I got out of a ticket once because I didn't see a "no through traffic" sign against a bright sunset. No chance that same cop gives a self-driving car a pass, nor should he.
It’s also possible that they were so far behind Waymo in the journey to FSD that they weren’t yet at a point where multiple sensors would make a significant difference.
Just my interpretation, but it felt to me like a hail mary because they were fully committed to being the first mover. Waiting around for LiDAR prices to come down would have meant that Waymo would have beat them.
Unlike Waymo who doesn't care about selling cars to people to drive daily. No one going to care that the taxi they are taking looks ugly as long as it get them to the place they are going for cheaper. The cost is also a less of a factor due to them being able to produce an income by charging people to ride in them.
Why not? There are production cars with lidar now that isn't the big spinning thing on top of the car.
As someone who drives a Tesla with the FSD beta, the vehicle has been getting progressively better since 2018.
It’s drives smoother and brakes more predictably dive they stopped using the front radar.
As someone who owned a 2019 Tesla and who owns a 2023 Tesla, the older car had better autopilot. It was starting to degrade in 2020. The new one is worse. Phantom braking was quite rare in 2019. The very first night I drove home the new car, it phantom braked on a lonely, empty stretch of I-5.
I want the radar back.
The thing they need to improve and are doing so rapidly is actual trajectory policy calculations.
And that’s not going to get better with more sensors seeing the same things it already sees.
Essentially that trying to utilize multiple sensors cripples any progress (given that resources will never be infinite).
For example, if your lidar sensor is 99.999% percent sure there is an obstacle in front of you, surely it's helpful to take that information into account, even if it is a tiny bit uncertain/noisy.
More data in any situation where bandwidth is already maximized will lead to entropy and noise. However, if the capabilities were there to process all of that data in low latency scenarios with headroom to spare, surely adding additional sensors and data points would lead to a more complete model of spatial awareness for the car.
That's all hypothetical and reliant on ignoring the realities of running a business and tech development lol
Fusion is hard. As hard as getting humans to agree. Been there. In both situations.
And of course you can concentrate on improving one echo chamber, err single sensor. But you can never come past its fundamental limitations.
Point stands that the ones being put in the cars aren't.
The eye is an incredible piece of machinery, specifically for dynamic processing like this.
And agreed that eyes are impressive.
Someone else said it here on HN, and I think they're absolutely right -- Tesla is all about vertical integration, and this is preventing them from excelling at anything other than saving pennies. A good part of why the new EV competition is doing everything better is they didn't roll their own tech. They bought packaged solutions from companies that only do one thing, but do it well.
I have even earned the dubious honor of having been pulled over for suspected drunk driving because I used AP on a trip home from my MIL's house after Thanksgiving dinner. I was amused by how much trouble AP was having with mild corners on I-5, the state trooper behind me was less amused. Well, at least until he established that I was sober, then we had a good laugh about autopilot and he gave my kids sticker badges. A happy ending for everyone but I didn't activate AP again that night.
Maybe the problem was that it was clear and dry? Ya think it would have been better with some road spray on the cameras?
Subsequent to that, I ended up abandoning AP altogether because it was so jarring when it would decide an overpass looked like something it should slow down for. My wife suggested that she'd be happier if I just used my foot for the accelerator. For some reason we still ended up buying another one, but after the phantom braking on day one (empty freeway, overpass, apparently this is very much now "a thing"), I guess I'll just skip AP before even starting. I wonder if I could ask Tesla to deactivate AP altogether so I could have traditional cruise control?
It’s not FSD, but if you use it as a driver assist, it takes a giant amount of burden off of driving in traffic. Even on a busy highway that’s going somewhat fast, it’ll just follow the car in front of you. And truly, it’s never once been dangerous.
Only catch is that it can’t “see” very long distance — if you’re going 70mph and there’s a stopped car in your lane, it probably won’t stop (at least, I wouldn’t test it!). But again, it’s driver-assist and not FSD, so you’re still expected to notice that. And within its limitations, it is really exceptional.
