[Royce-CMR]

I see a number of negative stories, so sharing my positive story with self driving cars.

Two weeks ago driving home, Tesla Model Y with FSD, FSD on, nighttime, suburban streets. Car phantom brakes and I can’t see a reason why. Glance down and I see the UI thinks a human is running into the street.

I look back up, canceling FSD and taking over… and a damn invisible guy in dark brown jacket and black pants races past my headlights.

He had stopped before crossing my lane, but when he saw FSD slow down he booked it across. Other cars slowed after he cut straight into my headlights as they noticed him for the first time. No one else saw him either. I was super impressed with FSD.

The promised perfect future isn’t here - you can’t take a nap and the car drives you - but the current state is a value add.

[kelnos]

The "funny" thing, though, is if you hadn't been using FSD at all, you probably never would have seen him at all, and he wouldn't have crossed until after you passed. FSD slowing down is what caused him to think it was safe to cross, because he thought "you" saw him. But you -- very reasonably! -- thought the car was slowing for no reason, and you might have hit the guy had you manually accelerated sooner. Not saying this was your fault in the least. Just thought it was interesting that FSD -- in a very strange way -- could have actually caused you to hit a pedestrian, even though it saw the person and did the right thing.

[userbinator]

Encouraging pedestrians to play chicken with cars is never a good thing.

[gmokki]

I personally play chicken with cars very often. Of course only when it is my right as a pedestrian.

If more people did that the drivers would be constantly more alert.

Twice a car has done emergency braking in front of me (they were not alert and braked late) and got rear ended.

[beAbU]

This sounds like terrible practice and you are gambling with you life. And probably the lives of those around you.

Fine, you might have right of way. Fine, the car driver might legally be in the wrong. But you'd still be dead and nothing changes that. You are not invincible, and the law will change fuck-all about you being in a wheelchair breathing through a tube for the rest of your life. I doubt youll even change the behaviour of the at-fault driver that much.

Lobby your council for better infrastructure for pedestrians, and steeper fines for infractions. Well lit and marked zebra crossings, etc. In Ireland _every_ zebra crossing outside of Dublin has bright flashing yellow lights on both sides that constantly flash day and night. If you are half asleep at the wheel they sure wake you up as you approach the crossing!

[kwhitefoot]

When I do this I am very careful to make sure that while I am not in any danger the driver will think that I am.

[ryandrake]

This seems like a very bad practice, unless you want your inevitable gravestone to say "Here lies gmokki. It was his right as a pedestrian."

[Free-is-Freedom]

Eh, that sounds like a pretty good legacy for the current era. Mine will probably say "Unknown" or "Anonymous"

[seanmcdirmid]

In Seattle, if a pedestrian wants to cross at any no-stop-light intersection (it doesn't matter if it is across a busy stroad!), cars are supposed to stop and let them cross safely, even at night. Yes, it is a poorly thought out law (unsafe for both pedestrians and cars, without improving the intersections to make them safe for pedestrians by not adding crosswalks, not removing pedestrian obstructing parked vehicles and trees, etc...), but in that sense even if the guy were in full black camo on a moon-free night without street lights around, cars are still expected to see and stop for them.

So in that case, if the pedestrian was at any kind of intersection, FSD would be doing the correct thing.

[toast0]

I've always been taught that pedestrians have the right of way, even when they don't. But I don't think that applies to invisible pedestrians.

Of course, Seattle is home to lots of terrible traffic designs and practices. I have relatives in Ravenna; in their neighborhood people park on either side of the street and residential intersections signal a 4-way stop by absence of any stop signs.

[seanmcdirmid]

I teach my son that he doesn't have the right away, no matter what the laws really say, because even if the car is at fault, he is still dead (and that scares me). Cross walks only for now, and definitely no going to try and cross 15th NW (a four lane that carries lots of traffic) like that.

It does apply to invisible pedestrians, but cops are more likely to rule it a drive-at-fault accident than something more serious like negligent homicide. I live in Ballard, people park on either side here also, and...there isn't much buffer even at designated cross walks to see people waiting (or just going) to cross.

[parineum]

That's the exact reason for the law.

The law is on the pedestrian's side, physics is on the car's side.

