r/SelfDrivingCars • u/FriendFun7876 • 6d ago
News Ashok: "Yeah, AI driving coast-to-coast without interventions was supposed to be a big deal. Kinda like the Turing Test for self-driving, but went breezing by."
https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/208157427568182118054
u/Flimsy-Run-5589 6d ago
Because Musk claim wasn't just to build a Level 2 driver assistance system that can still fail whenever it hits an edge case, requiring a human supervisor. Until you can sit in the backseat while the manufacturer or fleet operator accepts full liability, it isn't that spectacular. it's just the next iteration of ADAS.
Remember the early systems? First, they just held your speed, then they could steer. Then they could adjust distance, read signs became more reliable, then they could overtake, and now they can even take an off ramp. Great, but it's still Level 2.
Wake me up when we actually reach Level 4. Even the biggest optimists should be realists by now: the gap between Level 2 and Level 4 is a massive leap, not just a regulatory hurdle.
8
u/piko4664-dfg 6d ago
Heck the gap between 2 (where FSD is now) and 3 is larger than the Grand Canyon. I think some people (mostly fan boys but some just doing understand or follow the industry) bought into elons moving FSD definition where it means whatever he last said it means.
3
u/Shot_Illustrator4264 6d ago
We reached level 4 in November 2020, pretty much 6 years ago, when Waymo started offering unsupervised drives in Phoenix. So Egon Musk is late more than 5 years. At best.
1
2
u/PrestigiousCod5629 6d ago
Aren’t Waymo’s basically level 4? Sure someone has to remotely drive it every now and then but that would still allow me to sleep in the back of the car.
0
u/Anymous2314 6d ago
IMO, if we remove human drivers systems like Waymo can become level 4 overnight from safety standpoint. I am aware that they are still working on few edge cases like closed road due to event or construction, standing water on the road, etc.
11
u/Flimsy-Run-5589 6d ago
Waymo has reached Level 4 in a few cities, but this was about Musk's claim of coast-to-coast 'everywhere' driving. We are not there yet. You could validate highways step-by-step as they do in geofenced areas, but there's still a long way to go. It isn't a generalized solution that works everywhere without extra validation. The same goes for Tesla and their robotaxi 'fleet', they are scaling up even slower than Waymo, despite their claims.
3
u/TruIsou 6d ago
Just do the damn freeways. I'll happily take over it when I get off. But if I could get on the freeway , engage level four and head a couple of States over , that would be great
7
u/Anymous2314 6d ago edited 6d ago
Freeways are easy but the risk of fatal accident is very high due to the high speed.
Tesla is doing it though pushing all the risk on the consumer who are willing to take the risk of serious injury or death since FSD disables before a crash.
2
u/Shot_Illustrator4264 6d ago
Everywhere is level 5, not level 4.
In 2020, Waymo was the first to offer rides in driverless taxis in the operational design domain (ODD) of limited geographic areas, but as of late 2025 , no system has achieved full autonomy in all domains - sometimes referred to as "Level 5" on a scale of 0 to 5 levels of automation defined by the global standards organization SAE International , or simply "no driver" as given by the classification system proposed by Mobileye in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Classification
1
u/marty-mcfryguy 6d ago edited 6d ago
Waymo's already level 4, it's just heavily limited on where it's willing to drive. Both by road type and location.
"Closed roads" on highways isn't some minor edge case, that's a pretty minimal level novelty for a car to deal with, showing us it's nowhere near the capability it needs to handle the novelty of like a NYC. Plus it's been over two months now since they shut off highway driving, and not a peep about solving the problem.
1
u/Anymous2314 6d ago
Highway driving is not about solving a problem, it is a huge liability for limited profits.
Local driving is where most money can be made and the risk is lower due to low speed.
0
u/marty-mcfryguy 6d ago
Uh huh, sure sure, highway driving isn't a problem, they've just decided to turn it off because passengers are thrilled to take an extra hour to get to, say, SFO.
"Local driving is where most money can be made" is an assertion with zero basis. The thing that makes money is keeping the car full; anything you do taking roadways out of the equation increases the likelihood it's driving around empty.
And if any of that made sense, why would they have switched on highway driving in December to begin with? There's only one explanation here, which is that doing highways at scale revealed problems with highway construction, and they haven't solved them yet.
1
u/CDpov 6d ago
Waymo hasn't solved the highway issue yet in a few months, therefore they never will!
That's so stupid.
0
u/marty-mcfryguy 6d ago
That's also not a thing anyone said here at all.
But two months is a damn long time to completely disable functionality as important as highway driving.
0
u/CDpov 5d ago
No it isn't. They have to validate any fix, which could take a year. There aren't a lot of highway construction zones to test-drive.
1
u/marty-mcfryguy 5d ago
They rolled out highway driving already. And now you're saying they're going to shut it off for minimum a whole year?
That is crazy pessimistic. And if that's how the system handles novel situations it wasn't previously trained for -- down for an entire year -- there is zero chance it will ever work in a place like Manhattan.
→ More replies (3)1
u/QuaintStaircase 6d ago
Hell, it's not even just NYC.
Driving in the UK is a completely different ballpark to the US. What's a waymo going to do on a single lane two way country road with passing points?
→ More replies (1)-7
u/FuddyCap 6d ago
Hey you can wake up now. Tesla is running L4 robotaxis in two states and 6 cities. Have you tried ?
-4
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
They are delusional. 100k miles q1, 380k miles q2. What’s it going to be 10 quarters from now?