This is like saying we need to get to the moon using steam power and ONLY THEN we can improve by using rockets. What if it's completely infeasible to solely use vision for FSD?
Even humans use audio processing to augment the vision.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-...
Continuing with your hypothetical, even though we’d be 90% safer as a collective, the safety of the individual feels compromised: the risk of an accident is non-uniform when involving humans (depending on e.g. age, experience, safety, alertness, etc.), but becomes uniform (or at least more uniform) with an algorithm in charge.
That’s a tough thing for people to buy into.
"Until Waymo's cars reduce any individual's chance of an accident."
So for example, suppose a Waymo car is better than humans overall, but tends to do worse than humans when there's a small bump on the road. And suppose that all humans (in a given regulator's area, e.g., California) tend to encounter such bumps at roughly the same rate (per mile driven) over their lifetime. In that case, it's probably going to be acceptable, since every individual is better off.
I don't know, maybe this is not impactful / obvious enough for people to care about?
What certainly is obvious is that the safest drivers are much safer than an average driver (does anyone know of a study that estimates this ratio?). Therefore, at the very least, the threshold for Waymo should be not the average accident rate, but the accident rate for the safest drivers.
Exactly. I have had zero accidents in 20 years; I'm not interested in a car that will lower the overall accident rate if it increases mine.
Who is "them" and who allocates the groups?
We can't even get any kind of car control skill testing or training to be part of a driver license issuance.
And in fact some regulators fully understand the tradeoffs and will prefer autonomy for the better good of the public. An example of this is the Boeing 737 Max, those crashes wouldn't have happened if there were no autopilot systems. But regulators are not suggesting that all autonomous systems on planes be turned off because of the safety and financial advantages of keeping them in place even though they are obviously not perfect.
Bad example. MCAS was an obvious case of a criminal corporate behavior, not a tradeoff between overall safety vs. technical perfection.
Then you've not been following the space. The one that immediately comes into mind is the Tesla that slammed into the side of the semi truck because it was painted blue like the sky.
If you follow the events with self-driving accidents, most of them are nonsensical crashes that no human would ever have done.
What if we would make cars and rules that are adapted to AI cars and ignore human drivers? e.g. Ban human drivers from some roads, allow AI cars with designs that exploit AI advantages (e.g. much better reaction time) but do not require or even allow human backup (enabling us to put the passengers in a secured shell), etc. I suspect we could than reach a 1/20th rate today.
Given how reckless some drivers are, I'd imagine the distribution of crashes among drivers is very skewed. I don't know numbers, but I'd expect to see something like 80% of car crashes involving (or objectively caused by) 20% of the drivers, with most car crashes involving people who have been involved in numerous crashes, and a large minority of drivers having been involved in zero car crashes.
There is a lot of variation in drivers. Young ones with good reflexes and senses but bad on experience, old ones with worse reflexes and senses but better on experience. Ones that stop at stop signs, ones that blow through them if they think they can get away with it. Cities like New Orleans where drivers are much more aggressive because the cops don't care, etc...
It matters who is driving what cars. If you're taking safe drivers and having them drive FSD cars, and comparing the average of that against the average of all non-FSD driven cars (which includes a lot of really shitty drivers in the average), then the net safety impact of this could be nothing. Introducing FSD cars would have no impact to overall car safety, and might even have a negative impact, if the FSD software is worse than the good drivers who are now not driving manually-steered cars but are driving FSD cars instead.
I present, "Canada's Worst Driver," a series that I watched quite a bit when I had a cable subscription. Besides being hilarious, it should make you think a time or three before crossing the street. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHB4WuM7Y_eP-PFv5F6To...
The Vertrauensgrundsatz does not account for distracted, tired and inebriated drivers.
Basically, maybe there’s better ways than standard vision (which for computers is still kinda basic compared to a person) to solve the pedestrian hitting problem.
The cars are clearly the danger to everyone who isn’t in a car, why would the burden be on everyone else, all the time?
