Fired Tesla Employee Posts New Video of Full Self-Driving Running Red Light

https://jalopnik.com/fired-tesla-employee-posts-video-fsd-running-red-light-1850678098

by bookofjoe • 3 years ago

87 77 3 years ago

Fernicia• 3 years ago

Looks like that intersection could fool a few human drivers too.

Could it? There's a lot of signals pointing in different directions but it's pretty hard to miss both the one directly in front or the one right next to the car.

Plus, if you see both red and green lights, your first instinct as a driver (human or not) should be to stop and re-examine more closely, not run through it.

wpsimon34• 3 years ago

True, but I suspect a human driver would take a moment to assess the situation instead of just continuing on confidently.

tekla6• 3 years ago

If so, why didn't they tap the brake?

TheHypnotist2• 3 years ago

Not true. This is very obviously a red light for that lane.

hn_user82179• 3 years ago

In general I agree, but yesterday I saw a car blow through a stop sign at an intersection and then honk at the cars going perpendicularly through the intersection (they had no stop signs) :/ people are pretty happy to be confidently wrong.

agloe_dreams2• 3 years ago

Just watched the video. Any driver who cannot correctly tell on an oblique intersection which light is theirs is a driver who should be fined until they can..or have their license taken away. Any programmer can clearly tell why FSD got it wrong (It saw the glow of the other road's green light on the angle) but nonetheless it was wrong and legally wrong.

olddustytrail3• 3 years ago

Then the driver of that car should be fined and/or have their licence taken away.

seanmcdirmid• 3 years ago

Whoever is responsible for the intersection should also be fined. Our whole safety culture is based on being as clear as possible with redundancies from the consumer and the provider (i.e., assume the worst, provide the best).

pc86• 3 years ago

Absolutely, but I think what most humans would do is slow down - especially at night - and not go through the intersection at 27 when they were approaching at 30. FSD appears to just make a binary "go/stop" decision and commit fully rather than slowing down when there is decreased confidence as a person would/should.

Definitely poor intersection design though as well. I've seen lights with extensions around the bulb to prevent them from being seen from obtuse angles, I wonder why these lights don't have those? Especially at night it would completely block your vision of the light(s) that don't apply to your road.

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

If the Tesla's self driving software had to be limited in speed based on it's confidence, it wouldn't be able to driver faster than 15 mph. Tesla's self driving is ENTIRELY based around "Fuck it, I'll probably be fine"

shiftpgdn3• 3 years ago

Everyone always gets upset at me when I bring this up. The infamous fatal "autopiloted" Model X crash in the Bay Area happened because the road lanes were painted to drive the car into the narrow side of a jersey barrier. The next day a near fatal accident happened in the exact same spot, likely because Caltrans as an organization has little to no liability and generally doesn't stay on top of freeway conditions.

There is an intersection in Houston that is one of the most dangerous in the USA that kills a dozen people a year due to poor design and planning from TxDOT. There are probably hundreds of intersections like this around the country that will need to be fixed.

If I go paint road lines into a wall painted like a tunnel, are the drivers who hit the tunnel wall responsible, or is it me who painted the road lines?

m4632• 3 years ago

I drove past the location of the model X crash shortly afterwards.

The white lines of the two adjacent lanes made it look like there was a well-defined lane there, with the barrier right in the center.

Here's a pretty good picture of what it looked like then:

https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/m...

You can see there is no hatching to make it obvious it was a non-drivable area.

I would have expected something like this might have made a difference:

https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png

(that said, why didn't radar help?)

cddotdotslash• 3 years ago

It’s an extremely common pattern for the lights for one direction of an intersection to be visible from the other (usually at an angle). Very few human drivers would confuse the two. At the very least they would slow down until they were able to confirm rather than driving full speed ahead like this car seemed to do.

cchance2• 3 years ago

not anywhere i've lived in the US

TheHypnotist2• 3 years ago

You aren't serious, are you?

surfpel• 3 years ago

Amusingly the driver also mistook it for green initially. Indeed a confusing intersection

tekla6• 3 years ago

So the road was pretty shittily marked, I was having a hard time figuring out wtf was going on (within the limits of the mediocre video), so its something that needs to be worked on.