Pedestrian's should be cautious because they have more to lose.

[seanmcdirmid]

It’s a half assed law that puts way too much faith in drivers and is not a real solution to pedestrian safety, which requires actual road redesigns.

[Royce-CMR]

I love your comment because it highlights another complexifier of FSD debates - what was the actual right action?

Yep, pausing signaled to the guy he could run across. However who’s to say he was going to be reasonable and wait? What if he wanted to get hit, or didn’t care? How much influence will those edge cases have on our (human or FSD) norms?

As a society we haven’t answered those questions; it further muddles the FSD debate.

As the tech improves it will be interesting to see how we humans define the rules of engagement.

[kaliqt]

It's very clear to me, let FSD stop the car, that puts all further blame on the guy if he dies or something happens. We should do everything in our power to reasonably and safely prevent it, and letting FSD stop does so, the rest is on everyone else.

[Royce-CMR]

Yep. The key words are: to you. When I have convos about this, a spectrum of views come out.

Other views I’ve heard:

- pausing encourages ad hoc crossing, increasing odds of hurting someone by volume even as odds decrease.

- if you stop you enable carjacking (walk into street, car stops, steal car / hurt the human, profit). I don’t want my car to set my loved ones up to be attacked.

- pausing significantly impacts traffic flow, compressing our already overcrowded roads

- I don’t want the car to stop unless it gets to my destination, there’s a red light, or I tell it to stop. I don’t want behavior I might not understand. I’ll decide if I stop for a human or puppy or cardboard box.

Everyone says human safety first but in practice there’s a spectrum of opinions in practice.

My hope is FSD will force a common viewpoint and setup a future generation with a more unified approach to road safety.

[kbos87]

Same thing has happened to me. FSD sounded the alarm and hard braked on a dark two lane highway. I couldn’t see why until I fully passed someone dressed in dark clothing who had just crossed the road. I was paying full attention and never saw them. They were probably a couple hundred feet from the front of my car.

[noAnswer]

Over 10 years ago. Colleague comes into the office and says: "I nearly died yesterday." Tells a story how he (as a passenger) was driving with other colleague to an exhibition. The driver thought it was a good idea to explain the car radio to the others...while driving over 200km/h on the German Autobahn. The car, a VW Passart, suddenly engaged full braking while slowly steering to the right (onto the breakdown lane). They came to a full stop besides a standing car.

Without the auto braking they would have driven into the end of a traffic jam with very high speed.

[Free-is-Freedom]

This is equivalent to "A colleague of mine played russian roulette but lived because the safety was on"

The moral of the story is not that safety mechanisms are good (this is self evident) but rather that you should never gamble with your life.

[noAnswer]

There is no moral. It just happend. The End. People have to travel sometimes and can't always be the driver/pilot/operator of the vehicle. And if they are, they can't always be at their 100%.

[1oooqooq]

my euro sedans from the 80s already had night vision options.

would be a much better use of the infotainment screens today and cost much less than FSD snakeoil. while covering this single praise for it.

[t0mas88]

BMW still has it. Mine will display a large warning triangle with a pedestrian in it projected on the windscreen, and then you can look at the nav display to view the night camera view from the grill with the person highlighted in yellow (the rest is black and white for night vision)

It responds to bicycles and pedestrians either on the road or moving laterally across your path. Ignores the ones that are on the sidewalk and going the same direction as the car.

[kaliqt]

Tesla FSD is not snake oil.

[Arainach]

"Snake oil is a term used to describe deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. Similarly, snake oil salesman is a common label used to describe someone who sells, promotes, or is a general proponent of some valueless or fraudulent cure, remedy, or solution"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil

Selling something as "full self driving" or "autopilot" when it is nothing of the sort is in fact deceptive marketing. Claiming something will be "ready in 2 years" for 10+ years in a row is deceptive marketing and a scam.

Fine print saying the system has limited capabilities does not make it not a scam. Using a name consumers associate with 100% computer control is flat out deceptive and indicative of snake oil.

[KennyBlanken]

It's not a value-add given it causes chain-reaction crashes from phantom braking and quite regularly slams into the back of emergency vehicles on the side of the road (likely because the cameras are blinded by the emergency lights.)