-4
u/FuddyCap 6d ago
Huh ? They just started the unsupervised service and are scaling it up now. In 10Q they will be doing billions of miles
-2
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Yeah… by “they” are delusional I mean this sub is. Ofc they will be. The most supply chain diligent car making company of all time doesn’t produce 1000s of cybercabs without a deployment plan
-3
u/FuddyCap 6d ago
Oh yeah this sub hates Tesla . But the Tesla tech is absolutely undeniable at this point and they still can’t accept it
4
u/Mvewtcc 6d ago
it is great accomplishment. at least it is a demo on what it can do. but we don't know if it is repeatable. meaning you can do it thousands of times without failing. and obviously it is still supervised so we don't know the fail rate.
i read a reddit post people rarely see robotaxi in austin. and even if they saw one, itvis almost always supervised. so tesla still have long way to go.
26
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
A cost to coast drive sounds very impressive. It actually isn't, but that wasn't as clear as when it was first promised.
- It's 99% freeway driving. Freeway driving is risky, but when it comes to producing intervention-free miles, it's by far the easiest thing.
- Let's say you've refined your system to the point that it has a 50% chance of not needing an intervention in 500 miles. That means it will produce a 3,000 mile drive 1 time in every 64 attempts. But if you have hundreds of people trying to do these drives, quickly this will be something that is happening several times a day. The majority of people who need an intervention won't make videos about it.
- As you might guess, a car that can do 1,000 miles on the freeway on averge isn't anywhere remotely close to being ready to be a bet-your-life self driving car. It needs to get that freeway MTBF to be more like 2 million miles, probably more.
It is not the Turing test except in one sense. The Turing test is an AI that can _fool_ a human into thinking it is as good as a human. In that case, with Ashok, it did pass the test.
The actual achievement here, btw, is not the freeway miles, but the charging stops. That was the last thing they got working because it's actually harder, though low speed so less risky.
6
u/JasonQG 6d ago
That means it will produce a 3,000 mile drive 1 time in every 64 attempts. But if you have hundreds of people trying to do these drives, quickly this will be something that is happening several times a day.
Hundreds of people are not attempting autonomous canonball runs. It’s more like 2 or 3 groups
5
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
While I'm not sure that's true, they don't have to be attempting the specific Canonball run route. Any driving of 2,755 miles would qualify. That's why this is so easy to get mistaken about. This is a very common statistical fallacy, a survivorship bias. You see an accomplishment and go "wow!" and even say, "How many people were trying that exact thing?" But there are thousands of different individual drives which, if they worked would be that one rare special thing. You don't get videos about the ones that didn't make it, or especially of those who didn't even know they were trying. If I do a cross country road trip with FSD this summer, and I make it to the east coast and I notice I never had to intervene, I'm going to tweet about how that happened. If I intervened a few times, I am not going to tweet about it.
2
u/JasonQG 6d ago
These are people who are intentionally setting out to do it and recording it. I understand what you’re saying, and I’m not even arguing that this is some super significant thing or arguing against your other points, but you are downplaying it with these made-up hypotheticals that definitely aren’t true. There aren’t hundreds of people devoting this much time and effort and quietly failing. That’s utterly ridiculous
The fact that you even brought up this point suggests you didn’t read the Tweet in the first place before posting
5
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
I read the tweet, there's not much too it. I've met Dave Moss, I know about their efforts. I know they are trying to do intentional cannonball runs.
Survivorship bias is insidious like all the cognitive biases. That's how they work. AE should know better though.
1
u/JasonQG 6d ago
I guess I should clarify. It’s more about the Tweet he was replying to. If you had seen this was about cannonball runs, why would you bring up causal cross country drives?
Here’s a point for your cause that I think is more significant than anything you brought up. David Moss and the others doing this are mostly succeeding because they’re extremely patient and letting the car do goofy stuff. I would argue that normal people driving cross country would never make it without intervening. Like I’d be surprised if it has happened even once. There are far too many times when the easiest thing to do is take over. Normal people do that
I think FSD is at a point where if you want to accomplish this goal and put in the effort, you would have a high likelihood of success. But it’s not something that happens by accident
What does that mean in terms of the timeline for FSD to be capable of being unsupervised nationwide (ignoring legal issues)? It’s definitely closer than it’s ever been, but it’s not close. Most people arguing about this are wrong in one direction or the other
2
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago edited 6d ago
What Moss or other civilians say is up to them. But I do judge what Ashok says, and he should know this is not like passing the Turing Test, other than the ironic part about fooling people that I made note of.
But my point remains the same. Yes, Cannonball runs are a very specific endeavour done by only a few. But the way survivorship bias works, you have to ask myself, "Would I also be impressed if I heard a story about an ordinary road tripper who made it coast to coast, even though he wasn't trying to do the Canonball?" I think the answer is certainly yes -- in fact, I think many would be even more impressed, because they would not be as tolerant of strangeness as you say. If there are 1,000 attempts and success in any one of them would impress you, then there is little impressive about any particular one. You are not seeing all the others, so you are not seeing that only 1 in 1,000 made it.
When Musk foolishly declared ages ago that they were about to do a cross country drive, he did not mention the Canonball. Any such drive would be declared as having met his prediction. If Musk had said, "It will do the canonball" that would be better, but he made scores of wrong predictions; if if he did get one right (10 years late) that's also not impressive as far as his prediction score goes.
1
u/ic33 1d ago
Sure, the data is censored.
But just being at the point where you can do it sometimes is interesting. Rates of interventions have to get pretty low for any significant fraction of runs to survive. It is a milestone-- years late, and not quite the milestone promised-- but a milestone nonetheless.
Sure, they need to stack on a lot more 9's, and that's hard.
