Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

And please keep in mind that this is pretty much in the optimal settings for FSD: great weather, huge streets, everything is as "car friendly" as it gets. I'd like to see FSD navigating an old Italian city, there's just no way. Even in car-friendly Germany you very often have streets with side-parking, which are too narrow to fit two cars, you need to communicate with oncoming cars, for instance by waving or flashing your headlights, swerve into free spaces on the side to let other cars go through, watch out for cyclists overtaking you from both sides, etc. And this is not even mentioning the weather... So this robotaxi thing might eventually work in some US cities, but pretty much nowhere else.

The thing I&#x27;ve been most amazed at about FSD is that there hasn&#x27;t been any sort of lawsuit around FSD refunds.<p>There are people who paid thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars for a promise that their car would eventually have &quot;full self driving&quot;.<p>A not-insignificant portion of those people have lost any chance at actually getting FSD, whether by their car being totaled in an accident, or having sold it, or such, without ever seeing working FSD.<p>As far as I know there&#x27;s no way to get a refund, and people very obviously didn&#x27;t get &quot;full self driving&quot; as advertised by Elon, so it really does seem like some people paid for a promise that turned out to be nothing... which sounds like lawsuit material to me.<p>There have also been multiple public promises that FSD would be delivered in a matter of years (like in 2016, the promise that &quot;by the end of next year, FSD will take you across the country safely while you sleep&quot;).<p>If anyone bought FSD due to believing those promised timelines, that also seems like it would be a pretty strong case for a refund to me.

I have FSD v12 and for my drives, in my part of the country, I have to do a mild safety intervention maybe once a week (like, getting closer to another car than I&#x27;m comfortable with)<p>sorry other people are having different experiences, but FSD is a significant quality of life improvement for me. Nothing is nicer than getting in the car after a long day and letting it chauffeur me home. (yes I still pay attention)

This pretty much jibes with my experience. Autopilot has phantom breaking still, but navigate-on-autopilot feels more predictable on the freeway and more useful than FSD. The fact that v12 has “exited beta” and is now the “Supervised” mode doesn’t give me confidence right now. The iterative progress it went through during the beta was really good — I felt that each point release was getting closer to a polished system that could be trusted. The v12 stack supposedly replaced all of the prior work with “photons in, photons out” straight neural networks, but I think this simply didn’t result in the stability the system needs. The v12 software behaves pathologically in situations where autopilot is excellent.<p>As a concrete example, it routinely switches out of the current lane to “follow route” and then immediately slams on the brakes to slow down, when no turn or exit is present. Then it turns on the signal and dutifully tries to get back into the previous lane. On screen, it says it’s wanting to change into a faster lane. This will happen multiple times on the same road. This is on CA-57 northbound in SoCal —- an area where I would expect there to be pretty good testing.<p>Personally, AP &#x2F; navigate-on-autopilot is still superior. On city streets, sure, FSD can sort-of manage. But it isn’t trustworthy enough for me to use it.

I think a good indicator if it is useful or not is to look at how much it is actually used.<p>Tesla published a chart of cumulative miles driven over time on page 8 of their latest quarterly update:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalassets.tesla.com&#x2F;tesla-contents&#x2F;image&#x2F;upload&#x2F;IR&#x2F;TSLA-Q1-2024-Update.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalassets.tesla.com&#x2F;tesla-contents&#x2F;image&#x2F;upload&#x2F;...</a><p>So far, I&#x27;m not sure what to make of it. The chart looks somewhat exponential. But since they brought more and more cars onto the road, one would expect exponential growth in this chart even if no additional usage was caused by software improvements. So one would have to un-cumulate the chart and then divide the y-axis by number of cars on the road to get usage by car.<p>And then one would have to factor in price changes.<p>I think the spike at the right is from the free trial they pushed out shortly after the release of FSD 12. The way I read the chart, the release of FSD 12 itself has not caused an increase in usage.<p>Does anybody know what caused the increase in growth in March 2023?

Seen this discussion before.<p>Musk claims that Tesla will announce fully autonomous driverless taxi mode on August 8th.<p>That&#x27;s &quot;announce&quot;, not &quot;ship&quot;. If this were anywhere near close to happening, there would be test vehicles all over the place, like Waymo and Cruise. There would be press reports. In reality, Tesla has an autonomous vehicle test license in California from the DMV and reports zero miles driven.

They should teach Tesla’s “autopilot” (and its FSD upgrade) in business schools. Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. You have to wonder if Tesla’s autonomous driving technology was actually ever meant to turn into a product. Or whether it is mostly a tool to justify the lofty Tesla stock price. I very much doubt that it is technologically ahead of its competitors.

