieve meaningful volume, Waymo would need to contract an automaker to build finished robotaxis, ideally domestically or where tariffs are sufficiently low.

Obviously Tesla's solution only works if their vision-only strategy bears fruit. Assuming it does (a wildly controversial assumption in this space, but let's go with it for now) the economics are utterly wild. It's difficult to imagine how any competitor could come close to competing on cost or scale. And that's assuming the Model Y, ignoring the as-yet hypothetical Cybercab.

I suppose Alphabet could buy the corpse of Canoo. I suspect that if it had a plausible manufacturing ramp, they would have been snapped up quickly. Automotive-scale manufacturing is a crucible, and it destroys most who attempt it. In fact most die long before they begin frfr.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#119

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 m…

> 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. 100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal. The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in a…

They're building on a false premise that human equivalent performance using cameras is acceptable. That's the whole point of AI - when you can think really fast, the world is really slow. You simulate things. Even with lifetimes of data, the cars still will fail in visual scenarios where error bars on ground truth shoot through the roof. Elon seems to believe his cars will fail in similar ways to humans because they use cameras. False premise. As Waymo scales, human just isn't good enough, except for humans.

Re: When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed

#120

> 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…

Also check the author's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jamesondow.bsky.social

It can't be healthy to be so obsessed with something/someone you dislike.

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