> The feature, which appeared to violate state laws that require vehicles to come to a complete stop and required drivers to opt-in for what it dubbed "Assertive" mode, drew attention on social media and prompted NHTSA to raise questions with Tesla.
Emphasis mine; this apparently wasn't the default behavior. Though, it may not have been clear to users opting-in exactly what "assertive mode" changes about the system's behavior.
Tesla would vastly prefer a situation where the NHTSA allows it to do anything it wants, so it does just that, hoping to normalize this deviance from how the law intends highway safety to be regulated. By this action, NHTSA is trying out a more assertive mode itself.
It's not the default, you have to turn it on in a menu. It's arguably not even "shipped", as it's part of the must-qualify-in FSD beta program. And most beta users probably didn't know it existed.
It also engages only when approaching an empty intersection. Any obstacles/pedestrians or moving vehicles cause a full stop. To be perfectly honest: I turned it on when I saw it, but haven't seen it actually do it yet. And at this point I guess I never will.
I mean, speeding is equally illegal and inarguably more dangerous. Yet no one is upset that the car lets you speed.
"FSD beta" refers to the specific autonomy-in-all-circumstances product in testing. You have to request it, then prove you can win a game vs. the car's Safety Score feature for a few weeks or months, then wait to be upgraded. It's available to the public, but only in limited release.
"Full Self Driving" is the name of the vehicle option that you can purchase or license, which includes a bunch of different features (light/sign recognition, autonomous navigation on highways, lane changes, stuff like that).
> You have to request it, then prove you can win a game vs. the car's Safety Score feature for a few weeks or months, then wait to be upgraded. It's available to the public, but only in limited release.
Or have enough social media clout (in the appropriately Tesla-positive direction).
Are you referencing anything in particular? It's true that the first few hundred non-Tesla-employee installs were to a bunch of known fans and inflencer types. But since September it's been a completely public thing with objective rules. They have 60k of these cars on the roads now per the linked article, it's absolutely not just a marketing thing.
I agree with you, for what it's worth. I'm not sure why this is at all controversial. Even if you argue that it's sometimes morally permissible to do a rolling stop, it's still baffling that Tesla would explicitly program its AI to perform illegal acts. Why open themselves up to criticism and scrutiny? Should they run red lights at empty intersections, too? Ignore speed limits in quiet residential areas? Maybe tailgate other drivers going under the speed limit?
You make it sound like as of something just by being legal adheres to the platonic form of truth. There are so many dumb laws. For example in a certain state I can't remember it's illegal to have an ice cream in your back pocket on Sundays. There are many, many idiotic laws that one would do well to at least question, instead of shaming others or being "baffled" why others don't put up with them.
Illegal isn't binary - just look at speed limits. Everyone speeds at least a little, and FSD/AP had to be allowed to speed to be safe.
Illegal is binary for most driving laws (especially 'do what this sign says' rules), but some things fall into an ambiguous category of illegal-but-rarely-enforced. The problem is that computers don't do well with ambiguous rules. I strongly suspect that when most cars are using FSD the rule of being allow to drive a little over the speed limit will be removed, and cars will have to stick to the limits. Hopefully the limits will be raised.
It is not legal to speed to pass in most states. I've only found Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota and Washington have such a law on the books, up to 10mph over the posted speed limit.
For sure in Colorado it's not legal to exceed the speed limit to pass. But it is illegal to drive below the speed limit while in the passing lane on a highway with a speed limit 65 mph or higher. There's exceptions for safety and congestion, but otherwise the left lane is considered a passing lane. If you're not passing, you're not supposed to be in that lane.
Only a couple of states have laws allow speeding to pass and the vast majority of states have an absolute speed limit rule disallowing speeding in any situation. A handful of states won't give you points due to a speeding ticket <6 mph though.
Of course these are the laws, not the practice, which is what I think GP was trying to say.
For what it's worth, in Ohio I've never been stopped by a cop for going 5 miles above the speed limit on or off the interstate, despite doing so in the presence of cops many times. I got my only ticket for going 15 miles over, though.
I've gotten a ticket on US 24 (going Fort Wayne to Toledo) for doing 69 in a 65. I've went through there probably nearing a hundred times by then (both family and work out that way) but only been pulled over for it that once. Ever since One of two tickets I've ever gotten, the other was also in Ohio but that one was much more obvious - I missed the speed change on a normal road when I was younger and was doing 45 in a 35. Cop knocked that one down quite a bit though, can't remember what actually got put on the ticket.
Of all of the places I've been Chicago was probably the worst at speeding, especially in the dead of night when the roads are "too" open. Recently they got a bit stricter with the speed cameras though https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicagos-speed-cameras-ticket...
