A question I posed to Grok:
“Tesla claims 7x fewer accidents with FSD. Is that correct?”

Grok’s response:
“Partly — the 7x figure is Tesla’s own comparison to a constructed U.S. national average, not an apples-to-apples measure of FSD vs. comparable modern cars.
……
Against the same modern Teslas driven manually, the gap is much smaller: about 2.7x fewer major collisions. That is the comparison safety researchers such as Phil Koopman say is the only reasonably matched one inside Tesla’s own tables.”

2.7x fewer major collisions is still quite significant. And I’d bet that the multiplier is higher for Senior Citizen drivers, e.g., me.

I work from home, as rarely have to go to the main office, 5 hours away.
I was bitching (light heartedly) to the boss about long drives as I get older.
He tells me how he doesn’t like it either, and recently got a Model Y with FSD.
He leaves the DC area weekly for a meeting in Philly.
Door to door and back home, never touches the steering wheel or pedals once.

I did ask about pot hole avoidance , which he said is an ongoing issue, and probably one of the last hurdles to solve.
Here in southern WV, that’s the only thing that gives me pause.

Despite the fact that the last accident I had on public roads was in 1958; now, at 85, I worry about my reaction time!

I drive less than 100 miles per month, never on I-4, and still worry! I always drive accompanied by a caregiver and ask them to evaluate my driving… I believe them when they say I am a safe driver. I also avoid driving at night - limited visual field and delayed reaction time.

In my younger (under 60, before my wife’s stroke) days I loved riding motorcycles and took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation rider course every two or three years. That taught me paranoia - that every vehicle on the road would try to kill me! That habit has carried over to my driving today.

All that said, I look forward to not having to drive any more, even loving driving both motorcycles and race cars in my youth.

My mom is 76 and hates driving. This year we got her a new model Y and she loves it. Now she is a woman about town with the car doing 90% of the driving. I have tested it and it’s very impressive. If Tesla had more compelling family cars I would get one as my daily. I’m 47 and have a 1 and 3 year old. I often get like 3 hours of sleep a night. That lack of sleep doesn’t preclude me from having tons of drive places. Supervised seems to be the answer for us tired drivers. I have tried the Rivian R2 with Autonomy + as well as Ford Blue Cruise and GM Super Cruise and if Tesla FSD is an IPhone 18 Pro those systems in comparison are an IPhone 3G.

quote:

Originally posted by ElKabong:
I did ask about pot hole avoidance , which he said is an ongoing issue, and probably one of the last hurdles to solve.
Here in southern WV, that’s the only thing that gives me pause.

And there you go...Confirmation that I am a better driver than Tesla FSD!

quote:

Originally posted by Dusty78:
<snip>
If Tesla had more compelling family cars I would get one as my daily.
<snip>

Member sjtill has ordered a Model Y L, I believe it’s called. Three rows of seats.

https://www.tesla.com/event/modelyl-cfg

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

quote:

Originally posted by Dusty78:
<snip>
If Tesla had more compelling family cars I would get one as my daily.
<snip>

Member sjtill has ordered a Model Y L, I believe it’s called. Three rows of seats.

https://www.tesla.com/event/modelyl-cfg

Yes but the 2nd row seems to lose some leg room and the second row seats have a one piece design making installation of kids car seats tricky (since there is no pass through for the bend the seat latch point.) I would want like a Rivian R1S/R1T size or bigger with Tesla FSD. I would even go with something like the Chevy Silverado EV if it had FSD. The Cyber Truck is just too out there for me. Unfortunately all of these other companies are decades behind Tesla in regards to self driving.

The Model Y L, with the 2nd row being captain chairs?

quote:

Originally posted by Expert308:
I spent the last 35 years of my career, until I retired 3 years ago, programming computers. No way I'd ever trust one to control my car. No way. There are just too many things that even the best programmers can't foresee happening.

quote:

Originally posted by crue-dell:
Tesla FSD is real world ai, not traditional software coding. Its learned/trained how to drive by watching actual driving scenarios by the best drivers. Its making decisions based on a 360 degree view. There is no other assisted driving system that is comparable. Tesla has spent over $10 billion on training compute. We are in the bottom of the 1st inning.

^^^ Correct, crue-dell.

Grok query:
‘How does Tesla FSD know how to drive?’

Grok response:
‘Tesla FSD does not “know how to drive” the way a human does, and it does not follow a giant book of if-then traffic rules. It is a large neural network that has learned a mapping from what the car sees to what the car should do, by watching an enormous amount of real human driving.

Photons in, controls out
Modern FSD (from v12 onward, refined through later versions) is end-to-end. The network takes:
• raw video from the car’s cameras (typically eight cameras covering 360°)
• vehicle motion data (speed, IMU, etc.)
• audio
• maps and navigation
and directly outputs the next steering and acceleration commands. Tesla describes this as compressing on the order of two billion input tokens per second down to two control outputs.