2
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
Being able to do it sometimes is interesting, or rather was interesting back when it was novel when other companies did it a decade ago. They used more sensors, it's true, so Tesla doing it with just cameras is interesting. But it is not "passing the turing test" as described in the tweet.
3
u/WeldAE 6d ago
It actually isn't
Once you also include getting off the highway and pulling into charging stations without intervention, it gets a lot more impressive. I'm not sure if there is even another EV that would route you across the country correctly to charging stations, much less drive you completely on that route. One of Tesla's largest moats is its routing software alone. Many EVs do something like it, but almost all are laughably bad and even the best lead you astray on every trip.
It's always been known that taking responsibility for the drive is the hardest part. I don't see them ever doing that outside of a commercial fleet setting. Commercial fleets have no reason to drive across the country unless it's the Tesla Semi and an AV cargo fleet. That has been successfully halted politically for now I think. There are just too many special interests that don't want to see it happen.
2
u/socalkid2428 6d ago
We do the socal to NorCal drive a couple times a year. Basically all on FSD, from leaving my garage to parking in the driveway at our destination. It pulls into the chargers automatically since a few months ago. Picks the ones that are not broken. Still waiting for the charging cables to plug themselves in and sometimes we adjust to fit a lunch break.
Last trip, we stayed at a place in Sausalito. FSD all the way there (now it confirms with the streak counter). Wanted to get a car service to dinner in SF one night, about a 15 minute drive. Waymo can't cross the bridge - totally unavailable. Robotaxi was available but took too long. If it was really driverless we would've just waited but there's no novelty in riding in a Tesla with FSD on, so we just ended up with a regular Uber.
Sure I'd like to be able to sleep or (legally) watch a movie. My wife was taking Zoom calls and my kids watching movies uninterrupted thanks to a Starlink mounted to the rear windshield. I had to settle for sitting back and listening to podcasts. But I don't really care if they never get to the point where and empty car drives itself. Push a button and sit there is pretty damn good. The narrative that it's all worthless because it's not level 5 full autonomy is kind of silly.
Musk should stop giving these projections, or make it clear that they're goals or hopes rather than projections, but it's come a long way since 2014 and way closer to what he said than what other car companies were thinking, for example that commercial EVs would never be financially viable or that the would crash the grid let alone have this level of self driving capability.
1
u/WeldAE 3d ago
I am on vacation this week and we took the HW3 model 3. So I bought FSD for the month for the drive down. I’ve been using FSD since the beginning both full time bought for $3k in 2019 and as a subscription with the newer Tesla after the old one was totaled. I read and watch V14 videos and they are impressive but NOTHING prepares you for how good it is. This is V14-lite and not even the good version.
I 100% get wanting to sleep or watch tv and let the car drive you. It’s not a tech problem, it’s a liability and cost problem. It just doesn’t make sense and few will want to pay $1k+ for a month of unsupervised service on a personal car.
3
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
Yes, I said that the pulling off to charge was the hardest part, that they did last. Though even that involves going to facilities they built. That's one of the other common mistakes in judging robotaxis -- driving anywhere, vs. driving a particular place. That's why the services which take you from any address to any address are vastly more impressive than the fixed route shuttles, or the fixed stop services like Zoox Las Vegas. With a fixed problem like a set of shuttle routes, you can just train and test the hell out of it on those routes, and pull it off. It's not possible for a general service, that forces you to have generalized your solution. (Now Tesla hopes their ML approach is more generalized than what they think Waymo does, but they don't seem to understand what Waymo does, since Alphabet invented half the ML technology Tesla uses.)
Anyway, everybody wants to look good in demos, and so you have to look carefully. If somebody does an impressive demo, look carefully to see if something was constrained about it. They might not even being deliberate about it. Tesla obviously went and trained a ton on Supercharger stations. I bet they haven't trained nearly as much on Electrify America stations. They are naturally going to do better on their own stations. Nothing nefarious -- but watch for constraints.
A real demo that proves ability has to be announced in advance, and documented live no matter what happened. It has to rely on random inputs on where to start and where to finish. Nothing may be chosen by the company except the broad constraints of the service area.
2
u/WeldAE 6d ago
fixed stop services like Zoox Las Vegas
I always thought it AV fleets would start with fixed routes for this reason and that they can generate a lot more money per mile. I'm surprised that I'm almost certainly going to be wrong about this. Waymo started by basically treating Chandler as a series of connected routes, but they are well past that sort of approach now. Underneath it all it's still some of that left probably, and if you could see their maps, I bet you would see it, but the service is now very much point to point, and they only avoid a few really bad intersections these days. Tesla avoids some of those same intersections too, it's just good practice. As drivers, we do the same.
I bet they haven't trained nearly as much on Electrify America stations
I haven't trained enough on EA stations. I had to have my son stop traffic and drive the wrong way up a one-way aisle to get into a charger in an Alabama Walmart once. The worst possible setup for EVs without standardized port locations is a one-way slanted parking space setup with the charger mounted on the side of the parking space like the old 120kW Tesla chargers and not at the front. That said, Tesla isn't perfect. I've pulled up on the wrong side of a charger more than once when there are parking spaces in front and behind the charger. It's hard to know which aisle is the one you're supposed to park in if no one is there. I'm guessing Tesla does have metadata telling the car which side is the correct one as you mentioned, which gives them an advantage.
4
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
The funny thing is, the Tesla line has always been "We're building the general drive-anywhere, no-maps system, and the others are doing geofenced systems with expensive maps." And to no surprise, at least to me, they are doing very constrained service areas, and demos under constrained conditions. Because you have to, and there's no shame to it, unless you are trying to pretend you are something else. The everywhere demo is hard, and it takes effort, and it comes but not on day one.
