If online dashcam videos have taught me one thing, it's that some drivers will do almost anything to avoid an accident, other than fully depressing their brake pedal while traveling in a straight line.
Selection bias? Dashcam videos showing normal braking and the clear, preemptive avoidance of an accident would be the least uploaded/promoted and watched?
A car in the back also, if you brake, you very much take the risk of getting hit by the car in the back because these idiots are pushing in your ass :/
It's possible he didn't see the train in time to fully stop.
Braking is important but steering to avoid something is probably the better option in most cases. It takes some distance to stop a fast traveling, heavy vehicle.
Imagine seeing an accident happen directly in front of you on the highway. You better be able to steer in time cause you sure aren't stopping before hitting anything.
This is also the reason to try and have both hands on the steering wheel all of the time, versus a relaxed one hand at 12 o'clock lounge while doing 70+ mph.
At least for my elderly brain - in low-visibility conditions, the red flashing lights of an "active" railroad crossing signal are far more distinctive and attention-grabbing than the very thin, kinda-fog-colored gates.
I believe it to be more common in the EU to have dangly bits (metal fencing?) that hangs from the barrier to the floor. when the barrier lifts up they 'fold' vertical. This presents a proper barrier (that stops kids, cyclists, pedestrians from getting under the barrier when deployed), the 'struts' are painted red and white so they're very visible.
*can't speak for absolutely everywhere, but my ride to work there are two sets of tracks I pass that have barriers that are designed to stop the stupid. Oh, I guess self-driving vehicles, too, now.
watch the video, a person can easily see the train, gate and lights before they disengage. Also a person would have heard the crossing noises, and the train horn.
From what we see in the video the driver was paying attention: he hit the brakes and turned the car to avoid hitting the train.
Now of course he did do it "too late" to avoid any collision, but at what point are we expecting an attentive human driver to realise that their self-driving care has decided not to stop at an oncoming train and make the split-second decision to intervene?
If we expect drivers to mistrust their allegedly self-driving vehicles to the point that they must be ready to anticipate the car failing to react to an oncoming obstacle and immediately intervene, then this is not self-driving technology — it is human driving with extra steps.
>If we expect drivers to mistrust their allegedly self-driving vehicles to the point that they must be ready to anticipate the car failing to react to an oncoming obstacle and immediately intervene, then this is not self-driving technology — it is human driving with extra steps.
Well, it is not self driving. Anyone who uses FSD Beta is beta-testing it and should be paying the same amount of attention as if they were driving themselves. It is human driving with extra steps.
> Well, it is not self driving. Anyone who uses FSD Beta is beta-testing it and should be paying the same amount of attention as if they were driving themselves.
Putting aside that the initials "FSD" stand for "Full Self-Driving", the level of attention of ordinary human driving is not enough. If that is the case, FSD Beta is accidents waiting to happen and should be removed from public roads.
Human driving goes beyond the factual realisation that there is a train crossing the road and the driver reasoning that they must push the brake. Rather, it is the driver having a constant feedback loop of information followed by intuitive reactions as to the action to take. Case in point, the cliché of having driven all they way from home to work and vice-versa and realising that one cannot remember the journey, even though the driver paid full attention to all rules and reacted appropriately to each obstacle. An attentive driver may even brake their vehicle when an object has flown into vision before having actually processed what the object was.
Compare that to the type of attention that would be necessary for "FSD Beta". The speed at which the car is travelling is disconnected from any immediate feedback loop in the driver's nervous system. The driver sees an obstacle in the road, one of many over the past few weeks which required no intervention given that the car reacted appropriately. Here is another obstacle. Has the car seen this one? If not, will the car see it soon? Will it react appropriately in time? Should the driver intervene now? That requires much greater attention and decision making than the intuitive process of human driving, all the more so considering that the majority of the time the occupant of the driver's seat in the "FSD" car is becoming accustomed that there's no need to intervene.
> the level of attention of ordinary human driving is not enough. If that is the case, FSD Beta is accidents waiting to happen and should be removed from public roads.
Respectfully, that's the point. People have been stating this clearly and unambiguously for years. People are not designed for that kind of split-second monitoring for hours on-end.
