Tesla 'Full Self-Driving' crashed through railroad gate seconds before train

LorenPechtel•about 18 hours ago

I suspect this comes down to the same problem we've seen in other forms--their system stinks at detecting that a stationary object is in the road.

AustinDev•about 17 hours ago

This is one thing LIDAR is pretty good at.

dzhiurgis•about 16 hours ago

Do people still believe this is the clutch?

I see way more crash compilations from Waymo than Tesla (despite having something like 300k FSD subscribers and over 1M permanent purchasers).

Sure LIDAR can fill like 5% of gaps, but let's not pretend it's the underlying AI model that does the grunt work. Which begs the question why Waymo hasn't scaled nationwide and why cybercab hasn't ramped up yet. Both aren't doing that amazing.

jerlam•about 14 hours ago

Probably selection effect. Tesla owners with FSD are often aware of its shortcomings and will not use it in situations where it wouldn't work, much less post clips of their mistakes online. People seem to agree it works fine on highways where cars travel in consistent patterns.

Waymos are in the exact opposite situation. They only run in busy cities so there are lots of bystanders to take a video of the situation, including the passenger, who has no incentive to hide the issue. Waymos can't revert to a driver in the car when things get tough; they call back to their monitoring center and come to a halt, which draws further attention and mockery.

You cannot assume that online algorithms are giving you a unbiased, neutral view of the world. They are specifically tuned against that.

fooblaster•about 15 hours ago

Tesla has not pulled the driver. It's just not comparable.

FireBeyond•about 13 hours ago

Tesla has always had a weirdness with trains. A couple of years ago in Pennsylvania, I watched, bemused, as a train rolled by at a crossing (we were driving manually). It looked like an erratic convoy of trucks, depending on whether there was a container on the car or not.

Tesla stans will say "well, just because it doesn't visualize the train properly doesn't mean it doesn't know it's a train", but shit like this today just bolsters that that's garbage.

I still want to see how Tesla does in my town where there's a fun intersection, where four lanes coming west hit a T. Drivers can turn north or south, but there's only two lanes on the north south road, so there's a sequence where the left two lanes can turn north, or south, and then the right two lanes can do it (i.e. staggered so drivers in the left two lanes turning north don't hit drivers in the right two turning south, and also don't have to try to merge 4 lanes into 2 while turning).

I guarantee FSD would absolutely shit the bed (sorry, I mean, "disengage" to preserve Elon's stats, I mean "your safety") on this intersection.

It's not ready for primetime. And it's still not close.

shibapuppie•about 10 hours ago

>Tesla has always had a weirdness with trains.

Yeah Tesla is allergic to trains, a-la Hyperloop.

qwerpy•about 16 hours ago

My gated community has a gate similar to a railroad gate. My FSD 12 HW3 model Y cannot be trusted at it. My FSD 14 HW4 Cybertruck does fine except if another car is in front of me. Then it tries to tailgate the car in. Strangely, the Y has the ultrasonic distance sensors and the cybertruck does not. The truck seems to be able to handle the gate detection but doesn’t understand the rule that only one car can go at a time.

That being said, if I were first in line at a railroad crossing I think I’d disengage FSD to be safe. If I were in a Waymo I’d be very nervous. LiDAR or not, an error can be catastrophic.

strogonoff•about 16 hours ago

If one claims that an error at a railroad gate can be catastrophic and therefore FSD should be disabled in that situation, how does one ethically reconcile that with enabling FSD on any regular street with pedestrians?

The principal difference that comes to mind is that in the latter case it would be catastrophic to others as opposed to yourself: you are the train in that situation, except pedestrians have no airbags and without the railroad gate equivalent they are not made aware of taking this risk.

qwerpy•about 15 hours ago

That’s a very interesting way to look at it! But my reasoning for continuing to do what I do is that FSD is bad at thin gates and much better at avoiding pedestrians. So it’s not an all or nothing thing for me.

Tesla 'Full Self-Driving' crashed through railroad gate seconds before train

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