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Comment by illwrks | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, considering I have never driven or been in a Tesla, when you say “it would follow the wrong road markings into a crash would I not intervene”, are you not concerned for your safety when driving it.

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As an owner of a Model Y -- I'm aware that its current implementation of FSD would do this. I don't pay for FSD, so it does not do it. Also, this is a bit like someone turning on cruise control and then just letting the car go off the road at a turn. Would you be too concerned for your safety to own a car with cruise control? No, you'd just either not use cruise control, or understand its limitations when using cruise control and steer as needed.

That only seems cosmetically similar to me. If cruise control would usually do the same thing but occasionally try to take a curve for me, I would consider it unreliable. Even if it always got the curve attempts it made correct, it is unreliable if its actions are not essentially a mechanical response.

But it’s a function you can choose not to use. My Model Y doesn’t even have FSD, I didn’t buy it. I could buy and use it, but I don’t. It doesn’t concern me that it exists, the Model Y has been an awesome car. If I did buy and use it, its limitations are widely known and I’d expect to supervise it if I used it.

Right, this is the difference between most car functions and then something like FSD. Reliability. Cruise Control always works the exact same, where the car will break/accelerate exactly as much as it needs to, to maintain the speed it is set to go. Same thing with ABS, where the brakes will be perfectly pulsated when heavy braking. Or differentials. Or pretty much any car system.

FSD is a little too wild west. I also lump ACC and LKAS in here, too. Phantom brake and bad directional input exist for those way too often.

Great explainer, thank you.

Agreed. Just sounds like a stressful experience all round.

I never paid for any of the autonomous upsells, so for me this is a lane-keeping functionality and I treat it as such, meaning it helps me but I am still fully responsible for my own safety.

It happens rarely enough, and as I mostly drive on the same roads, I know where it happens as well, usually I disconnect the thing before it gets to the problematic place.

So no, it's so much stressful as annoying. But it does remind me that the claims of self-driving is just horse-shit.

I'm struggling to see how you can be so calm about what you just said. To me, the idea of a system that works 99% of the time and doesn't work 1% of the time is utterly terrifying, far more so than a system that works only 50% of the time. 1% is small enough for a human operator to become complacent, but still many orders of magnitude greater than an acceptable risk factor. It seems like exactly the sweet spot that's going to maximise loss of life.

I guess this is about predictability.

I know what (and where) the problematic spots are for the lane-keeping, so I use it in situations where the benefit is large and the risk is manageable.

There are many places where I won't switch it on and just drive myself.

Also 99% vs 1% depends on how you look at it. The main road I drive is about 200km long, in one direction it does not have any problematic spots. In the other it has 2 lets say 10 meter spots. By distance it's 0.01% problematic. It's not like Desert Bus where it tries to get you all the time.

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