Tesla coast-to-coast FSD crashes after 60 miles

In America, you fail the second you apologize or take accountability. Ignoring criticism and deflecting all the time gets you further, as it is part of the game. Unfortunately, this is just an accepted social science-y thing at this point. It is a very much cultural thing of the past couple of decades.

My biggest criticism of Elon is that he supports neo-nazis

> when you realize that your predictions are going to be wrong, you should have the basic decency to update people

Not to get too political, but the last I've heard of Elon Musk is that he was speaking to/mobilizing right wing extremists at a big protest in London. I am also pretty sure he has been trying to do similar things in other European nations (for whatever reason).

It seems to me that it is a bit late to plead for "basic decency" at this moment.

But at the same time let me ask you, what has he got to lose? What financial or reputational risk is he taking by not taking any accountability?

He lies relentlessly even to customers who paid for the product.

I know because I’m one of them. FSD paid in full almost seven years ago, still does absolutely nothing in Europe. A five-year-old would do a better job at driving because the Tesla can’t even see speed limit signs correctly.

Tesla takes no responsibility for their misleading marketing and years of lies. Most recently Musk promised in early 2025 that these old cars would get a hardware update that will finally enable the paid-for FSD (as if…) The company itself pretends to know nothing about this latest promise made by its CEO.

It’s insane that a business with a trillion-dollar market cap operates like this. It seems to be more of a cult than a real company.

Interestingly with SpaceX he is much more willing to change plans. With SpaceX he and SpaceX seem to be searching for the right solution.

For self driving, he simply decided X is right and talked about exponentials and no matter how many time it fails, there is no reflection what so ever.

He's a psychopath, in the sense he doesn't feel normal emotions like remorse and empathy. He will lie to your face to get you to buy his product and when it fails to deliver on promises he will lie again.

Well, I have to admit that your friend has a point. Humans are bad at reacting quickly and correctly to unexpected situations, and some debris large enough to damage your car showing up from out of nowhere after several hours of boring driving along a largely straight highway with little traffic is definitely one of these situations. But a self-driving system worth its salt should always be alert, scanning the road ahead, able to identify dangerous debris, and react accordingly. So, different pair of shoes...

When the self-driving car killed a pedestrian several years ago, the initial sentiment on this site for the first few hours was essentially "those dastardly pedestrians, darting into traffic at the last second, how are you supposed to avoid them?" It took several hours for enough information to percolate through to make people realize that the pedestrian had been slowly and quite visibly crossing the road and the self-driving car (nor the safety driver) never did a thing to react to it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that video footage is much lower quality than what we can see with our human eyeballs. At no point in the video can I clearly identify what the debris is, but it's clearly evident that the humans in the car can, because they're clearly reacting to it seconds before it's even visible to us in the dash-cam-quality footage. I will freely accept that many drivers are in fact bad drivers, but a carcass (I think?) on a lane visible for >10 seconds away is something that anyone who can't avoid needs to have their license revoked.

I don't love Tesla (though I would like an electric car). I don't think it's unlikely that someone driving could have hit that or caused an even worse accident trying to avoid it.

However, I'm sure a human driver in the loop would have reacted. The driver sitting there watching a machine do it's thing 99% of the time and being expected to step in to save that situation though is a horrific misreading of human nature.

Obviously, in this particular case the humans wouldn't be hitting that. The people in the video have clearly seen the object, but they didn't want to react because that would have ruined their video.

Even if they did not understand what it is, in the real world when you see something on the road you slow down or do a maneuver to avoid it, no matter if it is a harmless peace of cloth or something dangerous like this. People are very good at telling if something is off, you can see it in the video.

It's their standard go-to excuse. "I would have done that too" really says more about them as drivers than anything else.

Those humans saw the debris. What happens next when a human is actively at the wheel is that the driver should look at all mirrors, decide whether to change lane or brake, execute. Or anything else that could lead to a movie like multiple car accident. Hitting the debris is the least dangerous line of conduct if there are cars all around. That looked like an empty road but who knows.

By the way, playing a lot of racing videogames is a great training for dealing with that sort of stuff, except maybe getting good at mirrors. I've been in a few dangerous situations and they were only the 10th thousand averted crash. Nothing to think, only reflexes.