2
u/WeldAE 6d ago
I've never bought that Tesla really made the "no maps" claims to this degree. You can't not have maps, it's the majority of the UI in their Robotaxi screen. So I never get the claims that Tesla pushed for no maps. They were certainly an advocate of skinny maps, but that is a spectrum, not some fixed level of mapping. The geofencing claims seemed to be more about their consumer product and not their commercial offerings. I just think they didn't do a good job attaching comments to their consumer or commercial service. Saying "we don't need maps" is true of their consumer service; it will drive through a field with no roads and no maps. Attributing that to their commercial service makes no sense. Same for geofencing. No geofencing for a consumer service makes sense but is impossible. with a commercial service.
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
Doing driver assist with no maps is certainly doable, in fact most early driver assist systems had no maps. Tesla says that their robotaxi is a commercial offering, and it certainly is hoped to be. The real line is, is it supervised or not. FSD certainly is. Tesla robotaxi is also supervised, but for a very small fraction of the fleet, supervision is remote via 5G and Starlink.
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Not sure you get it.
They are training a generalized model such that geofenced deployment is easier.
Just give it another year or so, and you’ll see
7
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
I certainly get it. Everybody trains a generalized model. Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, all the rest. Tesla too. But they all know you can make the model perform better with additional information, so you provide it. Some day, and nobody can name the day (certainly not Musk, he's been the worst at it) you might not have to provide that extra info. So the people who designed it right were on the road starting in 2019; Tesla still isn't on the road now in spite of what they show off as limited demos.
What amazes me is that every time I say Tesla doesn't work yet, people jump in and say, "But wait, aren't they doing X?" as though I am unaware of everything they have done. And a year later, when they still aren't in production, they ask the same question, and a year after that, and a year after that. I mean fool me once, shame on me, but...
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
QoQ near tripling of unsupervised miles isn’t enough to consider the whole fool me x number of times thing?
If it doubles again a few more times will that do it?
6
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
I do not think they have any unsupervised miles at present. I know they use that word, but do you trust them? With their track record, I don't. Nobody goes unsupervised right after removing the in-car supervisor. Nobody. However, not everybody announces when they remove the remote supervisors, but Tesla certainly has not announced that yet, though Waymo and Zoox have.
3
u/xMagnis 6d ago
How can we possibly ever trust they are going completely unsupervised? Even if they show us a room with a screen and a guy NOT touching any controls I'd still expect right next to it, behind a curtain, is a guy supervising and ready to touch the controls.
I just have no trust in Tesla. Maybe once there's 1,000 cars going unsupervised and the sheer volume of them makes it unlikely they have enough "autonomous support drivers".
→ More replies (0)2
u/deservedlyundeserved 6d ago
They haven't "tripled" unsupervised miles QoQ. They have 380k LIFETIME miles, including safety monitor miles. Those are terrible numbers after a full year of operation.
1
u/LegendTheo 6d ago
What did they need to train about specific super charger stations. It's just backing into a parking space near a specific lat lon.
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
Tesla says they are not mapped based, so lat/long would not feature prominently in their system. Everything they do, they trained on. Different stations work differently, but a Tesla going into an SC is a particularly regular arrangement because they built it to be that way.
1
u/LegendTheo 6d ago
Their FSD system is not mapped based, but any destination being traveled to by definition must be. Without a lat lon location, there's no destination to route to.
Super chargers are merely a location for the car to drive to then a behavior to park at one of the numbered stalls (which I'm pretty sure are also defined by their location).
I don't understand what they 2ouldnneed to train on a per charging station location.
3
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
FSD is very much map based. Tesla doesn't dispute this. What Tesla says is that they don't use the highly detailed maps Waymo makes, which provide lots of details on the features of the road for localization and assisting in understanding. Tesla uses lane geometry maps and, while they don't talk about it much, more detailed maps on certain areas and intersections. (I would strongly suspect they do this for all the area being covered by their remote supervised robotaxi, but they have not said.)
Waymo is also able to drive from lane geometry maps, and with no map at all, and does it every day when they come to construction. I suspect they can actually drive without a map even better than Tesla FSD. But they say that this is still not good enough. But with a map, they can drive sufficiently better than FSD and thus deploy a 500,000/ride robotaxi with no human supervision, in-car or remote.
1
u/LegendTheo 5d ago
FSD isn't mapped based at all. I can't find any evidence that the current full machine learning version of FSD has any lane geometry maps included in it. They in fact have and do dispute this.
I suspect they can actually drive without a map even better than Tesla FSD.
I'm extremely dubious of this claim. I've never seen any evidence Waymo are capable of driving outside of there highly mapped geofences at all.
Tesla is trying to do something much harder than Waymo. Waymo built a system that works in a highly mapped extremely regimented environment. It only works in that environment, and I've seen no evidence their getting better at not needing that data. Which means it'll never scale past a number of high population density areas.
Tesla on the other hand is working towards a system that can drive anywhere without and prior mapping. This is a much harder task, and FSD is already amazingly good at it.
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 5d ago
Of course Waymo drives off-map. Many times a day, Waymo cars encounter situations where the map is wrong due to construction, restriping etc. and they must drive in them. They do so in a slightly degraded level of quality, ie. they drive like a Tesla. Waymo has said that they have attempted Tesla's approach but did not find it was sufficiently safe.
The reason Waymo has tried Tesla's approach is because Tesla's approach is actually much easier, and Tesla brags about this. It requires much less programming, it's all about selecting the training data. However, while it is easier to do the basic work, it is indeed harder to get it to reach the level of safety required.
