The human has to keep the hands on the wheel at all times and eyes on the road.

Edit: I looked at these FSD videos before and am very sure it will not work that well in an average European city. Unfortunately, because I really would love to buy a real self driving car that legally allows me to watch a movie while driving (highways is enough).

You’re indemnified.

There may be some circumstances where a driver operating a Mercedes-Benz vehicle using Drive Pilot could be committing a criminal offense. For example, I think sitting in the driver's seat while intoxicated would still be illegal even if you're not actually driving. But that is separate from liability.

Are you thinking of immunity? Indemnity is regularly contracted between private parties. (Also, police can’t give you immunity in America.)

"once a driver turns on Drive Pilot, they are "no longer legally liable for the car's operation until it disengages." The publication goes so far as to say that a driver could actually pay zero attention to the road ahead, play on their mobile phones, and even watch a movie. If the car were to crash, Mercedes would be 100 percent responsible."

it's obvious they'll expand it to more and more freeway/highway driving scenarios, and from there grow into any out of town driving.

meanwhile Waymo and Tesla can take their bruises with downtown traffic and pedestrians and children and hand drawn road signs and dirty signs and poorly placed ones and whichever more crazy real life reality show surprise guests appear on stage...

I wouldn't (and I don't think you did but several others in such discussions do) snicker too much on Mercedes. they have a knack on getting a couple of car related things pretty right.

>Here's the way I see it, Ted. Guy puts a fancy guarantee on a box 'cause he wants you to feel all warm and toasty inside... Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.

Not that I'm implying Autopilot is necessarily a "quality product" in comparison. It is just that a guarantee or liability coverage is nothing but a marketing expense for the company issuing it. It doesn't actually mean the product is higher quality.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4

Thanks for the subtle reminder that your statement is most definitely not "all I need to know."

And even worst failures...looking at all these I simply do not believe the videos posted are not edited or a selection of a success out of many failed ones.

https://youtu.be/KG4yABOlNjk?t=1252

https://youtu.be/WowhH_Xry9s?t=77

https://youtu.be/WowhH_Xry9s?t=196

Since the video was live on YouTube no editing was done...

These videos are only posting the successful events, we need to see them all. That is why probably Tesla is not putting their money where their mouth is.

I think it’s a tough call in this case. The Tesla is trying not to block an intersection where a light is green but there’s no room to clear the intersection on the other side due to traffic ahead. In fact an oncoming car is able to turn left in front of the Tesla because it waited.

Probably the law is that you should NOT enter the intersection in such a state, but the human nature would be to make a more nuanced judgement of “how bad would it be” to continue thru and possibly get stuck sticking out into the intersection for a bit until traffic moves again.

I would think - how long might I be stuck? Would it actual impede other traffic? Also factors like, am I’m late for work? Am I frustrated because traffic has been horrible or am I enjoying a Sunday drive?

Ego (Tesla’s name for the driving software) doesn’t get impatient. It can maximally obey all traffic regulations at all times if they code it to do so, even if human drivers behind might be laying on the horn.

This little clip really shows how much nuance is involved in designing these systems, and how doing the technically right thing can either be wrong or at least ambiguously right.

16:40 to 17:12

The driver in this case could see that the cars beyond the blue car were starting to move, and thus predict that he could cross a little bit early (betting on the space being available by the end of the maneuver, but risking being the ass who ends up blocking the crosswalk after miscalculating).

- First one, to stop too far away both from the road intersection and the pedestrian crossing. And of course you should not stop on top the pedestrian crossing. The car behind the Tesla, noticed that right away, and went over the Tesla. Even the Tesla driver in the video commented on that. I wonder what FSD version that driver has :-)

- Second failure, the car ahead, the one already over the road crossing started moving but the Tesla would not move at all. Only when the video author accelerated as he mentions in the video.

What light? There is none if you're talking about t=995.

Most intersections with unprotected left turns let you fit at least a whole car, sometimes two in the intersection to wait, and the third car has its front wheels on the paint, so it's totally in the intersection.

Even if the light for opposing traffic turns green while the turning car is still clearing the intersection, opposing traffic is legally required to wait and not enter the intersection until opposing traffic has cleared the intersection.

This extra liability would seem like making self driving cars error on the side of stopping to be in the interests of auto makers who would be exposed to that liability.

