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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

#761

Post by eschneider »

darknavi wrote: post #640
rootusrootus wrote: post #518

I'm on my second free FSD trial, just started for me today. Gave it another shot, and it seems largely similar to the last free trial they gave. Fun party trick, surprisingly good, right up until it's not. A hallmark of AI everywhere, is how great it is and just how abruptly and catastrophically it fails occasionally. Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel and your foot ready for the brake. W…

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

"You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail."

I spent over a decade working on production computer vision products. You think you can do this, and for some percentage of failures you can. The thing is, there will ALWAYS be some percentage of failure cases where you really can't perceive anything different from a success case.

If you want to trust your life to that, fine, but I certainly wouldn't.

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

#762

Post by rvnx »

yborg wrote: post #753
nh2 wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video is great. It looks like Wayno really understood the problem. It explains concisely why it's a bad idea to roll our incremental progress, how difficult the problem really is, and why you should really throw all sensors you can at it. I also appreciate the "we don't know when it's going to be ready" attitude. It shows they have a better understanding of what their task actually is than anybody who claims "ne…

You don't get a $700B market cap by telling investors "We don't know."

Ironically, Robotaxis from Waymo are actually working really well. It's a true unsupervised system, very safe, used in production, where the manufacturer takes the full responsibility.

So the gradual rollout strategy is actually great.

Tesla wants to do "all or nothing", and ends up with nothing for now (example with Europe, where FSD is sold since 2016 but it is "pending regulatory approval", when actually, the problem is the tech that is not finished yet, sadly).

It's genuinely a difficult problem to solve, so it's better to do it step-by-step than a "big-bang deploy".

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

#763

Post by BobaFloutist »

dyauspitr wrote: post #506
BobaFloutist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Elon, Tesla, or "FSD", but for what it's worth, that's absolutely the fault of the person behind you for not maintaining appropriate stopping distance.

I would say less than 5% of people maintain the required 30-50ft of recommended distance needed to stop safely at those speeds.

Then I guess they're not skilled enough to be granted the privilege of driving at those speeds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#764

Post by sumodm »

darknavi wrote: post #640
rootusrootus wrote: post #518

I'm on my second free FSD trial, just started for me today. Gave it another shot, and it seems largely similar to the last free trial they gave. Fun party trick, surprisingly good, right up until it's not. A hallmark of AI everywhere, is how great it is and just how abruptly and catastrophically it fails occasionally. Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel and your foot ready for the brake. W…

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

Something along this lines is the real danger. People will understand common failure modes and assume they have understood its behavior for most scenarios. Unlike common deterministic and even some probabilistic systems, where behavior boundaries are well behaved, there could be discontinuities in 'rarer' seen parts of the boundary. And these 'rarer' parts need not be obvious to us humans, since few pixel changes might cause wrinkles.

*vocabulary use is for a broad stroke explanation.

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

#765

Post by ricardobeat »

coffeefirst wrote: post #682
darknavi wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

This feels like the most dangerous possible combination (not for you, just to have on the road in large numbers). Good enough that the average user will stop paying attention, but not actually good enough to be left alone. And when the machine goes to do something lethally dumb, you have 5 seconds to notice and intervene.

Five seconds is a long time in driving, usually you’ll need to react in under 2 seconds in situations where it disengages, those never happen while going straight.

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

#766

Post by bastawhiz »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #630
bastawhiz wrote: post #257

Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. I got a one month free trial of FSD and turned it off after two weeks. Quite simply: it's dangerous. - It failed with a cryptic system error while driving - It started making a left turn far too early that would have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually intervene. - In my opinion, the default setting accelera…

I'm not disagreeing with your experience. But if it's as bad as you say, why aren't we seeing tens or hundreds of FSD fatalities per day or at least per week? Even if only 1000 people globally have it on, these issues sound like we should be seeing tens per week.

Perhaps having more accidents doesn't mean more fatal accidents.

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

#767

Post by sandworm101 »

eschneider wrote: post #761
darknavi wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

"You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail." I spent over a decade working on production computer vision products. You think you can do this, and for some percentage of failures you can. The thing is, there will ALWAYS be some percentage of failure cases where you really can't perceive anything different from a success case. If you want to trust your life to that, fine, but I certainly…

Or until a software update quietly resets the relationship and introduces novel failure modes. There is little more dangerous on the road than false confidence.

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

#768

Post by bastawhiz »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #641
bastawhiz wrote: post #257

Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. I got a one month free trial of FSD and turned it off after two weeks. Quite simply: it's dangerous. - It failed with a cryptic system error while driving - It started making a left turn far too early that would have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually intervene. - In my opinion, the default setting accelera…

> After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. May I ask how this initial trust was established?

The numbers that are reported aren't abysmal, and people have anecdotally said good things. I was willing to give it a try while being hyper vigilant.

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

#769

Post by modeless »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #716
snypher wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just a few more years of death and injury until they reach a finished product?

If this is what society has to pay to improve Tesla's product, then perhaps they should have to share the software with other car manufacturers too. Otherwise every car brand will have to kill a whole heap of people too until they manage to make a FSD system.

Elon has said many times that they are willing to license FSD but nobody else has been interested so far. Clearly that will change if they reach their goals.

Also, "years of death and injury" is a bald-faced lie. NHTSA would have shut down FSD a long time ago if it were happening. The statistics Tesla has released to the public are lacking, it's true, but they cannot hide things from the NHTSA. FSD has been on the road for years and a billion miles and if it was overall significantly worse than normal driving (when supervised, of course) the NHTSA would know by now.

The current investigation is about performance under specific conditions, and it's possible that improvement is possible and necessary. But overall crash rates have not reflected any significant extra danger by public use of FSD even in its primitive and flawed form of earlier this year and before.

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

#770

Post by bastawhiz »

paulcole wrote: post #663
bastawhiz wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I be supportive of a system that has actively scared me for objectively scary reasons? Even if it's the worst reason, it's not a bad reason.

How you feel while riding isn’t an objective thing. It’s entirely subjective. You and I can sit side by side and feel differently about the same experience. I don’t see how this is in any way objective besides the fact that you want it to be objective. You can support things for society that scare you and feel unsafe because you can admit your feelings are subjective and the thing is actually safer than it feels to y…

I also did write about times when the car would have damaged itself or likely caused an accident, and those are indeed objective problems.
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