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

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. When it goes off the rails, it usually does so in surprising ways with little warning and little time to correct. And since it's so good much of the time, you can get lulled into complacence.

I never really understand the comments from people who think it's the greatest thing ever and makes their drive less stressful. Does the opposite for me. Entertaining but exhausting to supervise.

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.

This is what Waymo realized a decade ago and what helped define their rollout strategy: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=247&si=Twi_fQJC7whg3Oey

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 "next year" every year.

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".

Does Tesla take full responsibility for FSD incidents?

It seemed like most players in tech a few years ago were using legal shenanigans to dodge liability here, which, to me, indicates a lack of seriousness toward the safety implications.