I really don't want to be fair though, because I think your point is totally correct.
Because reality.
Since the advent of motor vehicles, I would argue risk has generally scaled with the efficiency and power of vehicles.
At the minimum, for 70 years we have known that danger to both pedestrians and safe drivers is ever present and growing. The reality is not about who SHOULD deal with this problem, but how to most effectively arrive at a functional solution which actually reduces risk for drivers and pedestrians alike.
As well, it's worth noting most accidents occur in areas where you drive most often and you're most familiar. And the increase in traffic accidents and fatalities over the last 10+ years has been due to driver distractions, ie cell phones etc, more than anything by a lot.
Yes there are reckless drivers out there doing stupid shit. However, that's always been the case. Now it's just easier than ever to capture them on camera and for them to go faster than ever for cheap. However, even back in the 70's, crash safety technology was laughably behind anything we have so it goes both ways imo.
It would be more remarkable if most accidents occurred in areas where you rarely go.
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/render-yourself-invisible-to...
No, but there's probably a good reason it's suspended. It's not that you forgot the rules. It's just that you're not following them.
Presumably by paying their child support.
I don't know if it works as intended, and it wouldn't surprise me if people have horror stories about clueless rulings by clueless judges, but obviously the intent is that the license is suspended because the person is intentionally not paying child support.
> No, but there's probably a good reason it's suspended.
Not paying the renewal fee on time is a big reason. That's a rule, indeed, but nothing related to driving or safety.
There have been suggestions that pedestrians could make cities interesting, since a place like New York would have every pedestrian no longer afraid to just walk into traffic. The cars will just wait until a fully clear moment that may never come
As you say, if you know the cars will stop and let you go, this power will corrupt.
Extend this thinking to bicyclists, skateboarders, delivery riders, motorcyclists, car enthusiasts driving themselves - all able to simply cut off a self driving car knowing it will give way.
But there is more adversarial out there.
AI input hacking to get known responses. Cars disabled because of gang tagging on sensors.
Car enthusiasts or privacy enthusiasts (privacy shouldn't require enthusiasm but here we are...) updating car firmware/software. People with full physical access!
And we haven't touched on the ethical stuff which is a world of discussion in itself.
Self driving cars by evolution in current societal rules etc will take a LONG time.
> Extend this thinking to ... - all able to simply cut off a self driving car knowing it will give way.
But this is already the case; if I jump into slow moving traffic in a (western) city centre the cars will let me through, possibly even without honking. The only things to fear are distracted drivers (which is the same with the AI, because I can't know whether the AI sees me) and the occasional madman, but those are rare.
What's more interesting as you point out are situations where other drivers will take advantage of the AI's adherence to rules and safety. That's going to be especially fun in cities like Napoli, where things like driving through red signal are completely normal. It's probably not going to work there at all in its current state.
Would stepping out in front of a car be illegal?
https://laist.com/news/transportation/understanding-new-cali...
If "person walks in front of car" event is rare, then the automatic car stop saving a life or minimising injury is nice. Saved a person from a bad day for a minor inconvenience for the car people.
If a NY city worth of people do it without regard, then cars will be gridlocked.
My guess is:
- Assuming self driving cars that that stop for pedestrians are common
- then laws against deliberately walking in front will exist
- to judge the dispute of "deliberate" there will be more cameras, because why wouldn't there be...
London already has near suicidal pedestrians.
And I say that with respect: it's the opposite of the usual tragedy of the commons. Every pedestrian in central London who just crosses the street without looking places themselves in appreciable danger, but contributes a tiny bit to training London drivers to be extra careful.
(Going off on a tangent: tipping is an interesting opposite.
If everyone in the US stopped tipping tomorrow, economic equilibrium would shift so that service sector people would have comparatively higher nominal wages and roughly the same overall income. That's how it is in Japan or Australia or Singapore (or the US before the 20th century), where tipping is either less common or severely frowned upon.