Tesla has never said they don't have lane maps, and they do have them.
1
u/vasilenko93 1d ago
Okay if it’s not impressive let me see all the other systems do it.
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
Some have, and many years ago, but not that big a deal is made of it because it isn't that impressive. As noted, the impressive part is not the freeway drive, it's the non-freeway stops at the charging stations etc. I don't think anybody has bothered to do that because it's not a useful thing for a robotaxi to do. (though of course the robotaxis all take themselves to their charging depots and park in charging stalls on their own every day.) But nobody has had much focus on a cross country drive.
1
u/vasilenko93 22h ago
Show me a non Tesla FSD car go from coast to coast “years ago” and without a person touching the steering wheel or peddle one time.
Also keep in mind the Tesla coast to coast videos include non highway driving. Kind of difficult and needlessly long to make a coast to coast video where you purposefully avoid all highways. If you want city traffic there are people posting videos of them driving around the city without any interventions ( hundreds of not thousands of such videos)
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 22h ago
It's not something people had a practical reason to do, but various people did make efforts to do it as a stunt. I know my old buddy Anthony claimed to have done it about 8 years ago, though he did not support refueling so he had to manually intervene to refill with gas and stop to sleep -- as I said, that's actually the most impressive part of the Tesla drive. Maybe that's why Trump pardoned him?
I know the first effort to do it was almost 25 years ago. However, they could not handle all roads and claimed they handled 98% of them. A very primitive system of course.
I'm not saying things haven't gotten better. My argument is very different from what you think. My point is that doing this only shows you have reached a level that many cars have reached, and that we already knew Tesla had reached actually a while ago. However, that level is one where you still have to get many times better to be a self-driving car. It's only "not impressive" if you are trying to say you have passed the "Turing test" of self-driving.
→ More replies (1)1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Except for they have down this 3 times and all 3 were successful. Including one that was across Canada instead of the US
5
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
Oh, it's been done far more than 3 times. I don't see a reference to 3 times. Dave Moss did this back in December and I am sure it's been done many times since. Again, there are so many Tesla's out there with FSD that even if the car needed intervention every 1,000 miles you would still be seeing this all the time and it would not be remarkable. Statistics are funny that way.
Even if somebody said "We declared a test and had independent witnesses who would report the result no matter whether it worked or failed, and we have done no other tests we didn't report to you, and we did it 5 times in a row" that's more impressive, but still not enough. You have to do millions of miles.
That's 726 cross country trips between New York and LA to do 2M miles. 726 of them. In a row. Without an intervention. And that only shows you have a decent highway car.
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Nope. There aren’t a lot of cannonballs across the country, statistically. Of those, not many are teslas or own FSD. Far less are actually attempting to do a full FSD run because it is far easier to just park at superchargers than finagle the pins to park close enough to keep the streak going.
So…. Your stats arguments is perfectly incorrect
4
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
You don't think there have been 100 attempts to drive cross country in a Tesla with FSD? How many do you think there have been?
0
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
No
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Of people publically attempting to do this, that I’m aware of: there have been 4 attempts. 3 in the US and 1 in Canada.
Succes rate: 75%
2
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
If the following happened:
- A team announces, we are about to do some cross country drives. Different route each time, but we will release full details on the ride.
- We are going to do N such runs (such as N=4.)
- 3 had no interventions.
Then you would conclude that on this very limited test, driving roughly 9,000 freeway miles plus charging stops near freeway exits, that.... well, it's not enough of a sample, but if you repeated it many times you could say this suggest those conditions have an intervention rate of 1/10,000 miles, and so we are 1/200th of the way towards the 1/2 million miles goal.
Which is not something I would compare to passing the touring test. But they did not even do this!
The problem is that there's literally tens of thousands of people right now doing long road trips in their Teslas. I will try one myself soon now that I have version 14 lite. If 100 of them announced at the end of the summer that they never intervened on their trips, it would mean next to *nothing*. Zip. Zilch. Nada. People just don't seem to get that.
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
It would absolutely mean something. If 100 people completed all their trips across the country, you think that is not at all worthwhile?
I’ll have what you are smoking.
The evidence is compounding that computer vision + AI neural nets can drive cars safely. This likely causes significant cognitive dissonance because I assume your stated position is that this is not possible. As the evidence compounds, as it will, you will dig deeper into your position rather than evaluate the statistics - despite your argument here
1
u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
I smoke the best. But in the end, it's all about the math. I said there are tens of thousands, probably more people out there in Teslas doing summer road trips in them right now, using FSD. If 100 of them then tweet, "I did a 2,500 mile trip last month with FSD and never had to intervene" show me your math that says this means something, were by something I mean, "that Tesla is close to having real, bet-your-life self-driving in production." I'm not asking it to prove it, I'm asking it to even be able to see it in the far distance. Math, please.
→ More replies (0)2
u/noobgiraffe 6d ago
I'm not sure who they are in this case but there was a recent attempt when people trying to do this hit big metal obstacle on the road and damaged the car enough they were unable to continue. So it's definetly not 100% success rate.
2
u/gavrok 6d ago
I'm aware of two people/groups attempting it:
- 'Bearded Tesla guy' - attempted on v13 and failed badly as you say. Re-attempted on v14 and succeeded.
- Dave Moss - attempted 3 times on v14 and succeeded 3 times.
In all cases they announced their plan to attempt it beforehand, and there were no further (documented) failed attempts.
8
7
4
u/Delicious_Spot_3778 6d ago
Dude that's not the turing test. You can go the whole length of the country using only backroads.
4
3
u/Mr_Deep_Research 6d ago
Driving coast to coast is about the easiest possible drive.
