The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
Makes you wonder if removing the lidar and using fucking cameras isn’t part of the problem… cheap bastards.
Charge the stupid fuck Tesla chain of decision making with murder. This bullshit “self driving” advertising is premeditated, that’s no longer manslaughter.
And charge the driver(s) with manslaughter under aggravating circumstances.
But oh no, muh profts, hurr-durrr…
Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.
The bad news is people hitting and killing pedestrians is so common you don’t hear about it. Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed. Even the FSD system that was as close to perfect as possible would still occasionally kill someone in large enough numbers, because there’s too many variables to account for. If the numbers are lower than a human driving, it’s a positive.
We should be trying to move away from cars though ideally. Fuck electric cars, FSD cars, and all other cars. A bus, train, bike, or whatever else would be safer and better for the environment.
Public transport is the way to go, just need to get break the cycle of six decades of automobile addiction.
Lets install adaptive headlights to stop blinding people or allowing manufacturers to install chrome accents on the rear of a vehicle to again stop blinding people or even just maybe make a smaller truck that isn’t lifting ego and instead actual building materials.
NHSTA:
Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed.
That’s easy to say, but do you want to be one of the people who gets killed? I don’t.
Yeah, it’s that easy to say and yeah, I don’t want to be one of the people killed, driverless or not. Cars are fucking deadly. 20 pedestrians die every day to cars. If we can get that number down but have them die to FSD vehicles, that’s better. I don’t care who or what is driving.
I’d rather not have cars everywhere, but if we do I want them to be as safe as possible (for everyone, not just the driver). If that includes FSD we should do it, even if the number of pedestrian deaths doesn’t hit zero (it never will) because the alternative is well above zero.
If I’m get killed by a driver on their phone, I want them to go to prison.
If I’m killed by a Waymo or whatever, who goes to jail then?
If we really must have self driving cars, limit their speed to 20mph in built up areas.
Number of people killed by Waymos self driving: 0? Number of people appear to think Waymo’s self driving has killed: hundreds?
Tesla’s don’t have the tech to make it safe enough, but Waymo hasn’t been the ones at fault for all this fear mongering.
If you’re dead, why the fuck do you care who goes to jail? Shouldn’t we care more about people dying than revenge after?
I wouldn’t care. I hope my wife and family would.
“He died for a good cause: Tesla’s stock price” is not what they want to hear.
I don’t like Tesla, but no one is dying to support FSD. They’re dying because multi-ton vehicles driving down the road next to fleshy meatbags sometimes ends up with them colliding. It doesn’t really matter who, if anyone, is behind the wheel. I’d rather them not come into contact. I’m in favor of everything that reduces that. I don’t really care if it ruins someone’s revenge fetish.
Because it is generally proven to save lifes. You’ll never hear of “thanks for the auto-brake system no one got injured and everything was boring as usual” but it happened a lot (also to me in first person).
I don’t like Musk but in general its a good thing to push self driving cars IMO. I drive 2 hours per day and the amount of time where I see retarded people doing retarded stuff at the wheel is crazy.
Air travel is generally safer than driving too, but every accident is studied thoroughly. Self-driving is fine, but anyone trying to implement it should be held to a high standard. Boeing slacked off and they’re facing some backlash.
This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.
But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.
Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.
So do cars driven by humans.
Human driven cars kill a lot of people.
Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.
Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.
This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.
Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.
This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.
His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.
My vacuum robot uses lidar. How expensive could it be??
His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.
This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.
To be fair, we achieved flight by copying nature. Once we realized the important part was the shape of a wing more than the flapping.
Also, on a final note…
Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??
If you have the option to add something that humans don’t have, why wouldn’t you? As an example, humans don’t have gps either, but it’s very useful to have in a car
Unfortunately the answer to that is: Elon’s cheap and Radar is expensive. Not so expensive that you can’t get it in a base model Civic though, which just makes it that much more absurd.
Because a global pandemic broke your sensor supply chain and you still want to sell cars with FSD anyway, so cameras-only it is!
Humans move with only feet so cars should be limited to using feet. And only 2 of them.
Well building battlemechs does seem like the obvious next step on Elon’s progression
You mean promising to build battlemechs, and fucking around for 5 years while grifting his stock valuation sky-high, then coming forward with a cheap robot that can’t even walk?
Not only that, specifically doing it to fuck the momentum of another project that would have competed with his entire market but would have been better for pretty much everyone (including those who stayed in the market he was targeting).
If the camera system + software results in being 1% safer than a human, and a given human can’t afford the lidar version, society is still better off with the human using the camera-based FSD than driving manually. Elon being a piece of shit doesn’t detract from this fact.
