Usually HN engineers are able to compartmentalize and correctly answer questions like this, but it’s a lost cause with Tesla for some reason. They’re unable to separate “it did a dangerous thing, but did not cause harm” in their minds.
Yes, it has problems. Yes, it has regressions. Yes, sometimes it does dangerous things. But it drove me 400 miles, door to door, last week and did fine. There’s clearly something historic happening here, but all HN can talk about is flaws.
If someone developed a warp drive, and 25% of the time it turned the operator into jelly, we wouldn’t sit here talking exclusively about jelly. We’d talk about how warp drive is cool and what the path to fixing stuff is.
This is a good point. HN posters have some difficulty looking at the objective reality of this situation, for example some are missing the obvious comparison to a completely unrelated sci-fi hypothetical that exists in your head.
Breaking my own rule only once: My car, that I own as a consumer, drove me through town, on the freeway, through another town, and into a parking lot four hundred miles away.
Twenty years ago, that was sci-fi. HN would have been able to reason clearly about it twenty years ago.
(Yes, I know HN wasn’t around in 2004. You don’t need to nitpick that)
This is a thread about Teslas running red lights. Your story about a trip wherein that didn’t happen has no real bearing on this topic.
Your nice trip aside, no sci-fi hypotheticals make running red lights acceptable either.
“What if we invented a reverse microwave but it made everything smell like cheese?” or “What if we invented an interpretive dance that solved climate change but only people over 6’4” could do it?” have the same amount of relevance to Teslas running red lights as the human jelly machine you’ve conjured in your mind.
I actually generally agree with you. It’s amazing. And I actually feel safer with waymo than human drivers. But the idea that running a stop sign is safe because there aren’t other cars is the issue here.
> If someone developed a warp drive, and 25% of the time it turned the operator into jelly, we wouldn’t sit here talking exclusively about jelly. We’d talk about how warp drive is cool and what the path to fixing stuff is
What? Who? We'd ask why the hell people are being put in it.
The hackers of yore, the ones we respect, weren't terrorists. When they phreaked the phone company they didn't try to take down 911.
> did not cause harm
Tesla's FSD has killed people [1]. It's also been the subject of multiple recalls by federal agencies.
I looked at the very first one on the list and it says someone drunk in a non-Tesla hit a Tesla and resulted in a death of the Tesla driver.
> According to the Albuquerque Police Department, on July 1, Sandoval-Martinez was driving drunk, speeding, and without a license when he ran a red light and hit Tiger Gutierrez’s Tesla, as well as a Toyota Corolla.
Not sure why the website is putting that under a Tesla death, probably to inflate counts since there aren't many Tesla deaths due to them being very safe cars.
Why are you attributing and referencing these incidents as FSD killing people?
> Why are you attributing and referencing these incidents as FSD killing people?
Nobody is.
The first entry, case No. 432, appears to have a null value in the Autopilot claimed and Verified Tesla Death columns. The first Autopilot claimed death is No. 410 [1].
> probably to inflate counts since there aren't many Tesla deaths due to them being very safe cars
How is 555 deaths across millions of cars sold refuting that? The bold text at the top clearly states "Tesla Deaths is a record of Tesla accidents that involved a driver, occupant, cyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian death, whether or not the Tesla or its driver were at fault."
You're the one that referenced that site as a source for FSD allegedly killing people. And now the only thing you have is an Autopilot death and quote the site text that says it includes deaths whether or not the Tesla or its driver were at fault? Where are the FSD deaths you claimed? Most people don't check sources and assume a comment is true because one is linked.
The fact that deaths are included as a 'Tesla death' regardless of who's fault it is shows that the site operator has an axe to grind and that the data cannot be trusted.
> How is 555 deaths across millions of cars sold refuting that?
555 deaths over 11 years worldwide is quite low given that about 45,000 people die in auto accidents just in the US every single year and 1.19M people die worldwide every single year.
I believe the NHTSA's fatal FSD crash refers to No. 225 on that list [1].
> Most people don't check sources and assume a comment is true because one is linked
I'd assume anyone responding to a comment would be curious and competent enough to look at a source.
> fact that deaths are included as a 'Tesla death' regardless of who's fault it is shows that the site operator has an axe to grind and that the data cannot be trusted
Judging fault is subjective. Judging whether someone died is not.
> 555 deaths over 11 years worldwide is quite low given that about 45,000 people die in auto accidents just in the US every single year and 1.19M people die worldwide every single year
Yes. That's the point. It's a dataset that shows Teslas to be safe, Autopilot not so much and evidences FSD having killed at least one person.
> it drove me 400 miles, door to door, last week and did fine
I call BS. Even in perfect weather on perfect roads with perfect visibility, 400 miles is at least 10 times as long as FSD can go without a disengagement.
I dunno what to tell you. It did it. A disengagement every 40 miles is not what I’m seeing on my car.
(By the way, this is part of the reason Tesla owners get called Elon-worshipers: we see the sentiment in places like this, it doesn’t line up with the reality we’re seeing every day, and trying to correct the discrepancy comes across as worship. It’s not, it’s just that it seems like something other than truth is driving these conversations.)
How did it even go 400 miles in the first place without stopping to supercharge?
I have a Tesla. My second so far, and I've been driving one since the first Model 3 was released. Pretty happy with the car. FSD is cool, better than I expected in many way, but I just can't envision it going anywhere over single-digit miles without a disengagement. I never got more than 3 or 4 miles before it did something requiring me to take over. And it was worse on the highway, not better.
Not interested in a fight, but I remain very skeptical every time someone makes a wild claim of hundreds of miles continously on FSD. It just doesn't match my experience at all, nor any of my friends who also drive Teslas and have experienced FSD.
400 miles is at least 5 hours of driving, which is a bit long for not even having a pee break. Since you're driving a BEV, it's also above the maximum range of your car, so you had to have stopped at some point, which suggests that there are details in your claim that are already missing because (you feel) those details don't matter to the essential truth of your statement.
I believe that you believe you made a 400-mile drive with full self-driving without any issues. But I also believe that belief can be made in good faith even if there were issues during that drive--either the things that did come up you don't mentally classify as issues, or you've just failed to commit what did happen to memory.
That's not a knock on you, by the way; recently, I've been struck in a number of instances the times where I have physical proof something happened yet I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of it happening while feeling that I would have had to have that memory. Human memory is notoriously finicky and fallible.
