Craig Doty II, a Tesla owner, narrowly avoided a collision after his vehicle, in Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode, allegedly steered towards an oncoming train.
Nighttime dashcam footage from earlier this month in Ohio captured the harrowing scene: Doty’s Tesla rapidly approaching a train with no apparent deceleration. He insisted his Tesla was in Full Self-Driving mode when it barreled towards the train crossing without slowing down.
I don’t see any information about the crossing. Was it a crossing without gates? As the sensors must’ve picked that up when driving towards it. If so, is a huge oversight not putting up gated crossings nowadays, certainly on busy roads, regardless of the performance of self driving cars.
The video in the article shows lowered arms flashing. Very visible with plenty of time to stop despite the foggy conditions. It just didn’t.
Ah. I’ve read it, but I have media tuned of, so I didn’t see the video. Thanks for the clarification!
Yep of course!
Stuff like that happens whe you opt for visual obstacle detection instead of lidar
Not being able to identify a railroad crossing without a gate is a failing of the car not the train. Gated crossings are not guaranteed, nor should they be because they don’t make sense for every situation in which roads and tracks cross.
they don’t make sense for every situation in which roads and tracks cross.
they don’t make sense for every situation in which roads and tracks cross.
Did the owner not put their car in “Do not ram train” mode?
So sick of people referring to “Do not ram train” mode. You see it all over social media, but especially Lemmy. It’s “Do not ram train (Supervised)” mode, and you’d have to be living under a rock for the last 5+ years to think you don’t have to actually take control of the wheel to stop it from ramming a train.
That’s an optional software upgrade. It’ll cost you $12.95 a month.
Oh come on, who wouldn’t pay for that? To not run into trains? That’s a bargain! Thanks Daddy Musk 🥰
And just think, the rest of us rubes have to manually not drive into trains, like barbarians
Oh! As a token of ah…of…aah… a knowledge mental acknowledgement, we the US people would like to gift this here Tesla to you all, Putin, and Iran leadership. You get a Tesla and you get a Tesla…and you get a Tesla!
Every couple of months there’s a new story like this. And yet we’re supposed to believe this system is ready for use…
Ever couple of months you hear about every issue like this, just like you hear about every airline malfunction. It ignores the base rate of accurate performances which is very high.
FSD is imperfect but still probably more ready for use than a substantial fraction of human drivers.
This isn’t actually true. The Tesla full self driving issues we hear about in the news are the ones that result in fatal and near fatal accidents, but the forums are chock full of reports from owners of the thing malfunctioning on a regular basis.
It IS actually true. It does goofy stuff in some situations, but on the whole is a little better than your typical relatively inexperienced driver. It gets it wrong about when to be assertive and when to wait sometimes, it thinks there’s enough space for a courteous merge but there isn’t (it does some Chicago style merges sometimes), it follows the lines on the road like they are gospel, and doesn’t always properly estimate how to come to a smooth and comfortable stop. These are annoying things, but not outrageous provided you are paying attention like you’re obliged to do.
I have it, I use it, and I make lots of reports to Tesla. It is way better than it used to be and still has plenty of room to improve, but a Tesla can’t reboot without having a disparaging article written about it.
Also fuck elon, because I don’t think it gets said enough.
typical relatively inexperienced driver
Look at the rates that teenagers crash, this is an indictment.
provided you are paying attention
It was advertised as fully autonomous dude. People wouldn’t have this much of a hard-on for trashing it if it wasn’t so oversold.
This fully autonomous argument is beat to death already. Every single Tesla owner knows you’re supposed to pay attention and be ready to take over when necessary. That is such a strawman argument. Nobody blames the car when automatic braking fails to see the car infront of it. It might save your ass if you’re distracted but ultimately it’s always the driver whose responsible. FSD is no different.
If it’s not fully capable of self driving then maybe they shouldn’t call it full self driving
Seriously you sound like a Mac user in the '90s. “It only crashes 8 or 9 times a day, it’s so much better than it used to be. It’s got so many great features that I’m willing to deal with a little inconvenience…” Difference being that when a Mac crashes it just loses some data and has to reboot but when a Tesla crashes people die.
These are serious rate differences man.
Every driver, and even Tesla, will tell you it’s a work in progress, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who has had an accident with it. I’d be willing to bet money that IF You find someone who has had an accident they have a driving record that’s shitty without it too.
If you want to talk stats, let’s talk stats, but “It seems like Tesla is in the news a lot for near crashes” is a pretty weak metric, even from your armchair.
