←back to thread

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

(www.reuters.com)
410 points jjulius | 5 comments | 18 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
bastawhiz ◴[19 Oct 24 17:33 UTC] No.41889192[source]▶
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 accelerates way too aggressively. I'd call myself a fairly aggressive driver and it is too aggressive for my taste.

- It tried to make way too many right turns on red when it wasn't safe to. It would creep into the road, almost into the path of oncoming vehicles.

- It didn't merge left to make room for vehicles merging onto the highway. The vehicles then tried to cut in. The system should have avoided an unsafe situation like this in the first place.

- It would switch lanes to go faster on the highway, but then missed an exit on at least one occasion because it couldn't make it back into the right lane in time. Stupid.

After the system error, I lost all trust in FSD from Tesla. Until I ride in one and feel safe, I can't have any faith that this is a reasonable system. Hell, even autopilot does dumb shit on a regular basis. I'm grateful to be getting a car from another manufacturer this year.

replies(24): >>41889213 #>>41889323 #>>41889348 #>>41889518 #>>41889642 #>>41890213 #>>41890238 #>>41890342 #>>41890380 #>>41890407 #>>41890729 #>>41890785 #>>41890801 #>>41891175 #>>41892569 #>>41894279 #>>41894644 #>>41894722 #>>41894770 #>>41894964 #>>41895150 #>>41895291 #>>41895301 #>>41902130 #
modeless ◴[19 Oct 24 18:17 UTC] No.41889518[source]▶
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, the rate of improvement in the past two months has been much faster than before.

Yesterday I spent an hour in the car over three drives and did not have to turn the steering wheel at all except for parking. That never happened on 12.3. And I don't even have 12.6 yet, this is still 12.5; others report that 12.6 is a noticeable improvement over 12.5. And version 13 is scheduled for release in the next two weeks, and the FSD team has actually hit their last few release milestones.

People are right that it is still not ready yet, but if they think it will stay that way forever they are about to be very surprised. At the current rate of improvement it will be quite good within a year and in two or three I could see it actually reaching the point where it could operate unsupervised.

replies(11): >>41889570 #>>41889593 #>>41890163 #>>41890174 #>>41890177 #>>41890374 #>>41890395 #>>41890547 #>>41893442 #>>41893970 #>>41894426 #
jeffbee ◴[19 Oct 24 20:29 UTC] No.41890547[source]▶
If I had a dime for every hackernews who commented that FSD version X was like a revelation compared to FSD version X-ε I'd have like thirty bucks. I will grant you that every release has surprisingly different behaviors.

Here's an unintentionally hilarious meta-post on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29531915

replies(3): >>41890595 #>>41890815 #>>41896509 #
modeless ◴[19 Oct 24 20:36 UTC] No.41890595[source]▶
Sure, plenty of people have been saying it's great for a long time, when it clearly was not (looking at you, Whole Mars Catalog). I was not saying it was super great back then. I have consistently been critical of Elon for promising human level self driving "next year" for like 10 years in a row and being wrong every time. He said it this year again and I still think he's wrong.

But the rate of progress I see right now has me thinking that it may not be more than two or three years before that threshold is finally reached.

replies(1): >>41890818 #
1. ben_w ◴[19 Oct 24 21:11 UTC] No.41890818[source]▶
The most important lesson I've had from me incorrectly predicting in 2009 that we'd have cars that don't come with steering wheels in 2018, and thinking that the progress I saw each year up to then was consistent with that prediction, is that it's really hard to guess how long it takes to walk the fractal path that is software R&D.

How far are we now, 6 years later than I expected?

Dunno.

I suspect it's gonna need an invention on the same level as Diffusion or Transformer models to be able to get all the edge cases we can get, and that might mean we only get it with human level AGI.

But I don't know that, it might be we've already got all we need architecture-wise and it's just a matter of scale.

Only thing I can be really sure of is we're making progress "quite fast" in a non-objective use of the words — it's not going to need a re-run of 6 million years of mammilian evolution or anything like that, but even 20 years wall clock time would be a disappointment.

replies(1): >>41890938 #
2. modeless ◴[19 Oct 24 21:32 UTC] No.41890938[source]▶
Waymo went driverless in 2020, maybe you weren't that far off. Predicting that in 2009 would have been pretty good. They could and should have had vehicles without steering wheels anytime since then, it's just a matter of hardware development. Their steering wheel free car program was derailed when they hired traditional car company executives.
replies(1): >>41891427 #
3. ben_w ◴[19 Oct 24 22:56 UTC] No.41891427[source]▶
Waymo for sure, but I meant also without any geolock etc., so I can't claim credit for my prediction.

They may well best Tesla to this, though.

replies(1): >>41896217 #
4. IX-103 ◴[20 Oct 24 16:00 UTC] No.41896217{3}[source]▶
Waymo is using full lidar and other sensors, whereas Tesla is relying on pure vision systems (to the point of removing radar on newer models). So they're solving a much harder problem.

As for whether it's worthwhile to solve that problem when having more sensors will always be safer, that's another issue...

replies(1): >>41896547 #
5. ben_w ◴[20 Oct 24 16:35 UTC] No.41896547{4}[source]▶
Indeed.

While it ought to be possible to solve for just RGB… making it needlessly hard for yourself is a fun hack-day side project, not a valuable business solution.