Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day
Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day
Watch this video of Tesla’s Robotaxi, and let me know what you think: In a 22 minute drive, I saw: All told, these early rider videos are a mess. This isn’t beta testing. It’s stress testing… and the autonomous tech is failing the test. Broad Daylight, Clear Skies: It’ll Never Be Easier to Not Mess ...
I saw the Tesla Robotaxi:
- Drive into oncoming traffic, getting honked at in the process.
- Signal a turn and then go straight at a stop sign with turn signal on.
- Park in a fire lane to drop off the passenger.
And that was in a single 22 minute ride. Not great performance at all.
Haaa, finally !! An AI taxi that behaves like a normal taxi driver. It must feel so refreshing.
Imagine you're the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone's finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it's expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it's much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You've now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it's a finger saved. Yeah, it's a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren't cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it's not replacing every table saw sold, it's slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, "Finger Saver" doesn't work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn't work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn't the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as "finger saving devices". Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a "Finger Saver" the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust "finger saving devices" at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
Cruise cars were already doing this and performed far better. GM is fucking braindead and pulled the plug like usual though.
Welcome to johnnycab
Navigation issue / hesitation
The video really understates the level of fuck up that the car did there...
And the guy sitting there just casually being ok with the car ignoring the forced left going straight into oncoming lanes and flipping the steering wheel all over the place because it has no idea what the hell just happened... I would not be just chilling there..
Of course, I wouldn't have gotten in this car in the first place, and I know they cherry picked some hard core Tesla fans to be allowed to ride at all...
Hooray! I feel so safe. I think I'll move to Texas so I can get obliterated by this taxi from the future.
Remember guys, Tesla wants to have a living person sitting behind the wheel for "safety." Don't YOU want to get paid minimum wage to sit in a car all day, paying attention but doing nothing unless it's about to crash, at which point you'll be made the scapegoat for not preventing the crash?
Welcome to the future, you're gonna hate it here.
Well obviously it's been trained on human taxi driver behaviour
Watching anything that fElon fail sparks joy.
It found out who made it so it knew what to do
Sounds like the indian guy driving it with a joystick was a bit hungover. You'd think they'd screen that thing at the entrance of the cubicle farm where all these AI folk drive these from. AI is just "anonymous indians" for elmo's grifting kind.
Tbh it's not as bad as I was expecting. Those clips could definitely have resulted in an accident, but the system seems to actually work most of the time. I wonder if it couldn't be augmented with lidar at this point to make it more reliable? A live stress test is ridiculously irresponsible and will definitely kill people, but at least it's only Texans at risk (for now).
I was skeptical of the idea of robotaxis, but this kind of sold me on it. If they're cheaper than human drivers, I might even be able to get rid of my car some day. It doesn't change the fact that I'll never get into one because the CEO is a nazi though.
I am entirely opposed to driving algorithms. Autopilot on planes works very well because it is used in open sky and does not have to make major decisions about moving in close proximity to other planes and obstacles. Its almost entirely mathematical, and even then in specific circumstances it is designed to disengage and put control back in the hands of a human.
Cars do not have this luxury and operate entirely in close proximity to other vehicles and obstacles. Very little of the act of driving a car is math. It's almost entirely decision making. It requires fast and instinctive response to subtle changes in environment, pattern recognition that human brains are better at than algorithms.
To me this technology perfectly encapsulates the difficulty in making algorithms that mimic human behavior. The last 10% of optimization to make par with humans requires an exponential amount more energy and research than the first 90% does. 90% of the performance of a human is entirely insufficient where life and death is concerned.
Investment costs should be going to public transport systems. They are more cost efficient, more accessible, more fuel/resource efficient, and far far far safer than cars could ever be even with all human drivers. This is a colossal waste of energy time and money for a product that will not be par with human performance for a long time. Those resources could be making our world more accessible for everyone, instead they're making it more accessible for no one and making the roads significantly more dangerous. Capitalism will be the end of us all if we let them. Sorry that train and bus infrastructure isnt "flashy enough" for you. You clearly havent seen the public transport systems in Beijing. The technology we have here is decades behind and so underfunded its infuriating.
You can tell it’s a Tesla because of the way it is.
At least it's not driving straight into a tree, I call that an improvement.
Maybe they're just getting the wrong people to provide training data. The kind of people who drive Tesla's do tend to drive like morons, so it would make sense.
lmfao
StudentRobo drivers, amirite?