Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

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Similarly, you and I are both forced to share the roads with folks who are impaired in various ways, whether it's declining reflexes, vision, cognitive function - or just straight up drunk driving. As somebody who comes from a country with very strict anti drunk-driving rules (checkpoints randomly on commonly used roads frequently enough to deter it), it blows my mind that I have to share the roads in the US with drivers who think having "just 4 beers" before their 45 minute drive home is fine.

Since the US hasn't shown many signs for cracking down on drunk driving, and adding better infrastructure for folks who can no longer drive for various reasons is equally a non-starter at the moment - I'm all in favor of any system that speeds up the arrival of genuinely fully autonomous driving. Tesla hasn't killed or injured anyone using this "FSD beta" program to date, despite a large number of miles driven, so their existing precautions appear to be working.

Even in the interim, before we reach fully autonomous driving, "better than the average human driver" is still a huge performance milestone worth aiming for before we start obsessing over "perfect" (Not saying FSD Beta is there yet, but Autopilot on Highways might be).

I don't fully understand your argument - are you saying FSD should be tested publicly, because we allow other impaired drivers as well? Wouldn't the solution be to strictly enforce the ban of impaired driving, on the one hand, and test FSD privately using trained supervisors, on the other hand?

If effectively enforcing the ban on impaired driving was a viable option that was truly on the table then yes, I would 100% be in favor of requiring this testing to happen privately. Breathalyzer for engine start, eye tracking to prevent phone usage (which Tesla has btw), more frequent vision/driving tests, etc would improve road safety significantly. But that's just never going to happen, it's a completely unrealistic scenario that requires a huge culture shift, and would be incredibly unpopular policy. Not to mention the public transport infrastructure that needs to be built to support all of these folks who suddenly are no longer allowed to drive but live in areas where driving is a necessity of everyday life. The demographics who'd be affected hardest by these kinds of changes are also vocal voters with high turnout.

Given the state of the public roads now, full of dangerously impaired driver's as it is, we've clearly decided as a society that it's worth the risk to allow this behavior to continue. So in that light, I think it's worth allowing these public tests of autonomous systems under some strict set of rules. I agree these rules shouldn't be exclusively self-enforced by Tesla and co., and there should be some more stringent open transparent reporting requirements around how many systems are active, miles driven, incident reports etc. But with the right controls and oversight in place I think it's a worthwhile endeavor to allow the testing to continue in the spirit of accelerating autonomous driving becoming a reality. It's the impaired drivers that _make_ it more urgent for this system to exist in the first place.

> Not saying FSD Beta is there yet, but Autopilot on Highways might be

Anecdotally I've found the new FSD Beta a huge leap forward when used like "Autopilot" (basically no destination, drive in a straight line for lane keeping). It understands the roads 500% better than the older builds in terms of lane layout, little or no lines, etc.

> Since the US hasn't shown many signs for cracking down on drunk driving…

Kind of curious where you live because the police seem to only look for drunk drivers these days, for the money.

In Phoenix you have to make the police do their job (like take their bumper off) if they don’t think you’ve been drinking because they know they just have to wait a bit to write up a big-dollar ticket.

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