Teslas had radar assist. It was too expensive for Musk. And to keep new car owners from being annoyed by older Telsas having more features than theirs, he ordered that the older Teslas have their radar units be disabled.

[InTheArena]

Actually, it appears that getting rid of "sensor fusion" has resulted in almost all of the phantom braking issues. My car still has radar assist, and only uses visual models now. And in that time, Phantom breaking has become a thing of the past.

The hitting a emergency vehicle thing - which is incredibly common as a kind of car crash - see why police always set their wheels to face into traffic when they do a traffic stop - doesn't seem to be occurring.

(Just in case you wanted some actual data)

[AlotOfReading]

Having worked with these kinds of systems, it can be difficult to tell from the driver's seat the actual effects of that change. It may have reduced false positives and true positives. It may have simply moved the false positives into scenarios you don't encounter. It may have not affected the true positive rate at all, but might have made positive identification slower and thus violated a real-time constraint elsewhere in the system leading to accidents. I've actually seen this last one root caused before.

The only people who have the data to know whether removing radar was safety net positive or not work(ed) at Tesla and can't say. Even then, they probably wouldn't know whether the system could have given better results with different changes.

[InTheArena]

Ehh. I had the same streach of road that resulted in three phantom breaking situations (one of them not in a tesla, but in a toyota). Steep descent on a road with a rail road crossing with exposed rails. No issues at all once the vision only upgrade hit both my M3 and MY (which has HW3). It's possible that they put in some other fix at the same time, but they stated at the time that sensor fusion was a big reason for phantom breaking, so I take them at their word that this was fix.

[sweetjuly]

That's not quite their point though. Completely deactivating the emergency breaking system would also solve the phantom breaking problem, and since the average person does not end up in situations which ought to trigger the feature that often it's unlikely any individual driver would ever notice that is was broken.

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not doubting that it went away for you. You know what you've experienced a lot better than I do. Everything I listed is consistent with that observation though and it's impossible to differentiate between them without internal data.

[MBCook]

I’ve owned 2 cars with radar. I’ve been in at least 2 others owned by family with radar.

None Teslas. None had phantom braking.

Tesla may have solved their issue (no 1st hand experience) but having radar shouldn’t have caused it if implemented properly. It’s clearly possible, seeming every other brand has managed.

[InTheArena]

Really? I saw phantom breaking all the time from both Toyota and Hondas. Typically on a slope, with something like rail crossings where the signals got a little squirrely. having the same glitch across multiple vendors with different implementation makes me think it's more a basic physics problem.

Regardless, the Tesla vision system - love it or hate it, is doing far far more safety systems then radar only based systems.

[MBCook]

In the 6 years I had it I got a handful of false warnings from my Honda, but never a false brake activation.

In the three years I’ve had my Mach E has had fewer false alerts than the Honda.

The one exception is it has a reverse brake assist the Honda didn’t, designed to stop you from hitting things when backing up. One friend’s driveway is so steep where it joins the street that if you’re not going very slow it will trigger the reverse brake assist. That was a surprise the first time.

[ghaff]

My Honda definitely periodically flashes a warning on a curve when there's an oncoming vehicle in the other lane but it's never actually braked on me.

[hokumguru]

Anecdotal I know, but I bought a model Y last year without radar. We’ve used FSD substantially and haven’t seen phantom braking issues even once. I think it’s been mostly resolved.

[dmix]

I've never driven one but I follow a youtube channel that documents beta FSD, posting raw video feeds and analyzing/critiquing them, and I've noticed they've been gushing about it more and more this past year. Far more than in the past he's always talking about how its mastered very complex stuff it would have disengaged or awkwardly completed only half a year earlier. I think the platform has improved quite a bit in recent years.

Of course opinions on the internet will have been established from headlines in prior years so who knows how much impact it will have on discourse if it turns out to be the case.

[hexane360]

On the other hand, I saw this just this morning: https://x.com/RealDanODowd/status/1778224756220940585

[kwhitefoot]

> Teslas have their radar units be disabled.

That's simply untrue. My 2015 Model S still uses the radar.

[machdiamonds]

Do you actually have any examples of FSD v12 hitting emergency vehicles?