I imagine driving a self driving car is like watching someone else driving as a passenger:
"oh look, a railroad crossing with a train crossing"
"we're getting close to the crossing, surely he noticed the train"
"why aren't we slowing down? oh crap he falls asleep at the wheel"
*grab the wheel and steer off the road*
As long as self driving cars require constant supervision, I think this kind of accidents will keep happening. Drivers will have reduced reaction time when they're not actively driving the car.
that's not the point. Commenter said a human couldn't handle fog/snow either, which, in this case, is objectively false. FSD failed when human vision and hearing did not. Maybe we need more then cameras afterall?
Radar would probably not, in this case. At the point where it crossed the road the train was not moving toward or away from the car, so radar would have to filter it out as a stationary object (stationary objects have to be aggressively filtered with radar to avoid false positives from metal signs or stopped cars near the road). Even if it somehow was detected as a moving object, sometimes trains stop in crossings, at which point it would definitely be a stationary object and radar would be useless.
You are correct. The point is radar in cars has really bad angular resolution so it can't distinguish stuff that's directly in front of you (like a stopped train on a crossing) from stuff that's just to the side (like signs). Since both signals appear identical to the radar, and you don't want your car to emergency brake every time you go past a sign, cars filter basically ignore stationary objects detected by radar.
That isn't what you want, but it's a limit of current commercially viable radar technology.
Fog (small water droplets suspended in air) is transparent to light but it can reflect it if
the wavelength of light is smaller than the water droplet diameter. Since there are so many droplets it scatters light making lidar useless.
The usual diameter of fog droplets is in the micrometer range, but is highly variable.
So microwave/milimeterwave lidar could theoretically work.
I thought it must be one of those situations where the train was around the corner and even most humans wouldn't see it unless they stopped and listened like they're supposed to. Then I watched the video. I would have missed it at that speed in the fog, but I wouldn't drive that fast in the fog.
The signal is clear enough at a safe speed, but there wasn't much time to react zooming around inside a cloud.
Really? I wouldn't have missed. There was plenty of time for the car to stop based on the video I saw. It looks like 4 seconds of visibility before the driver had to turn the car. It didn't seem like the car was going that fast. There's no way a normal human being paying attention wouldn't be able to get the car to a full stop in that 4 seconds.
From what I understand, Tesla's FSD only uses vision to drive. But we, as humans, use all of our senses to drive. We use vision, smell, sound, as well reasoning and historical knowledge.
If I saw flashing lights in a fog, I would slow down no matter what. I might have heard some sounds, however faint, from the train moving. I would have reasoned that I should always drive slow in the fog, particularly near an area where there are train tracks. I might have sensed that we are driving in train track territory because I saw some tracks around here in the past or I have come across knowledge about this area before that I remembered. Tesla's FSD uses non of these senses.
Flashing light means you have to stop according to the official rules (at least where I am from). That’s because trains can go much faster than what people think and can hit you out of nowhere.
The point is that we use all our senses - however minor.
If I see a crashed oil truck and there is a strong gasoline smell, I might drive as fast as possible out of the way in case it explodes or catches fire. If I smell something weird coming from the car's components, I might stop and not drive. If I smell a cow poop (such as near UC Davis), I might ready by brain for the tiny chance that a cow might escape the fence into the road.
We don't just use pure vision like FSD. If FSD is only vision, then it should make up for the other senses such as sound, smell, and human reasoning with things that humans don't have such as rador/lidar.
> Doty said the car nearly hit a moving train in November after it approached some tracks after a sharp turn.
> He said that the Tesla did not slow down but that he was able to stop, still hitting the crossbar and damaging his windshield.
So this guy has been in a similar position before and still let the car barrel towards the train hoping it would stop this time? I don’t buy his story.
The fog is an interesting situation too, as non-vision technologies would struggle here too.
Overlooking the train is one thing, but overlooking the red flashing lights at the railway crossing that were clearly visible in the video is another thing entirely...
But isn't Elon telling the story that it improves overtime from month to month. So you may would have expected that it have learned since November, which is more than 3 month in the past.
Automotive radars struggle to detect objects which are not moving relative to the ground in the range direction. Such detections must be filtered aggressively to avoid false positives from stationary objects such as metal signs near or above the road.
At the point where it crossed the road the train was moving sideways relative to the car. In the range direction it was close to stationary relative to the ground (and the crossing arm was entirely stationary, of course). So I think radar would be unlikely to save this case. If the radar was looking to the side, so it could see the train cars approaching at high speed and predict that they would enter the road, then maybe. But this seems like it would also potentially have a lot of false positives e.g. at overpasses. Perhaps for that reason, I believe automotive radars like the ones Teslas used to have generally only point toward the front. And if the train had been stopped in the crossing, as they sometimes are, the radar would be unhelpful no matter where it was pointed.
