Tesla "Full Self Driving" not capable of autonomous driving
 

News flash - this just in: "Tesla Tells California DMV that Full Self Driving Is Not Capable of Autonomous Driving"

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/am...-self-driving/

I’m astonished that Tesla has’t been either sued by consumers, or investigated by the NHTSA, for it’s claims.

First they call their glorified cruise control “Auto Pilot”, which implies to consumers that they can sleep or have sex while the car drives itself.

Let's be real. Regardless of what the 'fine print' says, most people don't read owner's manuals. When they hear something is called "Auto Pilot", they think the car can drive itself. Because that's what they want to believe. As a result, numerous accidents have happened with people doing inappropriate things with their cars. Just peruse youtube if you want to be amused, entertained, and horrified.

Now they bring out a version called “Full Self Driving”. Except that it isn't.

The reality is that both AutoPilot, and FSD, are SAE Level 2. Not Level 5, which would be true 'full self driving'. Nor even Level 4, or Level 3. They are Level 2. Which, according to the SAE, means:

"You are driving. You must constantly supervisethese support features. You must steer, brake, or accelerate as needed to maintain safety".

I guess Tesla wasn't happy with how many people mistakenly believed their 'AutoPilot' was full self driving but it isn't, so they're revising the name to 'Full Self Driving' which also isn't any more than 'AutoPilot' wasn't.

I don't know what's more appalling. Tesla making such blatantly false and misleading claims, or that the NHTSA hasn't stopped them from doing this, or the gullibility and stupidity of Tesla buyers who believe this nonsense.

It's one thing to be a 'pioneer' and on the 'cutting edge' of developing new technologies that need to be refined and advanced, etc. etc. etc. But flagrantly lying about it to deceive people is a whole different matter. Especially when doing so can get them hurt. Or killed.

The big print giveth (misleading names) and the small print taketh away (details no one reads). But in the process, people are going to die when their not-really-self-driving car plows into something.

Someday, if the human race survives into the far future (questionable), people might look back and really call this time The Stupid Ages (for soooo many reasons). But then, as is attributed to Henry Louis Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Or the very perceptive Phineas Taylor Barnum, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

What did change that people started bashing Tesla? He said that he was confident that would achieve Lv. 5, but did not commit, which I think is unfair fir him to do. but I was talking to some colleagues about past comments from big oem from US and Northen Europe saying similar things about this, and current new promises about new techs, that bumps sales and shares, but they will not be held accountable, because it is not a promise.

Musk's two biggest assets are deep pockets and marketing knowhow.

it's funny to me now, but literally every car blog article about 'autopilot' turns into this debate. i've been called out a number of different names for raising the same point.

apparently, according to what other commentors have told me, as a human being, we are all born with the full expectation and training to understand aviation computer systems, their limitations, and the terminology that accompanies them. because of this, 'autopilot' is a completely acceptable term because the pilot can't walk away from the system.

i've learned more about aviation systems in the last 10 years then i ever thought i would.

up until tesla existed, this was everything i knew about auto pilot
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WMhYl74vw2c/maxresdefault.jpg


again, most people seem to disagree with me, but i'm almost entirely convinced that we won't see fully-self-driving vehicles within our lifetimes. i believe we'll be perpetually stuck at level 2 or 3 for a very long time. it comes down to liability.

after seeing how much of a fiasco the other OEM's besides tesla have turned charging networks into a problem by issuing statements that their company builds vehicles only, and they refuse to invest in the charging networks, despite the fact that ev's can't exist without a somewhat robust charging network... these companies can't even admit that their products can't exist without a propulsion resupply network.

level 5 would require that these same companies, that can barely admit to having to re-supply a propulsion source to the vehicle, would become fully liable for anything that happens after the vehicle leaves their factory.

to do this would need to upend the entire vehicle industry as we know it.

because the companies are now liable, individual vehicle ownership would no longer be desirable to them (can't have individuals not maintaining a product that the company is liable for!). this destroys the entire dealership and sales network they've already established. so we'd start looking at fleet vehicles by #brands, and taxi type services.

because of that, individual insurance would take on an entirely different meaning-- likely group policies that are supported by the #brands. there'd be no reason for an individual to have an automotive insurance policy for a 'taxi ride'.

but the biggest difference in all of this is that a large part the american economy and social status system is tied somewhat closely to our vehicle brands, costs, freedom of movement, and vehicle ownership status. because level 5 would ultimately eliminate personal vehicle ownership, someone's status would need to be redefined through methods outside of the vehicle they pull up in. this will likely be somewhat adjusted to with taxi services similar to uber black, but because people could no longer have multiple high end cars, vehicles are no longer the status symbol they are now...


of course, the tesla fanatics have told me i'm wrong on all of this repeatedly, and musk will save us all! [likely from himself the way things are going, but they leave that part out because it's got negative connotations]

I think Tesla uses misleading terms like "auto pilot" and "full self driving" which to the average consumer can give the impression it can do things it doesn't actually do. That's probably where most of the controversy comes from.

