Comment by atonse
4 days ago
Tesla's already solved this - their vision model does this phenomenally well.
And they've demonstrated adding a sidecar LLM to it as well, mostly for these kinds of "read these 3 street signs, what should i do next?" sort of situations.
The same Tesla that pulled radar to go vision only and a person was killed because the vision model didn't recognize a truck? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36680043
Not sure that counts as phenomenally well.
That incident and article is from ten years ago.
From this year https://www.autoweek.com/news/a70794762/nhtsa-escalates-prob...
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This is from ten years ago. Tesla's vision only FSD is extremely good now. It has been for at least 18 months or longer.
Only for 2024 or maybe late 2023 cars and later (HW4). The older the car is the worse the FSD software is because the old hardware can't run the latest software.
Totally solved: https://electrek.co/2026/09/15/tesla-four-fatal-driver-assis...
Anecdotes. Only accident rate per mile driven (compared to human drivers' rate) is a relevant comparison. I don't think that any self-driving system will ever be absolutely perfect (all such complex non-linear systems are to some degree probabilistic and chaotic), but as long as the accident rate is lower than the human accident rate, I would consider it solved.
It's Lego mindstorm logic level to drive a car on the motorway, so per mile is an absolutely insanely bad metric in general.
Per mile inside cities or other difficult scenarios are what may get close to an actually meaningful metric. That's why Tesla is very misleading and waymo is much more legit.
Cute, but no. Can't compare a self-driving system that's only willing to work in a subset of conditions humans drive in, to humans driving in all those conditions.
> Only accident rate per mile driven (compared to human drivers' rate) is a relevant comparison
This is such an insane take I see all the time from self-driving boosters
If a self driving car glitches out and crashes in some edge case pathological scenario we don't just accept that as totally fine because its hidden under big statistics
The reason why a crash happened does matter, its not just about aggregate statistics
As a thought experiment if I have a perfect self driving system but I add some code that purposefully crashes 1 in 10 million rides are you ok riding in it since the aggregate statistics look good?
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You added "totally" - as others have said, I don't know if anyone will claim a perfect system with no fatalities, enough stats show that it is already much safer than human drivers.
And the true third party validation is that insurance companies are starting to offer lower premiums the more you use FSD. So their risk models are showing enough improvement that they're putting their money where their mouths are.
The idea that Tesla's FSD is not ready for the mainstream is quite outdated, given that tons of Tesla owners are already using it daily, not just your early adopter types.
Note that the article has no info on whether it's FSD or Autopilot and whether they contributed to the fatal crashes. "Verified engaged" means ADAS was active at some point in the interval from T-30s to the end of the accident. The total number of collisions is not normalized by the miles driven.
It also has no info on what hardware+software version was in use. The older cars are significantly less capable but there are far more of them on the road.
$o $olved