Okay, so I’m going to edit my earlier replies but replying again so you see, as I was wrong.

Version 11/12 in 2023/2024 wasn’t using the AP code, it just wasn’t using the neural nets. So it was legitimately FSD, but it was running different code on the freeways (non neural net) vs on city streets (neural net)

But it was indeed FSD. Version 11.x was the change where it stopped using AP when you left city streets.

The motorcyclist was killed on a freeway merge ramp.

I’d say that means it’s a very good chance that yes, while FSD was enabled, the crash happened under the older AP mode of driving, as it wasn’t until November 2024 that it was moved over to the new FSD neural net driving code.. I was wrong here, it actually was FSD then, it just wasn’t end to end neural nets then like it is now.

Also yikes… the report says the AEB kicked in, and the driver overrode it by pressing on the accelerator!

I’d say it’s a pretty important distinction to know if one or both systems have a problem and the level of how bad that problem is.

Also are you referencing the one in Seattle in 2024 for FSD? The CNBC article says FSD, but the driver said AP.

And especially back then, there’s also an important distinction of how they work.

FSD on highways wasn’t released until November 2024, and even then not everyone got it right away. So even if FSD was enabled, the crash may have been under AP.

Edit: Also if it was FSD for real (that 2024 crash would have had to happen on city streets, not a highway) then thats 1 motorcycle fatality in 3.6 billion miles. The other 4 happened over 10 billion miles. Is that not an improvement? (edit again: I should say we can’t tell it’s an improvement yet as we’d have to pass 5 billion, so the jury is still out I guess IF that crash was really on FSD)

Edit: I will cede though that as a motorcyclist, you can’t know what the Tesla is using, so you’d have to assume the worst.

Edit: Just correcting myself that I was wrong about FSD in 2024. The change over to neural nets happened in November, but FSD was still FSD on highways when this accident happened. It was even earlier than that when FSD became AP when you transitioned to higways

There’s been 54 reported fatalities involving their software over the years in the US.

That’s around 10 billion AP miles (9 billion at end of 2024), and around 3.6 billion on the various version of FSD (beta / supervised). Most of the fatal accidents happened on AP though not FSD.

Lets just double those fatal accidents to 108 to make it for the world, but that probably skews high. Most of the fatal stuff I’ve seen is always in the US.

That equates to 1 fatal accident every 125.9 million miles.

The USA average per 100 million miles is 1.33 deaths, so even doubling the deaths it’s less than the current national average. That’s the equivalent of 1.33 deaths every 167 million miles with Tesla’s software.

Edit: I couldn’t math, fixed it. Also for FSD specifically, very few places have it. Mainly North America, and just recently, China. I wish we had fatalities for FSD specifically.

You mean like this Euro NCAP testing, where Tesla does stop and most others don’t including some vehicles with lidar?

https://youtu.be/4Hsb-0v95R4

The range on ultrasonics is too short. They only ever get used for parking type situations, not driving on the roadways.

So to drive with FSD is 8x safer than your average human driver.

WITH a supervising human.

Once it reaches a certain quality, it should be safer if a human is properly supervising it, because if the car tries to do something really stupid, the human takes over. The vast vast vast majority of crashes are from inattentive drivers, which is obviously a problem and they need to keep improving the attentiveness monitoring, but it should be safer than a human with human supervision because it can also detect things the human will ultimately miss.

Now, if you take the human entirely out of the equation, I very much doubt that FSD is safer than a human at it’s current state.

They had radar. Tesla has never had lidar, but they do use lidar on test vehicles to ground truth their camera depth / velocity calculations.

In this case, does it matter? Both are supposed to follow a vehicle at a safe distance

I think it does matter, while both are supposed to follow at safe distances, the FSD stack is doing it in a completely different way. They haven’t really been making any major updates to AP for many years now, all focus has been on FSD. I think the only real changes it’s had for quite awhile have been around making sure people are paying attention better.

AP is looking at the world frame by frame, each individual camera on it’s own, while FSD is taking the input of all cameras, turning into 3d vector space, and then driving based off that. Doing that on city streets and highways is only a pretty recent development. Updates for doing it this way on highway and streets only went out to all cars with FSD in the past few months. For a long time it was on city streets only.

I’d be more interested in how it changes over time, as new software is pushed.

I think that’s why it’s important to make a real distinction between AP and FSD today (and specifically which FSD versions)

They’re wholly different systems, one that gets older every day, and one that keeps getting better every few months. Making an article like this that groups them together over the span of years muddies the water on what / if any progress has been made.

Well, only 1 or 2 of those were in a time frame where I’d consider FSD superior to AP, it’s a more recent development where that’s likely the case.

But to your point, at some point I expect Tesla to use the FSD software for AP for the exact reasons you mentioned. My guess is they’d just do something like disable making left/right turns , so you wouldn’t be able to use it outside of straight stretches like AP today.

I always just assumed it was their way to ensure the vehicle was really autonomous. If you have someone remotely driving it, you could argue it isn’t actually an AV. Your latency idea makes a lot of sense as well though. Imagine taking over and causing an accident due to latency? This way even if the operator gives a bad suggestion, it was the car that ultimately did it.

They don’t even do that, according to Waymo’s claims.

They can suggest what the car should do, but they aren’t actually doing it. The car is in complete control.

Its a nuanced difference, but it is a difference. A Waymo employee never takes control of or operates the vehicle.

For what it’s worth, it really isn’t clear if this is FSD or AP based on the constant mention of self driving even when it’s older collisions when it would definitely been AP, and is even listed as AP if you click on the links to the crash.

So these may all be AP, or one or two might be FSD, it’s unclear.

Every Tesla has AP as well, so the likelihood of that being the case is higher.

At the swimming pool with a speedo on and a waterproof holster for a small hand gun.

Ah, i thought it was a hole in space or something like that, so the absence of anything, and even space was something, but not matter specifically.

It’s a matter replicator, I don’t think a black hole is matter?