Adequate Self Driving

Robust Tesla self driving is years away, if ever. What could Tesla do in the meantime to make us happier? Currently, individual cars learn nothing from our interventions. Suppose there were a way to tell our car something we know but it doesn’t.

• I’m thinking of local-to-car map overrides that the user creates based on his personal experience.
  • Fix issues where the maps are wrong or suboptimal.
    • Outdated speed limits
    • Mapped speed limit for a residential area is correct, but really should be lower.
    • Road construction.
    • If the updates allow day of week and time of day qualifiers, they could be used to describe school zones.
    • Change the start of a lower speed limit section of a road earlier, so the car has slowed to the right speed at the real start of the section.
    • Corners that the car takes too fast.
  • If there are intersections or highway entry/exit ramps that the car doesn’t handle well, the override could flag them as blocked/unusable and the router would pick a different route.
  • As a variation, you could mark just certain lanes as blocked—e.g., for a left turn that is unsafe, but it’s okay for the car to use the intersection to go straight.
• Next, Tesla could provide what amount to location-specific post-perception overrides.
  • Deal with specific flashing yellow lights that cause unnecessary slowing.
  • That speed limit sign is for trucks only, dummy.
  • Ignore speed limit changes for the next 100 meters, because you often get it wrong. (E.g., when one road crosses another or when lanes are shifted due to construction.)
  • Mark unseen speed bumps (and potholes?)
• Possible implementation
  • A directory on the flash drive that contains individual files, each with one or more overrides. On startup, the computer loads the information from the files into memory. (There needs to be some way to deal with conflicts. Most specific wins?)
    • For now, this requires the user to have a flash drive installed.
  • To reduce load on the CPU, overrides that apply just to routing are separated out and examined only when creating routes. The remaining entries can be split into those that apply somewhere near where we are now and those that can be ignored at the moment.
  • As the car drives, it continuously checks for an override that should be honored now or shortly in the future.
  • Tesla needs to define only the API (valid syntax and recognized options) for the override files. Third-parties can create the GUI apps for users, reducing the burden on Tesla developers.
  • Users within a community could share overrides they have found useful, simply by sharing the individual files with the selected settings. (E.g., school zones)
  • I’m thinking a small team at Tesla could prototype this much in a couple months.
• Down the road
  • Tesla could expose certain tuning parameters via the API, without needing to create a GUI method for users to set them. Somewhat like extending the Service menu, but with additional qualifiers (location, time-of-day).
    • If there is a normal-braking-force parameter, AlanSubie4Life could set it so the car slows down using only regen when possible.
    • Drivers could tweak assertiveness settings based on where they are. E.g., If they know they need to be pushy on a particular entry ramp during rush-hours.
  • Tesla could provide a built-in app that could be given a URL to an override file. The app would fetch the file and add it to the overrides directory. The app could also allow examining or deleting existing override files. There might be some use cases for overrides that are cryptographically signed, but I haven’t thought of any.
  • It would be nice for the API to be general enough that other ADAS vendors might adopt it. Schools could then provide a single override specification for their zones that all AVs could use, for example. Transportation departments could share construction zone info. But, please don’t delay implementation while waiting for a committee to set the specs.

Comments?

"Full Self Driving Tesla" by rulenumberone2 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Admin note: Image added for Blog feed

 

[D Good]

Apple Maps. That is the solution. Say no more. Their lane data has never been wrong for me. Not even once. Whatever Tesla uses now incorrectly maps about 25% of intersections in my area. Utterly ridiculous. Who are they using with this godawful lane data??? Just reach out to Apple and get some decent maps. How hard could this be?

 

[Mr. Michael]

It would be consistent if Tesla picked the lowest cost map vendor. You get what they paid for...not much.

 

[DWtsn]

So if I was a bad driver then FSD might seem good? Not sure they will ever get mapping right in rural areas. Probably only have the speed right half the time around here. While most roads have no speed limit sign (even most bad drivers can figure out the speed limit), I even have a case here where I am leaving a small town with 25 mph posted speed, which the car follows. On leaving the town there is a 55 mph sign. The car starts to accelerate, and in less than 5 seconds it slows to 35 mph. I have gone around and around with Tesla “service” on this and all they have done is try and blame state authorities for bad map data that it defaults to, even in the presence of an actual sign. I have investigated their ”state authority” for map data and found that there is and never has been any such authority here, and Tesla has never even asked for this data. FSD beta is a huge fail and will be a huge surprise if ever even “adequate”. Instead of constantly doubling down on a terrible strategy (city self driving), they really just need to get highway driving right (like hands free right), to actually give us something sort of useful, instead of a continual stress test for the suckers who paid real money for this.

I live in rural east Texas and I drive everything from rural, single-lane, backcountry roads to County/State highways to major interstates and weekly into the DFW Metroplex. My car (21 MSLR) can occasionally drive me home from Walmart, along very rural roadways and do a decent job. But then it'll get itself very confused and brake/stop for no reason, turn on the turn signal at a random sidestreet for no reason, etc. And it CANNOT figure out that when driving on an unmarked, country road, you CANNOT drive the middle of the roadway! It's crazy that the car cannot figure out that there is two-way traffic, even when there is literally two-way traffic, it confuses the car. And it seems like with every update they take one-step forward and two-steps back. Yesterday, after the latest update, my car on FSDb attempted to make a left turn at a T-intersection and turned in front of an oncoming car forcing me to brake immediately and 15-minutes later the car tried to "hurry" to make a left turn in front of an oncoming pickup truck but literally turned straight into the front of a vehicle stopped at the stop sign, waiting on crossing traffic. I was shocked!! I had to accelerate across to avoid getting hit by the oncoming pickup and had to swerve to avoid hitting the car at the stop sign and roll down my window to wave apologetically to everyone that I just tried to cause to crash!! I mean I know as a FSDb driver we're supposed to be ready to take over immediately, but I think that should come with some reasonableness on the part of Tesla and their Engineers. I think the FSD is a failure thus far. And for a family that owns two Teslas, and is out LOTS of money for an almost useless piece of technology, I'm reaching a breaking point.

 

[KimDicus2003]

I just want a car with simple distance aware cruise control without phantom braking. This is critical.

 

[Undecided_2]

I’d substitute EAP/FSD for a stalk to control the wipers if I was offered one.

 

[DrChaos]

It would be consistent if Tesla picked the lowest cost map vendor. You get what they paid for...not much.

From what I can see, I suspect the directive from the top is to eliminate all use of maps entirely.

 

[dbldwn02]

From what I can see, I suspect the directive from the top is to eliminate all use of maps entirely.

Yeaaaa....my car still thinks a 3-way stop is somehow a left turn and then a hard right turn...10 years after the 3-way was installed.