Hold on the writer was testing “Autosteer”, described autosteer as a function that keeps the car within the travel lane markings and then proceeded to fault the system for not slowing and stopping? Then he literally talked about Full Self Driving which does exactly what he described? This is a bad article.
I rented a current model year Audi A4 on my last trip which had the Audi equivalent of Autosteer. I could drive for minutes at a time without touching the steering wheel. And I literally just touched the steering wheel, and that was enough for the car to continue in its way. Where is Geoffrey’s outrage there?
Methinks this journalist has no idea what Autosteer is supposed to do. Maybe this highlights the larger problem of “smart cars”. Most owners have their own notion of what a feature should do which ultimately makes them oblivious to what’s actually happening.
One of those lessons is that systems must be designed to be operated by real humans. It's remarkably common for organizations to look at an incident and declare the root cause to be "human error." ...They don't end their inquiry with blaming individuals.
No, that's discussing complex systems and important principles to adopt when creating and maintaining them.
>In the context of driving, blame is almost always placed on individuals.
In the context of driving accidents, almost always no autonomous vehicle function is involved, and yet this topic is about an autonomous vehicle function.
Moreover, if we're going to assign blame, there's plenty of blame to go around. Blame individuals if you want, but that doesn't prevent policymakers from analyzing the system in aggregate and mandating changes which, irrespective of which individuals get blamed, saves lives. That's what we want to happen, isn't it? To save lives?
Except for Waymo, none of the "self driving cars" are legally autonomous vehicles. They're just driver assistance systems, like advanced cruise control, and drivers are still responsible for maintaining control of the car at all times.
Tesla should probably be in a lot more trouble for falsely advertising these systems as "autopilot" or "full self driving", but even they make it clear after purchase that these are actually just driver assistance systems.
I didn't know and I've been following Telsa closely for years. I wonder if their point that this stuff is rather opaque is reinforced by this, rather than obviated by the specifics of "it didn't stop at 2 stop signs but did stop at others on auto-steer but auto-steer should stop at none"
I'm curious what you and others make of the sticker thing -- why is it well-known that specifically a smiley face sticker will disable it? Is the idea that the recognition software just outputs "FACE 100%" because enough is visible on the back?
Then he literally talked about Full Self Driving which does exactly what he described
On every other car, the smart cruise control feature that keeps a car within the lane markings...can also handle slowing down and stopping (though stopping for signage is limited to self-driving systems like FSD).
Where is Geoffrey’s outrage there
Audi wasn't required by the government to issue a massive recall. Tesla was. The outrage is that Tesla is deliberately violating the requirement of the recall.
On the Audi a4 I rented, I did not need to engage cruise control for lane centering to engage.
My point was that Audi is doing exactly what Tesla is supposedly not doing. Everything Geoffrey complained of was exactly what Audi does. Why should Tesla get scrutiny for safety but other car manufacturers don’t?
Does the Audi driver monitoring system let you take your hands off of the wheel or look away for extended periods of time? Can it be fooled by a smiley-face sticker?
On the Audi a4 I rented, I did not need to engage cruise control for lane centering to engage.
Looking at Audi a4 right now, can confirm that this is false...lane centering must be deliberately engaged and is part of Audi's cruise control functionality (but is a separate function from speed management).
If you read the article, they very clearly understand the difference: the entire point of this series is that Tesla doesn’t restrict usage to the places it’s designed for, which they could easily do, and doesn’t have effective safety measures for the attention that drivers are supposed to be maintaining. Social media provides plenty of examples showing that this isn’t some niche concern but rather something real people are misusing.
> In fine print and user manuals most drivers probably haven’t pored over, Tesla says that Autosteer “is designed for use on highways that have a center divider, clear lane markings, and no cross-traffic.” It adds: “Please use it only if you will pay attention to the road, keep your hands on the steering wheel, and be prepared to take over at any time.”
> As the crashes spotlighted by The Post investigation indicate, it isn’t clear to some drivers where you’re supposed to use Autosteer and what, exactly, it will do for you. It’s not nearly as advanced as Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” capability, which requires a $200 per month subscription to access and is designed to be used on city streets.
The biggest mistake here is conflating Autosteer with Full Self Driving (FSD). This isn't necessarily the author's fault as Tesla uses the word Autopilot to mean Autosteer, but any Tesla owner should know this.
