[tippytippytango]

Ultimately, anecdotes and testimonials of a product like this are irrelevant. But the public discourse hasn't caught up with it. People talk about it like it's a new game console or app, giving their positive or negative testimonials, as if this is the correct way to validate the product.

Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"

10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.

We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.

[irjustin]

> Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal.

The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in as much as it can get away with, to be on the driver, effectively level 2.

[atlex2]

They're building on a false premise that human equivalent performance using cameras is acceptable. That's the whole point of AI - when you can think really fast, the world is really slow. You simulate things. Even with lifetimes of data, the cars still will fail in visual scenarios where error bars on ground truth shoot through the roof. Elon seems to believe his cars will fail in similar ways to humans because they use cameras. False premise. As Waymo scales, human just isn't good enough, except for humans.

[irjustin]

So, I agree with what you're saying, but that doesn't matter.

The legal standing doesn't care what tech it is behind it. 1000 monkeys for all it matters. The point is level 3 is the most dangerous level because neither the public nor the manuf properly operates in this space.

[atlex2]

Yeah - Tesla is in a weird level 2-4 space. They've managed to shunt liability onto their customers until now..

[simondotau]

It can be misleading to directly compare disengagements to actual catastrophic incidents.

The human collision numbers only count actual incidents, and even then only ones which have been reported to insurance/authorities. It doesn't include many minor incidents such as hitting a bollard, or curb rash, or bump-and-run incidents in car parks, and even vehicle-on-vehicle incidents when both parties agree to settle privately. And the number certainly excludes ALL unacceptably close near-misses. There's no good numbers for any of these, but I'd be shocked if minor incidents weren't an of magnitude more common, and near misses another order of magnitude again.

Whereas an FSD disengagement could merely represent the driver's (very reasonable) unwillingness to see if the software will avoid the incident itself. Some disengagements don't represent a safety risk at all, such as when the software is being overly cautious, e.g. at a busy crosswalk. Some disengagements for sure were to avoid a bad situation, though many of these would have been non-catastrophic (such as curbing a wheel) and not a collision which would be included in any human driver collision statistics.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

As a robotaxi, yes. That's why Teslas rollout is relatively small/slow, has safety monitors, etc...

FSD, what most people use, is ADAS, even if it performs a lot of the driving tasks in many situations, and the driver needs to always be monitoring it, no exceptions.

The same applies to any ADAS. If it doesn't work for in a situation, the driver has to take over.

[terminalshort]

If there was actually a rate of one life threatening accident per 10,000 miles with FSD that would be so obvious it would be impossible to hide. So I have to conclude the cars are actually much safer than that.

[buran77]

FSD never drives alone. It's always supervised by another driver legally responsible to correct. More importantly we have no independently verified data about the self driving incidents. Quite the opposite, Tesla repeatedly obscured data or impeded investigations.

I've made this comparison before but student drivers under instructor supervision (with secondary controls) also rarely crash. Are they the best drivers?

I am not a plane pilot but I flew a plane many times while supervised by the pilot. Never took off, never landed, but also never crashed. Am I better than a real pilot or even in any way a competent one?

[surgical_fire]

> FSD never drives alone.

So much for "Full Self" whatever.

[FeloniousHam]

I'll grant that the marketing oversells the capabilities of the system, but (as I have commented repeatedly in these FSD threads): anyone using it knows within a couple days their comfort level. I'm utterly unconvinced that any user is actually confused about the capacity of the system just because it's named "Autopilot" or "Full Self Driving" is not telling the truth.

The fact of the technology is that while imperfect, it is absolutely a marvel, and incredibly useful. I will never drive home again after having a beer after work, or when I'm tired after a long day. I can only attribute the angry skepticism in the comments to willful ignorance or lack of in-the-seat experience. I use it everyday, it drives me driveway to parking with only occasional interventions (per week!).

I'll throw in that my wife hates it (as a passenger or driver), but she has a much lower tolerance for any variance from expected human driving behaviour (eg. lane choices, overly cautious behaviour around cars waiting to enter traffic, etc).

[buran77]

> I can only attribute the angry skepticism in the comments to willful ignorance or lack of in-the-seat experience

Next to "the latest version really fixed it, for realsies this time", the "anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant or has irrational hate for Tesla" must be the second most sung hymn among a small but entirely too vocal group of Tesla owners. Nothing brings down a conversation as quickly as someone like you, trying to justify your purchase by insulting everyone who doesn't agree with your sunk-cost-fallacy-driven opinions.

[FeloniousHam]

> Nothing brings down a conversation as quickly as someone like you, trying to justify your purchase by insulting everyone who doesn't agree with your sunk-cost-fallacy-driven opinions.

I don't have any sunk cost in FSD. The car, sure, but it's a fine electric car that I got when there weren't many options (especially at a reasonable price).

I felt I was being generous. My inclination is that animosity to Musk's odious politics clouds the rational judgement of many critics (and they've mostly have no first-hand experience with FSD for any length of time).

[surgical_fire]

> I use it everyday, it drives me driveway to parking with only occasional interventions.

Let's hope you never become statistic.

I am happy that FSD is not permitted where I live. I would be concerned to drive close to one. Call it willful ignore if you prefer.

[tippytippytango]

Above I was talking more generally about full autonomy. I agree the combined human + fsd system can be at least as safe as a human driver, perhaps more, if you have a good driver. As a frequent user of FSD, it's unreliability can be a feature, it constantly reminds me it can't be fully trusted, so I shadow drive and pay full attention. So it's like having a second pair of eyes on the road.

I worry that when it gets to 10,000 mile per incident reliability that it's going to be hard to remind myself I need to pay attention. At which point it becomes a de facto unsupervised system and its reliability falls to that of the autonomous system, rather than the reliability of human + autonomy, an enormous gap.

Of course, I could be wrong. Which is why we need some trusted third party validation of these ideas.

[terminalshort]

Yeah, I agree with that. There's a potentially dangerous attention gap that could just play into the fundamental weakness of the human brain's ability to pay attention for long periods of time with no interaction. Unfortunately I don't see any possible way to validate this without letting the tech loose. You can't get good data on this without actual driving in real road conditions.

[Veserv]

At a certain point you do need to test in real road conditions. However, there is absolutely no need to jump straight from testing in lab conditions and “testing” using unmonitored, untrained end users.

You use professional trained operators with knowledge of the system design and operation using a designed safety plan to minimize prototype risks. At no point should your test plan increase danger to members of the public. Only when you fix problems faster than that test procedure can find do you expand scope.

If you follow the standard automotive pattern, you then expand scope to your untrained, but informed employees using monitored systems. Then untrained employees, informed employees using production systems. Then informed early release customers. Then once you stop being able to find problems regularly at all of those levels do you do a careful monitored release to the general public verifying the safety properties are maintained. Then you finally have a fully released “safe” product.