You hear so much about the people Jeffrey Dahmer murdered, but never anything about all the people he didn’t murder!
Cute.
Here’s some actual information
People are terrible at probability estimation, and even with two fatal accidents a month FSD is likely still safer than most of the people on the road per million miles driven.
I see you’ve decided to be condescending, and also made a falsifiable claim. This is the part where you bring some actual data or STFU.
Whatever you say Mr Dahmer joke instead of content. I see that was really all in good faith and maybe I unintentionally hurt your feelings by citing a source on base rate biases?
What data would you like me to bring for discussion since you’ve been so open thus far? Do you want me to bring some data showing that teslas spend more time not having accidents than having accidents? I’m happy to go do some homework to enrich this interaction.
It’s not as though you can just ask Tesla for every case of an FSD crash. The falsifiable claim is just me tossing a number, the point is that memorable bad press and bad stats are not the same.
In what way is it not ready to use? Does cars have some other driver assistant features that are fool proof? You’re not supposed to blindly trust any of those. Why would FSD be an exception? The standards people are aplying to it are quite unreasonable.
Of whiat words is FSD an acronym?
It’s unreasonable for FSD to see a train? … that’s 20ft tall and a mile long? Am I understanding you correctly?
Foolproof would be great, but I think most people would set the bar at least as high as not getting killed by a train.
Did you watch the video? It was insanely foggy there. It makes no difference how big the obstacle is if you can’t even see 50 meters ahead of you.
Also, the car did see the train. It just clearly didn’t understand what it was and how to react to it. That’s why the car has a driver who does. I’m sure this exact edge case will be added to the training data so that this doesn’t happen again. Stuff like this takes ages to iron out. FSD is not a finished product. It’s under development and receives constant updates and keeps improving. That’s why it’s classified as level 2 and not level 5.
Yes. It’s unreasonable to expect brand new technology to be able to deal with every possible scenario that a car can encounter on traffic. Just because the concept of train in a fog makes sense to you as a human doesn’t mean it’s obvious to the AI.
In what way is it not ready to use?
To me it seems you just spent three paragraphs answering your own question.
can’t even see 50 meters ahead
didn’t understand what it was and how to react to it
FSD is not a finished product. It’s under development
doesn’t mean it’s obvious to the AI
If I couldn’t trust a system not to drive into a train, I don’t feel like I would trust it to do even the most common tasks. I would drive the car like a fully attentive human and not delude myself into thinking the car is driving me with “FSD.”
You can’t see 50 meters ahead in that fog.
Completely true. And I would dictate my driving characteristics based on that fact.
I would drive at a speed and in a manner that would allow me to not almost crash into things. But especially trains.
I agree. In fact I’m surprised the vehicle even lets you enable FSD in that kind of poor visibility and based on the video it seemed to be going quite fast aswell.
LIDAR can
Yeah there’s a wide range of ways to map the surroundings. Road infrastructure, however is designed for vision so I don’t see why just cameras wouldn’t be sufficient. The issue here is not that it’s didn’t see the train - it’s on video, after all - but that it didn’t know how to react to it.
Because it’s called Full Self Drive and Musk has said it will be able to drive without user intervention?
The naming is poor, but in no way does the car represent to you that no intervention is required. It also constantly asks you for input and even watches your eyes to make sure you pay attention.
The car maybe not, but the marketing sure does
Marketing besides the naming we have already established and Elon himself masturbating to it? Is there some other marketing that pushes this narrative, because I certainly have not seen it.
It’s called Full Self Driving (Supervised)
Yeah, it will be able to drive without driver intervention eventually. Atleast that’s their goal. Right now however, it’s level 2 and no-one is claiming otherwise.
In what way is it not ready to use?
Full Self Driving (sike!)
You’re not supposed to blindly trust any of those. Why would FSD be an exception?
Because that’s how Elon (and by extension Tesla) market it. Full self driving. If they’re saying I can blindly trust their product, then I expect it to be safe to blindly trust it.
And if the fine print says I can’t blindly trust it, they need to be sued or put under legal pressure to change the term, because it’s incredibly misleading.
Full Self Driving (Beta), nowdays Full Self Driving (Supervised)
Which of those names invokes trust to put your life in it’s hands?
It’s not in fine print. It’s told to you when you purchase FSD and the vehicle reminds you of it every single time you enable the system. If you’re looking at your phone it starts nagging at you eventually locking you out of the feature. Why would they put driver monitoring system in place if you’re supposed to put blind faith into it?