Imagine how crazy the law would be if this were the case: - Light changes from green to yellow 1ms before your front wheels pass the stop line - Other direction traffic runs a red light and hits you from the side - You're now somehow liable because your wheels entered the intersection with zero ability to react quickly enough (no human can react in 1ms and no car can stop that fast) and the other driver that clearly blew a red is not?

That would be pants on head crazy, tbh...

Not parituclarly relevant to the gridlock violation at issue here, but left on red from a one-way street to a one-way street is legal in the same conditions as right-on-red generally in a large majority of US states, a few of which also allow left-on-red from a two-way street to a one-way street. Left-on-red is only completely illegal in a few states.

Yeah, I've seen tickets written for this in Emeryville, CA for cars that entered on green and weren't going to clear the intersection in the next ten minutes. (I don't know if the intersection is still that bad.) Bicycle cop, because there was no way they'd get a car in there.

> Left on red is never legal

I recall that this was legal in Michigan, where I grew up, but it either had to be onto or off of a one way street. I could never remember which, so I didn't try it.

But I did see someone make a left on red on market street in SF from the rightmost lane, which is very illegal.

I believe it requires two one-way streets.

Although searching for this now, it does appear to also be allowed from a two-way,[0] which sounds vaguely familiar but isn't really the same as turning right on red.

[0] https://www.michigan.gov/msp/services/traffic-safety/traffic...

Regarding deceptive editing, plenty of people post their Teslas doing squirrely things and them intervening. So it's not like a secret that sometimes you have to intervene.

And, empirically, there's no evidence that these cars are less safe when driving this way. Tesla claims people driving with FSD enabled have 4x fewer accidents than those driving without it, and nobody has presented any data that disputes that.

"...Several attempts have been made to reach out to Tesla for comment over the years since these numbers first started coming out, however, Tesla closed its press relations office and no longer responds to press inquiries..."

Saying fsd on tela has the same statistic than the general driver population prints a grim picture, as it puts it in a strictly worse performance than peers vehicles (SUV or saloons depending on the model)

I am not joking when I say millions of times less information. The aggregate motor vehicle fatality rate in the US is ~1.3 per 100,000,000 miles. To even have a chance of proving safety you would need to analyze on the order of 1,000,000,000 miles exhaustively. In contrast, to demonstrate it is not safe you would only need a list of like 20 fatalitys over those same billion miles to affirmatively prove it is unsafe. A list of 20 names versus the raw data for 1,000,000,000 miles is at least a factor of millions in information required and qualitatively different to achieve. Proving safety is enormously difficult and basically requires direct access to the raw information. Proving unsafety is extremely easy and can be relatively easily demonstrated by third partys when dealing with safety critical systems.

Safety engineering is not some sort of new idea that we need to reinvent by the seat of our pants from first principles, it is a mature methodology regularly deployed in aerospace, medical, civil, and automotive engineering applications. Assumptions of safety are fundamentally incompatible with safety critical engineering. This is not a fringe opinion, it is literally a core concept at the foundations of safety critical engineering and not understanding that concept demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of modern safety. It is like a geologist arguing the Earth is flat; anybody who suggests such a idea is so fundamentally divorced from the ideas of the field that their knowledge not only fails to reach the level of a expert, they fail to reach the level of even a basic practitioner.

https://youtu.be/WowhH_Xry9s?t=272

See how is confusing the speed limit for cars and trucks, and doing a sudden break. More precisely, at 5:12.

So if you have car driving behind you, not expecting the sudden break, this could cause an accident. They are joking with people lives.

Ethics matter in Software Engineering.

"reckless" "untrained fanboys" "defective software" - what is this tone? Why is it reckless? Why do the fanboys need training? Why do you think the software is defective? These are significant unjustified claims!

To me, it seems each company has a different strategy for self-driving, which aren't directly comparable. Beta testing with relatively untrained people on public roads seems necessary for either strategy though.

California seems to think so.

>Beta testing with relatively untrained people on public roads seems necessary for either strategy though.

Then why is Tesla the only company doing it?

Mercedes has an L3 system shipping today and they didn't see any need to endanger my life to build it.

I can’t imagine letting it go for a full hour without causing some road rage or traffic blockage.