Self driving cars in general are a useless technology demo. Not just TSLA (although more so because of the repeated false claims).<p>It’s a way for the car industry to fight against their extinction.<p>In the beginning the argument was: “it’s not the cars killing people, it’s the damn ‘jay walkers’ (term invented by auto industry, btw). Get those people off the road and cram them into the sides of the streets so my fat car can ride freely!11”<p>That campaign worked, to some extent, and now we have a patch work of sidewalks.<p>Then later…<p>Eisenhower (inspired by the ability for the German military to easily mobilize across the country via autobahn) pushed for interstate highways subsidized by the people. Auto industry capitalized on this and this contributed to the invention of the American suburb and slow decay of once walkable urban cores.<p>Cars were a luxury item. Now it’s a necessity, along with a whole laundry list of items for a car owner:<p>- gas<p>- time spent looking for charger, and charging<p>- parking (less space at home for living and instead using space for car)<p>- time spent finding public parking<p>- parking fees<p>- time spent in traffic<p>- car repairs<p>- car maintenance<p>- car insurance<p>- yearly taxes for registration<p>- car sales tax<p>- car depreciation<p>- toll fees for turnpike&#x2F;regional highway<p>In recent years, people have been realizing how car centric transportation cannot scale (ie, induced demand); and is an environmental disaster.<p>Now the auto industry’s answer is: “oh we have self driving cars!!1 that’s going to fix it. It’s the damn human that can’t drive!! Have aRtIfICiAl iNtElLiGeNcE hold the wheel! As for pollution, electric cars will fix that” (totally ignoring the carbon emissions to transition to an EV, increased brake dust and tire wear pollution, and rolling 10 yr contribution to e-waste in the form of batteries, and a grid that has traditionally relied on non-renewable sources)

The article answers the wrong question of &#x27;is FSD perfect?&#x27;.<p>A better question is whether it&#x27;s &#x27;cost-benefit positive&#x27;. That&#x27;s all that matters when users decide whether or not to use something.<p>If FSD reduces fatigue and allows you to arrive to work fresher, it might be worth tolerating the odd wrong turn extending the drive time by 2 minutes.

How does Tesla FSD fair against the Waymo self driving taxis?<p>I&#x27;m curious about whether self driving is still an impossible task right now, or if it&#x27;s just a matter of quality between companies - in which case it&#x27;s possibly a fair bet being made by Telsa execs that they&#x27;ll bridge the gap given time and money.

&gt; For the second test, my wife reluctantly gave me permission to try out FSD for interstate driving, which should be its best case scenario.<p>Except this isn&#x27;t the new FSD stack, it&#x27;s the old one.<p>It&#x27;s a fair criticism of the current offering, but it&#x27;s not much evidence against a future robotaxi.

Good analysis but did many people miss what happened during the Tham Luang cave rescue?<p>One of his most terrible (failed) marketing stunts:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Why-did-Elon-Musk-accuse-the-cave-diver-Vern-Unsworth-who-masterminded-the-Thai-cave-rescue-of-being-a-pedophile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Why-did-Elon-Musk-accuse-the-cave-dive...</a><p>&gt; I’ve had a Model Y for more than 3 years now, well before Elon revealed himself as the kind of person he really is, and I’ve been happy with it.

