One 8 mile freeway trip, and I think it is bad. Very light traffic, and it refused to maintain speed. I must have needed to encourage it with a throttle tap a dozen times. The speed limit is 65, and I had the max speed set to the speed most traffic was traveling. If the nearest car was hundreds of feet in front of me, it would go 3-8 mph under my max speed. For the times I was closer to cars traveling at my max speed, it maintained it.
It seemed to behave the same in standard or hurry, except in hurry it insisted on moving into the left lane when the right was clear, even if there was a faster car coming up behind me in the left lane.
At least it didn’t try and take the bus ramp, like the old system would.
The max speed indicator is actually more oddly broken than I thought. It can show the driving mode (chill, standard, hurry), the max speed setting, both, or neither. The only pattern I found is that it shows the max speed when I’ve achieved the max speed. So if I have it set at 37, it won’t show anything until I get to 37, and then it will show “max 37”. Except sometimes when it shows it anyway.
Maybe I’ll try setting the speed offset back to 40% and see what happens. Speed limits are just legal niceties, right, and we get to ignore those now.
Too many posts in a row, but I am playing with the updated FSD.
Yesterday I had to intervene twice for safety related reasons. This is in much less than 50 miles of driving on the new FSD, and both incidents were very similar.
I was making a right turn on red, and I’ve learned that the car will often creep forward to get a better view. I thought it was creeping, but instead it pulled out into traffic. It wasn’t immediately in front of another car, but it was close enough that the oncoming car would have needed to slow down if I hadn’t used some hard acceleration to get up to speed much more quickly than usual for normal driving.
Later the same day I was making a right turn from a stop sign onto a busy street, and it did the same thing. This time I was being very sensitive, and I used the brake when I decided the forward motion was more than just a creep, but that it was starting to go. The really stupid thing is if the car had gone immediately at the break in traffic, it would have been fine, but it hesitated, which was enough time for the oncoming cars to get too close.
Both of these are on end-to-end city driving model (AI based), which has been out for some time.
New in this update is the end-to-end highway driving model. It is unusable because it insists on driving in the left lane for no reason. This is a ticketable offense in Colorado. Stay right, unless passing (or there’s a bunch of traffic and all lanes are full). The old highway model used to try to get left, but I could cancel the lane change, and select the “minimize lane changes” option to keep it in the right lane. That option has been removed, and I’ve had the new system both change lanes anyway after I cancelled it, and attempt to change lanes immediately after I successfully cancelled it. There is currently no way to keep FSD legal on the highway.
Sounds kind of like FSD is assuming Musk’s personality. “I’m gonna go, other traffic can slow down for me.” “I’m gonna drive in the left lane, fuck the rest of you.”
Is this because the training data is a bunch of selfish drivers, or is Tesla tweaking the model?
(Yes, it’s probably just bugs, but it’s more interesting to speculate.)
Some states reserve the left lane for passing only. Sane states reserve the left lane for cruising faster than the slowpokes in the right lane.
A case can be made for left-lane-is-passing-only, provided the road is only 2 lanes each way and traffic density is below ~4 cars per mile of road. Once there are more than two lanes in a direction or more than negligble cars on the road, the idea of leaving lane one empty is simply ludicrous. It amounts to speed control by creating artificial congestion.
IME the left-is-passing laws tend to be concentrated in the more rural states while the left-is-drive-faster laws are in the more urban states.
To the degree Teslas are concentrated in CA and other big city states, their training data may indeed predominantly reflect that locally lawful behavior.
The underlying problem is the driving model isn’t really aware of local laws and customs. I expect they’re putting that off until the basic driving is good enough. I think they’re already at that point, though.
All “keep right except to pass” rules that I’m aware of also include the “or there’s a bunch of traffic and all lanes are full, in which case slower traffic keeps right” caveat. If these rules are actually followed, left lane traffic is always passing anyways.
I keep thinking they trained it on jerk drivers. When left to make its own speed decisions, FSD seems to use whatever rules my dad uses: 40mph street, let’s go 55! Now a 65mph highway, let’s go 55!
I’ll be trying this when I get a chance. So far all I’ve tried is going to hurry mode to get it to go the speed I want, which doesn’t work.
This is the relevant part of Colorado’s law:
A person shall not drive a motor vehicle in the passing lane of a highway if the speed limit is sixty-five miles per hour or more unless such person is passing other motor vehicles that are in a nonpassing lane or turning left, or unless the volume of traffic does not permit the motor vehicle to safely merge into a nonpassing lane
I guess I judged FSD too harshly. It was on a 55mph freeway, so it was legal to cruise in whichever lane it pleased. Though even from my use of it last week on a 65mph highway, it did try to move to the left when not passing.
The thing about the recent highway experience that is so frustrating was that I was in the right lane, with no cars in front or behind me, and 2 miles away I needed to be in the right lane to merge onto a different highway. FSD chose this time to go into the left lane. (I-25 north bound two lane HOV/toll section through Denver, with right lane to 36 and left continuing on I-25.)
We drove the Tesla when Musk gave us a month trial (I assume to gather data) so we tried it a few times. I was very hesitant as the cruise control has never worked well enough for me to trust and there are still BRAKE! warnings when I am slowing down and a car is 20 yards ahead of me but it was not too bad. A few places where I questioned its decisions but none were, “OMG! We’re going to die!” moments.
My impression is that humans are theoretically better than current AI to understand the feel of traffic flow. I say theoretically because there are a lot of idiots on the road and I suspect the Tesla is smarter than they are.
I saw a Waymo get a ticket for running a red light last night. It was behind me, on the treacherous Tatum blvd. through P.V., and I entered an intersection on a late Yellow, and watched it turn Red as I passed under the light. The Waymo entered behind me and the camera flashed…
(edit: the link works. But it you just want to read the punchline:
It’s a newyorker cartoon, showing a cop saying “Does your car know why my car pulled you over” )
Mark Rober’s newest video is about lidar (ignore whatever the title YouTube shows). He compares a lidar based care with the Tesla vision only system. No surprise, the lidar is superior in situations of decreased visibility.
The “painted wall” test is interesting, in that he says it is clear to a human something is going on. In some of the shots it is very obvious something is blocking the road. In others it is clear something is on the sides of the road, but not completely obvious (to me) that the road is blocked. I’d be curious about a similar test with naive humans. In fairness to vision only self driving systems, a painted wall is a real edge case situation.
It is cool to see that an effective lidar is so small, compared to what’s on the roof of Waymo cars.
I’m so glad to see something in this thread that is something other than “my Tesla can finally do something marginally better than it could last week!”
My favorite part of the video was
Summary
how they scored the styrofoam trompe l’oeil wall to break apart like a comic book concrete wall when it got hit.
Well that was unnecessarily snotty and inaccurate. It’s literally a thread about improvements in self driving, there hasn’t been a Tesla update in months and the last few updates were significant. Feel free though to tell us about the massive updates from other products. We’d all be interested.