It is? That is a surprise. In germany and most countries I drove, it was definitely illegal. Of course, it is common and it makes sense, but the law is that the speed limit is absolute.
Why does the autopilot need to speed to be safe? When does “speeding to be safe” become “unsafe speeding”? 10 miles faster than the the one that you’re trying to overtake? What if they’re speeding by 10 already? Why is the speed limit not 10 higher than it is, if that’s the actual safe speed? How can Tesla unilaterally decide that exceeding the speed is perfectly good and safe?
Because people passing you is very slightly more dangerous than people following you. It’s not a big deal most of the time, but when everyone passes you across thousands of hours it adds up to a significant risk.
Why would anyone want to pass you when you’re moving at the speed limit? You are at the speed limit and everyone passing you would be beyond the speed limit.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not. They would want to pass you because human drivers aren't rigidly law abiding machines. Is there a large portion of people that go exactly the speed limit, or even lower? Sure. Is there also a large portion of people that speed virtually every moment they're behind the wheel? Yes, absolutely. And I wouldn't be surprised if that were the larger population in most areas. No one who actually drives with any regularity would ever be surprised that people are speeding to pass them.
Nobody is saying autopilot "needs" to speed to be safe at all times. But it needs the ability to be able to go faster than the posted speed limit. I.e if the speed limit is 45mph, going 47mph shouldn't be a problem that the car freaks out over. For a while, on city streets if you were using Autopilot you'd be able to go up to 5mph over the posted limit without issue. I think in the FSD Beta, you can go more.
The car already has a ruleset for when to not obey speed limits. If you're on the highway and your lane is going 65mph but the other lanes are moving very slowly, the car will slow down accordingly. Similarly, this could be implemented for the inverse to an extent.
And again, I don't think the car should speed by default, but a car going 2-3mph over the posted limit should be acceptable rather than an error state because the world is not black and white.
You're like this close to the the heart of the issue.
If you can determine in real-time whether the maneuver your about to perform or the speed you're going is safe then why even have speed limits? The speed limit for highways is still 65 whether it's a a bone dry, pitch dark, pouring rain, or completely iced over. "Any speed under 65" can't possibly be a safe speed for all these conditions while allowing for the highest safe speeds possible in ideal, or even average, conditions. And this doesn't even being to take into account the huge vehicle variance and tire ware. The safe operating speeds for a top-heavy Honda Fit with narrow tires vs a low-to-the-ground wide-tired Corvette are going to be wildly different.
And then you have to deal with other drivers. If traffic is going 75 you're gonna have a hell of a time merging capped at 65. And in an ideal world nobody would pass on the right making it possible to get off the highway without increasing speed but real life hits hard.
If you can create an all-knowing AI that can predict your the road conditions around a corner or beyond the crest of a hill, maybe. Remember, we are not discussing individual decisions made by people based on a current situation, but the defaults encoded into the software of thousands of cars. And if that default is lax, it will end up in lax behavior.
> Why does the autopilot need to speed to be safe?
For the same reason driving below average speed is dangerous. If you drive 10km/h slower than everyone else you are a problem, even if everyone else is driving at or slightly above the speed limit (very common in Germany).
You are arguing that everyone should be moving faster. But we want everyone moving at the speed limit - building cars that intentionally break the speed limit will make the effective speed creep up. It needs to creep down.
But we want the flow of traffic to be at the speed limit, that’s why there is a speed limit. So more cars need to go slower, not more cars need to go faster.
With respect to speed limits (and not stop signs, so this is explicitly a bit of a digression), it's also worth noting that sometimes you have to choose between "safe" and "legal" since most municipalities set speed limits which are not safe (the safest speed being the speed at which traffic naturally flows). So should a self-driving car (or human, for that matter) drive safely or legally?
That's...preposterous. There are a great many illegal acts that are so rarely enforced that the act is normalized, with enforcement surprising the culprits - speeding and rolling stops being the primary examples. Such are normalized because individual enforcement is practically impossible; it's when the behavior gets codified by a business as/in a product that gov't has a chance to crack down on it.
I would strongly discourage you from trying that line of argument with the cops when you're pulled over for speeding. I'm certain that a court of law with decent standards does not interpret speeding "at least a little" as anything except a binary.
The "argument" is tried against cops when you pass them while driving faster than the speed limit. In the vast majority of cases, if you're going less than 10 over, they will ignore you.
A thing is not legal just because law enforcement lets you get away with it, but I don't think this is a good example. It's silly to have this conversation without at least acknowledging the way driver behavior expands into "grey areas" and gaps in enforcement, and I don't think it's trivially obvious that "self driving" cars should rigidly follow the letter of the law even if that means they'll be the only cars on the road doing so.
This one seems so obviously avoidable that I’m baffled as to why they let it happen.