US to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed in low visibility conditions
US to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed in low visibility conditions
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 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.”
Eyes 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 -
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?
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.
You'd think "we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes." is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.
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.
How Can Cameras Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real?
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…
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
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.
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.
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" ?
"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.
It drives your full self, it doesn't break you into components and ship those seperately.
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.
Literally its "partial self driving" or "drive assist"
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.
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.
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
Tesla: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual cameras.
TeslaMusk: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual camerasFTFY
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.
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
Because a global pandemic broke your sensor supply chain and you still want to sell cars with FSD anyway, so cameras-only it is!
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.
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.
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?
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)
The thing is that you don't need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.
But you can't grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling
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.
Full Self Driving shipping
202520262027309844841e+156^ You are hereMakes you wonder if removing the lidar and using fucking cameras isn’t part of the problem… cheap bastards.
Was that cause of the cost? Didnt Elon come out claiming lidar was a "crutch" or something?
It's an extra 60k.
Well he said all sorts to try and justify it but really it was a cost-cutting exercise, of course it was a cost cutting exercise, why else would they do it?
Anyway that explanation doesn't make sense, if using lidar was a crutch then surely that's a good solution right. It's a bit like going, no you shouldn't use wings on your aircraft that's a crutch, you should be using the antigravity tech that we don't have yet.
In the long run there probably are going to be better solutions (that's how civilizations advance), but those better solutions don't exist yet, so... maybe we should use what we have.
If anyone was somehow still thinking RoboTaxi is ever going to be a thing. Then no, it’s not, because of reasons like this.
It doesn't have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.
Exactly. The current rate is 80 deaths per day in the US alone. Even if we had self-driving cars proven to be 10 times safer than human drivers, we’d still see 8 news articles a day about people dying because of them. Taking this as 'proof' that they’re not safe is setting an impossible standard and effectively advocating for 30,000 yearly deaths, as if it’s somehow better to be killed by a human than by a robot.
The average human driver is tried and held accountable
That is the minimal outcomes for an automated safety feature to be an improvement over human drivers.
But if everyone else is using something you refused to that would have likely avoided someone's death, while misnaming you feature to mislead customers, then you are in legal trouble.
When it comes to automation you need to be far better than humans because there will be a higher level of scrutiny. Kind of like how planes are massively safer than driving on average, but any incident where someone could have died gets a massive amount of attention.
It's bit reductive to put it in terms of a binary choice between an average human driver and full AI driver. I'd argue it has to hit less pedestrians than a human driver with the full suite of driver assists currently available to be viable.
Self-driving is purely a convenience factor for personal vehicles and purely an economic factor for taxis and other commercial use. If a human driver assisted by all of the sensing and AI tools available is the safest option, that should be the de facto standard.
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....
Wouldn't it be death by negligence rather than pre-meditated murder. After all I don't think anyone at Tesla actually wanted this particular person to die, they just didn't really care to take any action to prevent it.
"I aimed my rifle at that person's head and pulled the trigger, but I swear I didn't want them to die"
Tesla should be broken up and reassembled with zero overlap in management.
And yes, legally it won't stick, but the shitty south african oligarch should absolutely be tried for murder.
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
Because self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, when implemented properly. A proper one is absolutely loaded with sensors, radar, laser, sonar; not just some cameras like Tesla's system.
If you ever get the chance to, hop in a Waymo and you'll become a believer too (currently available only in Cali and AZ). These little robotaxis see everything at all times, not just what's in front of them like humans. I trust them more than I'd trust any human driver. They can avoid accidents that you and I would never see coming. Witnessed this first-hand.
I thought it was illegal to call it full self driving? So I thought Tesla had something new.
Apprently it's the moronic ASSISTED full self driving the article is about. So nothing new.
Tesla does not have a legal full self driving system, so why do articles keep pushing the false narrative, even after it's deemed illegal?Assisted full self driving is an oxymoron.
Absolutely, but that's what Tesla decided, that or supervised, because it's illegal to call it actually full self driving.
