Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” sees pedestrian, chooses not to slow down

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/teslas-full-self-driving-sees-pedestrian-chooses-not-to-slow-down/

by rurp • 3 years ago

40 71 3 years ago

cs702• 3 years ago

Human drivers in my city routinely do the same thing, so from my perspective the car behaved in a very-human-like manner.[a]

A longer video by the same person showing FSD Beta 11.4.1 driving his car is here (40+ minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAFyPqSu8Vo

---

[a] What's more, when there's a line of pedestrians about to cross an intersection, which will block it, I've seen human drivers accelerate to avoid getting stuck behind the line. Actually, I see that all the time when there are a lot of pedestrians downtown.

mcguire2• 3 years ago

Back in Austin, it was pretty common for pedestrians to have to stop and wait in the crosswalk while cars continued to pass. I've also seen cars pulled over by police for doing so.

whazor• 3 years ago

I noticed EV drivers are much more willing to break and wait for people crossing.

I think it is because of regenerative breaking and quick acceleration, which makes the cost of stopping much smaller. Or negative if you get a kick out of acceleration.

ryandvm2• 3 years ago

Fair enough, but better than a human is supposed to be the point of all this. Who needs self driving cars if they're going to be mowing people down while they check their Instagram?

freejazz4• 3 years ago

I don't get this argument by the tweeter: "In places like San Francisco, pedestrians enter the crosswalk before you've completely crossed rather than waiting. "

I'm city person, lived in NYC most of my life and continue to do so today, and it's pretty clear to me that the pedestrian entered the crosswalk (on the other side) before the tesla made it to the crosswalk... like... it's on video...

input_sh• 3 years ago

I mean the tweeter is called Whole Mars Catalog and if you click on their profile it's basically all about fanboying Musk and Tesla.

Kudos to them for sharing the video to begin with, but it doesn't surprise me one bit that they're trying to spin it so it's actually the pedestrian's fault, or SF's fault, or city mentality, basically anyone's but Tesla's.

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

In car centric countries it's always the pedestrian or cyclist fault. Maybe because not being in a car is associated with poverty IDK but the hatred is bizarre.

sandofsky• 3 years ago

Their previous claim to fame:

    Is there anyone in the Bay Area with a child who can run in front of my car on Full Self-Driving Beta to make a point? I promise I won't run them over... (will disengage if needed) 
    
    (this is a serious request)

https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1557112809132945408

Yizahi2• 3 years ago

Unironic usage of the word "bullish" is a dead giveaway that a person is working full time at a traveling kids entertainment facility. Very convenient for the readers :) .

nuancebydefault4• 3 years ago

I don't want to sound pedantic. If you would put a camera in a 1000 cars fully driven by humans and film each for a day, how many of such recordings could be found? I guess a handful.

The real question is... how far off is this technology from practical human driving and when (not whether) it will surpass.

mikestew2• 3 years ago

If you would put a camera in a 1000 cars fully driven by humans and film each for a day, how many of such recordings could be found?

Already with the whataboutism? Automated driving is supposed to promise safer driving than humans, not bug-for-bug compatibility.

wilg4• 3 years ago

This is an asinine argument. It’s not necessarily safer right out of the gate! Maybe they just need to fix the bug.

dondeng• 3 years ago

But if humans do this 10 out of 1000 and automated cars do it 1 out of 1000 times isn’t the automated driving safer than humans then?

DennisP3• 3 years ago

The video didn't look unsafe to me. The pedestrian was walking in from the left side of the road and never got close to the car. In my state that's perfectly legal.

nuancebydefault4• 3 years ago

I think in this respect it is already safer than human driving, my point being.

mcguire2• 3 years ago

You realize "it drives like a human being" and "it will surpass [humans in terms of safety?]" are contradictory statements?

michaelmior6• 3 years ago

As written, they are not given that the first is present tense and the second is future tense. There is also some ambiguity surrounding what "like" a human being means in this context, but I could imagine a car driving "like" a human, but safer.

smolder• 3 years ago

It's not exactly contradictory. It can "surpass humans" in the sense of being significantly better than average. If FSD drove like only the best human drivers, free of mistakes, you could say it surpassed us in terms of safety.

nuancebydefault4• 3 years ago

I'm confused. English is not my native language but did I imply anywhere "like a human being"?

