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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

#211

Post by arcticfox »

ffggvv wrote: post #157
simias wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the very common argument (even here on HN) that it doesn't matter because "humans have plenty of accidents too". I think it's not a good rebuttal because self-driving cars will have to be orders of magnitude safer than humans if order to be successful. If I'm drunk and I decide to drive and I end up crashing into a pedestrian, then it's my own damn fault and I'll face the consequences. If a self-driving…

theres actually no proof of the claim that its safer or even as safe as human driving. The only "data" is from tesla themselves. Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

> Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

This is false: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

It would be more helpful to focus on actually deceptive issues in how they report data, namely the conflation of easy highway miles (Autopilot enabled) with more dangerous city driving (Autopilot unavailable). For example their Q1 2021 report:

"In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."

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

#212

Post by wearywanderer »

valine wrote: post #204
wearywanderer wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From what I saw, it drives worse than an intoxicated teenager on the first week of their learner's permit.

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

#213

Post by Syonyk »

dmm wrote: post #109
ghoward wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people need to see your comment because there seems to be a belief that full self driving is just around the corner. However, IMO, it will never happen because it needs a full artificial general intelligence. In your case, the new lane was clearly marked, which just shows how weak the system really is. Imagine if there was snow covering the lane markings. Or sunlight reflecting off of the road confuses the visio…

> 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 it will happen but only by making many expensive, intrusive changes to our cities and roads to accommodate "self-driving" cars.

We could put some metal guides in the ground so they can follow that path.

We could then separate that path from other obstructions with barriers, maybe put some tunnels in the ground that keep other people out.

And have signals that indicate when the "self driving" stuff is going to interfere with other roads, so nobody gets in the way!

"Totally change cities to meet the requirements of self driving cars" sounds an awful lot like "Just put rails in and call it a train."

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

#214

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

#215

Post by osmarks »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #181
ghoward wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people need to see your comment because there seems to be a belief that full self driving is just around the corner. However, IMO, it will never happen because it needs a full artificial general intelligence. In your case, the new lane was clearly marked, which just shows how weak the system really is. Imagine if there was snow covering the lane markings. Or sunlight reflecting off of the road confuses the visio…

There will always be an edge case that could result in a crash leading to a loss of life - don't think 99% is good enough that is why we won't have aircraft flying on autopilot all the time.

Humans are hardly perfect drivers either.

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

#216

Post by nickik »

rootusrootus wrote: post #121
chronic83027 wrote: post #27

- Tesla is lacking radar modules due to chip shortage - As a result, Tesla can’t make vehicles - Tesla (as always) is cutting it close to making a profit - Therefore, sell cars without radar - This “profit squeeze” is corroborated by this week’s (May 27) increase in vehicle prices by $500-$2,000, the reintroduction of enhanced autopilot for $4,000 and Elon trying to pump n dump crypto again with his “crypto eco-overs…

I think Tesla is very close to a do-or-die situation. They are in severe danger of being disrupted by the very automakers they took on. If they can't make a profit with the current market conditions (and they haven't, right? their profit is entirely due to credits?), I just don't think it's necessarily going to get any easier as time goes on. EVs are commodities.

I'm sorry but this just total nonsense.

They could make lots of profits if they weren't growing 30-50% a year reinvesting massively, paying massive bonus to Musk that he only gets based on massive growth.

They have 18+ billion of cash on balance and could easily raise much more if they needed too.

They have upper tier operational margin and extremely good per unit margin.

> EVs are commodities.

EV are only 2% of global vehicle sales and Tesla is clearly the leader and is growing very fast still.

Go actually read about the limited availability of lithium, nickel and chemical processing. Not that there is not enough in the ground but scaling the supply chain to 100% EV will be massively challenging and that is before you even get into cell manufacturing.

> their profit is entirely due to credits?

I really don't understand why people are so utterly obsessed with this one part of Tesla income stream. Their margin are all clearly still fine and their growth is amazing even if you subtract profits.

Sure in the last couple quarter if you assume no credits at all then Tesla would just be an amazing growth company that doesn't make a profit but it wouldn't actually fundamentally change the bull case for Tesla all that much.

Tesla is by a huge margin the dominate EV player in US, EU and China by revenue generated while they have good margin (other car makers don't break out their margin for their EV business btw) and there is no evidence what so ever that their growth will stop, there is actually a huge amount of evidence that the opposite is the case.

I know some people don't like Tesla, that fine but people who still treat Tesla like this tiny startup that is just about to go bust unless they deliver on some feature X is simply not the case.

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

#217

Post by wearywanderer »

osmarks wrote: post #210
wearywanderer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not talking about running general purpose CPUs. I'm talking about the most high end specialized silicon we have. Throw the best TPUs ever made at the problem and you still won't get anywhere even remotely close to what the squishy pink meat can do.

The power gap is so huge, our software simply must be inadequate. We're talking about a power gap wider than the gap between my toaster oven and the Saturn V.

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

#218

Post by sjcoles »

bumby wrote: post #49
chronic83027 wrote: post #27

- Tesla is lacking radar modules due to chip shortage - As a result, Tesla can’t make vehicles - Tesla (as always) is cutting it close to making a profit - Therefore, sell cars without radar - This “profit squeeze” is corroborated by this week’s (May 27) increase in vehicle prices by $500-$2,000, the reintroduction of enhanced autopilot for $4,000 and Elon trying to pump n dump crypto again with his “crypto eco-overs…

> Tesla is lacking radar modules due to the chip shortage Is there evidence this is the motivation for the decision? I’m not skeptical, just couldn’t find it in the article. When I first read it, I assumed it a was a technology choice as there seems to be competing camps between cameras and radar. Musk has previously stated he was in the camera camp because they provide more information and I figured this was just a…

Honda also announced they are removing radar and using video only adaptive cruise.

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

#219

Post by jfrunyon »

ghoward wrote: post #96
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…

More people need to see your comment because there seems to be a belief that full self driving is just around the corner. However, IMO, it will never happen because it needs a full artificial general intelligence. In your case, the new lane was clearly marked, which just shows how weak the system really is. Imagine if there was snow covering the lane markings. Or sunlight reflecting off of the road confuses the visio…

It doesn't actually need full general AI, but it does need to know and understand all of the roads in its "service area". IMHO the real solution will be building a database of roads (and lanes, speed limits, traffic lights, stop signs, etc).

BTW, the average driver gets in a crash every 18 years. The best humans aren't perfect either, and a self-driving car really only needs to be better than the worst humans to be an improvement (although it will have to be much better to succeed).

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

#220

Post by computerex »

graiz wrote: post #123

Tesla is a great at many things but managing customer/media expectations isn't among them. I'm sure Elon has the data and will tweet why vision is better, he may even back it up with really good data, but it's reactionary media management rather than preventative. How hard would it have been to write a press release explaining why they are removing radar, what it means to safety, and how it impacts the future of self…

They are in a pickle due to the chip shortage. There are no good technical reasons for removing the radar sensors. What would they say?
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