[Reason077]

There are very few (if any?) known deaths caused by FSD accidents.

Note: it’s important to distinguish between Autopilot and FSD here. “Autopilot” is Tesla’s old assisted driving stack that comes free in most vehicles and has had no significant updates in years. “FSD” is an entirely different software stack that only works with newer vehicles and that Tesla charges $$ for. It’s much more advanced and IMO a lot safer.

This article never mentions FSD, only Autopilot.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There are very few (if any?) known deaths caused by FSD accidents

It’s tough to say given many data sources are aggregated. For what it’s worth, my parents’ car is a Tesla with FSD and I’ve stopped it from, off the top of my head, racing into a red-lit intersection, running over a small dog and running into a closing garage door.

I still use it. It mostly works. But I’m vigilantly monitoring it in a way that isn’t supported by Tesla’s marketing (which frequently shows drivers engaging it hands off).

[Reason077]

The garage door I can certainly believe. Its AI brain just won’t be trained to look for that sort of thing.

I’m surprised about the red lights and animals, however: ours seems very cautious around any kind of live animal on the road, even braking and manoeuvring to avoid birds on the road. It’s not so good at avoiding the corpses of already dead ones, however (bump!).

[Retric]

> The garage door I can certainly believe. Its AI brain just won’t be trained to look for that sort of thing.

Why not? That’s likely to come up at minimum thousands of times per day, and likely vastly more as the system improves.

[Reason077]

I get the impression that it kind of comprehends the world as a horizontal plane. It’s focused on objects on the surface and isn’t looking for hazards coming from above. Could that be improved? Sure! Is it a priority for them? Maybe not…

[Retric]

At minimum it needs to pay attention to railroad crossing bars and bridges.

They show a 2D representation to the driver because that’s good enough for drivers, but I wouldn’t assume that represents how the system operates internally at every stage. Even navigating requires the concept of bridges crossing roads without intersecting them.

[Reason077]

It is indeed known to have issues at railway crossings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783427

AFAIK, there's no issue with bridges that cross roads, however. It will just ignore a road that's above or below the one you're travelling on that doesn't intersect with yours. Just like a human driver would do.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I’m surprised about the red lights and animals

Both only happened once. But they were shocking when they did. (To be fair, my Subaru tried to push me into oncoming traffic because it was avoiding a “collision” from the guy in the other lane turning weirdly. Turned at collision-avoidance feature off.)

[budsniffer952]

You are on Hacker News, you don't think we know what FSD is?

[Reason077]

The article only mentions Autopilot, but half the comments here are talking about FSD.

[FireBeyond]

> “Autopilot” is Tesla’s old assisted driving stack that comes free in most vehicles and has had no significant updates in years. “FSD” is an entirely different software stack that only works with newer vehicles and that Tesla charges $$ for. It’s much more advanced and IMO a lot safer.

I'm not sure the point you're making here - that just sounds like "Tesla couldn't care less about updating their software and it's still "not good". People it hits are still dead. "Oh well, it's not like Tesla had updated the software, so you can't blame them".

[Reason077]

Oh, I absolutely agree. Ideally Telsa would dump the old Autopilot stack and put all cars (that have the hardware to support it) on a free version of FSD, nerfed so that it's roughly feature-equivalent to Autopilot.

That way everyone would get the safety advantages of FSD, including the really important stuff like better driver attention monitoring. Unfortunately, Tesla keeps Autopilot bad because it forces more people to pay for FSD, and in this case they seem to care more about profits than safety.