alee
Member
A big piece of driving is about showing intent through action. We drive in a way that says: "I intend to make this turn (and you should yield to me)", or "I am not moving (so I am yielding to you)". Accidents happen when that predictability goes away. We get frustrated at drivers that are doing something unusual because we don't know what they will do next.There's a great song lyric by Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you will have made a choice!" The FSD computer (or the engineers who programmed it) doesn't seem to have quite internalized this. The car seems to have a "safe mode", which is usually to act timidly and do nothing, or brake to a halt, without taking into account that in many contexts this "safe mode" is actively _more_ dangerous than continuing with less than perfect certainty. E.g. stopping in the middle of an intersection when the light is red, or hard phantom braking when another car is on your tail. I strongly wish that the car would go into "safe mode" less often, and/or just beep to alert the driver when there's too much uncertainty, rather than safing. (The beeped-at driver can do the safing, and Tesla gets a lot more useful training data this way.) Perhaps 10.6+ will go more in this direction.
If the car is defaulting to something because of uncertainty, I think it should make an audio prompt and adopt some sort of control like "hold down stalk to go". The car steers, and I decide the urgency it needs to move to clear traffic. I think this is probably a safer FSD beta control than the current ultra-timid state.