That is such an old, beat up strawman argument. Yes, Elon has said it would be fully autonomous in a year or so which turned out to be a lie but nobody today is claiming it can be blindly trusted. That simply just is not true.
It isn’t Full Self Driving if it is supervised.
It’s especially not Full Self Driving if it asks you to intervene.
It is false advertisement at best, deadly at worst.
Unfortunately, companies also have to make their products safe for idiots. If the system is in beta or must be supervised, there should be inherently safe design that prevents situations like this from happening even if an idiot is at the wheel.
ESP is not idiot proof either just to name one such feature that’s been available for decades. It assists the driver but doesn’t replace them.
Hell, cars themselves are not idiot proof.
No, the standards people are applying to it are the bare minimum for a full self driving system like what musk claims.
It’s a level 2 self driving system which by definition requires driver supervision. It’s even stated in the name. What are the standards it doesn’t meet?
It is ready because Musk needs it to be ready. Watch out, this comment may bring the morale down, and Elron will be forced to … Cry like a baby 😆
Didn’t he recently claim Tesla robotaxi is only months away?
Well I suppose he didn’t say how many months, but the implication was less than a year, which has been his claim every year since 2016.He said that Teslas were an investment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because owners would be able to use them as robot taxis when they weren’t using their car and charge a small fee by next year…in 2019. Back then he promised 1 million robot taxis nationwide in under a year. Recently he gave the date august 8 to reveal a new model of robot taxi. So, by Cybertruck estimates, I would say a Tesla robot taxi is a possibility by late 2030.
He is just spewing shit to keep the stock price afloat, as usual.
He also said they were ready to manufacture the 2nd generation Tesla Roaster “now,” which was back in 2014. No points for guessing that as of yet (despite taking in millions of dollars in preorders) they have not produced a single one.
Given this very early and still quite relevant warning, I’m astounded that anyone is dumb enough to believe any promise Elon makes about anything.
As a frequent train passenger, I’m not overly concerned.
Seems a bit too weak to derail, probably only delay.
What a bunch of morons people were in 1912 to believe a ship could be unsinkable. Amirite guys?
I hope Tesla owners only get themselves killed.
What a horrible thing to say, especially since Elon and Tesla have only relatively recently turned to absolute shit. There are a lot of Tesla drivers that don’t support what he has done to the company and all that.
Here you are advocating for the death of people because they purchased a vehicle. A lot of people bought Teslas as they were one of the better EVs at the time during Tesla’s climb to their peak (which they have since fallen very far from). They too deserve death?
Here you are advocating for the death of people because they purchased a vehicle.
No; I’m expressing the same sentiment that I express for motorcycle riders that refuse to wear a helmet. I really, genuinely don’t care if they beat their brains out on the front bumper of a Hyundai, but I don’t think they get to force a Hyundai driver to hose brains off their car.
Teslas are death traps. Their owners can make that choice for themselves but I don’t think they get to make it for others, which is what they try to do every time they turn on that self-driving feature.
Obvious strong blinking red light ahead, obvious train passing ahead…
Tesla FSD: Hmmm let’s not even slow down, I don’t see any signs of problems.
FSD is an acronym for Fool Self Driving.
The good news is that we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel…
“It’s just a freight train coming your waaaaayyyyyyy!” -metalilica
Seriously, you just had to throw that pun in there. LOL.
Are there any classes of object left that Tesla FSD has not either hit or almost hit? Icebergs, maybe?
Guess it gained self awareness and realised it was a tesla
TFW even your Tesla thinks your Elon fanboy tweets are insufferable.
“Your father’s a Cybertruck!”
As someone with more than a basic understanding of technology and how self driving works, I would think the end user would take special care driving in fog since the car relies on cameras to identify the roads and objects. This is clearly user error.
Leaving room for user error in this sort of situation is unacceptable at Tesla’s scale and with their engineering talent, as hamstrung as it is by their deranged leadership
If you are in the driver’s seat, you are 100% responsible for what your car does. If you let it drive itself into a moving train, that’s on you.
I cannot fathom how anyone can honestly believe Tesla is entirely faultless in any of this, completely and totally free of any responsibility whatsoever.
I’m not gonna say they’re 100% responsible but they are at least 1% responsible.
If Tesla is at fault for an inattentive driver ignoring the myriad warnings he got to remain attentive when he enabled FSD and allowing the 2 ton missile he’s sitting in to nearly plow into a train, then Dodge has to be responsible for the Challenger being used to plow into those protestors in Charlottesville.
God fucking damn it, why do you people insist on making me defend fucking Tesla?!