Did you friend make any mention that the passenger saw it hundreds of feet away and even leaned in as they headed directly towards it? The driver also recognized it and grabbed the wheel as if to say "brace for impact!".

I wouldn't. And I'm not that great a driver. The Tesla should be significantly better than me.

I use autopilot for local driving (city - suburbs) and I pay for FSD when on long road trips (>300 miles). You are correct, they are completely different things so one doesn’t correlate to the other one.

I just got back from a trip to the USA where I spent about five days driving around Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin and the number of shredded truck tires on the highways was flabbergasting.

From what I understand, in the USA when a truck tire wears down they put a new layer of tread on it. But it doesn't seem to work very well as it eventually peels off.

I'm from Norway, and visited a buddy in Florida back in the early 2000s. It was my first time to the US.

I recall I was completely flabbergasted by all the cars just ditched along the highway. There were lots of them, just off the road into the grass on the side or whatever.

I asked my buddy about it and he said it was usually tires, as it was cheaper to buy another car than get new tires... Well that didn't help my blown mind one bit.

Mind you, on the way to his house I passed a Kia dealer which literally had a huge "buy one car - get one free" sign outside...

It depends where in the US you drive. It’s a big country with independent state governments. It’s like saying I was driving in Romania and I was shocked by how bad European highways are. I lived in Texas and the stuff I saw on the highway was crazy, vacuum cleaners, decorated Christmas trees and refrigerators. Most parts of the country interstate and highway systems are pretty clean.

> Nobody is cleaning that?

In the linked video highway patrol comes out to remove the debris just a few minutes after they hit it. (highway patrol had been called out prior them hitting it)

It's been years since I've seen anything you couldn't drive over that wasn't in the travel lane.

Around here anything big enough to matter gets reported, the cops fling it to the side of the road and it gets picked up on a schedule because they always pick things up a few weeks before they mow (presumably because hitting garbage isn't great for the mowers).

It is clearly designed to test the self driving...

Why are Dutch or Swiss highways so much more pristine than French and German ones?

Have you compared distances?

Yes, people call it in and cops clean it up. We just have a lot of roads and people that poorly packed stuff in trucks

> That's kind of irrelevant, this technology is meant to be safer and held to a higher standard

I don't think that is the case. We will judge FSD whether you make more or less accidents than humans, not necessarily in the same situations. The computer is allowed to make mistakes that a human wouldn't, if in reverse the computer makes a lot less mistakes in situations where humans would.

Given that >90% of accidents are easily avoidable (speeding, not keeping enough safety distance, drunk/tired driving, distraction due to smartphone usages) I think we will see FSD be safer on average very quickly.

Indeed... You can see the driver reaching for the wheel, presumably he saw it coming, and would have hit the breaks. He left the car to do its thing thinking it knows better than him... maybe.

A human would not have hit that, the two guys see it coming from a long time and would have stopped or changed lanes like.

The debris is pretty close to the color of the road. Seems like a good case for radar/lidar ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's because anecdotal experience means very little. In ~2021, these vehicles could almost never make it from A to B without a safety-critical intervention.

That they can today doesn't mean they can do the same route 10,000 times without a safety-critical intervention. In fact, public tracking indicates Tesla's numbers are MUCH lower than that.

> Did they have traffic tailgating?

No. If you continue to watch the video after the collision, it's clear that there was no traffic tailgating. They even slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. No other cars.

When they first released V13, the highway stack was still the old C++ code. It wasn't until another four or five months that they switched it to a neural network. It doesn't seem like they've put much focus on it since then.

Even with traffic tailgating it would need to brake or go to then right. Your comment sounds like a Tesla ad written by someone from Tesla or a heavy, heavy fan boy.

Solar roofs, Dojo, Hyperloop, robotaxi, roadster, semi, mission around the Moon, man on Mars by 2020, it’s all coming guys he promised!

If it's not your money does it matter? I don't think it's fair to say he doesn't deliver anything e.g. he did cars, rockets, and now AI (the rate X are building out training capacity is genuinely astonishing) at the same time.

Easy problem to solve. We just need to train an AI image classifier with highly annotated images of every single possible combination of road debris in every single country in the entire world. Shouldn't take longer than a month, right team? /s