I just completed my trial and it was better than I expected, and yet still utterly terrifying at bits. It still feels _very_ far off from being able to safely navigate and negotiate only medium-complexity environments, but maybe the vaunted 12.4&#x2F;12.5 update will change all of that.<p>For example:<p>* It still won&#x27;t change in or out of a solid line HOV lane here in Arizona. Feels like an easy fix, but there it is<p>* I have concerns about its ability to check oncoming traffic when coming out of an occluded side street or alley. For example, my alley (where my garage leads) connects to a MAJOR road that is extremely fast. It is also fairly occluded in the side view by bushes and a light post. A human will move their head forward, crane their neck, and also be able to detect subtle changes in the light and shadows through the bush itself to determine if there&#x27;s _any_ movement and interpret that movement as a potential car, even if they can&#x27;t positively see a car. They can inch forward until they can see that the path is clear. The Tesla&#x27;s side-facing camera is in the b-pillar, behind the driver&#x27;s head, and at best, it can inch forward (and does) but gaining a high-confidence positive reading that the path is clear is... well, nearly impossible in certain cases that aren&#x27;t impossible for humans, and that&#x27;s concerning.<p>* Parking still takes one too many adjustments, and impatient drivers around you definitely notice it<p>* At one point, the FSD&#x2F;AP engine itself crashed on me while fully engaged. Unfortunately, this happened on a freeway connector ramp with a pretty steep curve, and when it crashed, it disengaged the steering wheel and sent us careening towards the barrier: it was a single lane HOV ramp, and we were going about 70 mph, so if I hadn&#x27;t been hover-handing, it would&#x27;ve easily resulted in a bad accident. This wasn&#x27;t a case of disengagement or AP getting scared or losing confidence. The engine itself suddenly, without warning, and for no discernible reason, crashed entirely. (It immediately threw an error and said AP System Error&#x2F;Take Control Immediately.) It then showed the car in a sea of black, as the visualization&#x2F;FSD engine rebooted. This sort of crash is kryptonite. It&#x27;s terrifying and its randomness and senselessness and opacity towards what caused it if anything is haunting. Again, a disengagement like this with no driver would result in catastrophe.<p>On the flip side, I was fairly surprised at how well it handled a lot of basic driving tasks. Visual-only parking still freaks me out (especially since my model HAS ultrasonics, but you disable them when you go visual-only, which is absurd), and a couple turns felt close to the curb, but overall, driving was fairly smooth and decent.<p>I have the added benefit of living in Phoenix, which is Waymo country. Waymos drive more confidently, and more importantly, are already fully autonomous. They navigate complex environents fairly decently (though, for example, my dad got stuck in one doing loops of a dealership parking lot that confused it a few weeks ago) and they&#x27;re comfortable to ride in. They&#x27;re not yet on freeways, but apparently that&#x27;ll change soon, but they also only go the speed limit, which is Phoenix is... a choice.<p>Elon keeps pushing this dream of a robotaxi fleet of Teslas, but I agree with the OP that it feels a far way off before I&#x27;d be comfortable with the idea of these things fully autonomously driving, and I say this as someone who sees a half dozen Waymos every single day. I also wonder more broadly about the core conceit here: not that fractional car ownership doesn&#x27;t make sense; it absolutely does, but in the idea that Tesla owners are going to be comfortable with their ~$50k-$150k vehicles roaming around and picking up strangers who... hopefully don&#x27;t do things to their car, all while hoping the car comes back home. I don&#x27;t believe Elon was pitching the robotaxi as being wholly Tesla owned vehicles, but it seems like a big societal shift to get people comfortable with their cars having minds of their own, and taking in randos.

I wonder how is there no open data on &quot;no mistakes FSD zones&quot;, e.g. areas of maps or routes that would be proven by large numbers to be error-free for Tesla FSD without interventions.<p>Would clearly show progress and make people understand when they&#x27;re trying the road that&#x27;s not proof yet.

FSD is not ready. I&#x27;m a Model Y owner, tend to lean pro-Elon, and will gladly tell you that it&#x27;s a fantastic car - but the self-driving is still not ready. My free month of autopilot made me trust it <i>less</i>. It&#x27;s quite good at highway driving, but the phantom braking and haphazard lane changing has eroded my trust to the point that I am manually driving the car 100% of the time.<p>I prefer the previous pseudo-FSD which simply stayed in the current lane, and relied on human input for anything more than that. This whole FSD update has been a sobering realization that I really only want the safety features.

The first two mistakes he points out I would&#x27;ve done likely too as a human not knowing the area to be honest.

US tech has many such stories throughout the ages. but there is still a &quot;cultural significance&quot; to the novel ones like FSD imho. the vision marketing helped fuel the eventual development to make it a reality, whether we are there yet or not.<p>another place where this is in play (also in the ai space) is the openai mumbo-jumbo. while there is plenty of discussions on hn about the real efficacies of genai, we have to agree that it has motivated companies to drop bucket loads of resources into its advancements. same way, the auto industry and researchers got a reason to fund designing the cars of the future.<p>a smaller example where this worked out was the macbook air and ultrabooks space. while everybody was captivated by the original fitting inside a large envelope, it was an overheating, slow (even for its time) mess for many years. but by creating a clear market demand for the vision, we finally have devices that meet the original vision.<p>while i cannot stand behind the current driver of FSD tech (or ai for that matter), i respect their role as a catalyst in research.

