this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

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[–] breadsmasher 145 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Eyes can’t see in low visibility.

musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”

FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes

musk reaction -

[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

It's worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.

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[–] expatriado 69 points 1 week ago (2 children)

if he was truthful: "the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits"

[–] III 29 points 1 week ago

Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.

[–] normanwall 24 points 1 week ago

Honestly though, I'm a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out... So he just never gets put in his place.

Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That's how he lives.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago

You'd think "we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes." is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How Can Cameras Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real?

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[–] fluxion 116 points 1 week ago (3 children)

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now definitely on Musk's list of departments to cut if Trump makes him a high-ranking swamp monster

[–] lurker8008 94 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why do you think musk dumping so much cash to boost Trump? The plan all along is to get kickbacks like stopping investigation, lawsuits, and regulations against him. Plus subsidies.

Rich assholes don't spend money without expectation of ROI

He knows Democrats will crack down on shady practices so Trump is his best bet.

[–] vxx 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

He's not hoping for a kickback, he is offered a position as secretary of cost-cutting.

He will be able to directly shut down everything he doesn't like under the pretense of saving money.

Trump is literally campaigning on the fact that government positions are up for sale under his admin.

"I’m going to have Elon Musk — he is dying to do this... We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting, OK? Elon wants to do that," the former president said"

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.

how is it legal to label this "full self driving" ?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

"I freely admit that the refreshing sparkling water I sell is poisonous and should not be consumed."

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

If customers can't assume that boneless wings don't have bones in them, then they shouldn't assume that Full Self Driving can self-drive the car.

The courts made it clear that words don't matter, and that the company can't be liable for you assuming that words have meaning.

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[–] krashmo 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

That's pretty clearly just a disclaimer meant to shield them from legal repercussions. They know people aren't going to do that.

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[–] postmateDumbass 17 points 1 week ago

It drives your full self, it doesn't break you into components and ship those seperately.

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[–] Etterra 62 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tesla: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual cameras.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility, and/or to take actions to improve visibility. Muskboxes don't.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They also decided to only use cameras and visual clues for driving instead of using radar, heat cameras or something like that as well.

It's designed to be launched asap, not to be safe

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

I mean, that’s just good economics. I’m willing to bet someone at Tesla has done the calcs on how many people they can kill before it becomes unprofitable

[–] WheelcharArtist 19 points 1 week ago

Muskboxes

like that

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[–] rsuri 60 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.

This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they're not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.

Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn't. We tolerate crashes because we can't improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it's irrational not to do it.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Also, on a final note...

Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??

If you have the option to add something that humans don't have, why wouldn't you? As an example, humans don't have gps either, but it's very useful to have in a car

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unfortunately the answer to that is: Elon's cheap and Radar is expensive. Not so expensive that you can't get it in a base model Civic though, which just makes it that much more absurd.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Because a global pandemic broke your sensor supply chain and you still want to sell cars with FSD anyway, so cameras-only it is!

[–] blady_blah 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is directly a result of Elon's edict that Tesla cars don't use lidar. If you aren't aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla's self driving project because he didn't want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

His "first principles" logic is that humans don't use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it's obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

[–] WoodScientist 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.

This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Humans move with only feet so cars should be limited to using feet. And only 2 of them.

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[–] finitebanjo 34 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Really fucking stupid that we as a society intentionally choose to fuck around and find out rather than find out before we fuck around.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Full Self Driving shipping ~~2025~~ ~~2026~~ ~~2027~~ ~~3098~~ ~~4484~~ 1e+156

                       ^

                   You are here
[–] billwashere 32 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Makes you wonder if removing the lidar and using fucking cameras isn’t part of the problem… cheap bastards.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If anyone was somehow still thinking RoboTaxi is ever going to be a thing. Then no, it’s not, because of reasons like this.

[–] testfactor 26 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It doesn't have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Exactly. The current rate is 80 deaths per day in the US alone. Even if we had self-driving cars proven to be 10 times safer than human drivers, we’d still see 8 news articles a day about people dying because of them. Taking this as 'proof' that they’re not safe is setting an impossible standard and effectively advocating for 30,000 yearly deaths, as if it’s somehow better to be killed by a human than by a robot.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (11 children)

It needs to be way way better than ‘better than average’ if it’s ever going to be accepted by regulators and the public. Without better sensors I don’t believe it will ever make it. Waymo had the right idea here if you ask me.

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[–] raspberriesareyummy 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Charge the stupid fuck Tesla chain of decision making with murder. This bullshit "self driving" advertising is premeditated, that's no longer manslaughter.

And charge the driver(s) with manslaughter under aggravating circumstances.

But oh no, muh profts, hurr-durrr....

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[–] KonalaKoala 22 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (11 children)

The bad news is people hitting and killing pedestrians is so common you don't hear about it. Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed. Even the FSD system that was as close to perfect as possible would still occasionally kill someone in large enough numbers, because there's too many variables to account for. If the numbers are lower than a human driving, it's a positive.

We should be trying to move away from cars though ideally. Fuck electric cars, FSD cars, and all other cars. A bus, train, bike, or whatever else would be safer and better for the environment.

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[–] PeroBasta 21 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Because it is generally proven to save lifes. You'll never hear of "thanks for the auto-brake system no one got injured and everything was boring as usual" but it happened a lot (also to me in first person).

I don't like Musk but in general its a good thing to push self driving cars IMO. I drive 2 hours per day and the amount of time where I see retarded people doing retarded stuff at the wheel is crazy.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (5 children)

The worst way to die would be getting hit by a shitbox Tesla. RIP.

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[–] Buffalox 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

I thought it was illegal to call it full self driving? So I thought Tesla had something new.
Apprently it's the moronic ASSISTED full self driving the article is about. So nothing new.
Tesla does not have a legal full self driving system, so why do articles keep pushing the false narrative, even after it's deemed illegal?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Assisted full self driving is an oxymoron.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

To be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing

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