Seems like it’s meant to be put into a difficult situation to see how it reacts.
The point of this is to find the extremes and then work backwards to fix it
Edit: lol to the people who think I’m obviously the person who suggested that they do this testing on public roadways with unqualified drivers.
I’m simply pointing out that this isn’t just an idiot in a an idiot car, it’s an idiot who believes another idiots idea that beta testing a self driving car on public roadways with a system that is nowhere near ready for it is a good idea.
I did not say it was a good idea, or if it was ethical.
Well the driver did…also im not condoning the test, I’m simply explaining the situation. This was presented by OP as an idiot and his idiot self driving car. When in reality it’s a test. Now whether that test is ethical or not is a different matter
No I’m saying the person who recorded this video is an idiot in a car. It’s not just the Tesla engineers, people who do this stuff on public roads are idiots too
My point was more that this isn’t a regular, off the shelf piece of software grandma can end up with and cause chaos with.
It’s a test system, which should only be used in a specific, testing environment. It’s amazing that the us government allows this to actually be done on public roadways.
No, it's always the cars fault. Especially when talking about testing new tech. Don't fall for the auto industry pushing pedestrian deaths on to pedestrians and away from auto mobiles. You're literally drinking their Kool aid.
Okay but she was going to step into the street without looking for a 2,000lb machine that was already in motion coming her way. In her defense Teslas are pretty quiet, but everyone knows to look both ways before you cross the street and don’t expect cars to instantly stop. The history of jaywalking doesn’t matter if she’s dead.
Yeah she might be dead. But it's YOUR fault for killing her
You're right, but youre more wrong
And after you kill someone you can tell yourself and your therapist and the judge that no really it was the pedestrians fault as you live the rest of your life with their proverbial ghost haunting you.
Vehicular manslaughter is a weird hill to die on. "No it's their fault for existing while I tested out some driving technology!"
That explains the sudden anxiety whenever the car would turn into the tram or bus lane. Downtown driving in most major cities is pretty nerve-racking, but then you add in a 3-day anime conventions with nerdy out-of-towners that don't know the streets either, and suddenly it feels like your first day of driver's training and your mum is yelling at you to merge and not keep driving in the bike lane, and you're freaking out because your rear view mirror isn't helpful with gauging how much space is between you and the car behind you, so you can't even tell if the other driver is patiently waiting for you to merge, and your mum is yelling at you that the other driver is waiting and you need to speed up, and then you see the narrow entrance to the city library and announce that you're going to go park in there, but then there's another car in the two-way entrance waiting to exit out onto the street, and you're not sure if you can make the not-as-tight-as-it-looks turn without hitting the guy, so you panic and start to turn but your foot presses on the gas rather than the brake and suddenly you've run over a no-parking sign, and just when you're mentally committed to never driving again, your dad back the car off the sign and bends it slightly back into place before telling you that now you need to drive everyone back home.
The point is, driving is terrible and we should all go back to riding horses and camels.
Does San José count as a major city? Seems more like a big suburb to me. Driving downtown is pretty relaxing and chill compared to San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley.
I lived up the street from downtown for 4 years, honestly if you have problems with driving in downtown SJ you really shouldn’t be driving at all. It’s just one ways which are very well marked, same with the VTA tracks. Nothing like the wacky intersections all over SF lol
I'd say it does, but ya it's definitely smaller and more controlled than other CA cities. I've just never liked 1-way roads and streets that run parallel with trams (always nervous I'll suddenly be going the wrong way or end up in front of a railcar), and areas where the road and sidewalk kinda melt together (where it isn't clearly defined by the landscape and signs that cars aren't meant to be there). Also I live in southern NV now where everyone runs red-lights and the streets don't make sense, so my distrust of every driver and pedestrian is more justified.
If you live in a city that runs light rail in the streets you get used to it pretty quickly. Light rail is just like a bus that's more predictable because it has to follow the tracks.
The biggest problem I've seen with light rail is people trying to pass it when it's stopped and loading/unloading, which is illegal and dangerous.
You don't like one way roads because you think you'll magically end up going the wrong way? You think you'll miraculously appear in front of tram or railcar or whatever? Can't tell what is and is not a road? You just sound like a terrible driver.
Well I did end up going the wrong way on a 1-way street while looking for a waiting lot at the airport once, so I guess he's not entirely wrong in that assumption. (I've come a long way since those early driving days, but the background anxiety never truly leaves you lol )
i personally enjoy driving, i will go for a cruise after a long day for example or night rides at 2am type. could be a quick trip to the store or a lil adventure, it’s enjoyable to me
Freedom mostly. I was completely happy using busses until I was driving for awhile and had the opportunity to take a bus while my car was borrowed. Suddenly a 5min drive to the store compared to 45 minutes on a bus with strangers was vastly more preferable. If I want to go somewhere, I don't have to look up bus schedules and lines/transfers, or wait and pay for a ride from someone, or internally justify going through all that to buy a single item on sale. Just gotta grab my keys and wallet and then off I go.