Musk mentioned robotaxis at one point. And the idea of eventual full atonomous driving.
Until manufacturer can sell you a car or service you aren't liable for when it crashes it ain't happening any time soon.

Probably not for decades. Maybe with a atonomous road network with some level of communication between cars. Seems hard to believe that will exist within the next 50-100 years.

It is coming far faster than you think. It will happen within the next 10 years. I have to sit through a corporate report on it ever quarter and there are big changes coming out very soon.
Musk may have been a bit optimistic with his timeline but he isn't that far off either.

And yes it will change everything in the industry!

Calling Elon "Shirley" gets the expected reaction.

Every. Time. Ha. Ha.

Mmmm... I see your points, but this is on par with marketing everywhere. Lies are a relative thing in that domain. The point that people will die due to his marketing claims - well Tesla doesn't claim that you can sleep or have sex while driving his cars. They've always been clear on what exactly you have to do and place measures (i.e. touching the steering wheel) that you should abide by. Do people do stupid things and get into trouble? Sure. Do people do stupid things that get themselves killed in 'normal' cars? Absolutely. On a much larger scale than any stat to do with Tesla cars. To drive innovation like he's doing, you have to forge ahead, and probably make some aggressive claims at times. It's the reality of competition these days. I'm not a fan of Tesla cars overall (I'm not an electric car person in general, yet), but you have to recognize the overall change/acceleration Tesla is driving forward.

Guys are we really freaking out about marketing here? Autopilot and Full Self Driving Mode are brand names. These aren’t marketing claims.

There are plenty of idiots in the world. There is a video of a woman trying to fill up a Tesla with gas. Should manufacturers be required to add EV or ICE or Diesel to the name of every vehicle for driver education? Is it not enough for the fill caps to have fuel types and warnings on the caps and lids? What if Tesla had a warning prompt on their screens before activating Autopilot that says “THIS IS NOT AUTONOMOUS DRIVING”? Would that be good enough? What if they integrated a audible noise that warned the driver to touch the steering wheel, or what if they stopped the car and disengaged Autopilot if the driver was asleep or not looking at the road, or what if the car drives to an emergency room and/or calls 911? Should I make a legal claim against manufacturers for crashing my car in the snow when the car clearly says it has traction control, yet the car lost control?

I think we tend to expect too much from technology and assume it should be perfect, or if it is not then a person will be able to claim negligence, or rather, that the equipment is faulty or the capabilities are misleading. Step into a Robotaxi and have it perform flawlessly in 99.99% of cases, but when it fails, everyone claims foul. Never mind that the failure rate is less than the failure rate of human taxis, where a taxi driver could also make an error, or be subject to an “act of god”, or have a medical emergency like a stroke, seizure, heart attack, medication interaction, syncopal episode, etc.

Let’s call this what this is—legal positioning. The capabilities of the car far exceed Level 2 autonomy, but if they claim level 4 or level 5 then they open themselves up to being sued for those exceptions when the system required driver inputs, but the driver wasn’t paying attention. What would you call a system that can take the car from one destination to the next without driver inputs, while making stops, changing lanes, overtaking vehicles, parking and negotiating obstacles? That sounds like someone could brand that as Full Self Driving Mode, while still being able to stipulate that there may be times when driver inputs are required, so the driver still needs to be attentive to the road.

For a Robotaxi, its systems would need to be so good that driver inputs aren’t needed at rates that are less than the rate of failure of human taxi drivers. They will likely never be flawless because of “acts of god”, but need to be better than human drivers. Insurance rates for Robotaxis could be much higher at first until time proves the systems are in fact more reliable and less costly than human taxi drivers.

Or took your "trail rated" SUV off roading and got stuck. Or fried your brakes on your "track ready" sports car on the track. Or overheated your "tough as the old Bronco" Bronco Sport on a hill climb/sand dune. People need to engage their brains when faced with marketing instead of using it to cover their asses when they do something stupid. I truly don't understand a person who reads "Auto Pilot" and decides it's a good idea to take a nap in his Tesla.

People are used to human-related traffic accidents and deaths, so they ignore them when comparing to autonomous vehicle accidents and deaths. Hence the comparison is between an ignored death rate (i.e. 0) and a perceived death rate that's more than 0, even though every rational person should see that a 10x improvement in traffic fatalities thanks to autonomous vehicles is a good thing, even if that means 3,600 deaths per year (sure is better than 36,000 deaths).

I wouldn't go so far as to compare statistics of autonomous fatalities to human-related traffic fatalities. There isn't an even playing field, not an apples to apples comparison. But aside from that, I do agree with what both you and Irace are saying.

At some point it will be, though, and the public will need to show its collective intelligence and understand that even though autonomous vehicles aren't 100% safe, they're still safer than human drivers. By how much will remain to be seen, but I have no doubt that any safety deficiencies of autonomous vehicles will pale when compared to their ever vigilant operation - no matter how good a human driver is, he can still be drunk, tired, distracted by bill boards, kids in the back seat, that McLaren in the the other lane, work issues, family issues, etc. This will have even more of an impact with more autonomous vehicles and less human operated ones on the road.

