This will likely be another story where the event recorder tells a completely different story. AEB doesn’t even appear to engage. Vehicle isn’t centered in lane. This looks like completely manual operation in the moments leading up to the accident. Inadvertent override, inadvertent disengagement, or wholly manually operated.
It's also possible driver didn't know the difference between auto-steer (which came in standard for older models from last year), traffic-assisted cruise control (standard on latest models) and FSD. The first two will likely plow through warning cones and unexpected blockages.
That 100% was not an FSD crash. If I'm reading the article correctly, it's just his word that says he was, correct? My guess is either he's lying to cover his butt or he was on FSD but had the pedal pressed to override the safeties
In fact he knows it wasn’t active exactly because it would be beeping and yelling to take over and slowing down to literally stop. Not possible to sleep with it on especially at that speed but people conveniently ignore that because it shuts down their dumb arguments.
That’s not what the debate is about. It’s about whether he was responsible. A defeat device doesn’t change that and makes it even more starkly clear that he is responsible.
I don’t see any debate here over that. He’s responsible regardless of the defeat device or not. FSD disclaims all liability directly in its terms of use. My point was simply that it’s entirely possible to sleep with FSD on. It also won’t perform emergency braking if it fails because the cameras are over exposed from a light shining directly in it. It will simply alert you to take over.
Source for this “so called hatred”? I’d bet cops know quite well how bad human drivers are and will be glad that robots that actually behave and follow rules, are driving instead.
I don’t think the driver was unaware they couldn’t sleep behind wheel. You can’t blame it all on the name of the product. The software makes it pretty clear you have to pay attention.
So you’ve read the entire terms of service on everything you’ve ever clicked accept on? It’s very common knowledge that most people click accept without reading things, we design things for the dumbest of society in most cases
Well if it's something I'm trusting with my life and driving for me, yes. I read it and wouldn't click yes if I disagreed. You can't fix stupid. Sorry about that, dreamer! 😂
So what would be your suggestions for improvement for "the dumbest of society"? Changing the name wouldn't be enough for them by the way. If they don't even read and blindly click yes and then claim ignorance after almost killing people, DO YOU REALLY THINK THE NAME IS GOING TO MATTER? 🙄😂 Listen to yourself. 😂
The car yells at you when you have your eyes off the road, I’m positive the driver knew you can’t fall asleep. What most likely happened is that they were in fsd, fell asleep for a second and hit the steering wheel. This is a reasonable enough argument to make about complacency with a technology that’s almost good enough but this person for sure manually drove into them
It would be the same as checking into a "full service" hotel and when you get to the room you discover that you were supposed to provide the bedding, pillows and towels.
But in the case of the hotel, nobody would gaslight themselves into thinking it was OK.
it's possible but this looks more like someone trying to just shift blame. How is it so convenient they decided to fall asleep and the car conveniently decided to crash? Almost every crash where they claim to have used ADAS just so happens to be with a driver that was incapacitated by drugs/alcohol or purposely driving distracted
Winning comment. Deserves many more upvotes.
Doesn’t even matter if we disagree on the situation or not, the name changes nothing. Drivers are fully informed that human supervision is required before they can even use it. Also the car constantly reminds you of this when you enable it.
I agree but at the same time naming and marketing is still important. Otherwise we wouldnt have laws against false advertising. I'm not sure what was done historically but the many warnings and the addition of supervised feels like a knee jerk reaction because tesla was in hot water
Sure. Being angry about “false advertising” is fine, but, I don’t believe the anger is really about that. People are angry at Musk about politics so they use that to justify their anger. They are just being dishonest about what they are really upset about. Those who paid money upfront of course are more justified and should probably just sue the company.
Anyway I think Tesla should have just called it “Tesla Driving”. Maybe it could have even become a verb like “Google” or “Xerox”. Does your car “Tesla” as well as mine? Oh gosh I’m sure that comment will make some heads explode 🤯 😂.
