Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by samrus » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

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…

Bullshit. Some humans might hit thay because they werent paying attention, but most people would see that, slow down and change lanes. This is a relatively scenario that humans deal with. Even the passenger here saw it in time. The driver was relying on FSD and missed it

I dont think FSD has the intelligence to navigate this

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

#212

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

ActionHank wrote: post #199

amelius wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the case in engineering cultures, like Boeing before they changed into a business culture.

Is there any engineering culture left in the US? I feel like this is the case across the board.

Yes, there is. In every place that I've worked, including my current position, acknowledging when you're wrong or have failed at something increases trust in you and your professionalism.

People who always have an excuse, try to shift blame, etc., are assumed to be lacking in competency (let alone ethics and trustworthiness).

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

#213

Post by _aavaa_ » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #134

_aavaa_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does matter. Money thrown away on his lies is money that isn’t invested on real projects.

I think the point is that if it's his money he's pissing away, then any other projects the money would have been spent on would have been equally dubious in any case. He's not going to, all of a sudden, become wise simply because he doesn't spend money on what he's spending money on. Did we give him wayyy too much free money via subsidies? Yes. But that was our mistake. And if we hadn't given it to him, we would have…

> And if we hadn't given it to him, we would have given it to some other scam artists somewhere or other.

No we wouldn’t have. Not every dollar we give goes to scam artists. And there are a whole lot of industries and companies far less deceitful.

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

#214

Post by sumeno » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #108

SillyUsername wrote: post #60

A lot of apologists say that "a human would have hit that". That's kind of irrelevant, this technology is meant to be safer and held to a higher standard. Comparing to a human is not a valid excuse...

> That's kind of irrelevant, this technology is meant to be safer and held to a higher standard I don't think that is the case. We will judge FSD whether you make more or less accidents than humans, not necessarily in the same situations. The computer is allowed to make mistakes that a human wouldn't, if in reverse the computer makes a lot less mistakes in situations where humans would. Given that >90% of accidents a…

> I think we will see FSD be safer on average very quickly.

This is what Musk has been claiming for almost a decade at this point and yet here we are

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

#215

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #126

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #117

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…

In America, you fail the second you apologize or take accountability. Ignoring criticism and deflecting all the time gets you further, as it is part of the game. Unfortunately, this is just an accepted social science-y thing at this point. It is a very much cultural thing of the past couple of decades.

This is far from universal in the US, but it's certainly true in certain circles.

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

#216

Post by sandworm101 » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

tedggh wrote: post #176

sandworm101 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With millions of Teslas on the road one would think if that was true we would have heard something by now. My absolute worst car quality wise ever was a Honda Accord. And I owned shitty cars including a Fiat. My most reliable car was a Honda Civic before I “upgraded” to a brand new Accord. I abuse my Tesla and so far no issues driving in one of the worst roads in the country. I must hit 100 potholes per month and ble…

Cars with "bad" suspension tend to survive potholes. A car with slow-to-move suspension will see the wheel dip less down into the hole when traveling at speed. But that is the exact opposite behabior you want when dealing with debris, which requires the supension to move up rather than down. "Good" systems will have different responce curves for up than down. Quazi-luxury cars fake this by having slow suspension in both directions, to give the sense of "floating over potholes".

[Cut, google ai provided wrong numbers]

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

#217

Post by samrus » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #124

tedggh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use autopilot for local driving (city - suburbs) and I pay for FSD when on long road trips (>300 miles). You are correct, they are completely different things so one doesn’t correlate to the other one.

That they are different things is really disappointing. If you want people to trust the system enough to buy FSD, the autopilot mode should use the same system, with limited functions. There is no reason why the vision/detection systems should be different. Especially if you already have the proper hardware installed…

Completely agree. Like a rate limiting model the way LLMs do. Where you get like 5 FSD drives on the free tier per month or something

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

#218

Post by dweinus » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #117

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…

My biggest criticism of Elon is that he supports neo-nazis

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

#219

Post by cozzyd » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

samrus wrote: post #202

cozzyd wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Elon would say that this is a regulatory problem because you guys don't have the same signs or distance units as in the US.

So why take money for it? And computer vision is well past the stage where the information can be read from these signs, theres enough training data. So thats not a real hurdle. If different road geometry or traffic customs/rules is the issue then just admit that FSD cant generalize like a human and is overfit to the us. Why lie and pretend its almost human level?

I was being a bit factious (related to Elon's previous bullshit claims that it was only a regulatory issue that everybody's Tesla can't moonlight as a robotaxi by the end of some year in the past...sure Elon).

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

#220

Post by toss1 » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

"One test is worth a thousand opinions."

And here, the too-frequently posted excuse that "oh, many humans would have hit that too" is utter nonsense.

In that situation, with light traffic, clear daylight visibility, and wide shoulders, any human who would have hit that is either highly distracted, incompetent, or drunk.

Both driver and passenger saw the object at least 7-8 seconds ahead of time; at 0:00sec the passenger is pointing and they are commenting on the object, at 0:05sec passenger is leaning forward with concern and the Tesla drives over it at 0:08sec. The "Full Self Driving" Tesla didn't even sound any warning until a second AFTER it hit the object.

Any alert half-competent driver would have certainly lifted off the accelerator, started braking and changing lanes in half that time. They didn't because of the expectation the Tesla would take some corrective action — bad assumption.

"My 'Full Self Driving' is as good as a drunk" is not a worthwhile claim.

Worse yet, the entire concept of [it drives and then hands control to the human when it can't handle a situation] is actively dangerous to levels of insanity.

Human perceptual and nervous systems are terrible at tasks requiring vigilance —it is like our brains are evolved for attention to wander. Having a life-critical task that can literally kill you or others ALMOST fully handled autonomously is situation designed for the human to lost attention and situational awareness. Then, demanding in a split second that (s)he immediately become fully oriented, think of a reaction plan, and then execute it, is a recipe for disaster.

In this case, it is even worse. The Tesla itself gave the humans zero warning.

The driver and passenger saw the object well in advance of the Tesla and in in 3-4 times the time and distance it would take to react effectively. But, they had an assumption nothing was wrong because they assumed the Tesla would handle the situation and they were not in a driving mindset, instead waiting to see what the Tesla would do. They were not actively driving the car in the world. Fortunately, the only result was a mangled Tesla — this time.