The actual implementation is a little more nuanced than always roll or never roll, with seven conditions required to avoid coming to a complete stop:
1. The functionality must be enabled within the FSD Beta Profile settings; and
2. The vehicle must be approaching an all-way stop intersection; and
3. The vehicle must be traveling below 5.6mph; and
4. No relevant moving cars are detected near the intersection; and
5. No relevant pedestrians or bicyclists are detected near the intersection; and
6. There is sufficient visibility for the vehicle while approaching the intersection; and
7. All roads entering the intersection have a speed limit of 30 mph or less.
If all the above conditions are met, only then will the vehicle travel through the all-way-stop intersection at a speed from 0.1 mph up to 5.6 mph without first coming to a complete stop. If any of the above conditions are not met, the functionality will not activate and the vehicle will come to a complete stop
Speaking as a city runner, you are 100000% wrong, and I have had numerous close calls demonstrating this.
If you roll through at 5.6mph while I am jogging into the intersection from your side, I will often be hidden by your A pillar the entire time right up until you hit me. And a 5.6mph point-blank hit to a pedestrian can be serious.
(edit: I have avoided these hits so far by watching people's eyes. If I can't see them see me, I stop regardless of right of way. This usually gives them a nice scare as they're rolling into the intersection and glance out their side window to see a person standing right there 'out of nowhere'. Not sure how I'll tell with FSD.)
As someone who did actually get run over when running through a crossroad as a kid, I _never_ run through crossroads since then, regardless of eye contact or not.
Runners (and the much loved sidewalk cyclists) are much farther from the road than a walking pedestrian. The drivers are NOT seeing you coming.
> Would you rather be hit by a semi-truck going 1mph or a bike going 28mph?
I'm actually not sure. The initial impact would hurt more with the bike, suggesting that perhaps momentum or something else proportional to velocity (not v^2) is a good heuristic there.
But if I tripped after impact, the bike would do no further damage to me and the semi would be ~1s away from killing me.
5.6 miles per hour is a fast jogging speed if you're on foot, twice as fast as typical walking speed. It is not a stop, doubly so if you're in a big metal box. Please don't do this.
Never having been stopped for doing this and confirming with police that they do not stop people for this are separate things, and I'm willing to bet that in your case it's the former, not the latter.
So presumably the Tesla is aware of all local laws and, more importantly, how strictly they are enforced from town to town, in every market the Tesla is sold or imported, in order to use this functionality safely and without resulting in ticketed traffic violations?
> more importantly, how strictly they are enforced from town to town
Does this dataset actually exist anywhere? I would bet that at best it might be able to be inaccurately inferred from other data.
Regardless, if we as a society decide to build self-driving cars, should we really be optimizing for the financial well-being of the driver (via tickets) over the physical wellbeing of the humans in the society (who are hit by FSD cars that roll stop signs in areas with less traffic enforcement).
Presumably because it matches the behavior of human drivers.
If self-driving cars were widely rolled out already, any large manufacturer could probably completely break traffic nationwide by rolling out an update that makes the cars actually follow every law and speed limit. (Just like work-to-rule can be as effective as a strike.)
Which, to me, just means the laws are wrong. The police often don't obey basic traffic laws like speed limits and signaling (in my experience of following police on the freeway).
I recently read an interview with a highway patrol officer whose opinion was that it's not really feasible for them to drive at the speed limit. Since a marked police car is already effectively a pace car -- no one wants to pass it for fear of being pulled over -- they would just distort the natural flow of traffic and probably create tailbacks everywhere they went, which would end up being more dangerous.
I'm not sure I agree completely with this reasoning, but it was an interesting perspective.
That's the same as saying that the speed limit (on freeways) is wrong because if everyone obeyed the speed limit, it would cause significant traffic congestion. In fact, you can see this when there IS a police officer driving the speed limit on the freeway and no one passes them. Traffic backs up for miles.
I recall seeing a forums post by a traffic engineer once and they said part of the process of deciding speed limits is, once the actual optimal speed for the road segment has been determined, subtract ~10mph to pre-emptively avoid complaints by the elderly that the speed limit is too high.
That was regarding suburban road planning though, not sure if the same applies to freeways and other major arteries.
It's not the same. The police officer is a moving speed limit restriction so cars driving at the normal speed will catch up to it and slow down and they will continue banking up for as long as the car is driving slower than normal.
You wouldn't get that banking up with everybody following the limit.
It becomes harder to change though because if the culture is to go x over the speed limit, people will probably still go x over the new higher speed limit.
This is ironic because next time there is a bike article, you get all the professional drivers in this thread commenting "but they never stop at stop signs!".
Can't have it both ways. The statistical evidence is clear: the average US driver is tremendously unsafe, untrained, unobservant and unskilled despite their country being built around driving everywhere. Their remonstrations on all the rule breaking they can perform safely stems purely from ignorance of their own inabilities.
in my country (the netherlands) i have seen people stop at stop signs at times when there is very, very little traffic (04:00 at night).
The point is also much more about creating a habit in which this kind of behaviour is just done, regardless of the state of the traffic on the road.
The law says you must stop for a stop sign, stop signs are placed in places in which sudden traffic participants could enter your field of vision at a time in which it is too late to react properly.
Also, people get fined for ignoring stop signs, even if no one is present.
Driving education in the netherlands is quite strict and so are punishments for drivers.
For instance, the driver of a car is always at fault for an accident with a "weak" traffic participant (foot/bike traffic), even if technically they werent at fault. (there is process to fight this in court if you assume ill intent/fraud is at play, although it is rarely used).
the reasoning being that the driver of a car has had a drivers education and can thus act responsible while driving a hunk of metal down the road at lethal speeds.
> in my country (the netherlands) i have seen people stop at stop signs at times when there is very, very little traffic (04:00 at night).
This is also normal in the US, despite what a few commenters on HN may have you believe. Hell, if anything, regular people out and about at 4am are better about following the basic laws, because you stand out a lot more when you flout them, and in the wee hours of the night the proportion of drunk drivers is far higher and so cops are looking for it.
i wonder if it’s a city vs suburbs thing. when i lived in the ‘burbs, doing highway driving, i got super accustomed to spotting the next red light and then coasting to a lower speed, hoping it’d turn green before i got there so that my average speed through the light was actually higher, city driving, you accelerate fast and break fast. once you’re accustomed to breaking with force and breaking often, a hard stop at a four way stop becomes a whole lot more natural than the alternative.
i don’t mean to overgeneralize. i expect there is at least some small correlation between density and how much you break at a four-way stop, and i’m curious what the other correlates are and how dominant full-stops are.
We humans often roll a stop sign (hopefully at a lower speed than 5.6mph) because we are impatient and because we have quite a lot of faith in our general intelligence and situational awareness to be able to make a reasonable call in these situations.
Still we often get this wrong and somebody gets hurt.
A computer is not cursed with our human impatience so why program it in?
But more importantly the computer has none of the general intelligence and situational awareness that a dim human has, and they won’t for a long time.
Have you ever been a pedestrian? The fact that most drivers don't give a shit about stopping for crosswalks isn't a reason for Tesla to say "fuck it let's go".
I wouldnt say outrageous but its pretty audacious to actually program in law breaking behavior. I would imagine this would instantly expose the company to liability?
Maybe my part of LA/SoCal is weird, but almost all of the people at the nearest stop signs stop at the signs, even when no other cars are there and no pedestrians are near the intersection.
In fact, the most annoying thing is that they will stop for too long despite the lack of cross-traffic or pedestrians traversing the intersection (in any direction).