Anyway I don’t like and never liked the name also. It seems very clear that it was intended to always be just “Autopilot” but then that didn’t work out so an extremely overly optimistic dude with a huge ego was forced to come up with something else. Full self driving was a dumb name from the start. It’s doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. 😂 Then add “(supervised)” and you have double dumb. Tesla Assisted Driving is much better. They could have even just dropped the “full” to calm all the drama. At this point the name doesn’t matter anyway. Anyone who claims ignorance after answering “Yes” (see below) is definitely liable anyway. No amount of playing dumb after killing someone will ever change that.
And you’re absolutely right about the laws over false advertising. So then use those laws and go after Tesla. Let’s see how successful you are. Companies make extreme claims all the time.
Yes. The really loud blusterous ones are so obvious. They don't even bother to learn the basics about something that they scream about. 😂 But it is entertaining. 🤷♂️😂
If you can’t read you shouldn’t use FSD. If you’re “misguided” after reading and answering yes, then you’re too stupid to be in the driver’s seat in the first place, of any car.
I’m talking about the driver in the OP, claiming he was “asleep on FSD”. If the software were called “driving assist”, do you think the driver can say “hurr durr I was on Driving Assist, it’s Tesla’s fault”
Seems like we are actually in agreement and you misunderstood my point
It would be great and finally shut down all these stupid and meaningless agreements about the name. It sure would take a lot of meaningless bluster away too. What would those poor single minded dummies have to argue about anymore, if it was actually just called “Assisted Driving”? 🤔🤔I’d love for them to rename it everywhere. Just get it done.
No proof (yet) that it wasn't but it's extremely unlikely that it was. The behavior is completely out of place for FSD.
I'm completely fine with dummies freaking out claiming FSD is at fault and then being proved completely wrong later. It shows them for the overzealous fools that they are. 😂
Unclear, actually. People fall asleep in ordinary cars all the time. In fact, it's speculated that falling asleep is one of the largest causes of fatal crashes, but they say it's alcohol because there's a blood test for that, and not for having fallen asleep.
If you *do* fall asleep, having a system like the Tesla's is 100% what you would want to have. It might well eventually crash you, but not having it is an assured crash.
And soon. You will veer off the road within a short distance of falling asleep. You wont' drive for a few miles and then crash in a coned-off accident scene or construction. But most of the time it should try to wake you, and then pull over or come to a stop on the highway. Hitting this police car is going to be an edge case but very dangerous one.
The one big question -- is having a system like FSD, with its misleading name, going to make you more tolerant of driving drowsy? That's hard to say.
Yes you can easily see how many if not most drunk driving accidents are a drunk falling asleep.
I’d be fine with them installing an alcohol detection system too. Blow in a tube as they do now. It may be necessary eventually since humans will absolutely use automation to accommodate for being impaired from drinking. You can even make an argument that this would be a “good thing”. “I’d rather have a person driving drunk with automation than without” some would say. But this is a very bad slippery slope. So they may even need to actively prevent this, at least as long as the human can take on or interrupt any part of the driving task.
The slippery slope is complex. The reality is people drive drunk even though they know perfectly well they should not, at their own peril as well as others. Whether more people would drive drunk (rather than call a taxi) if their car would save them is a difficult question, as is the issue of whether, in order to stop them, you should deliberately let them crash when they do it anyway.
The math is the sort of math people can't handle. Consider this: And these are the real numbers!
On Saturday and Sunday morning, 1 driver in 7 has a blood alcohol >.08 (impaired.) Yes, really. This makes them 4x more likely to crash than a sober driver.
Only about one in 600 of these impaired drivers will crash. Thank goodness, though still bad.
20% of those drunk crashes involve the driver falling asleep, compared to about 2% of sober people.
Let's say having FSD on makes it 10x less likely you will crash from impairment. (not a real number, a hypothetical) FSD would prevent most of the fall-asleep crashes, but probably a large fraction of the others.
