One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving • Hacker News Board

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#31

Post by michaelt » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

> Another point is that city driving seems to be a safer in general, there is much less chance if things go wrong when you are in a taxi driving 30-40mph, than cruising with Autopilot 60+mph and hitting a truck on a freeway.

Freeways are wide, generally well maintained, have gentle sweeping turns with excellent visibility, have no pedestrians or cyclists, and don't have many junctions.

And there's only 50,000 miles of them in the US. 10 cars, 10 hours a day, 50 miles per hour, and you've driven them all in 10 days.

Much easier than city driving IMHO.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#32

Post by energywut » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 10:54 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #27

nocoiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD has been promised every year for the better part of, what, a decade? I’m dubious that a six-month sprint would be make or break for this finally happening.

I'm 100% with you on Elon crying wolf. But it's not really relevant. What they've achieved with FSD 13 is really quite amazing. Given how fast AI is advancing, is it so hard to believe that a system to drive cars using cameras will be feasible this year?

Yes. AI is advancing, but is still regularly making mistakes. Even in the domains where it excels, it still needs oversight from a skilled practitioner. Would you trust AI to run `rm` commands on your machine without your intervention? If not, why would you allow it to run a deadly multiton device on an unpredictable environment with adversarial actors?

AI is definitely not even close to being able to safely drive cars using cameras without an observant human driver.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#33

Post by modeless » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

energywut wrote: post #32

modeless wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% with you on Elon crying wolf. But it's not really relevant. What they've achieved with FSD 13 is really quite amazing. Given how fast AI is advancing, is it so hard to believe that a system to drive cars using cameras will be feasible this year?

Yes. AI is advancing, but is still regularly making mistakes. Even in the domains where it excels, it still needs oversight from a skilled practitioner. Would you trust AI to run `rm` commands on your machine without your intervention? If not, why would you allow it to run a deadly multiton device on an unpredictable environment with adversarial actors? AI is definitely not even close to being able to safely drive ca…

I wouldn't trust a general LLM trained on reddit and 4chan (literally!) to run `rm` on my machine. But I would absolutely trust a purpose-built model trained on hundreds or thousands of years of data for a specific task. Models trained for specific tasks on huge datasets can be very reliable; certainly more reliable than humans.

I wouldn't let GPT-5 drive my car, but I let FSD drive it every day. It's not perfect yet, but I definitely see a day very soon when it will be better than me or any other single human, with all the failures humans have.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#34

Post by LightBug1 » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #19

henry2023 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always fire the driver if he/she causes a few fatalities.

Are you sure the driver won't have a poster up above his screen like this one? : https://is.gd/Lw37Su

Poster? Second screen multiplayer.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#35

Post by eclipsetheworld » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 11:00 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #7

Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1] That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company. [1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...

Yeah, they should have called them "human fleet response agents" instead. [0]

[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#36

Post by eclipsetheworld » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 11:04 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #31

> Another point is that city driving seems to be a safer in general, there is much less chance if things go wrong when you are in a taxi driving 30-40mph, than cruising with Autopilot 60+mph and hitting a truck on a freeway. Freeways are wide, generally well maintained, have gentle sweeping turns with excellent visibility, have no pedestrians or cyclists, and don't have many junctions. And there's only 50,000 miles o…

It depends on how you define “safer.” Cities have a higher frequency of accidents, but with lower severity. Highways have a lower frequency of accidents, but with higher severity.

So in this case, you probably want to opt for accidents of lower severity. Metal undents more easily than flesh.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#37

Post by DennisP » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 11:04 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #7

Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1] That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company. [1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...

Your link says it's the same thing Waymo is doing:

> Waymo uses what it calls a “fleet response agent,” a human assistant the vehicle can ping when it gets confused by a complex traffic scenario. These agents can view real-time exterior camera feeds, examine a 3D map of what the vehicle sees and even rewind the footage like a DVR to get better context. “As with the rest of our operations, a helpful human is no more than a touch of a button away,” Waymo said in a blog post.

> Tesla's setup appears to be similar. The robotaxis will do the driving, until they don’t. Then a remote human may quietly step in to lend a hand.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#38

Post by hartator » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 12:41 AM UTC

Ataraxic wrote: post #8

hartator wrote: post #5

The main downside is not just a cost thing but its waves are blocked by moist in air, rain, and dense fog. So, it will also degrades to just use cameras in this conditions.

From the recent tesla acme test, where the tesla runs into a wall containing a picture of a road, they also tested rain and water blocking two mannequins. The lidar equipped vehicle managed to stop before hitting the mannequins while tesla's autopilot did not. The distance before automatic braking triggered was reduced iirc. Sure lidar is degraded by rain, but I think the conclusion that when it rains the whole syste…

It wasn’t real rain though. If the vehicle stopped because of the water instead of seeing the mannequin, there is no much value to the lidars.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#39

Post by Animats » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 3:18 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #37

Animats wrote: post #7

Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1] That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company. [1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...

Your link says it's the same thing Waymo is doing: > Waymo uses what it calls a “fleet response agent,” a human assistant the vehicle can ping when it gets confused by a complex traffic scenario. These agents can view real-time exterior camera feeds, examine a 3D map of what the vehicle sees and even rewind the footage like a DVR to get better context. “As with the rest of our operations, a helpful human is no more t…

Waymo's people don't remotely drive. Waymo wasn't willing to trust cell phone network latency. They just give hints to the car's control system, like "turn around and take another route", when a car gets stuck.

Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving

#40

Post by crq-yml » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 3:25 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #31

> Another point is that city driving seems to be a safer in general, there is much less chance if things go wrong when you are in a taxi driving 30-40mph, than cruising with Autopilot 60+mph and hitting a truck on a freeway. Freeways are wide, generally well maintained, have gentle sweeping turns with excellent visibility, have no pedestrians or cyclists, and don't have many junctions. And there's only 50,000 miles o…

There's an aspect to Waymo's plan that means that they never really have to solve highway driving to capture market share. Highways are appealing to car manufacturers because they incentivize speed, acceleration, braking, and more nefariously, to be the bigger vehicle and more capable of surviving accidents. When automobiles were a new, growing market, manufacturers lobbied for fast streets, wide highways, and ample parking.

A viable self-driving business plan, on the other hand, has to accommodate taking final responsibility in an accident. That was what got manufacturers into the lobbying game to begin with - they needed to create a public that saw themselves as responsible owners while everyone else on the road was a meanace, and worked towards that reality through both consumer marketing and the financing and regulation systems around autos. Self-drive means that the goal changes to "every ride we provide is a safe one, and we do not serve customers that ask for danger".

And that means that some markets like regional airports and particularly sprawling, car-dependent metros may go unserved for some time, depending on how the strategists feel about their chances, but then the aspect of courting the public shifts towards strongarming governments into more intensive road safety measures, and then to only professional human drivers, and then perhaps to mandated self-drive in urban areas. Having tons of capital to throw around lets you dream very big.

In this way the problem gets redefined incrementally towards something that meets with where the engineering actually is and allows Waymo to compete while retaining its excellent record.