To be clear there is a definite driving “culture” in LA that is very permissive and aggressive (out of necessity). FSD doesn’t follow this culture.

And we can also test it in Ho Chi Minh. Tesla says it has superhuman abilities... - https://youtu.be/1ZupwFOhjl4

This is super annoying, but the most recent FSD update seems to have mostly fixed that.

It's still pretty crappy in a lot of other ways, but at least that improved.

I have read this comment before.

The problem is that issues may be fixed one week but re-appear later.

Self driving is not an exercise in fixing bugs despite what many people think.

So, they are getting what they need to make it better.

lmao do people do this for free?

You need to be able to accurately do bounding box detection in order to determine whether that billboard of a person is real or not or if that dog with a hat should be avoided.

Research has conclusively shown that vision only systems simply can't match LiDAR for this task.

And we also can move our eyes around in three dimensions to infer depth.

w.r.t. the super computer point, AI systems have been able to out perform humans for specialized tasks for a while.

This is another one, definitely one of my favorite examples ( at correct time) - https://youtu.be/2u6AgLuwVqI?t=86

Notice also on this example:

https://youtu.be/gzcR8RaC3-g?t=397

They have a driver attention detection system, that works even with dark glasses, as the driver in this case. Also even if you do not take over in the 10 seconds, like in the case for example of the driver fainting, or having a heart attack, the car will stop safely on the side of the road, alert emergency services, and unlock the doors for first responders.

Oh wait that is an unreasonably niche scenario to be worthy of consideration in the context of full autonomy.

https://www.carscoops.com/2022/05/tesla-driver-claims-model-...

Nobody else is doing that, and I resent their beta-testing features with the rest of us there as unwilling participants.

Do you mean strictly in the sense of accepting liability for crashes while AutoPilot is engaged?

Because Tesla makes safety a primary selling point of their vehicles. Objectively Tesla invests hugely in the safety of their vehicles, and scores the absolute highest marks for safety in many government tests.

Tesla makes an L2 system where the driver must remain engaged. And part of their FSD system includes the most sophisticated driver gaze and attention tracking system on the market. This has made their FSD system on predominantly non-highway roads safer than the average human driver without FSD.

That’s a just blunt lie. Their driver monitoring system is very deficient. They lack, for example, industry standard of infrared camera that allows you to see through the sunglasses.

And all older Model S/X, that have FSD, lack any camera at all.

I’ve found the system extremely adept at gaze tracking and alerting. The cabin camera is infrared in their latest models (at least for the last 2 years).

Please don’t call me a liar. I am happy to be called wrong and corrected.

I should have said “one of the most advanced” because this is in truth a subjective measure and I don’t think agencies like NHTSA rank and qualify attention tracking?

if you won\t do it for a randoms destination, on what would you risk your children life, on some white listed high-way? which one?

Do you get a refund?

The nag when FSD is enabled is actually quite annoying. Even glancing over at the screen for more than a second will trigger it. If it triggers more than a couple times you get locked out for the drive. If it triggers more than 5 times in total across any number of drives, you get locked out entirely for a full week.

But FSD isn't even necessary to help, an autonomous acceleration and follow mode for all cars on traffic lights and in traffic jams would already have huge benefits.

> Mercedes is delivering a product that only support a few features but do it well

This naturally implies that Tesla experimented with a broader set of self-driving features in an throw-it-at-the-wall experimental fashion. Which is more of a technical/product management question than a financial/legal/marketing one. Unless OP simply means Mercedes released the same set of features just extremely restricted in what you can do with them?

If so the hacker/experimental vs limited focus on "small set of features" dichotomy is not super relevant. It's just business risk aversion or gov regulatory strategy, not product/technology development strategy.

Or kill someone who didn't ask for any of this

I agree the comparison is laughable.

And regarding the FSD, most youtube videos I have seen run into human intervention within 20 minutes or so. Going 60 minutes without human intervention is certainly possible if you get a bit lucky but that does not mean you should take your eyes off the road for a second. FSD still has to be constantly supervised, which makes it of very limited utility. At this stage it is still a fun experiment at most.

I don't think that's correct. I've seen "in a certain amount of time" but you make it sound like it's a safety issue, which it's not, that being a key differentiation from a L2 system. When it can't drive it stops driving and you have to drive. If it's not a safety issue you could conceivably bee sleeping, as long as you can wake up in a timely manner.