Let's say the existence of FSD with this feature makes it twice as likely somebody will drive home impaired
You see the issue. Allow FSD and you get many more drunks, but fewer crashes, by a large margin. The problem is you get some _extra_ crashes, from people who would not have driven drunk, and somebody dies in one. The family of the deceased are in front of the jury. The larger number of people who got home safely or who were never hit, are not. Our system has trouble doing this math.
I asked my LLM friend for data on causes of impaired driver crashes. Here it is FYI. I have to say my intuition is a driver assist tool like FSD, even badly supervised, would prevent a decent fraction of these, but far from all. You're going to be a sucky supervisor. But also a sucky driver. Numbers below from LLM.
Recognition Errors (~41% of Impaired Crashes)
Even when wide awake, an intoxicated driver's brain experiences a severe drop in its processing speed and field of vision.
Inadequate Surveillance / "Looked but Failed to See" (~25%): The driver physically looks at an intersection, oncoming traffic, or a pedestrian, but their alcohol-impaired brain fails to register the threat until it is too late.
Internal Distraction (~10%): Drunk drivers spend far more cognitive energy trying to simply manage their vehicle or their own physical state, causing them to completely lose track of the external environment.
Tunnel Vision / Fixing on a Target (~6%): Alcohol restricts peripheral vision (creating physical "tunnel vision"). The driver can only see what is directly in front of them, completely missing vehicles merging or drifting into their lane from the sides.
Decision Errors (~33% of Impaired Crashes)
Alcohol removes natural inhibitions and drastically degrades spatial judgment. [1]
Misjudgment of Gap or Speed (~15%): The driver sees an oncoming car or a turning lane but cannot accurately calculate how fast it is approaching or how much space they have to merge.
Driving Too Fast for Conditions (~10%): Taking curves, highway exits, or wet roads at speeds their delayed reaction times cannot physically manage. [1]
Choosing the Wrong Path / Illegal Maneuvers (~8%): This includes the quintessential late-night drunk driving error: driving the wrong way down a one-way street, turning into an oncoming highway off-ramp, or choosing the completely wrong lane at a complex intersection. [1]
Non-Performance Errors (~20% of Impaired Crashes)
Falling Asleep at the Wheel (20%): As previously detailed, alcohol acts as a chemical sedative that triggers sudden, uncontrollable micro-sleeps or total unconsciousness. [1, 2]
Performance Errors (~6% of Impaired Crashes)
This is when the driver identifies the danger and makes the right decision, but their physical muscles and coordination fail to execute the command. [1]
I honestly don’t think FSD was engaged. I use it daily and it is very conservative in its driving even in hurry mode. There’s more to this story that we aren’t hearing.
No this is what happens when people read and agree to this yet ignore it and dangerously do what they want. And they should be held criminally responsible when it results in injury like this.
Even if "the public" was misled, "the public" WAS NOT the person driving the car, who saw and agreed to this.
Literally says “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” in multiple places throughout the car. If it notices you aren’t paying attention after a period of time, it will nag you and eventually force you to take over. So the driver is either lying and/or intentionally fooled to system so he can “sleep”
Not sure where it’s misleading to the point you get an idea to start sleeping behind the wheel. Must be missing some brain cells.
Do you really think people would pay more attention if they called it something else? While I agree with you it shouldn't be called FSD, I dont think it would have made any lick of difference here. The problem is its too easy to bypass the camera check and the steering wheel nags
It is extremely likely FSD realized the driver did not pay attention, and LOUDLY disengaged. It also does this whenever there is a situation outside of its training. (again very LOUDLY)
Now, we might ask whether this is a good policy, that is another matter.
Good point but actually no. Because, FSD instantly turns on the flashers and starts slowing down in that case. The car was not even centered in the lane. It's highly doubtful FSD was engaged, at all. This dangerous jerk is lying. It's clear.