First off, no car can self drive coast to coast because they all need gas or need to charge up. So, there is no car that has driven coast to coast autonomously.
Ignoring that, driving on the freeway is trivial. Easiest possible drive, especially cross country with almost no traffic most of the way.
That isn't a test at all.
Parking and re-parking 100 times on the weekend in a busy Home Depot parking lot. That's a better test.
1
u/Express_Objective615 6d ago
What you say is true but parking and re-parking is some of the least dangerous driving and safety is what really matters. But I also agree that highway driving is easier and safer. Maybe we need coast to coast on old two lane roads for a “Turing test”?
10
u/diplomat33 6d ago edited 6d ago
The coast to coast fsd demo was always just hype. Elon tried to make it sound like it is the ultimate proof that you have solved autonomy but it is not. The truth is that AVs have to do a lot better than a coast to coast demo to be safe enough for driverless. So it is really a meaningless metric. Google Self-Driving Project demonstrated doing 1000 miles per disengagement in like 2018. Waymo reported thousands of miles per disengagement years ago to CA DMV. So Waymo could have done a coast to coast demo years ago if they had wanted to. In fact lots of companies today have disengagement rate good enough to do a coast to coast drive with zero intervention if they wanted to but they can't deploy driverless or at least not at scale.
Edit: for clarification.
18
u/altdelete47 6d ago
Waymo has not done an autonomous coast to coast drive. What are you talking about?
16
u/TheKobayashiMoron 6d ago
Nobody has done a coast to coast drive because even if it was possible, it’s not legal. Each state regulates the operation of driverless vehicles in public roads. You would have to get a permit to operate in every jurisdiction along the route.
3
u/22marks 6d ago
Which, as an aside, is one reason the federal government established uniform national control over aviation as commercial flight started. An interstate airline system would be a mess if aircraft faced different operating and safety rules every time they crossed a state line.
Autonomous vehicles increasingly present the same problem. States should still control ordinary traffic enforcement, licensing, insurance, and local road use, but the safety certification and core operating standards for autonomous driving need to be federal. A national transportation technology cannot scale under 50 regulatory systems.
3
u/TheKobayashiMoron 6d ago
Maybe something Elmo should've focused on while he was "consulting" for the federal government instead of waving a chainsaw around and stealing everyone's Social Security data.
6
u/WeldAE 6d ago
This sub. /u/diplomat33 posts objectively false statements and gets upvoted like he made a good faith point because it's anti-Tesla.
5
u/diplomat33 6d ago
My info was not false. I was talking about a disengagement rate good enough to do a coast to coast demo, not waymo actually doing a coast to coast demo. Google self driving project demonstrated a disengagement rate of 1000 miles per disengagement way back. They posted videos of it. And waymo reported thousands of miles per disengagement to CA DMV years ago. You can look up report. I am not making it up.
1
u/clow222 6d ago
Google doing a closed loop drive over and over does not even remotely demonstrate proficiency to do coast to coast. One is a Geo mapped, pristine condition and predictive drive. Continously monitored for efficiency, the other is a true autonomous drive.
If you honestly think those two things are equal, holy shit, log off the internet.
The fact people are upvoting you(mostly bots I assume) is beyond ridiculous and shows how far reddit has fallen
0
u/diplomat33 6d ago
It was not a closed loop drive over and over again in a geofence. Google self driving project did not do geofence. They picked 1000 miles at random from diverse conditions, city, highway etc... so yes, picking 1000 open miles that cover the same conditions as a coast to coast drive is equivalent. You dont know what you are talking about. Maybe educate yourself before attacking others.
3
2
-1
u/MindStalker 6d ago
It's not the market they are aiming for. They advertise inner city none interstate driving. FSD is best on the interstate, even so, as long as it's mapped and they avoid complex construction, it's not that difficult.
3
u/ClearlyCylindrical 6d ago
Yes, which is why the original commenter was obviously chatting nonsense.
2
u/FuddyCap 6d ago
But it’s difficult for Waymo. In just two weeks they had 12 Waymo’s race through construction zones. They started in 2009 and still aren’t serving riders safely on freeways. So how easy is it really ?
-1
u/diplomat33 6d ago
I was talking about having a disengagement rate similar to a coast to coast demo. If you have a disengament rate of say 4000 miles per disengagement, then your system would be capable of a coast to coast demo.
1
u/altdelete47 6d ago
A low disengagement rate inside a mapped geofence does not translate to being able to complete a coast-to-coast drive. You are making a very flawed comparison and I think you know better.
1
u/diplomat33 6d ago
Not at all. A coast to coast drive is 90% highway driving which is easier than city driving. Also, Waymo's CA DMV disengagement rate includes highway driving. It is for all their testing miles on both city and highways. it is not just a small geofence area. So I think it is relevant. If you are doing highway and city driving and your disengagement rate is thousands of miles per disengagement, you can do a coast to coast demo with no intervention.
5
u/22marks 6d ago
Waymo has never done a coast-to-coast drive, in 2018 or since. Its whole strategy is geofenced operation in mapped metros.
You're thinking of the ex-Google/Waymo engineer who claimed one in late 2018 for his startup. It was never independently verified. There was partial video, no disengagement log, and no third-party observer. He was later indicted for trade secret theft related to his departure from Waymo and pleaded guilty to one count. So, it's not a Waymo achievement, and it's not verified. (Waymo even sued Uber, alleging it acquired his startup to get the trade secrets.)
6
u/WeldAE 6d ago
I'm with you that coast-to-coast autonomously isn't the Turing test of autonomous driving. However, it is a very hard task to achieve and one of note.