The SAE makes it clear that the car is driving at L3, and on that basis you would expect the transition to another driver would be graceful, just like with two human drivers.

I'd argue that isn't remotely enough time to safely take control. You're betting your brain wakes up sufficiently in that time, and if it doesn't the consequences are potentially deadly.

>Also if I am using a tablet doing email or browsing or even playing games, 10 seconds is plenty of time to put the tablet away and grab the wheel.

That's a bit better from an alertness standpoint, but not from a situational awareness one. You're deprived of both context and situational awareness on the road.

Some key details extend far beyond a 10-15 seconds, such as: another car driving erratically, lanes ending, line of sight on pedestrians or cyclists visible prior that are now occluded by traffic. The list goes on.

> That's a bit better from an alertness standpoint

How do you know?

Subjective measurement of time is very inaccurate. I have experienced this, when I timed some regular activities I undertook every day, total habit. I would have said they took me ten seconds. When I timed them, it was forty five seconds.

I have no faith in anybodies' perception of how long they can switch context like this unless they have objectively measured it

I have heard that this has been studied, a quick web search turned up just this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000169...

That's a good point. On the face of it, I'd assumed an awake person already engaging their brain would perform better than a person just waking up in that context, but perahps not.

>I have no faith in anybodies' perception of how long they can switch context like this unless they have objectively measured it

Agreed. Moreover, I'd say that the risk for faulty information processing or incorrect preconceptions is higher if the person is distracted but awake.

You are "on call" rather than "at work", so you must be prepared to act when the car rings. If the car doesn't ring, you are free to do whatever you want as long as you can hear the ring and take back control when it happens.

The L2/L3 difference is that with L2 you have to supervise at all times and you have to decide to take control.

And no, it doesn't turn off if there are no vehicles in front, but it does turn off above 45 MPH. On most highways you'll only be below 45 because of traffic.

Above 45 they have a separate L2 system that requires "normal" attentiveness.

Are there equivalent videos for Mercedes?

For comparison, Tesla FSD cruising right through a crossswalk with pedestrians and the driver is gleeful about it: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/teslas-full-self-drivin...

For comparison, Tesla FSD veering into oncoming traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/128zncy/fsd_te...

I remember seeing a video where Tesla FSD veered right at an island/telephone pole. Another where it veered at a crowd of pedestrians on the corner of a signalized intersection waiting to cross.

A reminder that the software has been buggy for years and Tesla is somehow being allowed to "beta test" it in public among people who did not consent to the risk.

We don't know of the Mercedes is as much of a murder machine based on the little material from their FSD system there is.

All self driving car manufacturers have videos of their cars doing the most ridiculous things. It's hard to pick one above the other. At least Mercedes seems to have documented their limitations rather than assumed their system works everywhere, so that's a good sign to me.

What we know, is that if Mercedes murders someone, they’ll take liability for it.

Tesla will meanwhile smear you in the media for abuse of the system, that they actively promote as superior.

Recently I visited LA and a friend gave me a drive in their Model 3. The difference in sensor interpretation quality was massive compared to what I see back home. That gave me hope of my aging Model 3 still seeing improvements… But also a nagging suspicion that Tesla may have spent a lot of manual effort on data labeling and heuristics for LA roads specifically, and the results may not be easily scalable elsewhere.

When I first got into the beta, it wasn't great, but has improved significantly since then.

Not stunningly, just moderately. But generally yes, that's a good description for EU bureaucrats.

I disagree.

Wordy, worthy, self interested, rule fetish... All of that. But not incompetent like this.

Teslas being optimised for L.A. makes more sense in this case.

Unusually it looks to me like conspiracy rather than cock up.

Less lateral acceleration should mean more safety, or I m wrong?

No Teslas in Europe offer the FSD Beta program.

If you have purchased the "FSD capability," your car should be upgraded to include FSD Beta (or "release") at some point in the future. In the meantime, what you have is essentially Enhanced Autopilot with some bonus features like automatic lane changing on freeways.

  - Must be under 40 mph
  - Only during the daylight and only on certain highways
  - CANNOT be operated on city/country streets

Ngl that sounds like it requires more attention than autopilot, if you’re not doing anything and then have to take full control that sounds like it could lead to an absurdly unsafe outcome

In those, you can see the system disengage the second it doesn’t have a vehicle to follow at slow speeds right in front of it (like when the vehicle ahead changes lanes).

