Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 410 posts

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

#241

Post by archagon »

dweinus wrote: post #218
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

And advocates "remigration" and other white nationalist slime on social media.

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

#242

Post by foobarian »

quickthrowman wrote: post #192
foobarian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been driving on local and highway roads for 30 years now and I have never come across a piece of debris so large that driving over it would damage my car. Seeing that video, I don't have high confidence that I would have dodged that hazard - maybe 70% sure? The thing is, usually there is plenty of traffic ahead that acts very obviously different in situations like this that helps as well. All that to say that I…

You’ve been driving for 30 years and have never seen a semi truck tire in the middle of the road after it ripped off the rim of a truck?

Honestly no, not in the middle of the road, but plenty on the side. The only things I come across in the middle of the roads are paper bags or cardboard for some reason.

But also, I doubt you would break your swaybar running over some retreads

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

#243

Post by AlotOfReading »

ACCount37 wrote: post #222
Xylakant wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statistics on this are much less clear than Tesla would like us to believe. There's a lot of confounding factors, among them the fact that the autonomous driver can decide to hand over things to a human the moment things get hairy. The subsequent crash then gets credited to human error.

That's an often-repeated lie. Tesla's crash reporting rules: > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. NHSTA's reporting rules are even more conservative: > Level 2 ADAS: Entities named in the General Order must report a c…

Tesla doesn't report crashes that aren't automatically uploaded by the computer. NHTSA has complained about this before. Quoting one of the investigations:

    Gaps in Tesla’s telematic data create uncertainty regarding the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage. Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic [airbag] deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes. A review of NHTSA’s 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments.
From:

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf

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

#245

Post by ModernMech »

foobarian wrote: post #236
ModernMech wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All that to say that I don't feel this is a fair criticism of the FSD system. Yes it is because the bar isn't whether a human would detect it, but whether a car with LiDAR would. And without a doubt it would, especially given those conditions: clear day, flat surface, protruding object is a best case scenario for LiDAR. Tesla's FSD was designed by Musk who is not an engineer nor an expert in sensors or robotics, an…

I don't disagree with that characterization of the technical details. However I felt the task those drivers set out was asking a different question: how good would the FSD system be at completing a coast-to-coast trip? I don't think this can be answered after hitting a singular, highly unlikely accident without a lot more trials. Imagine there was a human driver team shadowing the Tesla, and say they got T-boned afte…

If you don't disagree on the characterization of the technical details, then you must realize how very fair it is for us to criticize the system for failing in the exact way it's predicted to fail. We don't need 1000 more trials to know that the system is technically flawed.

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

#246

Post by dmix »

rkomorn wrote: post #224
dmix wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their hands on the steering wheel and foot next to a brake and two people looking out the window.

Are you saying "they let the car drive on its own but were still paying attention"? Not sure how to take this reply.

That a human was still in the loop in addition to a computer and both missed it.

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

#247

Post by ACCount37 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #181
ACCount37 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! Just add more sensors! We're only 992 more sensors away from full self-driving! It totally works that way! The debris? The very visible piece of debris? The piece of debris that a third party camera inside the car did in fact see? Adding 2 radars and 5 LIDARs would totally solve that! For fuck's sake, I am tired of this worn out argument. The bottleneck of self-driving isn't sensors. It was never sensors. The b…

The problem can be sensors, even for humans. When a human's vision gets bad enough, they lose their license.

We had sensors that can beat "a human whose vision got bad enough to get the license revoked" used as far back as in the 2004 DARPA competition.

That got us some of the way towards self-driving, but not all the way. AI was the main bottleneck back then. 20 years later, it still is.

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

#248

Post by ModernMech »

newyankee wrote: post #206
root_axis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced. The debris is clearly visible to the humans a long way off and the adjacent lane is wide open. Avoiding road debris is extremely common even in more congested and treacherous driving conditions. Certainly it's possible that someone texting on their phone or something might miss it, but under normal circumstances it could have been easily avoided.

I feel Waymo's LIDAR might have worked here

100% it would have. One of the main things the LiDAR system does is establish a "ground plane", which is the surface on which the car is expected to drive. Any hole or protrusions in that plane stick out like a sore thumb to a LiDAR system, you'll be able to see it in the raw data without much of a feature detector, so detecting them and reacting is fast and reliable.

Contrast with Tesla's "vision-only" system, which uses binocular disparity along with AI to detect obstacles, including the ground plane. It doesn't have as good a range, so with a low- profile object like this it probably didn't even see it before it was too late. Which seems to me a theme for Tesla autonomy.

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

#249

Post by root_axis »

foobarian wrote: post #159
tptacek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans routinely drive from LA to NYC without wrecking their cars. In fact, that's the normal outcome.

I've been driving on local and highway roads for 30 years now and I have never come across a piece of debris so large that driving over it would damage my car. Seeing that video, I don't have high confidence that I would have dodged that hazard - maybe 70% sure? The thing is, usually there is plenty of traffic ahead that acts very obviously different in situations like this that helps as well. All that to say that I…

> I have never come across a piece of debris so large that driving over it would damage my car

More likely you simply drove around the debris and didn't register the memory because it's extremely unlikely that you've never encountered dangerous road debris in 30 years of driving.

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

#250

Post by ActionHank »

JohnFen wrote: post #212
ActionHank wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

My point is less around how engineers behave, and more around how organisations behave.

If an organisation is constantly retrenching experienced staff and cutting corners to increase earnings rather than being driven by engineering first, it doesn't matter what the engineers do amongst themselves. This culture, in fact, rewards engineers doing a bad job.

Post reply on HN