My neighborhood has the effectively one-way street thing going on. FSD would be a total clown show in here. Tesla would have to add some way to determine the velocity of the oncoming traffic around a 90 degree bend while dealing with extremely limited visibility due to seasonal foliage. They would also have to add a way to factor in the historical behavior of these cars over time. For example, I know the guy who drives the blue Tundra is kind of pokey, so I speed up a bit to clear the contention first. The more compelling scenario might be the one where I know the white Mercedes SUV has an extremely aggressive driver, so I'll prefer to wait on them to preserve the peace.
Yes, what is also important is that in many cities you often need to drive with a bit of... let's say "confidence", otherwise you will never leave your current spot. When you try to enter a busy street, you sometimes JUST NEED TO GO, trusting the oncoming traffic will slow down if needed. Sometimes a nice person will flash headlights to let you know it's OK, but I'm pretty sure FSD will not be able to notice that...
Also, even in rule-abiding Germany, some traffic laws are seen more relaxed than others. For instance, the law says that at a stop sign, you need to come to a full stop, but you will see that most drivers don't do that but just drive very slowly (if that...). Likewise, the law says to keep 1,50m distance from bikes and motorcycles, but in the above mentioned narrow streets, that would also often mean that you will not move at all for a long time. I would guess that FSD would need to abide by traffic laws just for regulatory purposes, and that would make you look like an idiot in many cities...
That's not even to speak of countries where traffic laws in general are more like suggestions...
> in many cities you often need to drive with a bit of... let's say "confidence"
Two things I've told my step-daughter when she was learning to drive, one is more common - "it is better to be predictable than polite" (no stopping when you have the right of way to 'wave someone through'), but more germane to your point:
"You should drive assertively, but not aggressively."
FSD already understands some human gestures, and it learns this stuff by seeing how human drivers do things. Understanding a headlight flash doesn't seem like a big ask. And recently, the biggest complain from FSD users was that it drove a little too aggressively.
Because it copies human drivers, FSD actually was doing slow rolling stops for a while. Then people freaked out and pretended that was super unsafe, and the government made them do full stops.
I am not going to trust super expensive car and life/health of me and my family on 'its generally working ok, sort of' level.
This ain't new headphones or TV, people apart from emotional early adopters have very different expectations when their lives are at stake. Namely absolutely stellar performance compared to average driver, being marginally better while struggling with tons of non-standard situations ain't cutting it.
Neither of those things were "learned adaptations" from human driving, and this is one of the biggest fallacies around FSD. People letting their FSD do stupid things and only intervening at the last moment (if at all) to let it learn from its mistakes.
That it might use the direction of the car in front of it as a guidance track doesn't mean it understood the human gestures of the cop telling it to do that. Or in a concert parking lot where an attendant might be doing things like alternating cars to the left and right lots.
> Because it copies human drivers, FSD actually was doing slow rolling stops for a while.
No, this was programmed behavior, with an interface/config setting, to do a "rolling stop". People "freaked out" because Tesla was literally allowing the car to perform illegal traffic infractions, and if they'd do it for stop signs, what else would they do it for?
But none of this is some Tesla "swarm" learning to do rolling stops. There is no adaptive learning happening. This is all trained from static models according to parameters from Tesla.
Version 11 had lots of hand-coded behavior. Version 12 is entirely a neural network, trained on human driving. Partly it comes from people running FSD and intervening sometimes, and partly it comes from just passive observation of a people doing their own driving. When FSD runs, video feeds into the neural net and it outputs vehicle controls, that's it.
Learning to respond to gestures is just more training on video and car control data. It shouldn't be hard to believe given all the other things we're doing these days with large neural networks.
But that's exactly the point: there's no general rule for this kind of thing, it depends on the concrete situation. There are definitely stop signs where you need to do a full stop because you cannot see any oncoming traffic. Basically: it's OK to do rolling stops until it isn't.
Same goes for flashing headlights, these can mean different things, depending on the situation. It can mean: I see you, feel free to drive. It can also mean: what the hell are you doing? Or: you left your laptop on the car roof.
Learning that sort of context is what neural nets are good at. The whole point is that none of this is hardcoded; the AI just learns what humans do in similar situations. At the point they're not even hand-labeling anything. The only input is video.
Flashing headlights can be ambiguous for humans too. There have been plenty of times when someone flashed lights at me and I had no idea why.
Imagine if you sit in a self driving taxi and need to get somewhere and the longer the ride takes, the higher the price for it. Then the taxi not really getting anywhere fast.