How would people feel if someone sold oleander and named it "Miracle COVID Cure", or a bottle of vitamins called "Complete Cancer Cure"?

This is beyond simply aggressive or 'bold' marketing. It's one thing to push the bounds of technology, which is necessary and great, and recognizing that most technological advances are incremental and not quantum leaps. But it's another thing to use a misleading name when there is already a pattern of abuse that has resulted in injuries and deaths, and using an even more provocative name that will only further encourage unwarranted behavior?

One of the points of regulations and laws is supposed to be to protect us from ourselves. People are generally poor at judging their own risk. On top of that, many people are ignorant (or stupid, if you want to be less charitable) and believe what they want to believe whether it's based in fact or not. Most people also don't read the fine print (or owners manual), regardless of how a company may use that as a legal shield to justify its actions. We live in a society rampant with cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.

Regardless of what one thinks of Tesla cars and Elon Musk, I think it's not a stretch to say that many Tesla owners fall in the category of irrationally rabid fanbois (or fanperson, or whatever the politically correct woke term is these days). They want to believe that their cars are fully self-driving whether they are or not. Names like 'AutoPilot' and 'Full Self Driving' only stir up those perceptions, and resulting behaviors. You only have to check out youtube to see a number of examples of stunningly stupid behavior of Tesla owners treating their cars as if they were autonomous, with the completely predictable results. Just a few examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPMvQphJQiE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVgkWii5JdM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZHRupjl5E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aTAIO7NNjc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3cLf5n9n6Q

Of course there will always be crashes in any cars. People will do stupid things while driving that will result in accidents, injuries, or deaths. But the cruise control in my Subaru isn't called 'Set It and Forget It' to encourage such unjustifiable stupidity the way "Autopilot" does and "Full Self Driving" will do even more.

It's not an excuse to say that most people aren't aeronautical engineers and don't understand what an 'autopilot' really means and does. Tesla buyers seem to be well-educated (you have to be financially well-off to buy one). More to the point, if there was ambiguity about 'AutoPilot', what is the rationale for naming the next version 'Full Self Driving', a name which seems very clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of English, and even more strongly suggests something that isn't the case? I can't imagine any choice of words for a name that would more clearly spell out full self driving capability than 'Full Self Driving', which is probably why they call it that.

This also isn't the libertarian's dream of 'people should be allowed to do whatever they want', or some nonsense about 'personal responsibility'. What a Tesla driver does in their car can very much affect other people. Like any of us. Like my wife, or myself. If some idiot sets their Tesla on 'Full Self Driving' mode and then sleeps or reads or plays with themselves while the car hurtles down the road at over 100 feet per second, and they plow into me as a result, then I will have been completely unwillingly forced to pay a very steep price for Tesla's 'marketing strategy'.

One can be an innovator and push the bounds of technology without misleading gullible people in ways that will encourage behaviors that increase the risk of their injury or death. Again, should it be legal or would it be ethical to sell oleander branded 'Miracle COVID Cure' under the rationalizations that the fine print says it's not really a miracle COVID cure?

Tesla isn't naming their system 'Full Self Driving' to help advance the technology. They're doing it to make money, the reason all companies do things. It's just that this one can cost consumers more than only their money. It can cost them their lives.

I agree. I think we are already at that point with Tesla's Autopilot, and with the new Full Self Driving Mode, it will soon be even clearer that Autopilot with human drivers vastly outperforms humans drivers. Within five years, I wouldn't be surprised if we see Robotaxis, and I think we will accept them as safer, if we can get around the moral arguments and focus on the larger picture.

We like to assign an agent or agency as the cause of events, so we fabricate conspiracy theories instead of accept that many random events can coalesce. We don't like the unknown, so we create religions. We need answers and justice, so police sometimes strain themselves thin in order to find any suspect instead of the suspect. This is the mentality we have to get around in order to accept a system that will be better, but not perfect.

I find it interesting that people are so quick to blame Autopilot or quick to believe the driver who is incentivized to blame Autopilot when the driver crashed their car, regardless of whether Autopilot was engaged or not. The system doesn't override driver inputs, so the driver is to blame, no different than if they drove with cruise control on and failed to slow or safely pass a vehicle they were approaching.

Many car companies have reverse automatic braking (RAB) like Subaru. Just because they do, doesn't mean a driver can blindly reverse out of a parking spot, and if the driver hits something then they can blame Subaru for a faulty RAB system or for false advertising. These system aids don't replace good driving practices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIvvMfxae0s

The biggest thing for cars in the near future will be autonomous cars, but even if those aren't ubiquitous, it is easy tech to have driver awareness monitoring that can tell if the driver is drunk, asleep or having a medical emergency, or simply not paying attention to the road. The car could automatically slow or brake if someone is traveling at speed and removes their eyes from the road for more than three or five seconds or something. It also seems likely that car-to-car communications would become a thing, so cars could anticipate other cars by not only proximity, but also by inputs, so a car knows not to change lanes because another car did it first or something.