Tesla FSD drives down railroad tracks, gets hit by train

[JM.]

Actually I never said any of those things.

Hilariously, I was starting to type that in a reply to you when the other message arrived. It's fun to see made up strawmen being kicked.

The problem of "what is FSD or AP" and then also what levels is a challenging one too. Even a couple of my neighbors with Teslas flip them around constantly and don't get it.

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[pamalabama]

I think the biggest issue with this thread and in general is people are shockingly ignorant about self driving.

They think because an automaker like rivian struggles with basic lane centering on highways that city driving is more dangerous.

Just because a system centers itself well on highways is no indication of safety. It has zero indication of whether a system is advanced or not. These are basic things that any system should do.

And if a system has some amount of phantom braking, while that can appear "dangerous" it means that the system is detecting more things.

Vulnerable road user detection is extremely important to enable driving on city streets. City streets driving appears very complex compared to highways, but it only appears that way because most ADAS systems are treating highways like a simple problem and not something that is safety critical.

Take the best ADAS system from BMW, Mercedes, etc. Use it in an unsupervised way and you'll end up dead. Do the same in a tesla. You won't die. Tesla won't kill you. If you were to use the old navigate on autopilot product (before they switched to FSD on highways) then it would be more likely.

That's why people see 4 hours of uninterrupted driving in manhattan , NYC (some of the hardest driving in America) and think it's fake. Even when it's pouring rain outside. It's because tesla has very advanced vulnerable road user detection and it's easy to drive with lots of cars around.

What is hard for tesla (by comparison) is understanding very specific road rules which are not an issue in a place like NYC. NYC roads are also probably mapped really well.

Tesla FSD doesn't drive like a teenage driver. It drives like an advanced professional driver that does not understand how to read some road signs like flashing school zones. It is also being fed incorrect maps of city streets and told wrong directions about where to travel. Imagine driving your rivian now but every place you go has to be done 100% through the in-car navigation and you have to follow every direction it gives you.

 

[COdogman]

You refuse to accept only 2 people died from FSD. And FSD is not killing people. 1 of those deaths was not the fault of FSD.

You refuse to accept that a website called tesladeaths.com is not here to make tesla look good. They are just doing the honest thing and independently verifying every death. Instead of just posting ignorant BS.

you started a thread where tesla turned onto a railroad track. Something that there is almost zero chance FSD would do in the context of where that road is located. Because to you it sounds good.

You are just acting ignorant out of defensiveness because Rivian has the worst ADAS that money can buy. Dangerous too.

And that Donald Stanfield guy is remarkably ignorant about how much more dangerous an ADAS system is at highway speeds vs. city driving. City driving is only dangerous to the average automaker because they do not have the advanced vulnerable road user detection that tesla has. If you have that, then city driving is infinitely safer

I didn’t start the thread, but thank you for giving me credit for doing so.

The rest of your nonsense is designed to deflect away from the fact that you cannot prove it is as safe as you and Tesla claim. And it doesn’t bother you even a little bit that you cannot prove that point. Tesla has not released any data that could support that claim so you are attempting to push this 3rd party website as a substitute…

We have discussed this many times. We don’t know how many deaths have actually been attributed to FSD. We don’t know how many injuries have been caused by FSD. And we don’t know how many other errors it makes during all those miles you brag about. So you simply cannot truthfully say it is safe or safer than human drivers.

I’ve had enough of your comedy for one day

 

[COdogman]

Hilariously, I was starting to type that in a reply to you when the other message arrived. It's fun to see made up strawmen being kicked.

The problem of "what is FSD or AP" and then also what levels is a challenging one too. Even a couple of my neighbors with Teslas flip them around constantly and don't get it.

Yeah, I guess Tesla is just confused so they combined them on their “safety report”

 

[Donald Stanfield]

Yeah, I guess Tesla is just confused so they combined them on their “safety report”

Not only did Tesla combine them, but they only count accidents where the airbag deployed which is only 18% of total accidents.

 

[pamalabama]

Not only did Tesla combine them, but they only count accidents where the airbag deployed which is only 18% of total accidents.

Because a lot of accidents are at low speed with no injury. I had a car totaled because someone backed up into it on the side of the road. At probably 10mph

Airbag deployments are the main accidents that cause injury. Tesla is looking at safety at highway speeds. most accidents on highways are airbag deployments

In practice, this correlates to nearly any crash at about 12 mph (20 kph) or above, depending on the crash forces generated.

Straight from the tesla website. As far as I am concerned that's pretty much any reasonable crash.

 

[COdogman]

Not only did Tesla combine them, but they only count accidents where the airbag deployed which is only 18% of total accidents.

Yep. And as we know, Tesla has the highest fatal crash rate of all brands. Weird

 

[Donald Stanfield]

Yep. And as we know, Tesla has the highest fatal crash rate of all brands. Weird

Careful, pointing things like that out just show how “anti technology” you are.

 

[pamalabama]

Yep. And as we know, Tesla has the highest fatal crash rate of all brands. Weird

Except they literally don't. It's an ignorant study.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/11/tesla-fatality-rates/

 

[captainjp]

FSD is a cute parlor trick. It has no real value to the average driver. What’s the point of FSD, if you have to supervise It the whole time? I liken it to teaching my teenage sons how to drive. Most of the time they do the right thing, but every once in awhile they’ll fuck up. The whole time, I’m sitting there, on edge SUPERVISING their driving. How is that useful?
Seems like the only thing that’s really come out of FSD is shitty YouTube videos showing off the capabilities. That and the promise of robot taxis. What use is that to me? The safety systems that Tesla incorporates as assistance is useful while driving, but I’m not confident enough in the system to let it run the show.