Either way, Autopilot and Full Self Driving are not one in the same and it's made pretty clear to the end user that autosteer is not for obeying street signs, etc. It's a simple lane-assist, cruise-control assist, and lane switcher when the turn signal is pressed (if you pay for the lesser of the upgrades).
That being said, Tesla's FSD is also not very reliable and in my own personal testing has aggressively "shot the gap" and flew over speed bumps. However, it at least is made to stop at stop signs and traffic signals and does so.
I mean what they're forcing tesla to do is annoy their drivers more, not actually change anything, mostly because tesla is actually better than most cars when it actually comes to safety.
No, Tesla declares in their manual that Autopilot can only be used safely if you "keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times". Tesla is only being required to follow their own legal requirements.
Other vehicle manufacturers do not state you must keep your hands on the wheel to safely operate their ADAS features, instead relying on camera-based driver monitoring systems, and are thus not required to issue any "hands-on" warning.
If Tesla wants to deploy a product as advanced as other manufacturers so they can get rid of the "annoying nag" they can just release a product that can, and legally indicates, it can be safely operated hands-free. But, then they would no longer be able to blame the driver for not keeping their hands on the wheel (as it says in the manual) in the event of a death as they have repeatedly.
Just as I'm less interested in what drivers should do versus what the government should do, I'm also less interested in what the current state of affairs is versus what it could be.
I don't have FSD speed over bumps anymore, however i wish it was adjustable as its gota pretty hard set at i think 15mph for speedbumps which is just a tad faster than what my wife feels comfortable with
Worth pointing out this is all about the autosteer feature, not the full self-driving feature. The screenshots in the article are of a system that is designed for much more limited use.
I use FSD daily and I’ve never seen it come anywhere close to missing a stop sign. This almost makes Tesla look a lot worse - the technology is able to provide what I would say is a relatively safe driving experience off highway, but it’s not available at the lower price point.
The part I found most interesting is that it still activates on roads that its mapping system knows aren’t suitable, and that the smiley face sticker is enough to fool their driver attention tracking system. Mercedes seems to have a much more mature engineering culture around safety.
The system is extremely annoying now, but will leave you alone if it sees your face and knows you’re watching the road.
Covering up the camera just makes it nag more frequently.
It’s frankly unusable now, as it’s constantly beeping at me…almost as bad as Lexus, which will beep if you as much as glance down to get a bottle of water.
Instead of watching the road, I’m now having to look and figure out why my car is beeping at me. Apparently, I need to “pay attention to the road”, which is what I was doing before the beeping.
After 6 years and hundreds of thousands of miles using autopilot without any issues, I am now considering just getting an older luxury car that doesn’t have any of this “safety” software.
I bet there is a rule at tesla (which is not in writing) to keep workarounds and loopholes like these intentionally open. There is no other reasonable explanation for them to do the shit they do.
I feel like this is absolutely what is happening.
I wish they would be fined an absurd amount to teach them a lesson. The public roads aren't your proving grounds
Yes, that’s the point, everyone has these expectations of Tesla to make it impossible to circumvent safety features, but the same standard isn’t applied to other car manufacturers; HN just loves to bash on anything related to Elon.
> the same standard isn’t applied to other car manufacturers
This belief is hard to reconcile with the Cruise threads. What you’re actually seeing is that other companies aren’t hyping their technology so far in advance of its actual capabilities. If Toyota sold “full self driving” as an expensive add-on and failed to ship it over the time most people owned the vehicle, you’d see plenty of ragging on them, too.
The contrast is especially noticeable when you look at what the market leaders are doing. Waymo owns their vehicles fully and isn’t claiming they’re suitable for general use everywhere, every time. Mercedes has an L3 system far in advance of Tesla but they only offer it in certain conditions and back it with insurance. If Tesla’s product was where their marketing claims it is, they’d do the same.
That we should be allowed to drive our own cars without being annoyed by these terrible systems?
I’ve avoided the new Lexus vehicles as their eye tracking is horrible - just glancing down to get a drink will set off alarms.
Now they’ve made my Tesla just as bad - my drive yesterday had an alert every 10 seconds or so, from “pay attention to the road” to “autopilot speed limited”. Very dangerous and distracting.
Should just abandon the fully automated self driving venture, especially in crowded urban areas.
Waymo cars have a shit ton of sensors, cameras, audio sensors, dedicated battery, cpu, cooling systems. Yet even that system is not perfect. Requires a human behind the wheel.
Let’s not forget the Cruise debacle. Tesla system is just a straight up disaster. That system is not worth the price tag.