Eh, i have a model y premium 2026 and fsd has messed up lane changes once or twice where i would have crashed if i didn’t take over. Fortunately I have always monitored it pretty well so it works great for me. I am at 95% fsd but the rest of the 5% is from me taking over. This one time it tried to change lane where someone was already extremely close on the other lane and the guy honked and braked. I didn’t expect it to try to turn cuz i saw the guy in the mirror. It hit the turn signal and tried to turn within 1 sec. I uploaded the dashcam from all sides on tesla fb page and everyone tried to make up reasons for it but ended up agreeing it was a pretty bad fsd fault when i posted view from all the sides.
This what Mercedes does, their advanced cruise control (DrivePilot) can tell if you’re not paying attention / having a medial emergency, put on the hazards, pull over into the shoulder, call emergency services and unlock the doors.
That’s been in their cars for 6 years now. We know the automakers can do this, some just choose not to. You have to ask why the choose not to implement these features.
I agree with you. This is absolutely somebody incorrectly blaming FSD. It’s amazing how Reddit just takes their word for it and immediately says FSD is seriously flawed.
It's mostly politics. They hate you know who and are so excited to find something that just might be bad that they trip over themselves rushing to judgment. It's funny to watch them make fools of themselves, over and over. 😂
it's usual BS about people trying to blame FSD for stuff FSD clearly never does. although to be extra generous i would say there is a world where driver falls asleep and somehow foot starts pressing brake pedal disengaging the system (or presses gas pedal overriding the system) and then this crash happens and the driver could then be faulting FSD without actually just be lying.
If my head is not at the driving level, it will alert me. After a bit it will disengage. The alerts are loud and hard to ignore. May not be the best method. It should pull the car over to a safe spot and disable fsd. The car can’t tell if a person is having a medical emergency and just disengaging leads to things like this accident.
It also will slow down and stop at even the hint of an emergency vehicle. FSD does this all this time. This was not, FSD. Not being centered in the lane is a huge glaring and obvious indicator.
Nothing complicated in life is perfect. But, FSD is pretty amazing and I think it's far better than most drivers.
As to this case, if they were really using FSD, then they must have done something to defeat the monitoring. I've tested this out a number of times, and if I don't pay attention or watch the road, it pretty quickly requires me to take an action and if I don't it says it'll take it out of FSD.
I think the issue is that if you’re NOT using FSD or driving ANY other car, nhtsa needs to require distracted driving alerts that are annoying as hell. Distracted freeway driving is OUT OF HAND!!!!
It would seem quite simple for a state or states to simply establish 48 hour response with severe sanctions to automakers for not 100% turnover of autonomous performance subpoenas. All of this in the public interest and allowing companies to bully and stonewall makes ZERO SENSE. Imagine a $25,000 fund/escrow after 48 hours and doubles daily thereafter. Make it forfeitable as public funds after five days. Great for public, great for courts and can drive speed in the resolution for the courts system. This accident seems a felony to a sensible person.
Agreed. The government could do a lot more by setting standards, guidelines and penalties. This should not be a guessing game to what to consider safe or not. Engineers working on the stuff want guidelines. Even if a guideline is wrong it sets a standard and can hopefully be changed.
I have seen multiple people (always young men) sleeping or pretending to sleep in Teslas on California 280.
I have been tempted to report them by calling 911. Would that be appropriate? (serious question). That might save someone’s life who actually is sleeping or having a medical emergency. But I bet most of these are just people misled by Elon's exaggeration of FSD capabilities and not really sleeping.
Not really related to the exact topic and I admit I’m kind of just rambling about myself for fun a little bit.
One time I was driving down a bridge and I saw a person bona fide driving like an absolute lunatic, stopping and starting suddenly, weaving constantly across the entire width of the bridge like a cop trying to get everyone to stop.
I called 911 and the person basically gave me the worst attitude I had experienced from anyone I had spoken to in a long time. I was trying to explain what was happening, in what I would characterize as a relatively calm and descriptive manner, but they interjected in the middle to just start asking me for my personal information like they were going to log my call and arrest me for fabrication or something. In the end they hung up on me before I even finished telling them what was happening.
