This thread is full of people who are describing their own personal experiences, which mostly tilt negative, with some positive notes like yours. But the article makes the point that a bunch of anecdotes is *not a replacement for data*, and the data we have (which is seriously flawed), shows that the average experience is not as good as yours.
Maybe your experience is an outlier compared to the data that’s been collected? Maybe your experience is the norm and the Tesla data would corroborate your experience. We can’t really know unless Tesla releases their data.
But they refuse to.
I don't believe people don't want this technology to happen, or don't think it's going to happen; I think the pressure and the criticism is there because people want it to be safe. When it comes to safety, I'd rather have FSD be subject to more criticism than it needs to be, not less.
The truth is that this is deployed as a supervised system, and as such it's at least as safe as the driver operating it. I can absolutely attest to situations where the car noticed and reacted to a safety situation before I did. I think on the whole I'm a safer driver monitoring my car vs. operating it.
[1] In this case, measuring self-reported "disengagement" data of amateur drivers in general traffic vs. the controlled conditions reported by professionals operating vehicles in limited environments and with limited functionality. You can't take a Waymo or Cruise on the freeway to try it out, they won't operate in parking lots or unpainted roads or construction areas, hell my understanding is that they fence off and disallow most unprotected left turns! You can get a Tesla to try any and all of that (and I do! regularly! and sometimes it fails!). I mean, come on, this isn't a fair comparison and you know it.
Que? Disengagement can occur for a variety of reasons, up to and including preventing the car from performing a hazardous/deadly move. This is absolutely about safety.
I would be interested in seeing how performance differs between cities and countries.
> But this software is working folks. It's going to happen. As I see it our choice is either to celebrate the advent of new technology or hide behind comment vote buttons trying to pretend that it isn't.
> For me, I'm happier watching it than I would be being a luddite. I'll take my downvotes now, thanks.
Snarkily dismissing everyone else's experiences as invalid isn't a great way to endear yourself.
There’s a term for this: Gaslighting.
All I'm saying is that my experience makes it very clear that what problems remain with this technology are resolvable ones. Consumer cars are going to drive themselves. Period. And given existing evidence, it seems reasonably clear to me that Tesla is going to get there first (though I wouldn't be shocked if it's Waymo, Cruise seems less like a good bet).
And given that interpretation, I find the kind of grousing going on in this thread unhelpful. If I show you a bug in your iPhone, would you immediately throw it out and declare that no one could possibly market a smartphone? That's how this thread sounds to me.
Perhaps I'm unreasonably dense, but I do not see the link (direct or otherwise) between 'it works well for me under the following circumstances' and 'it will work well for (almost) everyone, under all (reasonable) circumstances'. The former can be true, without any guarantee of the latter. Given all the hyperbole and promises that have been made thusfar, it's hardly surprising that folks are inclined to be skeptical, particularly if their own experiences are as poor as many in this thread indicate.
What I do agree with is that cars are going to be allowed to drive themselves, irrespective of how well they can do it, because the politicians and the bureaucrats apparently are unable to resist the siren song of 'progress'. That much we've seen in SF with Cruise among many other plraces. Whether this is a good thing is a different question entirely...
In 1903, New York Times predicted that airplanes would take 10 million years to develop (https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...).
Many people who saw the first actual flights from Wright brothers dismissed them as a parlor trick that will not amount to anything practical.
Technology has a long history of exponential improvements. At first it improves slowly and then suddenly.
Sure, everyone (not just Tesla) was expecting self-driving to happen by now. It didn't happen yet.
I share the OP's perspective that the maturity of self-driving is already so high that it's a matter of time for it to become viable to deploy at scale.
The initial DARPA challenge was Wright's brother. We're closer to a plane that can travel halfway over Atlantic. Not quite there yet but it's just a matter of time until it can cross it.
> As I see it our choice is either to celebrate the advent of new technology or hide behind comment vote buttons trying to pretend that it isn't.
> For me, I'm happier watching it than I would be being a luddite. I'll take my downvotes now, thanks.
Pot, meet kettle.
Let me repeat: I love my car. I'm not here to hate. I'm here to try to explain how great this thing is. Really, you have no idea how fun it is to have a robot drive you around town. And, comments like yours and the rest here make it clear that you're really missing out on that kind of joy in your rush to hate.
Call a friend and get a ride in an FSD beta car. You really might change your mind.
Aren't the negative experience comments doing the EXACT same thing?
The people here sharing negative experiences aren't suggesting that the positive experiences others report are just the result of being a Musk fan.
He correctly predicted that his positive experience will be downvoted by Musk haters even though it's as valid as negative experiences shared by other people that were not downvoted.
That's clear bias and so obvious that it can be called ahead of time.
He didn't write anything less valid that the upvoted complaints and shouldn't be downvoted by anyone.
I got the...pretty strong implication from it. I didn't downvote them, but it did rub me the wrong way for exactly the implication that the people with negative experiences are from Musk haters.
There are two sentences that, taken together, seem very dismissive of people who have negative experiences:
> Everyone hates it (and given the dumpster fire at Twitter right now, everyone really loves to hate Tesla).
> But this software is working folks.
"Everyone hates it" and the parenthetical reference to Twitter really leans into the idea that people who dislike it feel that way for ideological reasons and not their own personal experience with the vehicle.
That's strongly reinforced by the next sentence that states "This software is working folks", which is a flat categorical statement that contradicts the experiences of the people who dislike it.
So, I didn't downvote, but if I did it would be exactly for the implication that the people who dislike it didn't have valid reasons for disliking it.