Not a tesla owner, but AIUI you have to hold the button down on the app while it comes to you - so you'd let go if it looked like it was going in the water.

This is exactly why having open source mapping information is so useful - if you see an issue you can go in and correct it rather than hoping an anonymous corporation will do it for you.

I guess the key here is, that Tesla knows that that OSM isn't "trustworthy"[1] and consequently treats the map information as it should be: just as the source for the routing algorithm. So it uses the maps as the basis on how to get from A to B, but the actual driving is based on the sensors, not trusting the maps. So the worst case of false mapping information would be of trapping the car in a place where it doesn't know how to get to its destination.

[1] Due to its open collaborative nature, there is an obvious risk for bad or even malicious edits submitted to OSM. On the other side, "professional" and closed mapping services can have errors too, especially they run the risk of being outdated, so shouldn't completely be trusted either. Due to the community efforts, overally the OSM data should be better maintained and errors can be fixed resulting in better map quality. But the big thing is, that you cannot trust any map data 100% - and if only it has been invalidated by a tree falling onto the road.

Tesla can collaborate with the community and other business users to take the feedback from their fleet and fix the issues upstream in the data. Facebook, Apple, Amazon and others are already doing so. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Organised_Editi...

Describing what those companies do as “collaborating with the [OSM] community” might be a bit of a stetch. At best some companies have been dragged kicking and screaming to actually talking to the OSM community.

Hi Rory, better than nothing it seems, they were all in Heidelberg for starters :)

It seems they use OSM as guidance about the structure and layout of the parking areas and then still rely on the environmental awareness of the vehicle to actually navigate.

Is the Tesla system prone to driving into water?

I'm guessing OSM is only used for routing not for actual navigation and that they filter out clear vandalism using edit criterias and ingestion delays.

I read a Facebook blog post a few weeks back about how they integrate OSM updates. I forget all of it but they use satellite images and CV to detect if a road exists, as well as some other automated tests. I think they open-sourced it, although I can't seem to find the post now

they didn't open source the code that produces those road suggestions, but they have released the data output

The water ways are also maped on OpenStreetMap and this kind of errors can be validated using querys. Also there is a big comunity checking the changes.

That of the thousands of engineers at Tesla, who focus on problems like these full time, would never consider byzantine failures?

Boeing has thousands of engineers and yet they all allowed a single sensor system able to take out a plane to exist ;)

Yeah but in this case imagine the first thing said in a feature threat model incorporating unverified user generated external data. In Boeing's case it was poor use of systems they controlled.