Lol
Linkin.park-numb.mp3.exe
This is clearly user error.
When it’s been advertised to the user as “full self driving”, is it?
Furthermore, the car can’t recognize the visibility is low and alert the user and/or refuse to go into self driving?
There are many quite loud alerts when FSD is active in subpar circumstances about how it is degraded, and the car will slow down. That video was pretty foggy, I’d say the dude wasn’t paying attention.
I came up on a train Sunday evening in the dark, which I hadn’t had happen in FSD, so I decided to just hit the brakes. It saw the crossing arms as blinking stoplights, probably wouldn’t have stopped?
Either way that dude was definitely not paying attention.
When it’s been advertised to the user as “full self driving”, is it?
I wouldn’t believe an advertisement.
I wouldn’t trust Musk with my life either.
But, presumably, we have moved beyond the age of advertising snake oil and miracle cures and advertisements have to be somewhat factual.
If a user does as is advertised and something goes wrong I do believe it’s the advertiser who is liable.
But, presumably, we have moved beyond the age of advertising snake oil and miracle cures and advertisements have to be somewhat factual.
Keyword presumably.
Right. But can you blame the user for trusting the advertisement?
If the product doesn’t do what it says it does, that’s the product / manufacturers fault. Not the users fault. Wtf lol how is this even a debate.
This is showing it works or no? I can’t tell and there isn’t audio, it seems like it would be stopped correctly.
Definitely shows it working.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe the weird flashing lights on the screen was maybe being pointed to as not working right or something to that effect? Idk lol no context provided at all
Tesla opted not to use LIDAR as part of its sensor package and instead relies on cameras which are not enough to determine accurate location data for other cars/trains etc.
This is what you get when billionaires cheap out on their products.
I never understood Musk’s reasoning for this decision. From my recollection it was basically “how do you decide who’s right when lidar and camera disagree?” And it felt so insane to say that the solution to conflicting data was not to figure out which is right but only to listen to one.
Also that LIDAR is more expensive then cameras, which means higher end user price, as far as I remember.
I wasn’t sure if he admitted that as being the reason (even though it obviously is)
I thought that was his main justification, idk tho, I don’t listen to the earnings calls or interviews myself lol
I mean, I think he’s a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.
When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren’t even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we’d probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.
Except, there’s some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because “all situations” means “understanding that there’s a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I’m going to assume they are going to do something dumb” or “some guy put a warning sign on the road and it’s got really bad handwriting”
Thus, the real problem is that he’s not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren’t safe either.
All about saving a buck.
LIDAR would have similarly been degraded in the foggy conditions that this occurred in. Lasers are light too.
While I do think Tesla holds plenty of responsibility for their intentionally misleading branding in FSD, as well as cost saving measures to not include lidar and/or radar, this particular instance boils down to yet another shitty and irresponsible driver.
You should not be relying on FSD over train tracks. You should not be allowing FSD to be going faster than conditions allow. Dude was tearing down the road in thick fog, way faster than was safe for the conditions.
Well said.
Maybe it shouldn’t be called full self driving if it’s not fully capable of self driving
A Tesla drover might get the impression that the cars “opinion” is better than their own, which could cause them to hesitate before intervening or to allow the car to drive in a way they are uncomfortable with.
The misinformation about the car reaches the level of negligence because even smart people are being duped by this.
Honestly I think some people just dont believe someone could lie so publicly and loudly and often, that it must be something else besides a grift.
One of the first things you learn to get your driver’s license is the Basic Speed Law, you must not drive faster than the driving conditions would allow. If only Full Self Driving followed the law and reduced its max speed based on the same.
Not only that, but took out the radar, which while it has its own flaws, would have had no issue seeing the train through the fog. While they claimed it was because they had “solved vision” and didn’t need it anymore, it’s bullshit, and their engineering team knew it. They were in the middle of sourcing a new radar, but because of supply chain limitations (like everyone in 2021) with both their old and potential new supplier, they wouldn’t continue their “infinite growth” narrative and fElon wouldn’t get his insane pay package. They knew for a fact it would negatively affect performance significantly, but did it anyway so line could go up.
While no automotive company’s hands are particularly clean, the sheer level of willful negligence at Tesla is absolutely astonishing and have seen and heard so many stories about their shitty engineering practices that the only impressive thing is how relatively few people have died as a direct result of their lax attitude towards basic safety practices.
Feels like these things were more capable a decade ago when they had radar.
Not that they should be called “full self driving” either then or now, but at least radar can deal fog better than regular ass cameras
