this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn't do it either.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it's getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it's practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn't even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn't used to be this bad.
Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it's either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you're in traffic because you know it'll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don't. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I'm watching it close. It can't navigate city streets, but neither can FSD....
TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it's bad and getting worse, not better. I can't believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that's why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.
I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It's a simple tractable problem that's generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it's not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.
Though they can induce another type of driver fatigue - it makes driving boring as heck as you don't need to do anything. I can't use line keep myself as it just makes me really tired and I'll risk falling asleep.
That's totally fair. I think it depends on the person and what they have going on that day. I remember, or rather do not remember, getting to work in my last car because my brain did the driving task while I was lost in thought. When I'm using lane keep, I feel like I'm hyper aware of what the cars around me are doing and what road changes are coming that I need to manually adjust for. I could see that getting very boring late at night or on empty highways though. Everyone is different and that's just another element of the equation that the car doesn't account for.
I agree. VWs' drive assists are absolutely stellar. It's just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that's essentially it. It's not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.
The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don't seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a "zone" with margins left and right.
So if you are on the inside of your "zone" and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don't really trust it with high speed turns.
I concur on the VW software. Once you understand it, it is predictable and safe where it should be used - highways with dividers
I'm a big fan of assists where I am still actively driving. They are there if I make an error (e.g. drift to the edge of a lane) rather than doing the driving for me.
Lane-keeping is actually on by default in my vehicle, and I find it to be a nice feature. Lane-centering feels too weird for me, so I've tried it out but am uncomfortable using it.
I absolutely love my adaptive cruise control, I use it all the time. I have a hybrid and it does a much better job of keeping the engine from kicking in than I do. Thankfully with Honda I can use it everywhere not just highways. It's been my absolute favorite "new" thing to have in a car!
GM’s Super Cruise is absolutely great. It only works on highways though. I recently drove for 5 hours through three states without touching the gas, brake, or steering wheel once. Except the little nub on the steering wheel to adjust the set speed.
My wife's hybrid Rav4 has it and loves it. I wish my Prius had it. I'm glad Toyota apparently knows how to do it right.
Toyota tends to stick with proven tech and does it the right way, rather than pushing the envelope on half-assed implementations.
It's almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.
Buckle up folks, we're going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.
I don't believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations of intersections, traffic signs, special conditions like accidents, heavy Rain or fog, road closures or construction sites to get it right every time. Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.
This doesn't mean that AI will be better, because then you don't even have a source code to track down where it went wrong to correct it in future updates.
Exactly!
And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.
I'm inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I'm not selling anything, I'm allowed to say "if". Heh.
Since the first time I heard about FSD I’ve been wondering why Tesla (or others) doesn’t set up a system where drivers opt-in (no opt-in by default) to sending anonymized driving data to help train the model. The vast majority of the time, it’s probably modeling OK driving. At least no accidents. But the shitty driving and accidents are also useful as data about what to avoid.
Maybe they’re already doing this? But then I wonder why their FSD is getting shittier rather than improving. One would think with more driving data, good and bad examples, would only help.
I would be shocked to discover they're not already doing this.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/
That's exactly how they train the model, but every Tesla is opted in with, to my knowledge, no option to opt out.
Not enough paid humans sorting between which data is examples of good behaviour and which data is examples of bad behaviour. Not saying that is what is happening as we don't even know if there is data, but that would be the weakness in that plan when run the way it would be run if instituted by elon.
Good point.
Yeah. Current generation learning models can do impressive things in the hands of a skilled engineer, but Elon is leading a round of class warfare against skilled engineers right now.
Shareholders need to decide which they really want to bet on to win.
That's what they do except for the opt in part.
Sounds like it'd be nice if you had real control over the car's software, and you could roll it back.
This... also makes me a little more weary driving around Teslas in traffic.
wary=cautious
weary=tired
The stress of being wary for long periods of time will make you weary.
Good way for people to remember the difference! Even my wife had this one mixed up for a while, and she's very sensitive to confrontation. So I confronted her and she was angry for a bit but now she says it correctly.
