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.”
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.
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.
Then it’s a difference of opinion, I think they would be happier with better public transport.
It could be measured I suppose.
Giving completely free will without economic pressure most people would chose one environment or the other.
I suppose there’s enough statistical data on the world to make such analysis. Not that I’m going to do it. But I think it could be measurable what people chose when money is not a factor, as in I need to live X because I don’t have money to live in Y.
Anyway it’s almost a fact that there would be people that would love to live in one place and some people on the other. So best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.
best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.
You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)
I think a lack of availability is what is stopping the free market from choosing the better form of transportation.
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.
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.
oh so you’re just an unhappy person
Man, this is Lemmy in a nutshell. Someone offers a well thought-out and well-written view to give some perspective on the other side of a popular Lemmy opinion, and the first response is just straight up ignoring the opportunity to have a real conversation and attacking the commenter as a person.
This place fucking sucks.
I’m unhappy of sharing this world with people with such low empathy, yes.
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 -
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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.
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.
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.
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
You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.
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…
if he was truthful: “the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits”
Honestly though, I’m a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Don’t reason deterrentists, they cause wars and send millions to prison
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:
Public transport is the way to go, just need to get break the cycle of six decades of automobile addiction.
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.
There is no proof they are safe, and we should stop trying to replace people.
Again, ride in one yourself when you get the chance and I promise you you’ll change your mind immediately.
Again, not only no valid proof they are safe, but they are being used to put people out of work like Taxi and Uber drivers.
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.
No, it is not generally proven to save lives, you are listening to lies somewhere. Its not a good thing to push self-driving cars and Musk is the one being retarded. Plus he supports Trump and not Harris.
The technology behind it is proven to save lifes. The reaction time of a full brake to stop a car crash i had the “luck” of experiencing on a Volkswagen was outstanding.
Same thing for the lane assist function if you are sleepy
Same thing for the lane assist function if you are sleepy
If you are sleepy behind the wheel, you need to pull over, get off the road, and take a rest.
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.
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.
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…
Does anyone else find this enraging ?
It’s a decade too late.
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?
All probabilistic models output a confidence value, and it’s very common and basic practice to gate downstream processes around that value. This person just doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Though, that puts them on about the same footing as Elono when it comes to AI/ML.
Right, which is why that marvelous confidence value got somebody ran over.
Are you under the impression that I think Teslas approach to AI and computer vision is anything but fucking dumb? The person said a stupid and patently incorrect thing. I corrected them. Confidence values being literally baked into how most ML architectures work is unrelated to intentionally depriving your system of one of the most robust ccomputer vision signals we can come up with right now.
Yes, but confidence values are not magic. These values are calculated based on how familiar the current input is to a previous observed input. If the type of input is unfamiliar to the model, what do you think happens? Usually, there will be a category with a high enough confidence score so that it will be chosen as the correct one, while being wrong. Now, assuming you somehow manage to not get a favorable confidence score for any decision. What do you think happens in that case? I never encountered this, but there can only be 3 possible paths: 1) Choose a random value. Not good. 2) Do nothing. Not good. 3) Rerun the model with slightly newer data? Maybe helps, but in the case of driving a car, slightly newer data might be too late.
In five years guys!!
Maybe have a safety feature that refuses to engage self drive if it’s too foggy/rainy/snowy.
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.
Inb4 someone on TikTok shows how to bypass that sensor by jamming an orange in it -__-
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.
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)
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??
You need slightly more advanced lidar for cars because you need to be able to see further ahead then 10 ft, and you need to be able to see in adverse weather conditions (rain, fog, snow), that I assume you don’t experience indoors. That said, it really isn’t as expensive as he is making it out to 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.
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?
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).
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!
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?
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.
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.
I sometimes find a small seed in seedless watermelons.
It’s the same issue, although the seeds are unlikely to harm you.
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”
It drives your full self, it doesn’t break you into components and ship those seperately.
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.
“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.
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!
Full Self Driving shipping
202520262027309844841e+156^ You are hereTo be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing
It sure crashed its full self