I’ve been using FSD for the last 6 weeks. Paid for the monthly subscription, and running v12.3.6<p>It’s almost killed me once, when it was about to blow through a red light at ~70mph, while a car was about to turn left in front of me. There was no indication that it was going to stop, so I slammed on the brakes.<p>Then, after about three weeks, it stopped tracking the lanes properly, and would drive straddling the lane divider. I’d repeatedly enable it when I was in the far left lane of a 4 lane road, and watch as it would promptly begin driving about two feet into the right lane. Disable, and reenabled and it would repeat this engineering feat. It continued for 2 days. Yesterday it was just driving extremely right justified. If there were any cyclists in the bike lane, my mirrors would be intruding into their space.<p>Of course I bought the FSD function as I knew that I would be attentive and provide feedback, kind of a service to humanity, as this feature is far from prime time, and isn’t safe. I may cancel the service as I’m concerned that my 17 year old new driver will enable it, and not be as attentive.

Disclosure: I work for a Tesla competitor, not on self-driving. This is solely my own opinion.<p>More and more, I feel that we need at least a couple more paradigm changes - specifically:<p><pre><code> - More understandable models - being able to get good answers to &quot;why did you do that&quot; - Better retraining - Don&#x27;t do that thing! (without training a whole model) - Better internal learning - don&#x27;t wait for the next download </code></pre> Non ML changes: Public understanding and acceptance of self-driving, favorable insurance and legal framework.<p>Public understanding includes improvements to two way communication between humans and self driving vehicles.<p>Legal framework includes limited liability for manufacturers. NOTE: I don&#x27;t love this idea or even like it, but without it we will only get driver enhancement features, not SDC. (If you&#x27;re angry at this suggestion, know that I am too)<p>---<p>My basic approach to all of this is that you need to have a solution to any problems that automation will encounter. The World is a problem generating machine. Most solutions to automation problems involve constraining the problem space. But as that guy said &quot;Life, uh, finds a way&quot;

Unfortunately, the adaptive cruise control is also far dumber than it thinks it is, slamming the breaks when passing under bridges on the highway etc.

The author makes a mistake early on “hoping” when he buys a new car there are alternatives with adaptive cruise control as “good” as Tesla. This is the problem with Musk’s hype. There are many, many better systems. Including Mercedes level-3 self driving which is far beyond anything Tesla have. Simpler systems like autopilot which perform better are in Audi’s Hondas and more. People really need to understand that Musks pitch is simply a lie and there are independent tests proving how far behind Tesla are.

&quot;&quot;If somebody doesn&#x27;t believe Tesla&#x27;s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,&quot; Musk said on the latest earnings call in April. He added, &quot;We will, and we are.&quot;<p>Musk has been making these kinds of pronouncements for years, and the company has yet to deliver.<p>He still has friends and believers.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;tesla-shareholder-vote-on-musk-pay-plan-wont-clear-legal-disputes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;tesla-shareholder-vote-on-mu...</a>

This is probably the most difficult problem in computer sense&#x2F;vision that we have, and I am beginning to think that short of the purely hypothetical &quot;AGI&quot;, this requires the computer known as &quot;the human brain&quot;.<p>The only way out I see is separate or vastly updated infrastructure - separate roads and highways, and streets with specific signs and markings to help FSD vehicles navigate. For example, to ban FSD vehicles from taking certain risky routes.

&gt; I’ve had a Model Y for more than 3 years now, well before Elon revealed himself as the kind of person he really is, and I’ve been happy with it<p>Logical fallacy in the second paragraph. Doesn’t bode well.

My car is old enough to not have adaptive cruise control and lane centering, but that&#x27;s all I&#x27;d love to have for now. Well executed, it&#x27;s such a joy on a highway or in traffic.<p>Jeep and others have it but drive like a bowling ball with guardrails up.<p>Has anyone here successfully retrofitted Audi a4 with ACC? I hear Cruise started like that, would be awesome to get a kit like that.

FSD is worse than autopilot, and makes autopilot worse. When you enable FSD, it turns on the cabin camera and applies the same driver attention standard to autopilot. Autopilot is really good! But if FSD is on, it becomes next to useless. You actually have to look at the road all the time!

&gt; I assume it would have corrected itself eventually and gone back onto the main lane.<p>&gt; Another case where I’m sure it would have corrected itself eventually [...].<p>Why? That&#x27;s some bold assumptions. If it&#x27;s going to fail, let it (as long as it&#x27;s safe and legal), and see what it actually does.

The first 2 and last incident seem like mapping errors. I know people working in this space, and it sounds like they all think the problem is &quot;just giving it a better map&quot;. They want to rely primarily on a world map and use things like vision to &quot;see&quot; cars and other local stuff. That approach will never work (except in limited cases like Waymo mostly gets away with). Humans rely primarily on vision and understanding, and reading signs.<p>FSD requires AGI. These systems are all expensive science fair projects and have already killed a number of people.