But an oxymoron is also fitting for Musk. You can even skip the oxy part. 😋100% agree. Who sells assisted full self driving anyway? Tesla’s is supervised which means it drives and the person behind the wheel is liable for its fuckups.
Did they change it again? It was FSD Beta, then Supervised, now you’re telling me it’s ASSISTED? Since that’s not in TFA…
IDK I heard assisted, maybe they decided on supervised? The central point is that it's illegal in some states to call it full self driving, because it's false advertising.
so why do articles keep pushing the false narrative, even after it’s deemed illegal?
The same reason that simple quadcopters have been deemed by the press to be called "drones". You can't manufacture panic and outrage with a innocuous name.
Calling it a drone has nothing to do with how many propellers it has, some drones are Jet driven. some are boats and some are vehicles.
A Drone is simply an unmanned craft, controlled remotely or by automation.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drone
an uncrewed aircraft or vessel guided by remote control or onboard computers:
It was called that name at the time when the kills happened.
To be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing
It sure crashed its full self
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.
In five years guys!!
Does anyone else find this enraging ?
It’s a decade too late.
Maybe have a safety feature that refuses to engage self drive if it's too foggy/rainy/snowy.
Inb4 someone on TikTok shows how to bypass that sensor by jamming an orange in it -__-
They need to just ban this technolgy from cars and semis entirely.
Preventing engaging something in bad conditions is a lot easier than what do you do if the conditions suddenly happen.
If it's suddenly foggy it needs to be able to handle the situation well.
Cameras/Lidar don't work well in fog. Radar does, but it isn't a primary sensor and can't be driven on safely alone in any circumstance.
So now you need to slow down (which humans will do) but also since the sensors are failing or insufficient, safely get out of the way of what might be other incoming vehicles behind you, or slow/stopped vehicles ahead of you.
You could restrict hours the system can be engaged which will reduce the likely hood of certain events (e.g morning fog, or sunrise/sunset head on sun) but there's still unpredictability.
If it took them this long to look at Full Self Driving, I don't have a lot of hope. But I'd like to be pleasantly surprised.
I wonder if they will now find the Emperor has no clothes.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions
They will have to look long and hard...
This is why you can’t have an AI make decisions on activities that could kill someone. AI models can’t say “I don’t know”, every input is forced to be classified as something they’ve seen before, effectively hallucinating when the input is unknown.
I'm not very well versed in this but isn't there a confidence value that some of these models are able to output?
Fuck Elon musk.
But self-driving is one of the most needed technologies to aim for in the near future. And it's a shame that as American space industry it has , apparently, let be in the hands of a lunatic.
The potential to reduce road mortality. And to give back to humans thousands of hours back of their time (you can do other things while not driving).
I don't really care about the philosophical question on who is to blame if a self driving car run over one person if road mortality got statistically reduced by a big value thanks to the technology.
The anti technology I see on some supposedly progressive people nowadays really scares me. Bad omen. It's like having a choice between rich conservatives and poor conservatives, but only conservatives nonetheless.
That’s just a train/bus with extra steps and far more risk. Cities with cars as the main mode of transport are still ugly places to live.
I live in what is supposedly taught as the better mobility solution. A dense european city.
It's true, I can go everywhere walking and by public transport.. and it sucks.
Such density to allow for good public transport means living in apartments like ants, instead of houses.
I like walking but in winter or summer it can be miserable. Buses you get really tired of very quickly, crowded, crazy people, smells, having to be on foot because no seats, dizziness, and in big cities pickpocketing. It's a lot of misery IMHO.
I've live like this many decades and I cannot see the time I can move out of the city, well knowing I'll need a car for everything because lower densities does not allow for walking/good public transport. But I find higher densities just miserable to live in.
As such I would love to have self driving cars. Seems such a life quality improvement.
Be easier to automate various types of rail.
As stated in other comment of mine. Public transport/walkikg is good for high density cities.
Not everyone would be happy living in such environment. I fact I think most people won't. Low density environment have a need for cars. And I think if cars are needed, they'd better be electric and self driving.
Why is it the most needed though?
I'm not really sold on the importance of it anymore tbh. It was a cool scifi dream but driving is not even at the top 1000 issues we need solving right now.