I had to LOL at this: Tesla's cars still can't fully self-drive through an empty tunnel
Tesla, the company that CEO Elon Musk claims will “solve autonomy,” has a problem: It turns out autonomy is hard. The company is totally definitely introducing a fully autonomous robotaxi this year, for realsies, yet it can’t even figure out how to make its cars self-drive through the Vegas Loop — a tunnel Musk himself had built.
A new version was just released that is also likely only starting with HW4 MYs.
2024.27.20 with FSD 12.5.3
No big improvements to the actual FSD but it has Summons.
Dumb Summons (the actual name) allows you to remotely move the car backwards and forwards with the phone app. This is good for if someone parks super close to you and you can’t squeeze into the spot.
Actually Smart Summons aka ASS (hurr) which will allow you to have the car leave a parking space and then come to you somewhere else in the lot. No way I trust this.
7 posts were split to a new topic: Tesla’s as witnesses to crime
I moved a bunch of posts to their own thread, as they are interesting, but not really about self-driving
Tesla just released a new roadmap to be taken with a grain of salt.
2024.27.5 (FSD 12.5.2): Going out to the plebes now including me on Tuesday night. 3x fewer interventions. HW3 and HW4.
2024.27.20 (FSD 12.5.3): Out to early testers now. Smart and Dumb Summons.
Later in September: No nag with sunglasses, end-to-end on highway, FSD on cybertruck.
October: unpark, park and reverse in FSD. FSD 13 with 6x fewer interventions.
Q1’25: FSD in Europe and China “pending regulatory approval”
This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of how humans help driverless vehicles stuck in specific situations, including a demonstration of the specifics of an intercession by the Zoox “fusion center”.
Gift link.
At times, Tesla seemed to take a more relaxed stance on those rules, seven former and current workers said. For example, some workers said they were told to ignore “No Turn on Red” or “No U-Turn” signs, meaning they would not train the system to adhere to those signs.
“It’s a driver-first mentality,” one former worker said. “I think the idea is we want to train it to drive like a human would, not a robot that’s just following the rules.”
If true this should be a big scandal. Programming Autopilot to not follow traffic laws should make Autopilot illegal IMO. One of the biggest advantages of self-driving vehicles is they are supposed to be better than human drivers.
I think it is much more complex, in that as much as human drivers routinely do not follow traffic laws, actually following them to the letter can make self-driving cars behave in ways other drivers do not expect.
One actual example is the behavior at stop signs, when the way is clear. When FSD first was able to handle stop signs it made the type of stop most drivers, who aren’t out right running the stop sign, will make. Come almost completely to a stop, and then go. It was really the exact type of “stop” that most conscientious drivers perform—not rolling stop.
There was much complaining about FSD breaking the law, and now the cars come to a total complete there’s-a-cop-behind-you stop. This is aggravating to other drivers.
Of course the biggest driving rule is speed limits, and that is something that is under the control of the driver, not FSD. All it takes is adjusting a knob or lever to make FSD exceed the speed limit. It would probably be dangerous to not let FSD exceed the speed limit in many places. (The “why” of 80% of drivers exceeding the posted speed limit is probably for another thread, but on many roads it is the reality.)
On the other hand, things like no right on red are often there for a good reason (visibility, pedestrian traffic, etc.), and the car should be following them. I’ve never had FSD make a u-turn, that would be weird.
Following the rules isn’t synonymous with being a good driver. Often enough, they’re at direct odds. Sometimes, it’s impossible to drive safely while following the rules.
What will make self-driving cars safer than humans is that they don’t get distracted, or drunk, or angry, or tired, or any of the other things that make humans perform less than at their best. Humans at their best are excellent drivers and not because they follow the rules robotically. If robot drivers simply matched this level of ability without having any of the problems that cause humans to not be at their peak level, there would be a dramatic reduction in accidents.
By the way, Autopilot is just traffic-aware cruise control and lanekeeping. It’s a totally separate thing from self-driving. It’s hard to believe anything else in the Business Insider article if they can’t even keep their terms straight.
I have when the navigation called for it
It looks like the HW3 version is finally shipping
2024.27.10 with FSD 12.5.2.1
Anecdote time.
When I was living in San Jose the People’s Republic of Palo Alto’s speed limits were typically 5 or 10mph less than similar roads in the adjoining cities. As a consequence nobody pays attention to them. Except me.
This was partially in self-interest. Driving a 20-year old beat-up Volkswagen Beetle I was clearly NPAKD* and didn’t want Palo Alto’s finest having an excuse to pull me over, but I’ll admit I was amused at watching fuming Beemer drivers behind me fuming as I tootled along at the prescribed 30mph.
Hey, dude. If you want to roll it at 45, talk to your city councilman.