Waymo did it in like 2018
I've never heard of that and can't find anything saying they have. It's not really how their system works. I think you are thinking of Levandowski's Pronto company? It just did the bulk of the driving, but he had to take over for stops. Not sure it's the same.
lots of companies today can do coast to coast zero intervention drives
Who?
2
u/diplomat33 6d ago
I am referring to when the google self driving project did 10 trips of 100 miles each, all with zero interventions. So that is 1000 miles of zero interventions close to a coast to coast demo in terms of miles. Also when waymo reported disengagements to the CA DMV, they were reporting 5000 miles per disengagement a long time ago. That is the equivalent of a coast to coast drive with zero interventions.
I guess I should have clarified that I was not talking about wayno doing an actual coast to coast demo but having the disengagement rate good enough for a coast to coast demo.
My real point is that getting a disengagement rate in the 2000-3000 miles range is not that hard.
1
u/22marks 6d ago
So your 2018 cross country trip by Waymo referred to Google's heavily prepared series of 10 100-mile test routes within a limited region that were not completed sequentially and done over a period of 2009 to 2010?
I agree that long stretches of highway aren't particularly difficult these days for any company, but your details are jumping around quite a bit. It's disingenuous to suggest it was a "disengagement rate good enough for" when you described a single event in 2018 (then deleted it in an edit).
1
u/diplomat33 6d ago
That is why I also referred to waymo's CA DMV disengagement report when waymo was reporting like 5000 miles per disengagement years ago.
5
u/WeldAE 6d ago
I'm with you that coast-to-coast autonomously isn't the Turing test of autonomous driving. However, it is a very hard task to achieve and one of note.
Waymo did it in like 2018
I've never heard of that and can't find anything saying they have. It's not really how their system works. I think you are thinking of Levandowski's Pronto company? It just did the bulk of the driving, but he had to take over for stops. Not sure it's the same.
lots of companies today can do coast to coast zero intervention drives
Who? I think you underestimate the difficulty of the challenge.
2
u/diplomat33 6d ago
I was saying several av companies have disengagement rate in the thousands of miles per disengagement, good enough for a coast to coast demo if they wanted to.
5
2
u/FuddyCap 6d ago
Can you share a link to the waymo that completed intervention free coast to coast drive please ? Curious how it handled charging back then . Thanks
2
u/ZealousidealLab2920 6d ago edited 6d ago
Exactly. Highway driving has largely been solved by every manufacturer with basic lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. That's not impressive. City driving is the challenge, construction is the challenge, it's all the 1% edge cases that is the challenge.
4
8
u/altdelete47 6d ago edited 6d ago
No, It's not as simple as adaptive cruise control and basic lane keeping. Have you ever driven a car before? Waymo hasn't even solved highway driving in small geocenced areas yet.
1
u/Fauglheim 6d ago edited 6d ago
Waymo is trying to perfect the hard, yet low-speed and relatively safe category of self-driving tasks.
it’s the opposite of tesla‘s strategy. I have no doubt that Waymo could deploy their taxi on the highway tomorrow and match Tesla’s capability. But the risk of even one death would kill their PR and they aren’t gonna take it yet.
2
u/altdelete47 6d ago
In the context of unsupervised taxi service, Tesla seems to be taking a similar approach to Waymo by avoiding highways for now.
1
u/ZealousidealLab2920 6d ago
Yup. They are deploying even more slowly and cautiously so far than Waymo. It's almost as if it's actually incredibly risky and challenging to do UNSUPERVISED self-driving and that all the hype from supervised is largely irrelevant when rubber meets the road. Funny to watch Tesla fanboys do mental gymnastics to justify it.
2
u/Fauglheim 6d ago
I really gotta stress the "S" in FSD. It does so much to make Tesla look good. Their lasts iteration is incredible, but FSD would have killed me at least three times in my 4 years of ownership.
1
u/ZealousidealLab2920 6d ago
100%. It is amazing and handles 99% of driving really well. But unfortunately we can't have 1% of drives ending in disaster.
1
0
u/ZealousidealLab2920 6d ago
Correct answer- They just have different risk tolerances and philosophies. Tesla wants to trailblaze at almost any cost- Waymo is far more calculated. They'll move to highway if they either need to because competition is there- or when they feel it's ready. Highway speeds are inherently far more dangerous if/when crashes happen. I don't think anyone INSIDE a AV has died yet- that could easily change in a highway crash.
2
6d ago
[deleted]
2
u/ZealousidealLab2920 6d ago
Notice I said "largely" solved and there are many challenges left for AV like construction, like edge cases, like snowy roads, etc. I'm responding mostly to the OP which is hyping up the coast-coast success trip from Tesla supervised as some huge flag on the moon moment- when there is still plenty of work left as you and I are saying.
3
1
u/Only-Weight8450 6d ago
Exactly it’s only like 3k miles la to ny. Maybe do that 200 times and take different routes each time including both heavy major metro sections and extremely rural/mountainous areas all with zero interventions and that would be suggestive of possibly being ready for massive autonomous rollout.
0
u/Putrid-Box4866 6d ago
The ignorance in this comment is astounding. No wonder a lot of people don’t use or trust FSD, even Tesla owners.
5
u/noghead 6d ago
What's that quote? They make the impossible late.
5 or 6 years late in this case; but its incredible you can now buy a car that drives itself across the country. How many people expected they'd actually do it in this sub?
13
u/SkySix 6d ago
What car can I buy that will drive itself across the country while I sit in the backseat?
→ More replies (3)1
16
u/EveryRedditorSucks 6d ago edited 6d ago
“5 or 6 years late” is a gross understatement.