 

[pamalabama]

FSD is a cute parlor trick. It has no real value to the average driver. What’s the point of FSD, if you have to supervise It the whole time? I liken it to teaching my teenage sons how to drive. Most of the time they do the right thing, but every once in awhile they’ll fuck up. The whole time, I’m sitting there, on edge SUPERVISING their driving. How is that useful?
Seems like the only thing that’s really come out of FSD is shitty YouTube videos showing off the capabilities. That and the promise of robot taxis. What use is that to me? The safety systems that Tesla incorporates as assistance is useful while driving, but I’m not confident enough in the system to let it run the show.

Because FSD doesn't make mistakes anymore that cause it to hit curbs, cars, pedestrians, etc.

FSD doesn't actually fuck up in ways that are not obvious. For example, FSD does not slow down for a school zone predictably and speed up at the end. It also does not always stop for a school bus.

Tesla used most of the AI parameters to enable fundamentally safe driving so you don't have to be on edge while using it.

Early versions had more problems and the system was not useful. Now it works well.

The only things I supervise these days are looking out for potholes

 

[captainjp]

Because FSD doesn't make mistakes anymore that cause it to hit curbs, cars, pedestrians, etc.

FSD doesn't actually fuck up in ways that are not obvious. For example, FSD does not slow down for a school zone predictably and speed up at the end. It also does not always stop for a school bus.

Tesla used most of the AI parameters to enable fundamentally safe driving so you don't have to be on edge while using it.

Early versions had more problems and the system was not useful. Now it works well.

The only things I supervise these days are looking out for potholes

Having school-aged children, your examples are particularly troubling to me. I would say that addressing school buses and zones should have much higher priority than avoiding curb rash.

You may be aware that during these scenarios one must be extra vigilant to supervise the system, but others may not be. You’ve only learned by experience, I assume. God forbid a child gets run over by a vehicle on FSD. Sure, it’s a learning experience, but at the ultimate cost. Is there a warning to drivers that the vehicle won’t stop for buses or slow down in school zones? Probably not.
I understand your fanaticism for the system, but again I don’t find it very useful to me, nor do I have confidence in the system to just allow it to drive me around. If I’m going to supervise it, I may as well be driving. Especially on the streets of NYC.

 

[SoCal Rob]

I think part of the problem is that we’re talking about “FSD” at all. Tesla officially calls it Full Self-Driving (Supervised) which makes me think that Tesla is still trying to sell this system as Full Self-Driving, which it isn’t. If Tesla as a company were forthright and honest, they’d call the product Supervised Full Self-Driving and we’d refer to it as SFSD.

Instead, Tesla makes what’s arguably the most important part of the product name, Supervised, a parenthetical at the end rather than the first word people see in the name. I say it’s the most important part of the name because drivers who ignore the Supervised part are taking a significant risk. Tesla seems to be tacitly condoning this risky behavior by deemphasizing the word Supervised, probably as much as they can legally. There seems to be a long-standing problem with the Tesla corporate culture regarding what they’re selling as ADAS versus what it actually does.

 

[COdogman]

Test Shows FSD Ignoring School Bus Stop Signs and Lights, Runs Over Child-Size Mannequin

https://dawnproject.com/the-dawn-pr...y-tests-of-tesla-full-self-driving-in-austin/

The Dawn Project, in partnership with Tesla Takedown and ResistAustin, demonstrated that the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving, version 13.2.9, will still run down a child crossing the road while illegally blowing past a stopped school bus with its red lights flashing and stop sign extended.
/QUOTE]

 

[Engi_Nerd]

Fun to watch armchair experts endlessly whip themselves up with Tesla schadenfreude. If you are not using FSD on HW4 on a daily basis, then you have no idea what you're talking about and are not adding anything useful to the discourse.

As has been mentioned by several people here, all ADAS is imperfect, which makes all ADAS dangerous. I rented a brand new XC60 on vacation last month and just trying to use basic lane-keeping was incredibly scary. In a few hours of driving, it misunderstood splitting lanes several times and the car darted across the road, resulting in unsafe oversteer. I have also had several rentals where I experienced dangerous (and scary) mis-application of radar-based automated emergency braking. I certainly remember early days of R1 where even their geo-fenced lane-keeping was sporadically diving for concrete barriers. Why then are these systems so widespread? Because humans are god-awful at driving and even imperfect systems will not be texting/ browsing / sleep-deprived/ old / eating / applying makeup / checking on their kids / dog on their lap / etc. You're an awesome, infallible driver? Congrats! Most people are not. A texting medical cab driver nearly killed me wife by running a red. Our "super unsafe" Tesla is the reason she's not dead. While charging last year we watched a teenage driver pull out in front of a father of five on a motorcycle. We administered CPR for 20 minutes, but he did not make it. I personally know more than a dozen people who have been in serious, life-altering car accidents and half a dozen who have been injured by cars while riding their bicycle. Our roads are a dangerous hellscape and are only getting worse due to expanding vehicles and shrinking attention spans.

It is naive & child-like to think is going to be some magic ADAS system that will pop out fully formed, able to deal with absolutely every edge case. That is not how grownups make hard things happen. These systems are going to have to improve the same way that air travel did. Accident-->Investigate-->Learn-->Improve-->Repeat. Not comfortable with that? Don't use them! But also don't sit here and pretend like everything is grand and Tesla is out there being a public menace. Their approach may not be perfect, but it's already probably safer than a substantial portion of drivers and it's also the only one that is scalable enough for it to benefit the public at large.

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