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by elmomle 1278 days ago
Comments like these disincentivize people from sharing honestly. I have full confidence that OP was telling the truth when saying they it was a relatively safe / low traffic environment, and I fully imagine they were paying attention and ready to intervene when FSD made mistakes.
4 comments

> Comments like these disincentivize people from sharing honestly.

As an automotive engineer: Agreed. Realistic experience reports are useful, and that includes also e.g. what drivers are willing to attempt and how they risk-rate.

This is true, but they also disincentivize random amateurs from conducting uncontrolled safety experiments with children in the car. I think blame-free retrospectives and lack of judgement are important tools, but I also think they are best used in a context of careful systemic improvement.
Do you think they really do disincentivize that behavior (serious, not flippant)? If my very close friend questioned my decision certainly, but if an internet stranger with intentional snarky tone did it I'm not sure it would.
There are two groups of interest to me here. Secondarily, the original poster. Primarily, the hundreds or thousands of people who see the interaction.

I don't know what the original poster would do, but hopefully they will be more inclined to think twice next time they consider performing the behavior in question. If they do think twice and the situation is unsafe, I certainly hope they won't put their kid at more risk just to spite an internet stranger.

But my primary interest is in the many more people who might be inclined to imitate the poster's behavior when they get the chance. Having the behavior contextualized like this can only help encourage them to think about the risks.

> I fully imagine they were paying attention and ready to intervene when FSD made mistakes

Is that enough? The software could decide to accelerate and switch lanes at such a fast rate that the driver wouldn't have time to intervene. It hasn't happened yet to my knowledge. But it may happen.

People sharing anecdotes isn't productive either. Someone talking about "almost crashes" is a terribly subjective thing. We have thousands of hours of youtube video of FSD. We have some data. And the value add of one commenter's experience is virtually zero.
Teslas have been driven for millions of hours at least, if not billions, thousands of hours of youtube videos are anecdotes as well proportionally speaking. What about Tesla releasing complete real data? What are they scared about? Until then Tesla claims can't be taken seriously.
Videos on YT suffer from selection bias. Folks having scares are less likely to make the time to publish them, especially if they're fan boys -- the one cohort most likely to publish.

Agree raw data, or even just per 10K mile stats, from Tesla should be table stakes. Why aren't they required to report such things by law?

I strongly disagree. It's interesting to hear a thoughtful recounting of a HNers experience.

Tesla releasing the actual raw data would be much more helpful, but of course they are refusing to do that, most likely because it would betray how overhyped, unreliable and dangerous the software is.

What do you want them to release? What does "raw data" mean to you? Does Waymo release this raw data?
Even just disengagements per 10K miles would be a reasonable start. Anonymized dumps of all automated driving would be ideal.
At the very least anecdotes are a place to start thinking about what data to collect. And wherever you think of it, it's established in modern debates that people bring anecdotes as a way to motivate discussion. Maybe it's wrong without a proper statistical study, but it's what people do and have done since forever.