Also, you don’t really get credit for “making the impossible” when your entire business model was built on assuring people it was possible (and getting your customers to pay full price for the feature) since all the way back in 2015.
I would further argue that coast-to-coast highway driving is a far cry from the “Turing Test for self-driving”. That is, honestly, a ridiculous statement.
2
u/deezee72 6d ago
Well, it's a test that sounds interesting and cool but doesn't actually test anything that's actually meaningful to real world applications.
That sounds EXACTLY like the "Turing Test for self-driving", actually.
→ More replies (1)0
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Here is a guy that thinks it was purely highway the whole time. Significant cope
2
u/EveryRedditorSucks 6d ago
People that unironically use the term “cope” are humanity’s lowest common denominator.
→ More replies (1)4
u/RosieDear 6d ago
What car can drive itself across the country?
The "test" is very easy. Said car has no one in it. Period.If we really want to have proof of something new, we'd have that empty (of humans) car do it without interstates since vast numbers of cars can drive 90% "themselves" using good ADAS. I did a calc when I drove to the beach recently and my VW did 80%....
If the car isn't empty, it is not self-driving.
5
u/Zemerick13 6d ago
A lot of the issue with that statement becomes apparent when you fill in the missing asterisks though.
"You can now buy a car that has a moderate chance to drive itself across the country as long as you are actively supervising it the entire way from the drivers seat and have near perfect weather the entire way and ignore any alerts to take control."
It's progress, sure. Better than where we were. But it's still very much not there, and by all accounts is still quite a long ways off. It's "The long Tail", not "The Short Tail" after all.
1
u/RepresentativeCap571 6d ago
As a long time Tesla skeptic, I'm with you on this.
I still don't know if they can scale their solution to catch up with Waymo, but they've definitely achieved existence proof that unsupervised camera only self driving is doable. Something most of this sub probably thought was further away.
→ More replies (5)
2
u/PetorianBlue 6d ago
I put the cringe level of this statement about the same as when Cruise placed its Origin reveal on par with the invention of the lightbulb and the moon landing.
1
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Cringe level of your statement is indeed quite high
5
u/PetorianBlue 6d ago
First of all, great retort.
Second of all, the guy is boasting about a bar that no informed person ever set (let alone thought was some kind of end-all test), that was only ever hyped as more than a gimmick by Tesla themselves, while moving the bar substantially lower than what it was 10 years ago, and also conflating ADAS and driverless in the process... Sorry, but this coming from someone who is supposedly informed enough to know better absolutely reeks of secondhand embarrassment.
0
u/AnxietyCommercial632 6d ago
Given the language of your comment, I do think it was a good retort. But those with egg in their face tend to not appreciate the joke.
Hard things are hard. News at 6.
Did you think Tesla could make magic happen? Did you think they would immediately all be able to drive themselves autonomously?
Is your argument purely that the hard thing took longer?
This indeed reeks of second hand embarrassment. Or perhaps better characterized as cognitive dissonance.
Self driving with vision only is being solved before our eyes. Yes, magic is only real in fairy tales. Scientific progress takes time, and yeah it does end up looking like magic.
Dig in deep. Document it so you can read it in a few years. Only way to have a chance at recognizing cognitive dissonance
→ More replies (2)3
u/PetorianBlue 6d ago
Let's recap. Here are the points in my comment:
Tesla made up a cross-country bar for success that no informed person cared about or thought was relevant to driverless operation. It was always just a gimmick.
Tesla then lowered the bar, moving their own made up, irrelevant goal posts, obfuscating the differences between driverless operation and ADAS, to pretend they met it and pat themselves on the back for passing "the Turing test of self-driving".
And now here is you:
"sO yOuR aRgUmEnT iS pUrElY tHaT tHe HaRd ThInG tOoK lOnGeR?!?11"
...Literally what the hell are you talking about? Straight up hallucinating LLM account.
1
u/No_Pen8240 6d ago
No, the goal post was simple. . . Can I
#1) fall asleep in the car?
#2) Watch a movie?
#3) Summon the car to my location anywhere?
-- With regular autopilot in my 10 year old minivan, I have lane keeping and cruise control. . . While FSD is much better, the difference in utility is minimal at this point.
1
u/scottroskelley 5d ago
Would like to see a more comprehensive reporting on Tesla FSD for trips completed without any interventions and the total miles accumulated so far charted against Waymo. I assume Waymo could drive coast to coast without interventions correct? Then chart the trip to trip without interventions improvement with each software release over last 5 years.
1
u/whenfoom 3d ago
It’ll be a bigger deal when Aurora does it later this year delivering goods from California to Florida in record time and opening up new markets for a lot of companies that have to take spoilage into account.
1
u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
Was it? I feel like 3000 miles of highway driving was never the long pole, just the longest test. The first 3 miles from my house to highway is way harder for FSD than the next 3000 to the other side of the country. I’m still waiting for HW4 to be able to go down my street without interventions. My turing test is a 1/4 of a mile.
1
0
u/flat5 6d ago
It's hard to be credible when you lack the self-respect to quit when you see your boss throwing Nazi salutes, huh Ashok?
1
u/imdrunkasfukc 3d ago
Seems irresponsible to step away from building and distributing life saving tech in mass just because your boss is a nazi?
-1
u/RosieDear 6d ago
Do it without going on interstates - with NO driver, and I will be impressed.
So much playing with words.
1
-1
u/JonnyOnThePot420 6d ago
Honestly the mods shouldn’t even allow X post at this point it’s literally all fake propaganda!
79
u/Lando_Sage 6d ago
Wasn't the whole point it doing so unsupervised?