Useless.

It seems many people in this thread are highly motivated by prior bias toward the negative on Tesla; far more than those of us who appreciate what Tesla is doing.

17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-a...

How many Tesla cars with full self driving are there compared to regular cars?

A Tesla with FSD will only be using FSD a small fraction of the time.

If we had statistics on the number of hours FSD was active compared to the number of hours all other car driving of all cars we might be able to compared these numbers.

Hour wise, I think normal driving is way above 7500:1.

Yes, if the AI power tools chop off less limbs than the human controlled power tools, I would find that acceptable.

I disagree.

What I want to know, is is it safe? Not is it safer than the average human driver, but is it safe in an absolute sense.

When a human driver crashes we can almost always pin the cause down to human error. Errors caused by some human failing, being less than they could be. The promise of machines is that they are consistent. They are never "less than they could be", but are consistently at their best.

Comparing humans and machines is comparing dogs and roses - it is interesting a rose smells better, interesting a dog is more loving (or fierce), but not a valid comparison

Self driving cars stand or fall on their own capabilities.

But on the other hand, if you can identify the most accident prone group of humans, and require them to use AI cars, and with this you could significantly reduce the number of road kills/accidents, wouldn't that be an improvement?

2. What would a good absolute number for that period be? Our threshold can't be zero or we'd have to give up every technology from showers/baths (~60x more deadly) to fresh produce (E. coli, salmonella, listeria).

Zero accidents caused by the failure of the software. (Clearly a good system may have some obscure bug that makes it fail - but failure of a self driving system should cause uproar and consternation - unlike the reaction of Tesla to the deaths caused by their systems, it seems)

If I slip over in the shower it is not because the shower head went rouge and strangled me. If a shower was designed that in the period of one year strangled eleven people (a fair comparison to Tesla's record) imagine that?

Point being your comparisons (food poisoning or household mishaps) are not relevant

- About 43,000 American motorists died in 2021. If we have a way to prevent many of their deaths with software, would you not want to unless you could prevent every death?

- Why is a software tool failure different from any other tool failure? Brakes can fail, wheels can fall off) (happened to me once), etc. Listeria in produce is a failure in the production chain. Showers can be made safer. You use your car/shower/spinach and some day, for reasons entirely beyond your control, it might kill you.

- Why isn't the driver to blame in a Tesla? They're supposed to be watching and responsible.

- There's no clear distinction between what's a software failure and what isn't. Collisions have multiple contributing factors. Perfect software will still have collisions. The numbers reported aren't just collisions where the Tesla was at fault. One person was killed by a self-driving vehicle when a person jumped a concrete barrier and ran across the highway at night. The human driver couldn't react in time, and the software didn't see them. Is that a software failure? At what point do we accept that a collision is no longer the car's fault?

"Ford’s BlueCruise Ousts GM’s Super Cruise as CR’s Top-Rated Active Driving Assistance System - Tesla Autopilot falls to midpack as other high-tech systems improve" (Jan 2023) - https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/active-drivi...

"...Of the 12 ADA systems we just finished testing, Ford BlueCruise came out on top, followed by Cadillac Super Cruise and Mercedes-Benz Driver Assistance. Tesla, once an innovator in ADA with its Autopilot system, fell from its second-place showing in 2020 to seventh this time around—about the middle of the pack. That’s because Tesla hasn’t changed Autopilot’s basic functionality much since it first came out, instead just adding more features to it, says Fisher...

...“After all this time, Autopilot still doesn’t allow collaborative steering and doesn’t have an effective driver monitoring system. While other automakers have evolved their ACC and LCA systems, Tesla has simply fallen behind.”..."

You might be right or not but gave zero arguments in your comment. The fact that these safety/regulatory restrictions exist does not mean the system is not more capable.

If you constrain a system to where it’s effectively useless and declare victory, that’s worse than trying to actually solve the problem and saying you’re not there yet.

It’s lowering the goal precipitously until you can achieve and then pretending you did it. Tesla has flaws, but this is a dumb article.

They beat Tesla to being certified in California as Level 3, with restrictions.

They can check a box and make this press release though, I guess that’s worth something.