This squares with my experience in the demo. It’s 98% there but that 2% is adding a lot of cognitive load and stress, so it’s a negative ROI.

FSD is maybe following the steps of the Segway… soon it will be ubiquitous.

Almost a decade ago I used to be a hyped up HS graduate fully spoon-fed the AI hype bubble (after 2012, the first &quot;deep&quot; learning breakthroughs for image classification started hyping the game up). I studied at a top 5 university for CS and specialised in deep learning. Three years ago I finished, rejected a (some would call &quot;prestigious&quot;) PhD offer and was thoroughly let down by how &quot;stupid&quot; AI is.<p>For the last 2-ish years, companies found a way to throw supercomputers on a preprocessed internet dictionary dataset and the media gulped it up like nothing, because on the surface it looks shiny and fancy, but when you peek it open, it&#x27;s utterly stupid and flawed, with very limited uses for actual products.<p>Anything that requires any amount of precision, accountability, reproducibility?<p>Yeah, good luck trusting a system that inherently just learns statistics out of data and will thus fundamentally always have an unacceptable margin of error. Imagine using a function that gives you several different answers for the same input, in analytical applications that need a single correct answer. I don&#x27;t know anyone in SWE that uses AI for more than as a glorified autocomplete which needs to be proof-read and corrected more often than not to the point of oftentimes being contraproductive.<p>Tldr; it is exactly zero surprising that FSD doesn&#x27;t work, and it will not work with the current underlying basis (deep learning). The irony is, that people with power to allocate billions of dollars have no technical understanding and just trust the obviously fake marketing slides. Right, Devin?

What everyone seems to be ignoring when it comes to autonomous cars is that the last 1% or 0.1% or whatever remains unsolvable for &quot;AI&quot; might not really matter.<p>We can change roads, ffs! At the bare minimum, we could fence off difficult areas and force manual driving. Once many people own an autonomous car, there will be pressure to make roads safe and convenient for them.<p>Phantom braking for instance, is only a safety issue when the following car gets too close. Lanes can be annotated, etc.<p>The &quot;AI&quot; part is just marketing to get these cars on the road and set the customer&#x27;s expectations. Once that is done, the hard parts will just be moved from the car manufacturer to the road builders.

&quot;well before Elon revealed himself as the kind of person he really is&quot;<p>Many of us knew that Elon was full of shit long before but until he started spewing his politics no one cared to listed to even respected industry experts. A sad state of affairs IMO.

I find it difficult to take the technology review seriously with the off topic remarks and prefaces about Musk and Tesla at the beginning of the post.

whoa, welcome to the war on cars, hn.

This is a pretty lame review, IMHO. I generally agree with the sentiment, but these examples are not great at providing full review of these features.

This article has the same feel as the old Tesla review by that journalist who was in bed with the oil&#x2F;gas industry and Tesla provided logs of him driving around in a parking lot at 1% charge after he tried to slander Tesla that the review car &quot;just ran out of battery suddenly&quot;

&gt; <i>I’ve had a Model Y for more than 3 years now, well before Elon revealed himself as the kind of person he really is, and I’ve been happy with it.</i><p>&gt; <i>When I buy my next car, my requirements will be simple: I want an EV, an extensive charger network along I-80, and an autosteer that’s at least as good as what I have today. Let’s hope there’ll be decent Tesla alternatives by then.</i><p>Gee, I wonder if this is going to be an unbiased review of the technology.

The author of this article doesn&#x27;t understand how continuous improvement in software works ... Saying that it will &quot;never&quot; work is myopic. Never bet against Moores Law or Elon!<p>As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don&#x27;t have FSD yet) I cannot <i>wait</i> to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a &quot;copilot&quot; do some of the &quot;thinking&quot; &amp; driving for me.<p>Yes, there are still some instances of FSD <i>Supervised</i> doing strange things in the YouTube videos people are posting, but it&#x27;s definitely no longer a &quot;demo&quot;! It&#x27;s real and it&#x27;s only a matter of time before it&#x27;s better than humans in most circumstances ...<p>Now as a TSLA shareholder, I&#x27;m still sceptical that the RoboTaxi&#x2F;CyberCab system will be 100% foolproof ... But if they can prove through data that it&#x27;s safer than 99.9% of human drivers on every day journeys and thus get regulatory approval it will be game changing! If Tesla can do 90% of short ride city driving at a fraction of the cost of Uber&#x2F;Lyft they have a real cash cow on the horizon!