Stop investing in cars. Let’s reinvest in the urban core, rollback the terrible car infrastructure that has invaded this country, and put significant federal/state/local dollars into public infrastructure and redesign of cities.
I traveled to NYC recently and using the public transportation system was amazing. No need to rent a car. Every destination was accessible by train/subway, ferry, or can rent an e-bike or walk there.
The only thing terrible about NYC was… the cars. Taxis and ride share drivers frequently running lights, blocking the intersections, or blocking the streets for emergency vehicles or commercial drivers. The noise pollution was mostly from drivers honking (whoever invented ANC, thanks bro).
Cars contributed heavily to the poor air quality as well. Tail pipe pollution. Noise pollution. Tire wear pollutants. Brake dust pollution. It was worse than the human contributed aspects.
End the trillions of dollars (indirectly and directly) given to building suburbs.
Waymo’s model is already safer than human driving alone, and I see the requirement for the human behind the wheel as being more a symptom of human irrationality than Waymo’s deficits. Tesla is a boondoggle and yet it’s hard for me to not see them being in a much better position ten years from now than they are today. I think the potential value self-driving is massive though, just because of the potential of cars driving with nobody inside them at all opening up a massive rental/ride-share/taxi market. That’s not oppositional to a world with public transit, that’s complementary, it’s a world where less people need to own cars and a high wattage EV hookup.
I do generally agree though that the electric car is not the future, more likely we will see much higher usage of cheaper
more efficient technologies that don’t require special charging infrastructure like e-bikes in the consumer market. I think things like electric commercial vehicles are more interesting. You aren’t going to transport pianos or logs on the subway.
Endless densification has its own problems, especially considering it may not even be viable to densify somewhere as much as New York which has ideal conditions for building both ports and skyscrapers. New York itself is famously expensive. I’ve used public transit in suburban areas beyond the point most would find reasonable, there are tons of edge cases which can triple travel time compared to a car, and getting rid of those edge cases is outrageously expensive and non-viable. Although one thing that would make it far more viable is drumroll self-driving, as all public transit infrastructure becomes cheaper without the need for drivers.
None of the waymos I've been in had a human behind the wheel.
There was still a wheel, I assume as a cheaper-than-a-tow-truck for if it runs into certain issues, and waymo wants to turn the self driving off til it gets to the shop
This is just poor anti car attitude infecting actual judgement of the technology.
Waymo doesn't require a human behind the wheel. They roam all over metro Phoenix without drivers and without issues.
Tesla FSD works fine with appropriate monitoring on city streets and virtually autonomously on freeway driving. Comma and open pilot aren't far behind.
The US is built for cars and thinking that is going to change is a pipedream.
This... People really do love to latch onto a few select loud voices in the media with alternative motives to bash things like waymo and tesla... I've had FSD for 3 years now and its infinitely better than it was and the issues i have with it oddly aren't FSD's fault theyre the manually calculated things like navigation... navigation is 100% non AI driven and its the main issue with path finding for the FSD currently.
The actual driving day to day i'm in FSD almost 90% of the time, without issues 99.5% of the time, everywhere i go doing 400-800 miles a week, and the few issues i have when in AP tend to be nav telling the car its turn is earlier than it is, or it being a bit more cautious than i want it to be but thats preference not a fault of FSD.
> Stop investing in cars. Let’s reinvest in the urban core, rollback the terrible car infrastructure that has invaded this country, and put significant federal/state/local dollars into public infrastructure and redesign of cities.
What do you want to do, demolish entire metro areas? It’s not like the suburbs are in the cities. How do you address the fact that retrofitting public transport has proven to be astronomically expensive?
Ending the massive subsidies for cars and pollution would go a long way. Most cities have huge amounts of space dedicated to subsidized car travel and storage, simply asking drivers to pay for what they use would go a long way towards improving the balance, as would removing legal requirements for continued subsidy. In the United States, even a bar owner who doesn’t want to encourage DUIs is still usually required to subsidize driving.
Much of the cost to transit and active transportation projects is often also car-related as those projects are forced into complicated engineering challenges to avoid taking any space from driving. If you want to roll out transit easily in almost any North American city, converting a single street parking lane into a dedicated bus lane is very cheap, and the revenues from less-subsidized off-street parking will pay for much of it.