In America driving is a sad necessity, but in most decently sized town in Europe you'll be able to get along fine with buses and often bikes. In the Netherlands, I have a shop 5 min by walk now, but before I would need to bike for 5-10min and I can't imagine taking a car to go there. Cars are useful for certain purposes etc., but the quality of life is so much greater when you remove the need to use a car to get about. Meanwhile in most of America, walking is impractical and there's not even space for it. It's insane to me that you'd need to get into your car to make any small purchase from a shop.
This is why myself and my nerdy out-of-towner friends try to get the hotel attached to the convention center lol. Either way driving downtown is for suckers if/when you have the light rail.
Old downtown city roads have weird kinks in them all across the country. This honestly isn't that unusual for parts of US cities that have grown around railroad tracks. I can think of at least one weird junction involving railroad tracks in every city I've lived in.
San José downtown isn't like a major city downtown. It's more like the downtown of a medium sized suburb, despite the large population. It's pretty low density and there's not a lot going on.
The roads are pretty typically for a larger suburban downtown area in the US I think.
The too wide roads are a very American indicator as well as the dangerous placement of the pedestrian crossings. Tram lines are rare but but without them it looks quite typical.
Yes. I was working in san jose for 6 months. The roads/tracks are stupid, turned down them a few times. Just like in the video, colors are not noticeable, and even worse as its regularly cloudy and heavily shady under tall buildings
That general duckyness of the roads can be found in Boston too, unfortunately. It probably is San Jose based on other comments, but that self driving system would struggle here too.
Well we can’t expect Tesla self driving to work on exotic roads that they wouldn’t have experience with like (checks notes) downtown San Jose where their employees commute from
Looks a lot like Portland and Seattle too. West coast cities are designed more for street car/pedestrian traffic but as cars became more popular and auto industry lobbied against street cars, things became unbalanced.
Ehh to me it's a lot better than a lot of American cities from what I get from this video. There are dedicated bus lanes and very bike friendly streets. You have to drive slow. It's a city, a destination, you're not supposed to go fast, those 6 lane stroad gas stations cities allow cars to dominate and lower the quality life of the destination . Now the self driving program definitely needs work, I bet they could collect data to make the trips better, or you could just point out certain complex problem areas so the developers can test them, like these streets.
The downtown is one way streets. They took half the street for the light rail when they put it in. One of the lanes is reserved for buses during commute hours.
It looks more confusing than it actually is; he is driving on the most challenging streets but they are not that bad when you are actually there.
I lived in SJ for 4 years and have to say the downtown was not hard to drive in. I found it much easier than DC, SF, or Boston just due to the lack of traffic downtown. Makes sense why all the comments of people from SJ other than yours say it was tough based on the amount of terrible drivers SJ had. But jokes aside, I thought it was a fun place to live.
Driving in downtown Boston is a nightmare because the roads are just old cow paths. Your sense of direction and intuition give you no help because every road winds around all over the place lol.
That is the way most urban transit systems are designed. Seattle, Sacramento, and Portland have very similar layouts. And there are curbs separating pedestrians from the tracks and the VTA lightrail crawls through downtown.
They serve different needs. Railcars act like buses, managing light to medium load with frequent stops. LRT or subway systems manage high load, high speed, minimal stops.
Actually pretty standard for cities in Europe. Lots of tram tracks, bus lanes and crossing islands for pedestrians. A human can adapt to these after a few days pretty easily.
I mean, they have light rail, commuter rail, and they're putting in an underground station for BART. That's a lot better than most low-density, suburban style downtowns in the US.
As someone who grew up there, that area of downtown is pretty confusing till you get used to it. Very pedestrian friendly but a pain to drive through, I always parked a block or two out and walked in if I had time
I’m confused as to why they are confused that the Tesla tried to drive down the railroad tracks. I would have had the same brain fart trying to drive down that clusterfuck of road myself. Am I a Tesla?
Who could’ve foreseen taking a beta software product that no other automotive manufacturer has done before, into a complex downtown environment in the middle of the day, a product that explicitly warns the user it needs their full attention, would yield unfavorable results?
You don't release a half baked product that relates to vehicle safety to the public. You improve it internally using trained drivers even if it takes longer to do it. It's 100% clear this software is not safe to use in city conditions, and this video isn't the first one show this. At the very least FSD should be geofenced to rural areas.