Because eg prospective waitstaff in the US expect to be tipped, they accept lower wages. Similarly, a single patron not tipping in the US gets a lot of social awkwardness without shifting the equilibrium much. A single waiter in the US not accepting tips loses out on income and also gets social awkwardness, also without shifting the equilibrium much.)
Next round of CAPTCHA: click the squares with blind pedestrians
think about it, this is how these things are being trained--by people frantically trying to click stupid images just to get to the webpage they wanted.
About comparable to the risk of falling. Lower risk than suicide. Or death by opioid overdose. And of course, the most dangerous thing most Americans do, by a huge huge huge margin, is overeat and lounge on the couch.
Relatedly, another "problem" with "self-driving" cars is that we want all of the convenience and ease of use, without adjusting liability and ownership considerations. Consider, if Waymo gets to the point where they have a self driving car that you have to have a subscription to use, do you own the car? Are you the liable for any accidents it has?
To lean in on that hypothetical. I'd imagine a lot of families will use self driving cars to send kids to school. Is effectively a bus that terminates at your house. Who is liable for a mistake if the operation of it is completely remote?
I'd imagine the company would take on liability, as long as humans can't drive the vehicle or they aren't driving when the accident occurred. Mercedes already got the ball rolling on this [1].
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
Aside from some niche cases in very dense cities, is this generally true anywhere? I've visited a lot of cities with various levels of public transit, and I can't think of many where it was faster. More convenient sometimes, sure, cheaper, yep, but faster? Not often.
I was leaning into it being a social thing. If you care about reducing fatalities and such, public transit has been a thing for a long time.
As far as convenience goes self-driving cars should be extremely convenient once we have them, no? I agree with you that public transport makes sense in very densely populated cities but most places in the world are actually wasting money on lots of public infrastructure that makes little rational sense, simply because it's a popular demand.
If anything, legislation and social acceptance has moved faster than the technology. That's the opposite what many of us observing this space expected 10 years ago.
At this point I'm starting to have doubts about whether the full dream of self-driving cars will even be realized within my lifetime.
I'm impressed that they're actually offering driverless rides on SF streets, but my point stands. The cars operate only on the slowest streets at the quietest hours. Any problem they encounter is handled by remote operators.
I'm not outright dismissive of self-driving cars. I truly want them to exist. I don't even own a car and dislike being behind the wheel. I just don't buy into infinite hype pushed by a revolving door of charlatans.
Also I do have a modern VR headset and celebrate the technology. But, to make a similar comparison, the metaverse "ready player one" vision is not within our lifetimes.
If you're into self driving tech, Cruise especially is regularly ridiculed for their vehicles blocking traffic. Take this latest example: https://twitter.com/as611/status/1597144790767788032
But more importantly in case you're not aware it's not true self-driving at all, they're geofenced and both Waymo as well as Cruise have been shown to have issues with even minor changes like a construction site. The tech isn't there, we don't really have full self-driving and if we actually put a million "self-driving" cars on the road as the above user suggested, it would be utter mayhem with current tech. If this will change in the future is to be seen and from what I've observed progress has already slowed as per ninety–ninety rule. It's easy to have some autonomy functions. It's hard to have millions of fully automated cars. So far, we're nowhere near it.
This level of sophistication makes me think it will not "frequently deadlock".
The modern Level 2 car is already today at below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT). The autonomous car then needs to be below 0.1 fatalities per billion VMT. Meaning that if you have 1 million vehicles of your make deployed, they each need to have driven 30-40 000 miles autonomously before you have enough statistics!
That means proving the safety of a Level 4/5 autonomous system is extremely expensive and slow, and requires significant public adoption before it's proven to be safe. The consequence is that, assuming proven safety is necessary before public adoption, it becomes impossible to prove safety.
Another point is that OTA upgrades for autonomy become entirely pointless, as you'll be polluting your statistics if you change the code more frequently than every ~3 years.
Does this statistic count fatalities to people outside the car? I ask because (in the US, at least) car safety ratings don't take those into consideration.
Which ratings? The NHTSA does include non-occupant fatalities in their statistics. E.g. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data...
