A 2025 Tesla Model 3 in Full-Self Driving mode drives off of a rural road, clips a tree, loses a tire, flips over, and comes to rest on its roof. Luckily, the driver is alive and well, able to post about it on social media.
I just don’t see how this technology could possibly be ready to power an autonomous taxi service by the end of next week.
The worst part is that this problem has already been solved by using LIDAR. Vegas had fully self-driving cars that I saw perform flawlessly, because they were manufactured by a company that doesn’t skimp on tech and rip people off.
I wouldn’t really called it a solved problem when waymo with lidar is crashing into physical objects
NHTSA stated that the crashes “involved collisions with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid.” The agency is continuing its investigation.
It’d probably be better to say that Lidar is the path to solving these problems, or a tool that can help solve it. But not solved.
Just because you see a car working perfectly, doesn’t mean it always is working perfectly.
“It crashed!”
“Yes but it did it all by itself!”
Except for the last 0.05 seconds before the crash where the human was put in control. Therefore, the human caused the crash.
The car made a fatal decision faster than any human could possibly correct it. Tesla’s idea that drivers can “supervise” these systems is, at this point, nothing more than a legal loophole.
What I don’t get is how this false advertising for years hasn’t caused Tesla bankruptcy already?
Well, because 99% of the time, it’s fairly decent. That 1%'ll getchya tho.
To put your number into perspective, if it only failed 1 time in every hundred miles, it would kill you multiple times a week with the average commute distance.
Someone who doesn’t understand math downvoted you. This is the right framework to understand autonomy, the failure rate needs to be astonishingly low for the product to have any non-negative value. So far, Tesla has not demonstrated non-negative value in a credible way.
You are trying to judge the self driving feature in a vacuum. And you can’t do that. You need to compare it to any alternatives. And for automotive travel, the alternative to FSD is to continue to have everyone drive manually. Turns out, most clowns doing that are statistically worse at it than even FSD, (as bad as it is). So, FSD doesn’t need to be perfect-- it just needs to be a bit better than what the average driver can do driving manually. And the last time I saw anything about that, FSD was that “bit better” than you statistically.
FSD isn’t perfect. No such system will ever be perfect. But, the goal isn’t perfect, it just needs to be better than you.
FSD isn’t perfect. No such system will ever be perfect. But, the goal isn’t perfect, it just needs to be better than you.
Yeah people keep bringing that up as a counter arguement but I’m pretty certain humans don’t swerve off a perfectly straight road into a tree all that often.
So unless you have numbers to suggest that humans are less safe than FSD then you’re being equally obtuse.
Humans do swerve off perfectly straight roads into trees, I know because I’ve done it!
Can you confirm that to the best of your knowledge you are not a robot?
A simple google search, (which YOU could have done yourself), shows it’s abut 1 in 1.5 million miles driven per accident with FSD vs 1 in 700,000 miles driven for mechanical cars. I’m no Teslastan, (I think they are over priced and deliberately for rich people only), but that’s an improvement, a noticeable improvement.
And as a an old retired medic who has done his share of car accidents over nearly 20 years-- Yes, yes humans swerve off of perfectly straight roads and hit trees and anything else in the way also. And do so at a higher rate.
Many Tesla owners are definitely dead many times, on the inside.
…It absolutely fails miserably fairly often and would likely crash that frequently without human intervention, though. Not to the extent here, where there isn’t even time for human intervention, but I frequently had to take over when I used to use it (post v13)
That’s probably not the failure rate odds but a 1% failure rate is several thousand times higher than what NASA would consider an abort risk condition.
Let’s say that it’s only 0.01% risk, that’s still several thousand crashes per year. Even if we could guarantee that all of them would be non-fatal and would not involve any bystanders such as pedestrians the cost of replacing all of those vehicles every time they crashed plus fixing damage of things they crashed into, lamp posts, shop Windows etc would be so high as it would exceed any benefit to the technology.
It wouldn’t be as bad if this was prototype technology that was constantly improving, but Tesla has made it very clear they’re never going to add lidar scanners so is literally never going to get any better it’s always going to be this bad.
…is literally never going to get any better it’s always going to be this bad.
Hey now! That’s unfair. It is constantly changing. Software updates introduce new reversions all the time. So it will be this bad, or significantly worse, and you won’t know which until it tries to kill you in new and unexpected ways :j
Because the US is an insane country where you can straight up just break the law and as long as you’re rich enough you don’t even get a slap on the wrist. If some small startup had done the same thing they’d have been shut down.
What I don’t get is why teslas aren’t banned all over the world for being so fundamentally unsafe.
What I don’t get is why teslas aren’t banned all over the world for being so fundamentally unsafe.
I’ve argued this point the past year, there are obvious safety problems with Tesla, even without considering FSD.
Like blinker on the steering wheel, manual door handles that are hard to find in emergencies, and distractions from common operations being behind menus on the screen, instead of having directly accessible buttons. With auto pilot they also tend to break for no reason, even on autobahn with clear road ahead! Which can also create dangerous situations.
Anything outside of a freshly painted and paved LA roads at high noon while it’s sunny isn’t ready for self drivings it seems
Actual self-driving vehicles, sure. Just not whatever the fuck Tesla is doing.
Or silly tunnels you can’t get out of.
Tunnels are extra dangerous. Not because of the likelihood of an accident, but because of the situation if an accident happens. It blocks the tunnels easily, fills it with smoke, and kills hundreds.
Except newly built tunnels in rich countries.
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More like the abusive step-father
I use autopilot all the time on my boat. No way in hell I’d trust it in a car. They all occasionally get suicidal. Mine likes to lull you into a sense of false security, then take a sharp turn into a channel marker or cargo ship at the last second.
Exactly. My car doesn’t have AP, but it does have a shed load of sensors and sometimes it just freaks out about stuff being too close to car for no discernible reason. Really freaks me out as I’m like what you see bro we just driving down the motorway.
For mine, it’s the radar seeing the retro-reflective stripes on utility poles being brighter than it expects.
They have auto pilot on boats? I never even thought about that existing. Makes sense, just never heard of it until just now!
They’ve had it forever. Tie a rope to the wheel. Presto. Autopilot.
I’ll point this post out to Wall Street Bets, Maersk stock will pop 10%+ overnight.
They’ve technically had autopilots for over a century, the first one was the oil tanker J.A Moffett in 1920. Though the main purpose of it is to keep the vessel going dead straight as otherwise wind and currents turn it, so using modern car terms I think it would be more accurate to say they have lane assist? Commercial ones can often do waypoint navigation, following a set route on a map, but I don’t think that’s very common on personal vessels.
That’s similar to commercial airliners right?
self driving is the future, but im glad im not a beta tester.
You’re probably right about the future, but like damn, I wish they would slow their roll and use LiDAR
Elon Musk decided they absolutely would not use lidar, years ago when lidar was expensive enough that a decision like that made economic sense to at least try making work. Nowadays lidar is a lot cheaper but for whatever reason Musk has drawn a line in the sand and refuses to back down on it.
Unlike many people online these days I don’t believe that Musk is some kind of sheer-luck bought-his-way-into-success grifter, he has been genuinely involved in many of the decisions that made his companies grow. But this is one of the downsides of that (Cybertruck is another). He’s forced through ideas that turned out to be amazing, but he’s also forced through ideas that sucked. He seems to be increasingly having trouble distinguishing them.
He really hasn’t. He purchased companies that were already sitting on profitable ideas. He is not an engineer. He is not a scientist. He has no training in any design discipline. He takes credit for the ideas of people he pays. He takes credit for the previous achievements of companies he’s purchased.
What is it going to fucking take for people to finally actually see the grifter for what he is? He’s never had a single good fucking r&d idea in his life 🙃 he has wasted billions of dollars researching and developing absolutely useless ideas that have benefited literally no one and have not made him any money. It is absolutely incredible how powerful his mythos is, that people still believe him to be or have been some kind of engineer or something. He’s a fucking racist nepo baby. He’s never done a single useful thing in his life. He wasn’t the sole individual involved in creating PayPal (and was entirely unrelated in turning it into the successful business it became), he didnt found tesla nor is he responsible for any of the technological developments it made (except for forcing his shitty charger design that notoriously breaks down and charges at half the speed that competitors do), he did not found SpaceX and by all metrics involved has been loathed by everyone at the company for the past decade for continuously committing workers rights violations and fostering a racist sexist and ableist work environment. The man has done nothing but waste people’s time stoking his ego and sexually abusing a slew of employees for the past 2 and a half decades.
They removed their lidar sensors after the prices had already come down.
Musk has drawn a line in the sand and refuses to back down on it.
From what I heard the upcoming Tesla robotaxi test cars based on model Y are supposed to have LIDAR. But it’s ONLY the robotaxi version that has it.
He seems to be increasingly having trouble distinguishing them.
Absolutely, seems to me he has been delusional for years, and it’s getting worse.
Full Self-Destruct
This represents the danger of expecting driver override to avoid accidents. If the driver has to be prepared enough to take control in an accident like this AT ALL TIMES, then the driver is required to be more engaged then they would be if they were just driving manually, because they have to be constantly anticipating not just what other hazards (drivers, pedestrians,…) might be doing, they have to be anticipating in what ways their own vehicle may be trying to kill them.
Absolutely.
I’ve got a car with level 2 automation, and after using it for a few months, I can say that it works really well, but you still need to be engaged to drive the car.
What it is good at… Maintaining lanes, even in tricky situation with poor paint/markings. Maintaining speed and distance from the car in front of you.
What it is not good at… Tricky traffic, congestion, or sudden stops. Lang changes. Accounting for cars coming up behind you. Avoiding road hazards.
I use it mostly like an autopilot. The car takes some of the monotonous workload out of driving, which allows me to move my focus from driving the car to observing traffic, other drivers, and road conditions.

I am never getting into a self driving car. I don’t understand why we are investing money into this technology when people can already drive cars on their own, and we should be moving towards robust public transportation systems anyway. A waste of time and resources to… what exactly? Stare at your phone for a few extra minutes a day? Work from home and every city having robust electric transit systems is what the future is supposed to be.
Back when I still believed, I was excited because I wanted get in my car and take a 90-minute nap until I arrived at work.
With public transportation, you can only be half-asleep or you’ll miss your stop.
I used to dream of watching a movie then falling asleep in bed while my car drove the 8 hours to my folks’ house.
But I’d want that beast to be bristling with sensors of every kind. None of this “cameras only” idiocy.
Someday. Maybe.
I have a 45 minute high speed train commute to a busy end-of-line station. I can sleep, read, work, or just stare out the window and think.
Same commute is probably twice as long by car during rush hour.
I’m not a fan of self driving cars, but saying that people are able to drive cars is a stretch.
In general I am opposed to machines being in direct control of weapons. I am also definitely of the opinion that there are lots of people who shouldn’t be driving.
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Yikes. Glad they’re ok
Ditto! They were about 1 foot from hitting the tree head on rather than glancing off, could have easily been fatal. Weirdly small axises of random chance that the world spins on
I still don’t understand what made it happen. I kept watching shadows and expecting it to happen earlier.
It makes no damn sense! There were worse shadows. it was totally unpredictable
There’s some difference in the fences on the left side at the exact time the car passed by on the other lane. My guess is that the timing of the other car made the software interpret those changes in the input as something moving instead of simply something being different.
I thought it might be following the tire tracks but no. It just decided to veer completely off.
I have visions of Elon sitting in his lair, stroking his cat, and using his laptop to cause this crash. /s
Why would you inflict that guy on a poor innocent kitty?
That tree cast shade on his brand.
It had to go.
For no reason?
They are running proprietary software in the car that people don’t even know what is happening in background of. Every electric car needs to be turned into an open source car so that the car cannot be tampered with, no surveillancing, etc etc
Everyone should advocate for that because the alternative is this with Tesla. And I know nobody wants this happening to other car manufacturers cars as well
Why someone will be a passenger in self-driving vehicle? They know that they are a test subjects, part of a “Cartrial” (or whatever should be called)? Self-Driving is not reliable and not necessery. Too much money is invested in something that is “Low priority to have”. There are prefectly fast and saf self-driving solutions like High-speed Trains.