But, yes, a lot of “ifs” in there, and obviously he did this to cut costs or supply chain or blahblah
Lidar or other tech will be more relevant once we’ve raised the floor (everyone getting the additional safety over manual driving) and other FSDs become more mainstream (competition)
Regarding point number 2, I have no doubt we’ll be able to develop systems that process visual/video data as well as or better than people. I just know we aren’t there yet, and Tesla certainly isn’t.
I like to come at the argument from the other direction though; humans drive with eyesight because that’s all we have. If I could be equipped with sonar or radar or lidar, of fucking course I’d use it, wouldn’t you?
Really fucking stupid that we as a society intentionally choose to fuck around and find out rather than find out before we fuck around.
You got one part wrong. The people fucking around aren’t the ones having to do the “finding out” part.
By refusing to vote in competent regulatory bodies, the ones finding out are a part of the problem with the societal ails. I don’t want specific people punished with prejudice, I want a rule of law that holds all people accountable as equals and averts all harm before it can happen.
Are you victim blaming the
killedmurdered pedestrians?I am speaking about societal problems in context of society as a whole, as I have been the entire time.
Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.
how is it legal to label this “full self driving” ?
If customers can’t assume that boneless wings don’t have bones in them, then they shouldn’t assume that Full Self Driving can self-drive the car.
The courts made it clear that words don’t matter, and that the company can’t be liable for you assuming that words have meaning.
I sometimes find a small seed in seedless watermelons.
It’s the same issue, although the seeds are unlikely to harm you.
Right? It’s crazy that this is legal.
Now go after Oscar Meyer and Burger King. I am not getting any ham in my burger or dog in my hot’s. They are buying a product which they know full well before they complete the sale that it does not and is not lawfully allowed to auto pilot itself around the country. The owners manuals will give them a full breakdown as well I’m sure. If you spend thousands of dollars on something and don’t know the basic rules and guidelines, you have much bigger issues. If anything, one should say to register these vehicles to drive on the road, they should have to be made aware.
If someone is that dumb or ignorant to jump through all the hoops and not know, let’s be honest: They shouldn’t be driving a car either.
It drives your full self, it doesn’t break you into components and ship those seperately.
“I freely admit that the refreshing sparkling water I sell is poisonous and should not be consumed.”
“But to be clear, although I most certainly know for a fact that the refreshing sparkling water I sell is exceedingly poisonous and should in absolutely no way be consumed by any living (and most dead*) beings, I will nevertheless very heartily encourage you to buy it. What you do with it after is entirely up to you.
*Exceptions may apply. You might be one.
That’s pretty clearly just a disclaimer meant to shield them from legal repercussions. They know people aren’t going to do that.
Last time I checked that disclaimer was there because officially Teslas are SAE level 2, which let’s them evade regulations that higher SAE levels have, and in practice Tesla FSD beta is SAE level 4.
and in practice Tesla FSD beta is SAE level 4.
In theory this is pure bull, and in practice it is level 4 bull.
That’s what I read from an article but I don’t think whether they’re level 4 or not doesn’t really matter. The point is they officially claim to be level 2 but their cars clearly function beyond level 2.
cars clearly function beyond level 2.
You want to read again what level 4 means.
Between the levels it is not just about function, but about completeness of circumstances.
It is a legal label, if it was safe it would be “safe full self driving”.
legal or not it’s absolutely bonkers. Safety should be the legal assumption for marketing terms like this, not an optional extra.
Literally its “partial self driving” or “drive assist”
Tesla: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual cameras.
TeslaMusk: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual camerasFTFY
I purchased FSD when it was 8k. What a crock of shit. When I sold the car, that was this only gave the car value after 110k miles and it was only $1500 at most.
Full Self Driving shipping
202520262027309844841e+156^ You are hereEyes can’t see in low visibility.
musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”
FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes
musk reaction -
The cars used to have RADAR. But they got rid of that and even disabled it on older models when updating because they “only need cameras.”
Cameras and RADAR would have been good enough for most all conditions…
It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.
Not only that, when we have trouble seeing things, we can adjust our speed to compensate (though tbf, not all human drivers do, but I don’t think FSD should be modelled after the worst of human drivers). Does Tesla’s FSD go into a “drive slower” mode when it gets less certain about what it sees? Or does its algorithms always treat its best guess with high confidence?
Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.
Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.
Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.
They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.
I dunno what cameras you are using but a standard full frame sensor and an F/4 lens sees way better in low light than the human eye. If I take a raw image off my camera, there is so much more dynamic range than I can see or a monitor can even represent, you can double the brightness at least four times (ie 16x brighter) and parts of the image that looked pure black to the eye become perfectly usable images. There is so so so much more dynamic range than the human eye.