I rented a current model year Audi A4 on my last trip which had the Audi equivalent of Autosteer. I could drive for minutes at a time without touching the steering wheel. And I literally just touched the steering wheel, and that was enough for the car to continue in its way. Where is Geoffrey’s outrage there?
Methinks this journalist has no idea what Autosteer is supposed to do. Maybe this highlights the larger problem of “smart cars”. Most owners have their own notion of what a feature should do which ultimately makes them oblivious to what’s actually happening.
One of those lessons is that systems must be designed to be operated by real humans. It's remarkably common for organizations to look at an incident and declare the root cause to be "human error." ...They don't end their inquiry with blaming individuals.
No, that's discussing complex systems and important principles to adopt when creating and maintaining them.
>In the context of driving, blame is almost always placed on individuals.
In the context of driving accidents, almost always no autonomous vehicle function is involved, and yet this topic is about an autonomous vehicle function.
Moreover, if we're going to assign blame, there's plenty of blame to go around. Blame individuals if you want, but that doesn't prevent policymakers from analyzing the system in aggregate and mandating changes which, irrespective of which individuals get blamed, saves lives. That's what we want to happen, isn't it? To save lives?
Tesla should probably be in a lot more trouble for falsely advertising these systems as "autopilot" or "full self driving", but even they make it clear after purchase that these are actually just driver assistance systems.
I'm curious what you and others make of the sticker thing -- why is it well-known that specifically a smiley face sticker will disable it? Is the idea that the recognition software just outputs "FACE 100%" because enough is visible on the back?
On every other car, the smart cruise control feature that keeps a car within the lane markings...can also handle slowing down and stopping (though stopping for signage is limited to self-driving systems like FSD).
Where is Geoffrey’s outrage there
Audi wasn't required by the government to issue a massive recall. Tesla was. The outrage is that Tesla is deliberately violating the requirement of the recall.
My point was that Audi is doing exactly what Tesla is supposedly not doing. Everything Geoffrey complained of was exactly what Audi does. Why should Tesla get scrutiny for safety but other car manufacturers don’t?
Cold water, your story. Yikes
Looking at Audi a4 right now, can confirm that this is false...lane centering must be deliberately engaged and is part of Audi's cruise control functionality (but is a separate function from speed management).
> In fine print and user manuals most drivers probably haven’t pored over, Tesla says that Autosteer “is designed for use on highways that have a center divider, clear lane markings, and no cross-traffic.” It adds: “Please use it only if you will pay attention to the road, keep your hands on the steering wheel, and be prepared to take over at any time.”
> As the crashes spotlighted by The Post investigation indicate, it isn’t clear to some drivers where you’re supposed to use Autosteer and what, exactly, it will do for you. It’s not nearly as advanced as Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” capability, which requires a $200 per month subscription to access and is designed to be used on city streets.
Either way, Autopilot and Full Self Driving are not one in the same and it's made pretty clear to the end user that autosteer is not for obeying street signs, etc. It's a simple lane-assist, cruise-control assist, and lane switcher when the turn signal is pressed (if you pay for the lesser of the upgrades).
That being said, Tesla's FSD is also not very reliable and in my own personal testing has aggressively "shot the gap" and flew over speed bumps. However, it at least is made to stop at stop signs and traffic signals and does so.
Personally, I'm less interested in what Tesla owners should then I am in what policymakers should force Tesla to do.
Other vehicle manufacturers do not state you must keep your hands on the wheel to safely operate their ADAS features, instead relying on camera-based driver monitoring systems, and are thus not required to issue any "hands-on" warning.
If Tesla wants to deploy a product as advanced as other manufacturers so they can get rid of the "annoying nag" they can just release a product that can, and legally indicates, it can be safely operated hands-free. But, then they would no longer be able to blame the driver for not keeping their hands on the wheel (as it says in the manual) in the event of a death as they have repeatedly.
I use FSD daily and I’ve never seen it come anywhere close to missing a stop sign. This almost makes Tesla look a lot worse - the technology is able to provide what I would say is a relatively safe driving experience off highway, but it’s not available at the lower price point.
The system is extremely annoying now, but will leave you alone if it sees your face and knows you’re watching the road.
Covering up the camera just makes it nag more frequently.
It’s frankly unusable now, as it’s constantly beeping at me…almost as bad as Lexus, which will beep if you as much as glance down to get a bottle of water.
People like the author of the article and people who misuse autopilot are why we can’t have nice things.
Well - yes - exactly. The software protects us from people who will misuse the technology and hurt others.