I was reasonig about the distance between machine and humans in their driving capabilities. It is clear that there us a gap in favor of humans and the gap is narrowing. Moreso, in the future there will be a surpassing. I don't get the contradiction you see.

LeoPanthera3• 3 years ago

T̵o̵ ̵g̵e̵t̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵c̵l̵i̵c̵k̵b̵a̵i̵t̵ ̵h̵e̵a̵d̵l̵i̵n̵e̵ ̵o̵u̵t̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵w̵a̵y̵:̵ ̵T̵h̵e̵ ̵p̵e̵d̵e̵s̵t̵r̵i̵a̵n̵ ̵w̵a̵s̵ ̵o̵n̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵s̵i̵d̵e̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵r̵o̵a̵d̵.̵ ̵N̵o̵t̵ ̵i̵n̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵p̵a̵t̵h̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵v̵e̵h̵i̵c̵l̵e̵.̵

Edit: I'm embarrassed to say that I did not watch the video. It's much worse than the description implies. The pedestrian was in the crosswalk, and crossing. FSD absolutely should have stopped.

However, as the article points out, "California law requires drivers to come to a complete stop for pedestrians at crosswalks".

I see this as a failure of the FSD development process, not of FSD. Tesla's software devs simply aren't familiar with driving laws. They may not even be drivers - it's not a requirement.

You'd expect Tesla to simply teach the algorithm to follow driving laws, but they haven't done that.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

Tesla purposefully programs its FSD to drive "human-like" rather than strictly following the laws. For example, it will go with the flow of traffic rather than strictly following the speed limit.

LeoPanthera3• 3 years ago

Ah yes, but that's under the control of the driver. I can set it to obey the speed limit easily.

Where's the option for "stop for pedestrians at crosswalks"?

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

Lol people are still falling for this scam? There is a fool born every minute I guess.

CobaltFire• 3 years ago

The benchmark for this situation shouldn’t be “it was as safe/safer than a human” when we have to append “while clearly breaking the law”.

pja• 3 years ago

In the UK that would be an instant driving test failure.

The moment a pedestrian puts their feet on the crossing they have absolute right of way & it’s on you to stop. If a pedestrian is waiting to cross, you’re expected to stop.

If Tesla exports this self driving code to the UK it’s going to cause accidents because people will absolutely not be expecting this behaviour from vehicles on the road in the UK.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

One side-effect of self driving cars is going to be finally having to deal with the reality of impossible laws. If every single vehicle followed traffic laws perfectly, it'd likely cause chaos and gridlock.

For example, in this case, even someone standing near a crosswalk might be enough for all vehicles to refuse to enter.

giobox2• 3 years ago

I also think the desire of some for an absolutist interpretation of driving regulation in this thread would result in chaos too.

How many seconds is one supposed to stop at a stop sign? The law is silent on the matter. There is so much around laws or rule systems that forms as conventions around the rules that are often just as important as the text of the rules themselves.

See also solid white lines (do not cross) in the US. People cross them for pragmatic reasons in many locations all the time, often in full view of law enforcement.

There are also road users for whom laws are rarely enforced or more frequently disobeyed, such as cyclists. In many places cyclists are bound to obey the same traffic lights as motor vehicles. This plainly doesn't happen 100 percent of the time, and again is often tolerated by law enforcement. A car with an absolutist interpretation of driving regulations would therefore still have to deal with the law enforcement and others may not share in this view.

Symbiote2• 3 years ago

Standing close enough to a crossing that you appear to be preparing to cross is easily enough for drivers to stop and wait in some European countries, e.g. here in Denmark.

If the pedestrian remains still, but the driver sees no reason they shouldn't cross, eventually the driver might well gesture, honk etc.

freejazz4• 3 years ago

Sorry, are you saying that it'd be a problem that pedestrians could cross when they intend to? I'm not following

DennisP3• 3 years ago

In my state, the law says the Tesla's action here is fine, since the pedestrian wasn't close to the car's lane.

Vehicles are required to stop when you are crossing their lane or when you are close to entering their lane.[1]

For California, I couldn't find an independent reference for the situation here but did find one saying a stopped driver doesn't have to wait until the pedestrian fully exits the crosswalk.[2]

[1] https://leddylaw.com/what-are-my-rights-as-a-pedestrian-in-s...

