Hacker News

Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch.

Consumer supervision is having all the controls of the car right there in front of you. And if you are doing it right, you have your hands on wheel and foot on the pedals ready to jump in.

To be fair to Tesla and other self driving taxis, urban and shorter journeys usually have worse collision rates than the average journey - and FSD is likely to be owners driving themselves to work etc.

I would guess the FSD numbers get help from drivers taking over during difficult situations and use weighted towards highway miles?

> hundreds of thousands of miles without incident

Almost there. Humans kill one person every 100 million miles driven. To reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles. Which means dozens or hundreds of billions miles driven to reach statistical significance.

Yeah, my response is to say some version of “you’re bringing anecdote knives to a statistics gunfight”

> the deepfake nude thing

the issue is that these tools are widely accessible, and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years

due to the current regulatory environment (trump admin), there is no political will to tackle new laws.

> I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.

unlike deepfakes, there are extensive road safety laws and civil liability precedent. texas may be pushing tesla forward (maybe partially for ideological reasons), but it will be an extremely hard sell to get any of the major US cities to get on board with this.

so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states (or even most red states) any time soon.

>it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons [...] because there's so little data

That ain't true [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test

> it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car

Teslas are really cheaply made, inadequate cars by modern standards. The interiors are terrible and are barebones even compared to mainstream cars like a Toyota Corolla. And they lack parking sensors depending on the version you bought. I believe current models don’t come with a surround view camera either, which is almost standard on all cars at this point, and very useful in practice. I guess I am not surprised the Robotaxis are also barebones.

Its not ever going to get ready.

Getting this to a place where it is better than humans continuously is not equivalent to fixing bugs in the context of the production of software used on phones etc.

When you are dealing with a dynamic uncontained environment it is much more difficult.

> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.

I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.

Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.

I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.

I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber.

I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).

I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.

Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.

I worked in some fully autonomous car projects back in ~2010. I would say every single company and the industry at large felt HUGE pressure to not have any incidents, as a single bad incident from one company can wreck the entire initiative.

yes, I talk to people and they have confidence in tesla. But then I mention that waymo is level 4 and tesla is level 2, and it doesn't make any difference.

I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.

Yep, feels a lot like that submarine that got crushed trying to get to the Titanic a year or two ago. It made the entire marine industry look worse, and other companies making submarines were concerned it would hurt their business.

This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.

> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.

A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.

> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.

What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.

> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone

The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.

Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.

They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.

> dangerous and irresponsible.

These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.

Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.

Which media org was bought for this?

Are you being sarcastic due to Elon buying Twitter to own/control the conversation? He would be a poster child for the bad actions you are describing.

There’s also one where Tesla hit a parked truck:

“13781-13644 Street, Heavy truck, No injuries, Proceeding Straight (Heavy truck: parked), 4mph, contact area: left”

What media company did Ford buy? What about Honda? Or Toyota? On the flip side, I can think of a very specific media site the Elon purchased.

It does not reflect well on Tesla to have failed to update their media structure now that EVs are everywhere and no longer a threat to existing car companies.

It's funny how one can see a persecuted underdog in a company that claimed full self driving (coast to coast) almost a decade ago and had not delivered anything close until just last year. I wonder how the folks who bought their "appreciating asset"[1] in 2019 feel about their cars' current value.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-claim-teslas-appreciat...

To be fair, the article calls that out specifically at the end:

> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything. We cannot independently assess whether Tesla’s system was at fault, whether the safety monitor failed to intervene in time, or *whether these were unavoidable situations caused by other road users*. Tesla wants us to trust its safety record while making it impossible to verify.

This is with safety drivers. So at this point you can't really make any conclusions about how good the Robotaxi is at avoiding major crashes since those should ideally be handled by the safety drivers. Without the actual data around all driver interventions you cannot make any positive conclusions about safety here.

My suspicion is that these kinds of minor crashes are simply harder to catch for safety drivers, or maybe the safety drivers did intervene here and slow down the car before the crashes. I don't know if that would show in this data.

Low mph does not automatically imply that crashes are not serious. It does not say anything about speed of other vehicles. Tesla could be creeping at 2mph into flow of traffic, or it could come at a complete stop after doing that and still be the reason of an accident.

If you routinely hit other objects, even at 1-4 mph, you are not a good driver.

Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph.

While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.

My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.

Doesn't matter if you're doing 4mph moving into an intersection where cross traffic is doing 35 or more.

For everyone's context, in the same time Waymo had 101 collisions according to the same dataset.

No, TSLA purposely does not list the details of the incident.

Your deportation papers for being a communism agitator are on the way.

One of the Robotaxi “crashes” was actually a moving bus colliding into a stationary Robotaxi.

I agree, and not in defense of Tesla but a 1mph collision while backing is something most human drivers are not going to report anywhere. That's why most cars have little scrapes and scratches on the bumpers and doors. Tesla should be more forthcoming with the full narrative of these incidents though.

The source is legally mandated reporting to the government.

Elecktek is just summarizing/commenting.

It is safety, regulatory and noise nightmare.

They are not comparable. The Waymo incident involved a child who ran out from behind an SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo [1].

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91491273/waymo-vehicle-hit-a-chi....

> Tesla beating Waymo

Heard this for a decade now, but I’m sure this year will be different!