Well, depending on the wavelength used and the MFP of the scattering elements (rain, fog droplets in this case) they do degrade a bit, but it'd be very unlikely to have a huge effect under 300 m.
We know empirically that having humans drive cars results in many accidents, injuries, and deaths. We’ve tried many ways to solve this problem without success, and it seems reasonable to conclude that we cannot make human driving safe.
It’s still early days for autonomous driving and it clearly isn’t there yet. But perhaps one day it will be. We won’t know unless we keep trying.
But what we do know – with an extremely high degree of confidence – is that “just drive the car yourself” has a very large death toll. That’s not the solution to road safety you seem to think it is. The status quo is very dangerous.
Well define "safe". If we compare the US to the UK for example, it's considerably safer driving in the UK. Surely investment in some level of change that is causal on that level will result in more lives being saved than introducing a whole new technology arena with unknown risks?
Having driven in both places, the driving standards in the US are much much worse. Perhaps we should concentrate on that first? And because not everyone will be able to afford a self-driving car utopia, perhaps it will have a greater effect.
As always the technology industry perhaps is using this justification to solve the wrong end of the problem.
Why are you repeatedly presenting this as a choice? Once again, you don’t need to choose between them. It doesn’t matter which has the biggest impact. Do both.
What we can be sure of is that your solution cannot make human driving safe. We’ve been trying for a long time and haven’t come close to solving it.
There is another difference. One is overlooked by professionals. The other one is used by consumers with no knowledge and just trust on what was sold to them.
That is the reason why other OEMs test such things with trained professionals before it is released to the general public.
It seems owners often post these videos to create Internet outrage in the hope Tesla will cave and pay for their totaled car. Enabling FSD in such bad weather conditions and then not being able to hit the brakes on time is mainly the fault of the operator. In the video they had at least 4 seconds to react to the situation, but for some reason they let the car speed ahead merrily.
Why did FSD enable itself in such bad weather conditions? Why did the FSD not hit the breaks on time, when the closed railway crossing and the train are clearly visible?
Remember in the last earnings call Elon said that the latest version of FSD is almost ready for actual autonomous operation. I don't think this is the case.
I don't say the FSD is working well, I just find it absurd how people use this technology in practice. This person knew the system had malfunctioned at the same spot before, yet they choose to enable it again under such bad conditions and then don't pay enough attention to intervene in time? Almost like the guy whose Tesla drove into a lane divider who also chose to ignore that and play on his phone even after the car had the exact same problem at the same spot multiple times. It just seems extremely reckless to me, that person would've died for sure if his car had gone under the freight train.
> This person knew the system had malfunctioned at the same spot before, yet they choose to enable it again
they roll out new versions regularly, that's a valid excuse to try it again on a new version at "something it failed at previously". Funny how everyone assumes OTA updates will always fix problems, and never create more.
> Remember in the last earnings call Elon said that the latest version of FSD is almost ready for actual autonomous operation. I don't think this is the case.
Doesn’t look like the car was totalled or even damaged too much but I could be wrong. However I appreciate these videos spreading around so Tesla owners understand relying on these features is troubling and should always pay attention.
Yeah, don’t push it on the driver. Push it on such a reckless company marketing their smart vacuum cleaner logic as FSD, and on the government for allowing such cars on the roads.
Driving with an error-prone automated system in such conditions while knowing the system already failed once at the exact same spot before is absolutely reckless, in my opinion. Marketing doesn't absolve you from using your brain. I really don't care about Tesla BTW and I don't like their cars either, I just find it weird that one wouldn't see any fault with the driver here...
Yeah, also drunk driving, typing on your phone, etc. It’s almost like we can’t just trust our fellow humans, especially not on whether some automated black-box technology that not even its creators can reason about, is safe. That would be the job of governments and regulators.
Yeah, for that reason I think true self driving will require lidar. You just need a system to tell you for certain that there is something in your way.
Raw LIDAR, sure - there are data filters that can help reduce the bounce from water aerosols, and probably near light frequencies less affected by water.
But to your point any quasi autonomous driving assistance should have sanity chacking to fall back | downgrade spped and control and warn operators when sensors no longer work as expected.
Just as a good human driver should know when to slow down | pull over in poor conditions.
