I love my Model 3, but I cannot overstate how little confidence I have that Tesla is anywhere near to full self driving.<p>Just this weekend I drove a 600 mile round trip. It was cold weather with some snow on the shoulders, but the actual road surfaces had no snow. I was mainly using just the cruise control, and no auto-steer. Even with just cruise, the car gets "spooked" from time to time and will suddenly jerk to a slower speed for absolutely no reason, even during the day and with no precipitation. At one point it did this several times within the span of 10 minutes, which was such an unpleasant experience that it made me want to stop using cruise entirely. Besides being jarring for the people in the car, it makes me worry that anyone tailgating will rear end me.<p>Besides that, the rain/sleet that was falling from time to time apparently blocked the camera, so at one point the car wouldn't even let me use cruise any more.<p>The car is tons of fun to drive and I don't regret the purchase at all. But I really don't like the overpromising on full self-driving.<p>EDIT: bmcahren pointed out to me that the new FSD beta software merges images from multiple angles, which my software does not do. I don't know much about that, but it sounds like the kind of change that could lead to a noticeably better result than what I experienced.
> The Tesla Model S in this video is equipped with summer-focused all-season tires, so traction and handling could’ve been better with the winter tires.<p>This is a bit of a nonstarter for gauging snowy weather performance, in my opinion. While comparisons can still be drawn between human and FSD drivers using the same (incredibly unsuitable) tires, handicapping the system doesn't provide a great measure of its prowess or challenges in "snowy conditions."<p>A bit of an aside, but few driving-related topics grind my gears more than people who live in snowy/icy climates driving with cheap (or just bald) all-seasons and complaining that their car "isn't good" in the snow so they need a bigger 4x4, which is of course subsequently kept on stock all-seasons for only a marginal improvement.
Yeah, driving on snow is a completely different beast. Winter tires are a must if you want to have any kind of traction (and no, 4WD / AWD is not a suitable replacement), and you definitely have to avoid sudden moves (my dad taught me to "drive with an egg under your foot"). Adjusting speed to the traction conditions is something I suspect a computer could do much better than I.<p>Having the lane markings be covered is also a challenge, but we usually find the lanes by looking at the road more broadly. If there is any kind of traffic, you'll get "tracks" pretty quick, too.<p>I strongly suspect we'll need a lot more AI training before we see a good FSD solution for colder climates, as it's very different from summer driving.
My wife lets me drive her Model 3 with FSD when I'm good. I drove it quite a bit this past weekend, in lovely Dallas winter conditions. (No snow, no fog, no rain.) While snow is obviously a challenge, the Tesla is so far from being able to handle routine driving in unchallenging conditions, it would be a big miscalculation to think, for example, that Teslas drive with FSD just fine in normal conditions. I would estimate that I take over about once every 3-5 miles in absolutely routine conditions.
That’s not “snowy conditions,” that’s a clear day on a well-plowed road. We don’t have such nice conditions anytime from January to March in parts of the US. =)<p>Clearly a ways to go, though better than I would have expected.
At 5m59s the narrator comments that signalling right on a left-turn has been a bug for a few beta versions.<p>This does not give me any trust that there's decent QA done on this software.
Chuck Cook is a FSD beta tester and has a lot of fairly detailed testing with the beta - <a href="https://youtube.com/channel/UCwdbsDtaMAh6QXvcbp08YzQ/videos" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/channel/UCwdbsDtaMAh6QXvcbp08YzQ/videos</a><p><a href="https://youtu.be/qj9t5GTeKNE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qj9t5GTeKNE</a> - Left turn view from both B-Pillar And Headlight Camera Perspective<p>There’s also James Locke which does drives a few routes on each new version - <a href="https://youtube.com/c/JamesLocke/videos" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/JamesLocke/videos</a>
Very impressive that AP disengaged at the beginning.<p>I don’t have much experience in SDCs, but did some computer vision/ robotics work previously.<p>I truly think that Tesla’s approach, if it works, will win in the long run (ie - next 15-20 years, I think the breakthrough for true L5 isn’t here yet - but will be in improvements in one-shot learning over the next decade).<p>Winter driving is a completely different beast than driving out in Arizona. You have to account for snow banks, slipperiness, lidar obstruction, and control itself - which is much harder.<p>How many thousands of miles of snow driving data does Tesla possess, compared to the #2 player?<p>Tesla’s approach of vision based, AP disengagement-led training will scale better, precisely due to what you’re looking at in this article - yeah, this is an unimpressive demo - but winter driving, rainy driving, dirt road driving are all <i>general cases</i> for Tesla, while they’re <i>special cases</i> for other companies (from what’s been revealed; Comma might be an exception).<p>Most people drive in the place they live, and drive on the highway to visit their friends and parents. It’s easy to be deceived into thinking driving is a small problem space of stop signs and lane changes. But even within just North America, there is enormous variety.<p>There is massive risk involved - these folks are pushing NNs further than any application I’ve seen, but with the last few releases, it suddenly doesn’t look all that crazy.<p>Secondly, combining rules based systems and neural networks is difficult. You end up with the N * M problem, and inevitably end up missing cases. It makes sense to do the absolute basic safety features as rules, and Tesla might be doing this, but all it takes for Tesla’s NN approach to pay off is one leap in explainability. There is an entire industry working on this - and Tesla will be the single biggest benefactor.<p>I don’t know who will win L5 - but I’m putting my bets on Tesla for L4.
This is fascinating. In short, the vision processing aspect still worked quite well, wrt. drivable area, lane lines, pedestrians, etc. Room to improve, for certain, but I’m not seeing a fundamental flaw here.<p>What’s left is the <i>driving</i> part, the “how to make the car follow this path” part. I predict this part will be ridiculously good once Tesla gets around to it. Imagine the traction control in your car, now with immediate-response electric motors, and it knows where it wants to go in 3d space (not just “driver is turning wheel to the right”, but actually knowing the arc to follow).<p>Exciting times.
This doesn't appear to add anything over the video directly: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ2Cir9OkPY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ2Cir9OkPY</a>
Just knowing where to point the car when you're going to smash into something is half the battle with bad winter conditions. I've hit a handful of ditches and snowy fields in my time that could have been much worse if I had veered right instead of left.
My autopilot slammed on the brakes while on the freeway last week because it was confused by the sun glancing off the pavement.<p>It was scary.<p>I have Zero confidence in Tesla self-driving.
The problem with FSD is that with humans, if they can’t see the road because a window has ice on it, they would go and clean it till they can make good enough judgement. But FSD just keep on going with less performance, whether you know it or not.<p>They need to clean themselves reliably
IMHO, tesla and others do the autopilot thing wrong and the right way to do it is to predict the trajectory for the next 5 sec and display it on the HUD-like screen projected to the windshield. This way the driver would see where the car is about to go and take control only when the predicted trajectory is wrong. This would solve the trust problem: the driver would know what's going on inside the car's "brains" and wouldn't need to act like an instructor to a epileptic student that can collapse at any moment. This would mostly solve the liability problem as well. The downside is that such autopilot can't leave truck drivers without a job.
Crazy it's called fully self driving, and at the same time it requires a driver to attend the wheel at all times.<p>This is at most a sophisticated driver assistant. The PR on this is just disgustingly disengenious.
It would be a cool feature if cars using autopilot would have a notification device somewhere so I could see they're currently autopiloting as I drive behind them so I can give them more room (since they won't behave human-like).
What is it with the display behind the steering wheel? There also seems to be some other smaller display on the right side of it.<p>I thought Teslas only have one giant screen one the right side of the steering wheel?