You're also kind of walking a fine line on the "No True Scotsman" concept...

It also doesn't mean it doesn't have the technical capability to drive through the streets of LA for 60 minutes.

https://www.thatcham.org/mercedes-to-accept-liability-for-ac...

Mercedes has soundly beaten the last decade of Tesla efforts by reaching L3.

I've personally watched FSD go off the rails and into a crash situation within 60 seconds of being turned on three times this month (I have a friend who loves to try it in San Francisco)

Had it crashed it'd be on my friend, not Tesla. The fact Mercedes is taking responsibility puts it in an entirely different level of effectiveness.

-

People also don't seem to understand Mercedes has a separate L2 system that works above 45 mph that already scores better than AP by consumer reports

Isn't Mercedes' L2 system non-upgradable, though? i.e. people with Merc's L2 system today won't be able to upgrade to L3+ later on, they'll need to buy a whole new car - right?

I bring this up only because I bought my X in 2018 with FSD prepaid - it's 5 years old now, and thanks to the gratis retrofitted computer upgrades it has the same level of FSD functionality as a factory-new Model Y purchased today - and I value that level of commitment to their carbuyers - whereas all the other carmakers I've ever dealt-with are the type that gladly charg $lots just for annual updates to the navigation maps SD card.

(I don't want to be seen defending Tesla, let alone Elon Musk here, but Tesla has avoided plenty of the worst practices of traditional automakers (okayokay, excepting the heated-seats thing).

Unless you have some source that suggests otherwise.

And it uses LiDAR which in my opinion is mandatory for FSD.

The fact that you're going to claim that Tesla, the company that famously discounts vehicles wholesale before unannounced upgrades, silently downgraded their CPO program to a used car program, removed ultrasonic sensors and didn't tell buyers if they'd be missing basic features like Summon temporarily (read: 4+ months) until their vehicles were delivered... is showing a commitment to their car buyers... really says something.

Elon makes a lot of “promises”, you’re right in that. Although, he really doesn’t. He makes educated guesses that you take for promises. Once Tesla’s own website and news outlets deliver those “promises”, should you start taking them for actual ones.

It's not like a basic Corolla has had features like drowsiness detection for close to a decade.

And you seem to have forgotten that in 2016 Elon claimed _all_ Teslas had FSD capable hardware, never contingent on if you had paid for FSD. That means the upgrades to 3 and 4 were paid upgrades for people who thought they were paying for a car that could already do FSD.

Overall you're upset and barking up the wrong tree (hardly even in the right forest)

Mine came as standard equipment.

i.e. neither your 2018 model X nor a factory Model Y is anywhere close to "Full Self Driving". Remember what Musk promised in 2017: "In November or December of this year, we should be able to go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York with no controls touched in the entire journey."

We're in 2023. You got scammed, and you're still defending the scammer.

You make it sounds like Tesla's with FSD on are crashing all the time. This makes no sense at all, because... they aren't?

17 fatalities, 736 crashes.

Based on what? ACC/LKAS has been a feature since before Tesla even existed as a corporation. You might be confusing their claims about FSD with AP (which they very much would like you to)

Similarly, they love for people to compare AP to all driver crashes and fatalities when AP only works in the situations that are otherwise least dangerous to drivers, in cars that are newer than the average car, driven by a demographic with higher than average safety records, etc... which means AP would need to kill a lot of people to not have better numbers than average

Without knowing the usual amount of no fault crashes given the number of driving miles the number is meaningless

And even if I did, my motivation for speaking up does not affect the fact that a crash happening does not mean autopilot was at fault.

[1] PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INOA-EA22002-3184.PDF

Getting to a point where Mercedes can guarantee their system will correctly initiate disengagements and do so with a 10 seconds of response time while putting the liability on themselves is a massive leap of anything Tesla has ever put out.

Again, this is what happens when you have literally no clue how the space works (and then turn around and accuse people of FUD.)

Tells me what I want to know about which system is safer.

Yet, according to you that is somehow a bad thing (dangerous?) or worse han some other brand. Which again, is factually untrue afaik.

This reasoning still makes no sense at all.

For point of comparison, the entire rest of the auto industry, worldwide has fewer advanced driver deaths than Tesla, despite millions more cars on the road with advanced driving functionality.

