It can be misleading to directly compare disengagements to actual catastrophic incidents.

The human collision numbers only count actual incidents, and even then only ones which have been reported to insurance/authorities. It doesn't include many minor incidents such as hitting a bollard, or curb rash, or bump-and-run incidents in car parks, and even vehicle-on-vehicle incidents when both parties agree to settle privately. And the number certainly excludes ALL unacceptably close near-misses. There's no good numbers for any of these, but I'd be shocked if minor incidents weren't an of magnitude more common, and near misses another order of magnitude again.

Whereas an FSD disengagement could merely represent the driver's (very reasonable) unwillingness to see if the software will avoid the incident itself. Some disengagements don't represent a safety risk at all, such as when the software is being overly cautious, e.g. at a busy crosswalk. Some disengagements for sure were to avoid a bad situation, though many of these would have been non-catastrophic (such as curbing a wheel) and not a collision which would be included in any human driver collision statistics.

> Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal.

The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in as much as it can get away with, to be on the driver, effectively level 2.

If there was actually a rate of one life threatening accident per 10,000 miles with FSD that would be so obvious it would be impossible to hide. So I have to conclude the cars are actually much safer than that.

Not sure if it’s evident in broader statistics yet, but I think that because Tesla got the early adopter market (tech savvy people), they are now losing that same market first.

I had a party at my house a couple months ago, mostly SF tech people. I found the Tesla owners chatting together, and the topic was how much FSD sucks and they don’t trust it.

I asked and no-one said they would buy a Tesla again. Distrust because they felt suckered by FSD was a reason, but several also just said Elon’s behavior was a big negative.

I just had a thought - a Waymo car costs $200k (maybe more) from a quick google search. YoY returns of $200k on S&P are about 10%, while an Uber driver takes home about $40-$50k - so in terms of cost, they are about 2x-2.5x of each other, with the Waymore likely needing expensive maintenance/support infrastructure, bringing the total much closer.

Which means if Tesla can really build that Cybercab - with an underpowered motor, small battery, plastic body panels, just cameras (which I think they promised to sell under $20k) - they'll be able to hit a business expense level and profitability that Waymo will only be able, in say, 10 years.

Even if you don't want to talk about non-existing hardware, a Model 3's manufacturing cost is surely much lower than a Waymo.

Once (if) they make self driving work at any point in time before Waymo gets to the same level of cost - they'll be the more profitable business.

Not only that, they'll be able to enter markets where the cost of Waymo and what you can charge for taxi rides is so far apart that it doesn't make sense for them - in this sense, they'll have a first mover advantage.

Tesla's FSD has indeed made significant improvements in the past year (still way behind where it was promised to be even half a decade ago), but they are FAR from being able to operate an actual robotaxi service. Austin is an embarrassment. It seems that tesla believes they can make more money on fooling investors than they can on any core business model

Sorry but while I am a happy Waymo user, this is overblown and just incorrect. Waymo has datacenter oversight. (which, who cares, the product is great).

Tesla FSD 12 -> 13 was a massive jump that happened earlier this year. 14 is still rolling out.

Testing out 13 this weekend, it drove on country roads, noticed a road closure, rerouted, did 7 miles on non divided highways, navigated a town and chose a parking space and parked in it with zero interruptions. It even backed out of the driveway to start the trip. I didn't like the parking job and reparked; other than that, no hands, no feet, fully autonomous. Unlike 12, I had no 'comments' on the driving choices - rotaries were navigated very nicely, road hazards were approached and dealt with safely and properly. It was genuinely good.

Dislike Elon all you want, but Tesla FSD is improving rapidly, and to my experienced eyes adding 9s. Probably two or three more 9s to go, but it's not a maxed out technology.

And yet it drives me on 2000 mile car trips without touching anything. If you ignore the hype and look at the actual product, it’s fine.

This scam is true for all AI technologies. It only "works" as far as we interpret it as working. LLMs generate text. If it answers our question, we say that the LLM works. If it doesn't, we say that it is "hallucinating".

Saved 20 minutes of your time? Slack goes wild.

Wasted 1 hour each of your 5 co-workers who ended up reviewing unusable slop? Silence.