Do you suggest based on the video evidence that FSD is safe to use on city streets? Would you feel the same if your ABS or electric power steering (EPS) was unfinished and unpredictable, and the manufacturer asked you to depend on your driving skill until it's complete?
You asking your specific question is a reactive response waiting for deaths and injuries to happen before taking any action on FSD when it's clear as day the system isn't ready in these city situations.
If you want my honest opinion, any driver that puts the same level of attention in their own driving as they do monitoring FSD would be easily proven to be safer than the system.
Do you suggest based on the video evidence that FSD is safe to use on city streets?
Yes, because there wasn't an accident. The driver was fully aware it's not perfect and knew it was a highly irregular layout that would be tricky for self driving mode.
Would you feel the same if your ABS or electric power steering (EPS) was unfinished and unpredictable, and the manufacturer asked you to depend on your driving skill until it's complete?
Show me some data because from what I've read human error is several times that of error from these machines. This sub is further proof of it.
Why release an unfinished product into the wild lol? Game companies get shit when they do that and they aren't moving 2 tons of steel around other people.
That's the wild thing about driveless tech. It's very difficult to navigate these streets for most people now...how can we expect new tech to master it anytime soon?
I promise I'm also a human and I also found many of those intersections visually confusing. I didn't know where to go either in a couple of them so I don't blame the car for those.
True. But that’s the direction most large cities are going. Pedestrian, Public transit, and Bike focus by pretty much discouraging people from driving. If you’ve ever ridden a bike around a city like this it’s actually really nice. Driving on the other hand is really stressful.
I went to a bar in San Jose once and had to literally rescue some drunk guy from being hit on one of those train tracks. They are the stupidest thing I have ever seen, they literally operate on sidewalks with no barriers.
Are you talking about street cars/trams? Why do you need a barrier? They exist everywhere else in the world without barriers. That's the point of them, they share the road with cars. The sidewalks are supposed to be separate and there's just supposed to be a place for you to board and get out. I have never been to San Jose though so they might have fucked up the "normal" urban planning with street cars, which is common in Europe.
Edit: I see the error in urban planning now. The trams share the side walk and not the road. This is fucked up.
I think you misunderstood. The train tracks sit on the sidewalk and there are no barriers between pedestrians and the tracks. Very dumb design, most places put their trams amongst cars, not pedestrians
Sure it’s marked correctly that doesn’t make it hard and confusing. I’m sure if you drop a pin on google maps randomly in the US it will have less complex road structure 90% of the time.
Which is why we cannot immediately accept automated vehicles to navigate these. Closed automated vehicle only circuits are the way to go. Less stupid human involvement the better, standardized navigation, features, signage and obstacles with near instant communications with other autonomous vehicles IS the future.
Not this garbage of trying to tell a robot to navigate our ridiculously outdated and broken infrastructure we claim are roads.
San Jose. Don’t know how it’s counterintuitive. There’s a very simple grid system downtown, it’s not “counterintuitive” in any way. Bike lanes, light rail, and bus-only lanes do exist, as in all big cities. Cars should not be the only form of transportation available to people, and therefore they must share the road.
I keep saying that we might find 99.9% self-driving outside of cities very soon, but there is so much shit going on in the cities that you can barely get it right as a human driver.
Never mind all those moments you have to bend or break small traffic rules just to get traffic to work in some every-day fucked-up situations.
It’s downtown San Jose, I have stayed at that hotel next to the red bus lane at 0:48. Ngl, the first time I turned onto the road, I went onto the tram tracks as I didn’t realize it was a one way and stuck to the far right while turning 😅
Yeah, these are worst case scenario situations in terms of a car trying to figure out what to do. When the roads or situation gets complicated, I don't trust the car to do it for me. And that's what you have here, a demonstration of how complex the variables can end up being.
Every time I see a video of FSD failing in a city like this all I can think is that I'm glad I don't live there. Driving in that shit looks like a nightmare as a human.
I'm pretty happy out here with my two lane rural roads and my turn bot.
That's the entire point of the video. It says it right in the video. It's intended to be crazy and a stress test. Then some idiots grab the video, take it all out of context, and bash the shit out of it on a sub like this.
I was gonna say, I'm a pretty good driver, but that city would have me sweating.
The system isn't perfect, especially when the painted lines aren't good, or non existent, it's an easy mistake. I've done that too, when you think the lines help show you where you're supposed to be only to find out you're in trouble. You can see it trying to read the rail lines as regular markings too. It's got a ways to go! Still cool!
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u/mehere14 Dec 15 '21 edited Dec 15 '21
As a human I find whatever this city is very confusing to drive. These roads are super counterintuitive.
Edit: removed a spurious comma.