[2] https://www.karlaw.com/blog/do-drivers-have-to-wait-for-pede...

ohgodplsno• 3 years ago

On a 2 lane road, you are about two seconds away from entering the other lane the moment you step on one. How damn close does it have to be ? Also, even taking law out of account: stop when there are goddamn pedestrians. At all times. Even if the law is with you. Heaven is full of people who had the right of way, and I'd rather not add each individual's perception of "but I had the right to speed up as the deceased was crossing!".

ahahahahah3• 3 years ago

For California the law is here: https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2022/code-veh/divisi...

The Tesla vehicle violated this. subdivision (3) kinda implicitly confirms that a driver doesn't need to wait for a pedestrian to fully exit (what allows for that though is just the definition of and requirements around "right of way").

michaelmior6• 3 years ago

If Tesla exports this self driving code to the UK

I'm guessing the vast majority of training data is collected in countries with right-hand traffic flow. I suspect it might not be so straightforward to adapt to countries with left-hand traffic.

hgsgm4• 3 years ago

It's just a sign flip. Mirror the incoming video and the outgoing commands.

taylodl• 3 years ago

That's the law in my state here in the States as well. The pedestrian has the absolute right-of-way in the crosswalk and you are to stop for a pedestrian waiting to enter the crosswalk. And I live in a car-centric state - as none of our cities have much in the way of public transportation other than a bus. Maybe we need to adopt your squiggly lines so it's easier for FSD to recognize when it needs to be paying attention?

Symbiote2• 3 years ago

Britain goes further than many countries: once you've stopped, you aren't allowed to start again until the whole crossing is clear of pedestrians.

nluken2• 3 years ago

This is a non-story. It's pretty clear to me the car should have stopped (and I question the original tweeter's road judgement for suggesting otherwise) but plenty of bad drivers do the same thing in the city.

LeoPanthera3• 3 years ago

"FSD doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be better than humans." That's what I hear from the pro-AI guys all the time.

So you can have that, or "well humans do that too", but not both.

nluken2• 3 years ago

That isn't what I'm saying. I agree that this behavior needs to be fixed. I'm saying that "Tesla's self-driving algorithm makes an error at a single intersection in SF" doesn't meet my threshold for news any more than a human doing that would.

A story called "Teslas systemically drive unsafely at intersections", with an investigation into this kind of behavior at mass scale? That's actual journalism, not just a glorified quote retweet.

rurp• 3 years ago

FSD already introduces new failure modes, if it's going to hardcode human mistakes as well what's even the point?

This is also assuming that FSD runs through crosswalks at the same rate as human drivers, but it might be much more frequent. If Tesla actually backed up their safety claims with data we could check and verify, but they are famously reticent to provide evidence of how their cars perform that hasn't been cherry picked.

diversionfactor• 3 years ago

After watching the video several times, I would definitely have slowed down seeing the pedestrian near the cross walk a hundred meters back, and would definitely have stopped in this instance. You never know when someone is going to run or not look for a car and being cautious saves a life. I live and have lived in a city as a driver for decades in multiple countries including in very dense areas and in no case would the FSD behavior be acceptable. We know from the Uber example this kind of automated disregard of pedestrians can result in death.

This is a much bigger and more serious issue, dozens of pedestrians are killed by cars every year in my city.

HellDunkel• 3 years ago

It may be necessary to drive a little more „human“ to improve the overall FSD experience. But once you start blurring the line of lawful/unlawful you get yourself into muddy waters. Seems as if Tesla is pulling out of their robotaxi/FSD plans without admitting so. Not good. Nonetheless i think they are doing some things right. a) they make quite an effort to visulize the mind of vehicle and b) they do not try to pretend safety by stacking up all sorts of limitations (geofencing, highways, top speed). If oly they marketed the system as ADAS and designed the UX as such and would not have made these silly robotaxi claims…

Yizahi2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of this masterpiece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S75Rfva9O8

Maybe the car knew something, eh? :)

hgsgm4• 3 years ago

Very human. This is what you want if you want AI to be Artificial Human Intelligence.

wilg4• 3 years ago

Worth pointing out that this behavior is in the release notes:

- Improved ego's assertiveness for crossing pedestrians in cases where ego can easily and safely cross before the pedestrian.

0max• 3 years ago

That's what happens when your leadership has third world carbrain (especially as a mode of exclusion) expectations.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

What does “third world carbrain” mean?

Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” sees pedestrian, chooses not to slow down

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