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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

reuters.com

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Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#471

Post by pelorat »

wstrange wrote: post #378
modeless wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year. It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who tried it for the first time probably share your opinion. That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly,…

I have a 2024 Model 3, and it's a a great car. That being said, I'm under no illusion that the car will ever be self driving (unsupervised). 12.5.6 Still fails to read very obvious signs for 30 Km/h playgrounds zones. The current vehicles lack sufficient sensors, and likely do not have enough compute power and memory to cover all edge cases. I think it's a matter of time before Tesla faces a lawsuit over continual FS…

The board is family and friends, so them ousting him will never happen.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#472

Post by KoolKat23 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #404
KoolKat23 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just reducing the value of a life to a number. It can be gamed to a situation where it's just more profitable to mow down people. What's an acceptable number/financial cost is also just an indirect approximated way of implementing a more direct/scientific regulation. Not everything needs to be reduced to money.

There is no way to game it successfully; if your insurance costs are much higher than your competitors you will lose in the long run. That doesn’t mean there can’t be other penalties when there is gross negligence.

Who said management and shareholders are in it for the long run. Plenty of examples where businesses are purely run in the short term. Bonuses and stock pumps.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#473

Post by boshalfoshal »

lrvick wrote: post #461

All these self driving car companies are competing to see whose proprietary firmware and sensors kill the fewest people. This is insane. I will -never- own a self driving car unless the firmware is open source, reproducible, remotely attestable, and built/audited by several security research firms and any interested security researchers from the public before all new updates ship. It is the only way to avoid greedy e…

You are conflating two seperate problems (security vs functionality).

"Firmware" can be open source and secure, but how does this translate to driving performance at all? Why does it matter if the firmware is validated by security researchers, who presumably don't know anything about motion planning, perception, etc? And this is even assuming that the code can be reasonably verified statically. You probably need to to run that code on a car for millions of miles (maybe in simulation) in an uncoutable number of scenarios to run through every edge case.

The other main problem with what you're asking is that most of the "alpha" of these self driving companies is in proprietary _models_, not software. No one is giving up their models. That is a business edge.

As someone who has been at multiple AV companies, no one is cutting corners on "firmware" or "sensors" (apart from making it reasonably cost effective so normal people can buy their cars). Its just that AV is a really really really difficult problem with no closed form solution.

Your normal car has all the same pitfalls of "unverified software running on a safety critical system," except that its easier to verify that straightforward device firmware works vs a very complex engine whose job is to ingest sensor data and output a trajectory.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#474

Post by idiotsecant »

renewiltord wrote: post #462
TheCleric wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. There’s a simple answer to this. As soon as it’s good enough for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if Tesla doesn’t trust it, why should I?

This is how I feel about nuclear energy. Every single plant should need to form a full insurance fund dedicated to paying out if there’s trouble. And the plant should have strict liability: anything that happens from materials it releases are its responsibility. But people get upset about this. We need corporations to take responsibility.

While we're at it how about why apply the same standard to coal and natural gas plants? For some reason when we start taking about nuclear plants we all of a sudden become adverse to the idea of unfunded externalities but when we're talking about 'old' tech that has been steadily irradiating your community and changing the gas composition of the entire planet it becomes less concerning.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#475

Post by eric_cc »

windexh8er wrote: post #394
eric_cc wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks that you had that negative experience. I’ve driven thousands of miles in FSD and love it. Could not imagine going back. I rarely need to intervene and when I do it’s not because the car did something dangerous. There are just times I’d rather take over due to cyclists, road construction, etc.

I don't believe this at all. I don't own one but know about a half dozen people that got suckered into paying for FSD. All of them don't use it and 3 of them have stated it's put them in dangerous situations. I've ridden in an X, S and Y with it on. Talk about vomit inducing when letting it drive during "city" driving. I don't doubt it's OK on highway driving, but Ford Blue Cruise and GM's Super Cruise are better the…

You can believe what you want to believe. It works fantastic for me whether you believe it or not.

I do wonder if people who have wildly different experiences than I have are living in a part of the country that, for one reason or another, Tesla FSD does not yet do as well in.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#476

Post by eric_cc »

itsoktocry wrote: post #427
eric_cc wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks that you had that negative experience. I’ve driven thousands of miles in FSD and love it. Could not imagine going back. I rarely need to intervene and when I do it’s not because the car did something dangerous. There are just times I’d rather take over due to cyclists, road construction, etc.

These "works for me!" comments are exhausting. Nobody believes you "rarely intervene", otherwise Tesla themselves would be promoting the heck out of the technology. Bring on the videos of you in the passenger seat on FSD for any amount of time.

It’s the counter-point to the “it doesn’t work for me” posts. Are you okay with those ones?

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#477

Post by Retric »

potato3732842 wrote: post #452
Retric wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with people on freeways is the kind of edge case humans aren’t good at but self driving cars have zero excuses. It’s a common enough situation that someone will exit a vehicle after a collision to make it a very predictable edge case. Remember all of the bad press Uber got when a pedestrian was struck and killed walking their bike across the middle of a street at night? People are going to be on limited acces…

I'd make the argument that people are very good at dealing with random things that shouldn't be on freeways as long as they don't coincide with blinding sun or other visual impairment. Tesla had a long standing issue detecting partial lane obstructions. I wonder if the logic around that has anything to do with this.

17 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on freeways. Considering how rarely pedestrians are on freeways that suggests to me people aren’t very good at noticing them in time to stop / avoid them.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/06/09/why-20-of-pedestrians...

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#478

Post by boshalfoshal »

gitaarik wrote: post #191

It concerns me that these Tesla's can suddenly start acting differently after a software update. Seems like a great target for a cyber attack. Or just a fail from the company. A little bug that is accidentally spread to millions of cars all over the world. And how is this regulated? Say the software gets to a point that we deem it safe for full self driving, then it gets approved on the road, and then Tesla adds a ne…

> how are we to be confident that its safe?

I hope you realize that these companies dont just push updates to your car like vscode does.

Every change has to be unit tested, integration tested, tested in simulation, driven on a multiple cars on an internal fleet (in multiple countries) for multiple days/weeks, then is sent out in waves, then finally, once a bunch of metrics/feedback comes back, they start sending it out wider.

Admittedly you pretty much have to just trust that the above catches most egregious issues, but there will always be unknown unknowns that will be hard to account for, even with all that. Either that or legitimately willful negligence, in which case, yes they should be held accountable.

These aren't scrappy startups pushing fast and breaking things, there is an actual process to this.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#479

Post by dansiemens »

TheCleric wrote: post #440
bdcravens wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liability for killing someone can include prison time.

Good. If you write software that people rely on with their lives, and it fails, you should be held liable for that criminally.

Are you suggesting that individuals should carry that liability?

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#480

Post by CrimsonRain »

23B1 wrote: post #80

"Move fast and kill people" Look, I don't know who needs to hear this, but just stop supporting this asshole's companies. You don't need internet when you're camping, you don't need a robot to do your laundry, you don't need twitter, you can find more profitable and reliable places to invest.

Nobody needs to hear your nonsense rants. A 50k model 3 makes almost all offerings up to 80k (including electrics) from legacy automakers look like garbage.
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