from Hacker News

Tesla FSD Beta 10.69.25 Struggles in Snowy Detroit MI: A Scary Video

by baptiste313 on 1/5/23, 3:11 PM with 26 comments

• by karlshea on 1/5/23, 4:32 PM

  FSD will continue to be a joke outside of the Bay Area pretty much indefinitely, at least for camera-only Tesla, for a really simple reason that’s obvious to anyone who has driven in a snowy metro: Salt spray.

  Five minutes on the road and those cameras will be 100% coated. It doesn’t matter how much neural net training you do even on no-lane snowy roads or getting the car to know how to adapt to conditions, if the cameras can’t see anything it’s over.

  Every time there’s some breathless article about upcoming cars that don’t even have a steering wheel I just laugh because they’re only ever going to sell or even work in SF.

• by kennend3 on 1/5/23, 4:54 PM

  I'd love to see FSD up here in Canada in the winter.

  We play "guess where the lanes are" at over 100km/h because our major highway system (401) ranges from 2 to 8 lanes wide and remains fully open.

  Sometimes Humans get it wrong and crash even having years experience driving in snow, how will a tesla handle road conditions when everything is white and any "lane indicators" are buried in snow?

  https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/opp-responds-to-numerous-crashes-o...

  Will FSD ever advance beyond some "ideal weather and road conditions" toy? I guess time will tell but it has a LONG way to go to support all road conditions.

• by photoGrant on 1/5/23, 3:33 PM

  "I'm risking my life, and my car".....fails to mention the general public.

• by whalesalad on 1/5/23, 7:01 PM

  I don't understand the approach that Tesla and others are taking to self driving. Why are they not building a model of the world and then basing decisions off of that? Roads do not magically change, so why are they constantly re-evaluating things and creating a new model all the time? There are static objects in the world (curbs) and then there are dynamic ones (other vehicles, people, traffic cones when a lane is shut down, etc). Every time I see tesla self driving stuff it looks like the internal concept of the world is wiggling and vibrating and changing alll the time. It seems to me that with enough sensors and fusion you can determine that a car is in fact parked and not wiggling. You can use known maps of the land to infer roads or at least general shapes of roads that could serve as a basis to stack realtime analysis on top of it. I can't help but think going all-in on image analysis is the worst approach possible for this sort of thing. Just because we have eyes and use them to see doesn't mean that computers should too. We have rules hard coded in our minds that help us do most of driving and our eyes are just giving the extra realtime data on top. I know that the road I am on is not going to magically shift/move. You can see very very far ahead in a car and immediately make concrete decisions about your journey (I know at least for the next 500 feet I am going to be on this same road that isn't changing, all I need to do is be mindful of vehicles in front of me).

  I am not articulating this well but it has been on my mind for a long time. I can't help but think the current approach of throwing GPUs and OpenCV at driving is a fools errand. Tesla eliminated a lot of their other sensors like lidar and whatnot too, to go all-in on image analysis. Foolish.

• by afandian on 1/5/23, 11:24 PM

  Aside from the FSD, is it legal to interact with the touchscreen like that while driving? I think it would be in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/using-mobile-phones-when-driving-the-law

• by Zanfa on 1/5/23, 6:40 PM

  Worst part is there doesn't even seem to be a significant amount of snow on the roads.

• by CynicusRex on 1/5/23, 5:37 PM

  The cognitive dissonance is palpable.

• by Logans_Run on 1/5/23, 4:29 PM

  I'm not a Tesla fan but to me the car seemed to handle it in a reasonable manner i.e. by disengaging whenever the FSD sensed slippery conditions (although the traction control system when on autopilot certainly seems to need some tweaking). I'm not sure what sort of tires were fitted but it seemed to struggle more when FSD was engaged vs. the human driver.