I hear you, but GenAI also gets the opposite fork from people who hate it: It's good result that used GenAI at any point => your prompting and curation and editing is worthless and deserves no credit; it's not good result => that proves AI isn't real intelligence.

As with Marmite, I find it very strange to be surrounded by a very big loud cultural divide where I am firmly in the middle.

Unlike Marmite, I wonder if I'm only in "the middle" because of the extremities on both ends…

Apple did it successfully, it's a marvelous ecosystem, but when there's an issue, it's because you're not holding it the correct way.

Agentic code doesn’t kill people. Tesla drivers who think they own a Waymo do.

Would at least like to use it for stop and go traffic, which is about the only thing I trust FSD for.

Sorry, but disabling autopilot/FSD to use your phone is much crazier.

A couple of facts on the Florida case: it was a jury verdict, not a judge. The jury found Tesla 33% at fault for a 2019 Key Largo crash. Damages were $129M compensatory (Tesla responsible for 33% of that) plus $200M punitive, for $243M total.

The driver admitted he looked down after dropping his phone and blew a stop sign; Tesla argues his foot was on the accelerator, but the jury still assigned partial fault because Autopilot was allowed to operate off limited-access highways and the company didn’t do enough to prevent foreseeable misuse. The driver had already settled separately.

Also check the author's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jamesondow.bsky.social

It can't be healthy to be so obsessed with something/someone you dislike.

is there any blame to be associated to Tesla for its feature? what's the right percent for you? 20%? 10%? 5%? 0%?

If the wheels of the car fell off, whould Tesla have any blame for that? If we had laid wires all along the road to allow for automatic driving, and Tesla's software misread that and caused a crash, would it be to blame?

When is Autopilot safe to use? Is it ever safe to use? Is the fact that people seem to be able to entirely trick the Autopilot to ignore safety attention mechanisms relevant at all?

If we have percentage-based blame then it feels perfectly fine to share the blame here. People buy cars assuming that the features of the car are safe to use to some extent or another.

Maybe it is just 0%. Like cruise control is a thing that exists, right? But I'm not activating cruise control anywhere near any intersection. Tesla calls their thing autopilot, and their other thing FSD, right? Is there nothing there? Maybe there is no blame, but it feels like there's something there.

I'm sure they'll figure this out right around the time they test the cars in places that have more than one season.

Next up: they put LCD layer with selective dimming over cameras and claim world's first instead of investing in lidar/radar as they should from the start rather than dropping it "coz it is not needed"

According to users, that issue appears to be solved as of FSD v13. The solution may be reliant on the higher quality camera modules shipped with hardware 4.

Technically you kind of get this in Nevada when using Tesla insurance and if you drive 100 % FSD. If you drive manually you are pretty much doxed for random Front collision Warning which is super sensitive

No. There's a critical difference between AI as a tool and AI as a product. When you use a tool, the responsibility to verify the output is yours. But when you pay for a product like Tesla's Full Self-Driving, the company assumes liability for its performance. If FSD causes harm, Tesla must be held responsible.

That needs to be adjusted for Tesla putting the Robotaxi "safety driver" back behind the wheel when the self-driving Robotaxi thing didn't really work.

I can't believe they are giving credit for "robotaxi" launching with human drivers. Yellow Cab had those in the '50s.

Funnily enough, not an article on grokipedia

This is a fairly weak shower thought, but it was interesting to note (anecdotally) people's propensity to rigidly prioritize safety in some, but not all circumstances.

For example, I've had numerous conversations where people will point to safety rating in vehicles to defend their purchasing decisions. Its simple to understand really, I want the safest car for my family/child etc, that is why I refuse to buy an older, used vehicle or prefer a sedan over SUV. Safety becomes cover for preference and defending trends like expanding pickup truck sizes since the 2000s while there is no safety rating or even objective measure of the efficacy of these self-driving systems.

Hopefully I haven't wasted your time, its just a psychological trend that I think exists.

It's weird, it's essentially allowing unlicensed driver on roads

Show me actual stats on the safety vs human drivers and I may actually care. The lack of them makes me think that it isn't actually that dangerous compared to humans.