Anyways, all of this to kind of say, you should probably call 911, but 50/50 on them actually giving a shit vs borderline going to arrest you for their perception that you’re wasting their time.
So many sheep answering like they know. FSD is still FSD (Supervised), it says it everywhere. If it does not detect you full alert to the road (unless you mod it somehow) then it comes to a complete stop with hazards on. And beeps at you like crazy before then.
Didn't he read the manual? It’s only Full Self-Driving while it works. If it fails, he’s in charge, even if he wasn’t driving. It’s like Schrödinger’s driver assistance. It exists in Level 2 and Level 4 simultaneously, and which one it was depends entirely on whether there was a crash, at least according to Tesla and his fans.
Really? Most people like you argue it the other way around it’s only “full self driving” when something goes wrong and the human doing shit, is completely ignored, yet when it actually saves lives then it’s not “full self driving”. You’re just as bad as those you criticize. 😂
I don't know the people you are talking about. As far as I'm concerned, there's no question about what FSD Supervised is. It's a Level 2 system, and you are still driving even when you aren't operating the steering wheel or pedals. You remain responsible, and the system cannot guarantee safety at all times, as this case proves once again. I'm not the one claiming it's anything more or truly autonomous. Every ADAS can save lives, that isn't unique to FSD. Yet, I know of no other company or fanbase that struggles to clearly distinguish between Level 2 and Level 4 as much as Tesla and its followers, purely because blurring the lines fuels the hype.
I agree with everything you said and even the last statement, somewhat. A car cannot be level 4 until it’s actually not possible for a human to intervene and create danger. No question about that. How can a vehicle be “fully autonomous” when a human can take over? It’s not, by definition. I was talking more about people arguing dishonestly and, assumed, that might be you.
The reason people are confused about levels is because, the levels are shit and not explained well at all. Level 3 does not “include” level 2 and level 4 does not include levels 3 and 2, and so on. Many people assume a higher level means greater and more driving ability and capabilities, and it absolutely does not. A level 2 Tesla can drive almost anywhere, even without human assistance. Level 4 AVs cannot. I would argue that current “level 4” AVs are not truly level 4 and also not “full self driving”.
Sorry if I did assume your views incorrectly but it is very common.
It has headlights and if you watch the video the cops lights were on and so were taillights. The car was not on FSD. It was not centered and almost driving over the white line. FSD doesn’t do that.
But of course we don’t know if this is an actual picture from the scene. Based on past experience it’s quite possible that Fred Lambert had this photo whipped up by ChatGPT.
It's pretty evident that this person likely had their foot on the accelerator. With or without FSD engaged, AEB by itself would have prevented this. The only thing that overrides AEB is a dumb human pressing the accelerator. That needs to be changed.
And as licensed adult driver in America you are expected to know the rules of the road and the operational specificatuons of your vehicle. That's not political, not right wing, not woke, it's the way it is and is the logic used when a judge makes their ruling.
Most people will try to the dumbass argument. But this has less probably of holding up in court.
Aslo on that note, if you are successful in winning an argument using the dumbass excuse you should lose the ability to sign contracts and enter agreements for X number of years because admittedly you're a dumbass.
Didn't read the fine print and got scammed into a predatory loan? Dumbass. You get X percentage of money back and are now under conservatorship and cannot enter an agreement without approval. Operating equipment without reading the mail and someone got hurt you are no longer able to buy whatever you want with the money you have without approval because you are a dumbass. This would make the world a better place.
The Tesla hate boner has made people willfully dumb. In what world is a driver falling asleep behind the wheel not entirely at fault?? Idc what the feature is named, that’s not an excuse
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u/HighHokie 4d ago edited 3d ago
This will likely be another story where the event recorder tells a completely different story. AEB doesn’t even appear to engage. Vehicle isn’t centered in lane. This looks like completely manual operation in the moments leading up to the accident. Inadvertent override, inadvertent disengagement, or wholly manually operated.
Most important line of the article: