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No, self driving cars are as hard as expected.


Even in its current state with FSD beta my car drives itself 95% of the time.


I'm not sure what software was present on this random Lyft I took a couple months ago, but I was seated in the front, watching Tesla's infotainment screen the entire ride, which on one side was displaying a sort of wireframe (not the right word, but they weren't realistic drawings) of objects in front of and around the car as we were driving.

I was alarmed to see how often pedestrians, and even cars passing while waiting at a traffic light, would just randomly wink out of existence while still in the car's path, or nearby. Sometimes it would show cars parked at the curb to the sides, and other times nothing, even with our car being the same distance away. And yet somehow at one point it consistently displayed a traffic cone that was on the sidewalk against a building. Didn't really give me much confidence in Tesla's self-driving software if the object detection bits can't even get that right. But again, I don't know what software was running on that car, may not have been the latest-and-greatest.

I don't think I'd trust even the FSD beta to drive my car 95% of the time. Or 1%, even.


The display is not a great indicator of what the car "sees". Ideally the display would reassure the passenger, but you could totally solve self driving without solving this UX problem.


It's a beta so you shouldn't trust it. I'm just saying, I've driven thousands of miles and 95% of the time no issues. The other 5% I almost always know where it will have issues and manually take over before it even gets into a bad situation. A lot of these bad situations I think are easy fixes that will be resolved with future updates. I agree the object recognition is a bit jumpy, but it hasn't really affected the driving afaik, and I'm sure over time that will stabilize. It is really cool Tesla shows you exactly what the car sees. In other self-driving systems the user usually has no idea what the car is seeing. Tesla could do that as well, but this way it is much more honest. I'm looking forward to getting the latest release which is able to recognize the 3d model of unknown objects and avoid them.


>I've driven thousands of miles and 95% of the time no issues. The other 5% I almost always know where it will have issues and manually take over before it even gets into a bad situation.

This is not Full Self Driving, or remotely close to it. Having to take over for any tricky situation is antithetical to FSD's purpose. Besides the fact that "thousands of miles" is a microscopic scale of driving. That's a vacation for some people.

>A lot of these bad situations I think are easy fixes

Ah yes, easy fixes. Just have to catalog all the "bad" situations!


Really? I'd say it's 95% there if the car is fully self driving 95% of the time.

Taking over for tricky situations alerts Tesla to those situations and allows them to rank and fix the issue.

1,000's of miles might be nothing, but then multiply it by the tens of thousands of drivers using it everyday and yes Tesla basically is aware of all the tricky situations and is working to resolve them.

I really don't understand people like you who criticize companies trying to push things forward. At least they're trying, why be so unsupportive?


Are you a developer? Everyone knows the last 10% takes 90% of the time.

Though in this case I would say the remaining problems in FSD become exponentially more difficult the closer to 100%.

Why am I critical? Because Elon Musk reminds me of bad bosses and product managers in my career. They act like PT Barnum to the public and throw tantrums internally.

I also strongly dislike Musk's rejection of Kanban and Toyota Production System principles.

After all, Musk was fired as CEO by the PayPal board after Engineering mutinied against his ill-advised plan to migrate to .net and Windows.


Err the best engineers in the world work for him and want to work for him. Engineers run his companies. They’re given crazy ambitious goals and the resources to go do it. Engineers love challenges and making the impossible possible. Robots, fast cars, and rockets.


You keep saying things like that, but from your comment history you seem to be a huge Musk fan, so color me dubious. So what data do you have on 1) the best engineers and 2) their preference for Musk as boss?

Yet more tantrum like behavior with Twitter and Tesla return-to-office has definitely soured many of my colleagues recently.


Glassdoor reviews give Elon a high rating and many of the reviews mention how the people are the smartest they’ve ever worked with.


That sounds like it was probably the standard Tesla display, rather than the FSD Beta display? My understanding is that it's a very different system. But yeah, the standard display has pretty laughable object persistence.


I was interested in FSD but autopilot is so shitty and unreliable it has convinced me to not buy the upgrade. If they want to sell an expensive upgrade from autopilot to FSD they need to make the autopilot flawless at its job.




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