Cars are extremely dangerous.
Instead of watching the road, I’m now having to look and figure out why my car is beeping at me. Apparently, I need to “pay attention to the road”, which is what I was doing before the beeping.
After 6 years and hundreds of thousands of miles using autopilot without any issues, I am now considering just getting an older luxury car that doesn’t have any of this “safety” software.
This belief is hard to reconcile with the Cruise threads. What you’re actually seeing is that other companies aren’t hyping their technology so far in advance of its actual capabilities. If Toyota sold “full self driving” as an expensive add-on and failed to ship it over the time most people owned the vehicle, you’d see plenty of ragging on them, too.
The contrast is especially noticeable when you look at what the market leaders are doing. Waymo owns their vehicles fully and isn’t claiming they’re suitable for general use everywhere, every time. Mercedes has an L3 system far in advance of Tesla but they only offer it in certain conditions and back it with insurance. If Tesla’s product was where their marketing claims it is, they’d do the same.
I dunno man. In my experience, the community of people who are very very very unhappy with Elon is far larger than just HN.
I’ve avoided the new Lexus vehicles as their eye tracking is horrible - just glancing down to get a drink will set off alarms.
Now they’ve made my Tesla just as bad - my drive yesterday had an alert every 10 seconds or so, from “pay attention to the road” to “autopilot speed limited”. Very dangerous and distracting.
Waymo cars have a shit ton of sensors, cameras, audio sensors, dedicated battery, cpu, cooling systems. Yet even that system is not perfect. Requires a human behind the wheel.
Let’s not forget the Cruise debacle. Tesla system is just a straight up disaster. That system is not worth the price tag.
Stop investing in cars. Let’s reinvest in the urban core, rollback the terrible car infrastructure that has invaded this country, and put significant federal/state/local dollars into public infrastructure and redesign of cities.
I traveled to NYC recently and using the public transportation system was amazing. No need to rent a car. Every destination was accessible by train/subway, ferry, or can rent an e-bike or walk there.
The only thing terrible about NYC was… the cars. Taxis and ride share drivers frequently running lights, blocking the intersections, or blocking the streets for emergency vehicles or commercial drivers. The noise pollution was mostly from drivers honking (whoever invented ANC, thanks bro).
Cars contributed heavily to the poor air quality as well. Tail pipe pollution. Noise pollution. Tire wear pollutants. Brake dust pollution. It was worse than the human contributed aspects.
End the trillions of dollars (indirectly and directly) given to building suburbs.
I do generally agree though that the electric car is not the future, more likely we will see much higher usage of cheaper more efficient technologies that don’t require special charging infrastructure like e-bikes in the consumer market. I think things like electric commercial vehicles are more interesting. You aren’t going to transport pianos or logs on the subway.
Endless densification has its own problems, especially considering it may not even be viable to densify somewhere as much as New York which has ideal conditions for building both ports and skyscrapers. New York itself is famously expensive. I’ve used public transit in suburban areas beyond the point most would find reasonable, there are tons of edge cases which can triple travel time compared to a car, and getting rid of those edge cases is outrageously expensive and non-viable. Although one thing that would make it far more viable is drumroll self-driving, as all public transit infrastructure becomes cheaper without the need for drivers.
There was still a wheel, I assume as a cheaper-than-a-tow-truck for if it runs into certain issues, and waymo wants to turn the self driving off til it gets to the shop
Waymo doesn't require a human behind the wheel. They roam all over metro Phoenix without drivers and without issues.
Tesla FSD works fine with appropriate monitoring on city streets and virtually autonomously on freeway driving. Comma and open pilot aren't far behind.
The US is built for cars and thinking that is going to change is a pipedream.
The actual driving day to day i'm in FSD almost 90% of the time, without issues 99.5% of the time, everywhere i go doing 400-800 miles a week, and the few issues i have when in AP tend to be nav telling the car its turn is earlier than it is, or it being a bit more cautious than i want it to be but thats preference not a fault of FSD.
What do you want to do, demolish entire metro areas? It’s not like the suburbs are in the cities. How do you address the fact that retrofitting public transport has proven to be astronomically expensive?
Much of the cost to transit and active transportation projects is often also car-related as those projects are forced into complicated engineering challenges to avoid taking any space from driving. If you want to roll out transit easily in almost any North American city, converting a single street parking lane into a dedicated bus lane is very cheap, and the revenues from less-subsidized off-street parking will pay for much of it.