There is no separate “detect cars, then predict paths, then plan a trajectory” pipeline that a human engineer wired together. Intermediate ideas like “that’s a pedestrian” or “that’s a lane line” can still exist as auxiliary heads the network is trained to predict (the old HydraNet idea, now often described as a video foundation model). Those heads help the network learn a useful internal world model. The thing that actually drives the car is the end-to-end path from pixels to controls.

Why Tesla chose this instead of a modular stack
Most of the industry still splits the problem into perception, prediction, and planning. Tesla’s argument is that those module boundaries are poorly defined, errors compound, and many human values (courtesy, intent, “that flock of geese is not going to move”) are almost impossible to write as rules. In an end-to-end net, gradients flow from the steering wheel all the way back to the cameras, so the whole system can be optimized for the actual job: driving well.

A favorite Tesla example: the net can treat a chicken crossing the road differently from geese standing still, without anyone writing a chicken-intent module.

Where the “knowledge” comes from
The training data is Tesla’s fleet.
Millions of cars record video while people drive. The system also runs in shadow mode: the network silently predicts what it would have done and compares that to what the human actually did. Interventions, near-misses, rare events, and “interesting” clips get uploaded. Tesla has said the fleet produces on the order of hundreds of years of driving experience per day. That data is filtered, labeled (often auto-labeled), and used to retrain the network on large clusters (Cortex GPUs; Dojo has been part of the story as well).

Training is a mix of:
• imitation — copy good human driving at scale
• reinforcement learning — reward safer, smoother, more human-like behavior
• co-training on extra tasks (occupancy, objects, signs, etc.) so the shared backbone learns richer features
New models are evaluated in simulation and on recorded fleet clips, then rolled out over the air.

What runs in the car
Inference happens on Tesla’s custom Autopilot / AI computer in the vehicle, at high frame rate and low photon-to-control latency. The car is not phoning home for each steering decision.

In short: FSD knows how to drive the way a very large video model knows how to continue a sentence. It has seen enough examples of “what a competent human did next in this visual situation” that it can produce the next action itself.’

quote:

Originally posted by jimb888:
I'm ready for self-driving but self-driving is not ready for me.

Took my wifes Tesla Y to the plumbing supply store to get some parts. She had FSD free to try it for a month. Literally laughing my fool head off as it turned the blinker on, moved into the fast lane on the freeway to go around some slow car all on it's own. It was almost remarkably perfect the entire way there. Almost being a key word.

Totally in love until I got to the plumbing store. They had put in a curb on the main street where the driveway turn into the parking lot formerly was. They wanted customers to take a side street and had relocated the turn in there. The car didn't know it and I just missed driving my wifes new car into it when I grabbed the wheel with microseconds to spare as the cars FSD jerked to turn right into the curb.

She was in the car with me, and there's no way she's signing up for that kind of heart stopping manuvers. Of course, my brother, same car, didn't see the curb at the Home Depot, drove right into it and flattened 2 tires...so FSD would likely have been awesome for him in that instance. It's so close to being there. I'm looking forward to it.

The Model 3 now comes with an additional front-looking camera. It’s mounted under the front bumper, about 14” above the ground. It has its own washer spray. It would’ve seen that curb.

Grok: “The camera [for Model 3] improves low-speed visibility (parking, curbs, tight spaces) after the earlier removal of ultrasonic sensors and is expected to support Tesla Vision and FSD features. It follows the same addition previously rolled out to Cybertruck, Model S/X, and refreshed Model Y.”

^^ Should've would've could've...Maybe. That quoted post if from ten months ago. Would anyone have even taken delivery of a Model 3 with that feature/upgrade at that point?

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:
^^ Should've would've could've...Maybe. That quoted post if from ten months ago. Would anyone have even taken delivery of a Model 3 with that feature/upgrade at that point?

I would’ve happily taken delivery of a Model 3 with that feature/upgrade at that point!

I ordered a Model 3 Premium in July.
Current estimated delivery is Dec 6 – Dec 31.

I suspect that jimb888’s Tesla didn’t have the additional low-mounted front-looking camera. Hence his Tesla nearly drove into the undetected curb. Or perhaps it did have the camera, but Tesla Vision and FSD for that camera weren’t yet supported.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Pipe Smoker,

https://x.com/TheCaptainEli/st.../2115464047797698610




Captain Eli
@TheCaptainEli
Notice how the headlines work.

A Toyota crashes: "Driver injured in crash."
A Ford crashes: "Two cars collide on highway."
A BMW crashes: "Accident on Route 1."

A Tesla crashes: "TESLA crashes."

Not the driver. Not "a car." The brand, in the headline, every single time.

Millions of crashes happen on the roads every year, and almost none come with a brand name. But when it's a Tesla, legacy media suddenly cares which car it was.

Meanwhile, Tesla publishes its own safety data every quarter. With Autopilot engaged, Teslas go far more miles between crashes than the US average.

That's not journalism. That's a campaign.

The cars keep getting safer. The headlines just keep getting louder.

^^^^^
I have to say that’s not unfair, assuming:
* FSD was driving
* the crash wasn’t the fault of another vehicle