What I don't get is why the driver/passenger are freaking out on camera. I'm going to guess its clearly for the social media outrage. They were already saying it was a red light before they passed it. They could have pressed the brakes at any time, but they decided to spend the time cursing. The car was already clearly approaching way too fast for the intersection (~25 mph) and they chose to do nothing.

nickthegreek4• 3 years ago

I think they could see that no cars were coming from their vantage, so breaking wasn't necessary from a safety point. You are kinda underselling the whole "something that needs to be worked on." since you know... its in a bunch of cars currently on the road with other people who might not like to be part of the experiment.

valval8• 3 years ago

The experiment that demonstrably makes cars safer than a human driver? Why would people not want to be a part of that? I sure do, I want to be safer when driving.

cchance2• 3 years ago

if there were cars entering the intersection crossing the car would have detected that and hit breaks also, it detects cross traffic as well, which overrides a "green" light intersection from a confused tilt of the light

joshstrange• 3 years ago

Even more strange, it was the second time it had done this. The person filming went back and did it again. At that point I feel like the correct response is "Yep, see, it just did it again" but instead it was played up for the video. That said, I'm not pro-Tesla nor do I think FSD is ready, just that this is a bad example.

tharkun__2• 3 years ago

How is that road shittily marked? I could see, even from the crap video, exactly where to drive. Perfectly fine double lines in the middle, perfectly visible edge markings on the right side. Perfectly visible red light. Yeah there's a crappy slight bend right before the light and before you turn that bend that puts you head on with the red light telling you to stop, you're basically going straight towards a green light that's meant for the road coming from the right. I bet it got confused by that.

belltaco• 3 years ago

The driver, who had been through the intersection earlier, says the light is green when it's red.

leoh• 3 years ago

Some folks get upset when something is reasonably experienced as outrageous and not merely to agitate others.

Some folks also seem to find it reasonable to let others know when something is unsafe.

Seen in that light, I don’t really see an issue and don’t think it’s cool to diminish the video by suggesting it was merely to produce outrage.

I, for one, don’t want to run into a wayward Tesla while on the highway.

me_me_me• 3 years ago

Ahhh, we will test in production and see what happens...

omnicognate• 3 years ago

Oh wow, I just went through a red light onto a highway at night. Better go back and do it again while operating a phone.

foogazi• 3 years ago

You have to make sure the bug is reproducible

heattemp99• 3 years ago

I saw a massive car accident happen at night at an intersection. A drunk driver was coming down a hill rated at 45. He was doing 60 probably. Tboned someone turning on their green arrow across the intersection. Massive accident I stayed to help with for a bit.

A few days later I was going down the hill at night just like the drunk driver. For a second I saw the upcoming light and then one soon after it overlap because of the gradient on the hill and the distance between the lights.

I could definitely see AI and people not paying attention getting overlapping lights like this confused.

weezin• 3 years ago

Pretty confusing intersection with the light not being above the lane. He himself wasn't sure at the start of the video which light was his. He was a "advanced driver assistance systems test operator" and didn't know that disengaging is how you teach it to do the right thing and that you should disengage if you are about to run a red? Posting it on social media is just the icing on the cake for him being terminated.

chrismcb• 3 years ago

Ok and? We know cars can't drive themselves 100% of the time.

qsdf38100• 3 years ago

Does Elon know this?

valval8• 3 years ago

Yes

nunez• 3 years ago

Can confirm that this has definitely happened to me while Beta was active. I've been able to take over before it did the thing in both instances.

In those instances, the (temporary) light box was tilted enough to make it seem like the light could have been for the parallel road and not us.

I didn't bring it up because Beta detects and reacts to pretty much every other light like you'd expect.

pengaru• 3 years ago

Tesla apologists are insufferable

bookofjoe• 3 years ago

It's worth reiterating that even if FSD in all cars resulted in car crash deaths that numbered 1% of current annual deaths — 45,000, approximately 125/DAY in the U.S. — those 450 ANNUAL deaths would be considered a FAIL of FSD.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

This happened at Uber ATC multiple times as well

skue• 3 years ago

What’s with all the comments stating that the intersection could fool some human drivers too?

First, looking at it on 2D video shot at night is very different than actually being there. But more importantly, the acceptable threshold for autonomous vehicles is not and never will be “Better than the worst drivers.”

sebazzz• 3 years ago

Its insane that a car company can just gamble and experiment on the public road, endangering lives and traffic.

xracy• 3 years ago

Everyone on here complaining about the road markings in the video is missing the point. Roads are frequently poorly maintained, and the markings are not consistent even from city-to-city (Or within cities). To be a reasonably full-self-driving vehicle, you need to be prepared for the imperfection which is roadways in the US (or anywhere).

we often make up for this in human judgment, but the machines are unable to make up for that, and that's a major gap.

Fired Tesla Employee Posts New Video of Full Self-Driving Running Red Light

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