> For the first time ever, [the proposed rating program] includes technology recommendations not only for drivers and passengers but for road users outside the vehicle, like pedestrians.
News story on this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/3/22960262/nhtsa-ncap-five-s...
The incentives are misaligned. Tesla should want to make the software better not just to attract some more customers, but because if they screw it up they're going to be on the hook.
How many times do you think this has happened?
I think I'm relatively safe from cars on the sidewalk. Yet with fsd cars I'm not so sure anymore.
Not even true. I've been hit by a car (with human driver) on a sidewalk. Driveways cross sidewalks, and drivers seem particularly inattentive when crossing them. When you're walking on the sidewalk, do you ever walk somewhere that's more than one block away? If so, you're going to have to cross a street anyway.
My partial answer is, making an extremely reliable system is hard. If someone wrote a deadly bug even only happen at a very corner case, it still can kill people. And it's quite hard to prove there isn't such bugs.
You only need 1 or 2 drivers for a huge train carrying a lot of ppl/stuff. Optimizing away the driving barely reduces the cost of operating the train as a whole.
With cars, everyone drives themselves. There’s a lot more driving happening and so if you can automate that away, you create more value.
> it's a hypothetical so give me some leeway on this!
IMO you should not base (and broadcast) your opinions about safety on hypothetical statistics. I don't even believe it's true that overall statistics show self-driving is safer than humans. IIRC prior reports showed that companies were selectively picking statistics about safety.
Moreover, other players also have cars covered in cameras. If anyone thought vision only was the best path forward because they couldn't figure out sensor fusion, they'd already have done it and saved the BOM cost.
For what it's worth, my experience has been that cameras are one of the more problematic sensor systems overall. Vendor software is garbage, any particular tuning is finicky in extreme conditions, you have to clean the damn things, cameras streams take up lots of bandwidth, etc.
If this becomes true then society would have an even bigger problem with organ donations - available supply would plummet. Some of the largest sources of organ donations are from car crash victims.
Surely we’re in agreement that this is a good thing, right? That a shortage of organ donors due to the donors not dying is a good thing. Sometimes it feels like people are suggesting otherwise and I can’t fathom the logic.
> But, the ones they do have are accidents a human driver would almost certainly have avoided.
I suspect most human-driver accidents are also accidents that (other) human drivers almost certainly would have avoided.
That's scant consolation for all the people dying in traffic accidents each day, of course.
Airplanes are not fully autonomous, even in the instrument flight rules system which is highly standardized. You don't have non-standard or non-predictable things. In instrument conditions, only instrument planes and pilots exist. While portions of segments are automated, transitions between segments and phases of flight aren't. It's ripe for automation, yet isn't fully automated.
The automobile environment has more objects thus more density of complexity, more non-standard and non-predictable actors like non-autonomous vehicles along with bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians, etc.
The current situation as basically the opposite: waymo's cars are better than humans in almost zero situations. It's hard to gain the my trust when your car can barely drive in a drizzle.
> Is this something we would accept?
No, and that's good.
Human drivers behave mostly like humans, even the worst ones. We all have millenia of evolution fine-tuned to recognize human behavior based on the most subtle of cues. So human bad driving is recognizable and thus far more avoidable.
AI drivers are effectively an alies species who make errors that make no sense whatsoever to a human mind, thus they behave, for all practical purposes, apparently completely randomly.
Consider the hypothetical: a million self-driving cars on the road that, collectively, will have 1/10th of the fatal accidents that human drivers would have[0]. But, the ones they do have are accidents a human driver would almost certainly have avoided.
Is this something we would accept?
My guess is that no, we wouldn't. Because the accidents avoided don't make the news, but the accidents that occur- especially ones that you say "my god, how did it screw that up?" will make the news, and our perception would be that they are more dangerous.
Until Waymo's cars are better than most humans in every single situation, they won't be able to win over the public perception war.
[0]I'm making those numbers up. I acknowledge that. But it's a hypothetical so give me some leeway on this!