Do you know what the depth of field at f/4 looks like? It’s not anywhere in the neighborhood of suitable for a car, and it still takes a meaningful exposure length in low light conditions to get a picture at all, which is not suitable for driving at 30mph, let alone actually driving fast.
That full frame sensor is also on a camera that’s several thousand dollars.
if he was truthful: “the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits”
Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.
Honestly though, I’m a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD
He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.
Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That’s how he lives.
The whole “we drive with our eyes” thing is such bullshit. Humans are terrible drivers. Autonomous driving should be better than humans.
That goes for OpenPilot too. They actually openly advertise that their software makes the same mistakes as humans, as if it’s some sort of advancement. Like if I could plug Lidar into my brain, I totally would.
You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.
How Can Cameras Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?
What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.
I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.
You can hear them, but manufacturers had to add external speakers to electric cars to make them louder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds
I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.
I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.
I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.
‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.
It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now definitely on Musk’s list of departments to cut if Trump makes him a high-ranking swamp monster
This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.
Why do you think musk dumping so much cash to boost Trump? The plan all along is to get kickbacks like stopping investigation, lawsuits, and regulations against him. Plus subsidies.
Rich assholes don’t spend money without expectation of ROI
He knows Democrats will crack down on shady practices so Trump is his best bet.
He’s not hoping for a kickback, he is offered a position as secretary of cost-cutting.
He will be able to directly shut down everything he doesn’t like under the pretense of saving money.
Trump is literally campaigning on the fact that government positions are up for sale under his admin.
“I’m going to have Elon Musk — he is dying to do this… We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting, OK? Elon wants to do that,” the former president said"
Alongside the EPA for constantly getting in the way of the FAA trying to slip his SpaceX flight licenses through with a wink and a nudge instead of properly following regulations, and the FAA for trying to keep a semblance of legality through the whole process.
The worst way to die would be getting hit by a shitbox Tesla. RIP.
I mean I’ll take it over being burned alive or brutally eaten alive by a pack of ravenous wolves.
I’ll take the wolves
Neither of those are necessarily quicker or less painful than getting hit by the car.
For some real fun, try for all three at once!
Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility, and/or to take actions to improve visibility. Muskboxes don’t.
They also decided to only use cameras and visual clues for driving instead of using radar, heat cameras or something like that as well.
It’s designed to be launched asap, not to be safe
I mean, that’s just good economics. I’m willing to bet someone at Tesla has done the calcs on how many people they can kill before it becomes unprofitable
Muskboxes
like that
I’m not so sure. Whenever there’s crappy weather conditions, I see a ton of accidents because so many people just assume they can drive at the posted speed limit safely. In fact, I tend to avoid the highway altogether for the first week or two of snow in my area because so many people get into accidents (the rest of the winter is generally fine).
So this is likely closer to what a human would do than not.
The question is, is Tesla FSD’s record better, worse, or about the same on average as a human driver under the same conditions? If it’s worse than the average human, it needs to be taken off the road. There are some accident statistics available, but you have to practically use a decoder ring to make sure you’re comparing like to like even when whoever’s providing the numbers has no incentive to fudge them. And I trust Tesla about as far as I could throw a Model 3.
On the other hand, the average human driver sucks too.
Yeah, I honestly don’t know. My point is merely that we should have the same standards for FSD vs human driving, at least initially, because they have a lot more potential for improvement than human drivers. If we set the bar too high, we’ll just delay safer transportation.
You can’t measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three “pedestrian-killing” mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.
But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can’t predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.
The only way to do this IMO is by
- measuring every driver intervention
- only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
- in the meantime, market it as “driver assist” and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the “somewhat advanced” cruise control that it is.
low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust
I also see a ton of accidents when the sun is in the sky or if it is dusty out. \s
Yup, especially at daylight savings time when the sun changes position in the sky abruptly.
Cameras are probably worse here, but they may be able to make up for it with parallel processing the poor data they get.
The median driver sure, but the bottom couple percent never miss their exit and tend to do boneheaded shit like swerving into the next lane when there’s a stopped car at a crosswalk. >40,000 US fatalities in 2023. There are probably half a dozen fatalities in the US on any given day by the time the clock strikes 12:01AM on the west coast.
Edit: some more food for thought as I’ve been pondering:
FSD may or may not be better than the median driver (maybe this investigation will add to knowledge), but it’s likely better than the worst drivers… But the worst drivers are the most likely to vastly overestimate their competence, which might lead to them actively avoiding the use of any such aids, despite those drivers being the ones who would see the greatest benefit from using them. We might be forever stuck with boneheaded drivers doing boneheaded shit
Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility…Muskboxes don’t.
They do, actually. It even displays a message on the screen about low visibility.
In five years guys!!
To be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing
It sure crashed its full self
