The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

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[–] 145 points 2 years ago (23 children)

Eyes can’t see in low visibility.

musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”

FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes

musk reaction -

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  • [–] 69 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    if he was truthful: "the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits"

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago

    Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.

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    [–] 116 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now definitely on Musk's list of departments to cut if Trump makes him a high-ranking swamp monster

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  • [–] 94 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why do you think musk dumping so much cash to boost Trump? The plan all along is to get kickbacks like stopping investigation, lawsuits, and regulations against him. Plus subsidies.

    Rich assholes don't spend money without expectation of ROI

    He knows Democrats will crack down on shady practices so Trump is his best bet.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago*

    He's not hoping for a kickback, he is offered a position as secretary of cost-cutting.

    He will be able to directly shut down everything he doesn't like under the pretense of saving money.

    Trump is literally campaigning on the fact that government positions are up for sale under his admin.

    "I’m going to have Elon Musk — he is dying to do this... We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting, OK? Elon wants to do that," the former president said"

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    [–] 90 points 2 years ago (16 children)

    Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.

    how is it legal to label this "full self driving" ?

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    [–] 62 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility, and/or to take actions to improve visibility. Muskboxes don't.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They also decided to only use cameras and visual clues for driving instead of using radar, heat cameras or something like that as well.

    It's designed to be launched asap, not to be safe

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    [–] 62 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Tesla: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual cameras.

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  • [–] 60 points 2 years ago* (16 children)

    Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.

    This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they're not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.

    Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn't. We tolerate crashes because we can't improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it's irrational not to do it.

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  • [–] 46 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Also, on a final note...

    Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??

    If you have the option to add something that humans don't have, why wouldn't you? As an example, humans don't have gps either, but it's very useful to have in a car

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    This is directly a result of Elon's edict that Tesla cars don't use lidar. If you aren't aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla's self driving project because he didn't want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

    His "first principles" logic is that humans don't use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it's obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.

    This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.

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    [–] 34 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Really fucking stupid that we as a society intentionally choose to fuck around and find out rather than find out before we fuck around.

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    [–] 32 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Makes you wonder if removing the lidar and using fucking cameras isn’t part of the problem… cheap bastards.

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    [–] 32 points 2 years ago*

    Full Self Driving shipping 2025 2026 2027 3098 4484 1e+156

                           ^
    
                       You are here
    
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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (26 children)

    If anyone was somehow still thinking RoboTaxi is ever going to be a thing. Then no, it’s not, because of reasons like this.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (25 children)

    It doesn't have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Exactly. The current rate is 80 deaths per day in the US alone. Even if we had self-driving cars proven to be 10 times safer than human drivers, we’d still see 8 news articles a day about people dying because of them. Taking this as 'proof' that they’re not safe is setting an impossible standard and effectively advocating for 30,000 yearly deaths, as if it’s somehow better to be killed by a human than by a robot.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Charge the stupid fuck Tesla chain of decision making with murder. This bullshit "self driving" advertising is premeditated, that's no longer manslaughter.

    And charge the driver(s) with manslaughter under aggravating circumstances.

    But oh no, muh profts, hurr-durrr....

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago (24 children)

    Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    The bad news is people hitting and killing pedestrians is so common you don't hear about it. Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed. Even the FSD system that was as close to perfect as possible would still occasionally kill someone in large enough numbers, because there's too many variables to account for. If the numbers are lower than a human driving, it's a positive.

    We should be trying to move away from cars though ideally. Fuck electric cars, FSD cars, and all other cars. A bus, train, bike, or whatever else would be safer and better for the environment.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Because it is generally proven to save lifes. You'll never hear of "thanks for the auto-brake system no one got injured and everything was boring as usual" but it happened a lot (also to me in first person).

    I don't like Musk but in general its a good thing to push self driving cars IMO. I drive 2 hours per day and the amount of time where I see retarded people doing retarded stuff at the wheel is crazy.

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    [+] 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)
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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (17 children)

    I thought it was illegal to call it full self driving? So I thought Tesla had something new.
    Apprently it's the moronic ASSISTED full self driving the article is about. So nothing new.
    Tesla does not have a legal full self driving system, so why do articles keep pushing the false narrative, even after it's deemed illegal?

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    To be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing

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