On an absolute, and relative, basis Tesla advanced driving is the most dangerous advanced driving system in the world.

Where in the first few paragraphs it gives the impression Tesla has 5:1 deaths, but later you learn that they are including simple lane keeping and cruise control in the comparison, and

> None of the cars using the automated systems were involved in fatal accidents

If you mean Tesla, that is definitely false. Mostly famously, the Bay Area crash where autopilot was conveniently disabled seconds before the car crashed into a barrier, killing the driver. In the aftermath, the driver's family, and other Tesla drivers noted that a recent update to FSD had caused a regression, whereby Teslas would swerve toward the divider instead of away from it.

simple lane keeping and cruise control in the comparison

Some of Tesla AP's worst fatalities are instances where the car was just replicating simple lane keeping functionality and yet the car still crashed into a big rig or emergency vehicle the Tesla didn't see but which any other carmaker's system would have seen.

Notably, in instances where the Tesla was at fault Musk refuses to discuss the accident, even though he otherwise has no issues releasing information about the driver when the driver is at fault. It's telling that Musk rarely (but still) does this, which means that every time he doesn't it's very strong circumstantial evidence that the car was at fault.

At some point you need to stop making excuses for Tesla's atrocious safety practices and abysmal safety record and just except that they're fundamentally dangerous cars.

You said that "the entire rest of the auto industry, worldwide has fewer advanced driver deaths than Tesla, despite millions more cars on the road", what are your sources for that?

What are you talking about? The real FUD is Tesla not taking responsibility when "Autopilot" crashes into something.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INOA-EA22002-3184.PDF

People don't go off on Tesla because of its lack of technical prowess. People go off on Tesla because their marketing department is a bunch of pathological liars.

https://youtu.be/zhr6fHmCJ6k

https://youtu.be/5cFTlx68itk

Your comment has complaints about an academic engineering definition/legal standard that, realistically, is probably going to be paid for in lives by delaying the roll-out and development of self driving vehicles. We know from the march of AI in other fields that the potential for cars to drive to superhuman safety standards is just on the cusp of technologically achievable and will likely be achieved with some sort of evolutionary approach of trying a bunch of things and seeing what works.

This is exactly the wrong time to be making automakers liable for experimenting. If anything, we should be lowering the standards automakers are held to to push through the last technical barriers and break into the oasis where less people kill themselves on the road. I've already lost too many tired friends to car accidents; we should be sparing no effort to get humans away from the driver's wheel. In a fair world, people advocating raising standards should be held liable for the lives they are throwing away on net.

Nobody is being forced to drive a car with autopilot if they aren't comfortable. The risks are obvious and understood. Personal liability is fine.

What about all the others participants on the road? Should pedestrian and cyclist also take personal responsibility for getting hit by a self driving car?

No. Personal liability is fine.

The situation would be very similar to how it is now, except a lot less people would be dying in car accidents.

If so, (how) do they run GPU drivers on it?

And if not, how do they guarantee that the system is responsive and safe?

(Of course a third option would be that they don't use an OS at all for the mission critical stuff).

> This seems like a marketing gimmick by Mercedes at best;

No, this is what a professional roll-out of a feature like this should look like.

> the two technologies aren't even in the same league. > Any comparison is laughable.

Well, at least we agree on these two. But probably not about the direction.

By my count, 46 videos of it not staying in lane, 54 videos of it swerving into objects, 23 videos of it ignoring red lights, 22 videos failing at intersections, 12 videos of pulling out into traffic, 15 videos ignoring road signs, 7 videos ignoring pedestrians, 5 videos ignoring speed limits, 23 videos stopping randomly, 5 videos failing in the snow, 3 videos ignoring buses, 5 videos speeding in school zones with children present, and 3 videos ignoring school bus stop signs.

With a level 3 system like the one from mercedes you can check your phone or do anything else and only have to react when it tells you to take control again.

Tesla is taking a radically different and open approach to autonomy compared to every other player. That opens them up to intense criticism though as there are thousands of videos online, with successes and failures. When close to a half a million people are using an autonomous system across the full ODD and all of the US and Canada it's going to be very easy to compile a collection of critical failures. But IMO this is the best way to make fast real progress in this space and not just a limited Disney ride.

This makes no sense to me based on the technology used. Cruise actually previously had a permit to ONLY operate at night.