* Not Palo Alto Kind, Dear
2024.27.10 is on its way! Will give it a shot later tonight. I wonder if the driver monitoring works at night.
I’m so happy for you.
The nag only happens when your eyes are obscured either by a hat brim or sunglasses. I have photochromic lenses in my regular glasses so it can turn on or off on a sunny day.
A bit more like 50 days than 10, but hey, I’m patient.
My car doesn’t have the IR illuminator. That could make a difference, too.
Took it on a quick drive. Not as much of a jump as I’d hoped, and sort of a 3 steps forward, 2 steps back situation. The hands-free driving is certainly nice and worked well, even at night. And driving-wise, they seem to have fixed the curb-hugging problem, which was a big issue at times. Gave a much more reasonable level of clearance than before.
Smoothness was a little hit or miss. Sometimes it felt very smooth, but others it seemed to not always make up its mind and the steering was a little jerky.
Lane decisions were better overall, but there was a regression in a particular left-turn lane (which was nothing complicated) where it just didn’t get in the lane. Weird. So I intervened there.
There was a particular spot that I really hoped they’d fix but they didn’t. There’s a turn lane across a road with a light-rail track. Just beyond the real stop line, there’s another segment that says STAY BACK or something, because if you nose into it the light rail might hit you. The car keeps nosing into that section. Not enough to get hit fortunately, but enough that the car is no longer over the sensor.
So there’s still plenty of work to do. Hopefully updates come out quicker now that they have the first version working on HW3. And it is a step forward, but definitely not 10x better or anything. I’ll try again later on some other cases that I know confuse it.
A new version dropped today. 2024.27.25 with FSD 12.5.4 for both HW3 and HW4.
It has Actual Smart Summon, Dumb Summon and no nag even with sun glasses.
Still no FSD on Cybertrucks. Lmao
Nice. Glad that both HW3 and HW4 get the new drop at the same time.
Played with 12.5 a bit more and I was a bit happier this time. The lane picking really is much better overall. 12.3.6 would sometimes be really hesitant in picking a lane when it splits, often straddling the line for a while. 12.5 doesn’t do that.
A non-Tesla post.
As I’ve said previously I have zero experience with so-called self-driving cars. Until now. So here’s a report from a noob in the field.
I recently got a new-to-me 2022 BMW with their 2022 version top of the line “driver assistance” package. I do not know how different this product is from their 2024 or 2025 model year driver assistance products. So far I’ve got ~150 miles of freeway driving and ~50 miles of suburban boulevard or minor street experience with the system engaged as fully-auto as it can be.
This package has a lot of emergency stop, swerve, or t-bone accident prediction logic. Also pedestrian detection, etc. Until I crash (or better yet almost crash) I’m not going to be able to say how well they work. Right now I’ve put them in my mental “might help; (probably) can’t hurt” category and hope to remain outside their activation zones UFN.
The non-emergency features are intelligent cruise control and auto lane-keeping. So primitive to the max compared to Tesla but still new & interesting to me. I’m not suggesting this BMW system is any much different from what any non-Tesla has these days; I’m just ignorant of other brands’ products so have no basis to compare features.
Hardware wise, it has 360° view outside cameras, a driver monitor camera, and 360° radar, and ultrasonic sensors for about 120° fans front and rear. Belt and suspenders and a top hat.
Initial impressions. …
The hands-on-steering-wheel sensor appears to be capacitive, not torque-sensing. They’re also not all the way around the wheel; you can grip it and apply torque in a way the car can’t detect. Assuming it’s got a good lock on its view of the road it permits you a few seconds of hands-free then displays reminder cues, followed a couple seconds later by loudly disconnecting if you don’t react and get back to hands-on.
The cruise control function is great. It will follow traffic, including stop and go, about as well as I can. Net of some glitches I’ll talk about below. It has no idea about stop or yield signs (or any other traffic control device I can tell) so approaching one of those I need to take over by braking to stop the vehicle short of the intersection. Once stopped I can push [Resume] and it will go when the car ahead and cross traffic is clear. For traffic lights it will follow the car ahead. Which means that if car(s) ahead in my lane stop for a red light I will too, and my car will go when the car ahead starts to proceed. If I’m first in line approaching a yellow or red light it’s all on me to decide whether to let it cruise through the intersection or I must take over and brake to a halt. Then on the green, push [Resume] and away we/it goes.
It can recognize a vehicle ahead and distinguish trucks from cars but is oblivious to brake lights as best I can tell.
It will happily accept and happily drive at seriously extra-legal speeds but it does read speed limit signs and gently reminds you what speed you should be doing instead of the one you are. How very BMW. 