I have a good friend who thinks teetotal means very drunk when it actually means no alcohol consumption whatsoever. I've brought it up to him a couple times and he reacts negatively. I haven't heard him say it since the second time.
I don't want to be a stick in the mud about these things, I just want people to improve their communication so they are respected and taken seriously.
If I see something like a there/their/they're mistake I just stop reading the comment. Probably unfair of me but I just disregard the person's opinion. And before anyone wants to tell me that not everyone speaks English as a first language, it's actually native speakers who make that mistake. People who learned English later in life generally know the difference.
The 2 that bother me are lose/loose and rogue/rouge.
Some of us Tesla drivers refuse to use any of their bullshit auto-driving software (I don’t even use lane assist anymore) because of bad experiences so hopefully most of them are just driving normally. Which I do admit may not spark much confidence given how terrible some drivers are.
Fully agree. The sort of good news for driving around them is that most of my frustrations come from it being overly cautious and almost getting rear-ended because it decided to stop for a green light or some other odd decision. It's rare to have it interact poorly with someone that is driving predictably. Like, cut it off without a signal and you have introduced something has not already accounted for. Driving alongside it on the highway, it sees you and knows where you are. But people are unpredictable and it only takes one mistake.
It works well on freeways. I still don't use it much on city streets except for the occasional shits and giggles. It has issues on non-divided highways and refuses to drive at my set speed limit.
Sounds like it still drives like a teenager!
Which of course is terrible since it should be improving over time.
This is worse than just driving yourself. I either need to be engaged in actively driving, or it really needs to be able to handle the task by itself.
It's why I find the lane-keeping feature in my vehicle to be useful, but lane-centering is just too weird for me to use.
I went to Texas for the eclipse. Made a big family vacation out of it...landed in Houston, rented a Mustang Mach-E, stayed there for a few days, drove to Austin for a few days, drove to Dallas for a few days (and for the eclipse, was at the Perot), then back to Houston for a few more days.
I say this because this was a lot of highway driving. More than I would usually do. And I absolutely loved one-pedal driving in the city, and the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping on the highway. I trusted it much, much more than in our 2019 Odyssey.
Anything more than that, I don't think the tech is really ready for. I wish it were. I know theoretically a computer could be a much, much better driver than humans...but it takes a non-trivial amount of intelligence to drive. We take it for granted, because a lot of it is practically instinctual to us, and almost entirely subconscious. It's an incredible amount of identification and complex decision making that goes into it if you actually break down the number of inputs you observe and variables you "know" the values of (such as stopping distance for various surface and weather conditions).
Ditto for my Volkswagon
Mu dude, ad fellow tesla driver, I fully concur!
I guess he's talking about other upgrades like radar sensors and all the stuff that people told him from the get go.
This article specifically mentioned only changes to the computer hardware, not the cameras.
My bad.
No they didn't...you can still activate regular adaptive cruise control without any of the FSD nonsense.
Yes, I said that....
No you don't need a second profile for that, you can just pull down once on the right stalk to enable regular adaptive CC with lane keep instead of twice for FSD. This second profile requirement is complete nonsense.
The "pull once for FSD" that removes the regular adaptive CC is a voluntary option in the settings, you can just disable that. If you have that enabled and don't like it, that's your fault not theirs.
You are not correct. There are several forum posts complaining about this issue. One of which is linked below.
You can disable it on your profile, but to switch back and forth you have to stop the car, place it in park, switch to FSD, accept the agreements, re-apply all your personal settings for traffic lights and such. At this point, the double or single pull activation greys out and you are stuck with single pull, all or nothing FSD. When the car screws up and you don't want FSD anymore, you must again navigate to the autopilot menu and disable it.
Or, like me, you can do this once in a safe location, save a second profile for FSD and switch immediately with two clicks from memory.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/fsd-12-5-4-no-longer-allows-double-click-to-start.334535/
Is there a reason you are so defensive?
I just find misinformation really annoying. Like, There's loads of reasons to hate on Tesla and Elon Musk, there is no need to make up stuff that isn't true, it just takes away from the actual lies and issues and drown out valid criticism.