The intelligent lane-keeping is not nearly as mature / successful. It appears to be purely sensor driven, with no interface to any sort of map of the road around it. Despite the very comprehesive nav system that works quite well.
Around here we have lots of sun-baked light gray asphalt with sunbaked and tire-worn formerly white but now dirty gray lane stripes. The car looses track of those every 3-4 minutes of surface street driving, then hands the steering job back to me with a cheerful little noise for a few seconds. Then it reorients itself and picks up the steering again. Lather rinse repeat. Sigh.
It is oblivious to the possibility of intersections which curve or have a lane offset when you get to the other side. It “dead reckons” across the intersection and if it finds itself straddling a stripe on the other side it’ll abruptly do something. Not always a predictable something.
It evidently tries to both follow the lane lines and also follow the car ahead. Which I can see might produce a blind-leading-the-blind caravan effect if enough cars have similar logic enabled and the lead car (or driver) makes a poor decision about where the lane is.
I have a personal bias to drive a few inches nearer the left lane margin than dead-center in my lane. The car seems to prefer the opposite. Which leads to it hugging the gutter or curb on boulevards. That makes me nervous; very nervous.
Likewise it’s common on a multi-lane road that the innermost lane(s) are a uniform standard width and the outermost lane is wider for bike space, gutters, vagaries of driveways, whatever. IOW, any excess or unevenness in the total roadway width is taken up entirely in the right lane. In those circumstances this driver human will tend to hold standard spacing off the left edge of that outer lane and leave all the excess lane-width to their right. The car seems to like centered (to slightly right of center?) across the entire lane-plus of width. Which to me is decidedly disconcerting.
While it is lane-keeping the steering is decided twitchy and it meanders within the lane enough that a cop following might wonder if I was impaired or txting instead of driving. It’s good about not straying across a line, but it’s also surprising how much angle it will generate towards crossing a lane line before veering abruptly back towards the center. Crude.
By contrast there is a special dense freeway traffic jam mode which works pretty well. And can only be activated on highways, not surface streets. So at least that much of the system is connected to the nav computer. The stripes on those highways are more consistent, the curve radius is large, and it integrates awareness of cars in other lanes. It has done a very nice job when someone has lane-changed into the empty space ahead and suddenly our following distance is much less than it was a moment ago due to the new car, and the closure rate has changed drastically as well. It also handled heavy rain as well or better than I could, somehow still identifying the stripes when I was struggling. That may be the follow-the-leader mode doing the heavy lifting though.
Now the caveats:
Sometimes the intelligent cruise control will do strategically dumb stuff like accelerate hard approaching a red light where the last car in line is a little farther away than its field of attention. Then it has to brake rather aggressively when it suddenly notices a stopped car ahead while it/we have 45mph of closure. Oops. Of course as a human with longer range vision I saw the whole situation developing and had I been driving I would have not accelerated and perhaps even braked gently to arrive near the car ahead with much less closure.
When it really loses track of the lanes or gets scared, it gives a scary sharp beep and you better be actively driving right now or somebody nearby is going to be scared of you. Or dented by you.
Overall it’s clear that it’s only “seeing” and “thinking” a short distance ahead. As other have noted about other cars, the feeling is very much that of riding with an amateur driver who’s hyper-focused on a couple of close-in things and completely lacking any awareness of the larger traffic picture.
The documentation makes it clear that’s exactly what’s going on. If anything they’re underselling, not overselling, what it can do. Which is nice.
I am reminded of the 1960s analog autopilots installed in 707s and 727s. They were sloppy, nervous, and prone to doing clueless shit. Becasue that was all the state of the art could provide. For seriously difficult conditions it was often safer to hand-fly than let it fly and try to ride herd on it.
Lastly, in the last few years of non-assisted drving I have often been annoyed at adjacent cars pressing towards the lane lines then veering back at the last moment. Which I had blamed on inattentive humans. I now suspect a lot of those almost-incidents are from other semi-self-driving cars bumbling around within their lane while oblivious to traffic in adjacent lanes like mine does.
In all, it’s really pretty cool in a 21st Century way. But it’s also really bad at what driving is actually about. I’m still quite new with it, but it’s easy to find myself driving paying more attention to the headup display and what evidence I have of what it’s “thinking” than I am to the larger picture. The task of monitoring the steering is different from the task of doing the steering, but not (yet) much easier. Despite many years of monitoring several generations of automation drive a machine through the sky, this monitoring task is a difficult draining one. Largely as I expected / predicted it would be. The reaction time required to solve an anomaly in the time.space available demands a high state of vigilance. One that I expect many assisted drivers will lack the discipline to maintain for long.
Great to read a non-Tesla review!
This is close to where I’m at. It’s more work for me to let the car drive than for me to do it myself.