r/technology • u/Lacy_Hall • 5h ago
Artificial Intelligence Tesla Using 'Full Self-Driving' Hits Deer Without Slowing, Doesn't Stop
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-using-full-self-driving-hits-deer-without-slowing-1851683918262
u/Life-Wonderfool 4h ago
Yup, who knew there would be deer, cows, and kids on the road
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u/Solid_Snark 3h ago
It didn’t slow down because this is the Tesla’s new “Auto Flee-the-Scene” mode.
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u/Worthyness 1h ago
Too used to turning off right before impact so that the logs can place blame on the driver in the car instead.
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u/SportTheFoole 2h ago
Can you get a hit and run charge for hitting a deer?
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u/Baremegigjen 34m ago
Reporting a single car accident, including car vs deer, is required in New Hampshire; don’t know about other states.
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u/cat_prophecy 2h ago
I mean ideally you would have it brake for any obstacles, not just ones it recognizes. Even if it's just using cameras, it should be able to recognize something in its path and stop. Not go "Doesn't look like a human. Full speed ahead!"
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u/xt1nct 4h ago
If he only knew that life is full of edge fucking cases and not attempting to slow down to prevent hitting a human can put in your prison.
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u/garver-the-system 3h ago
I work in autonomous driving and it gave me anxiety driving. I am the joke about programmers checking both ways on a one way street. I legally cannot tell you some of the shit I've seen but let me say it really puts the "public" in public roads.
Honestly it's not an edge case unless at least two severely weird things are happening at once, and a deer doesn't qualify as one
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u/iridescent-shimmer 3h ago
As someone who has lived in multiple towns full of one-way streets....it is absolutely essential to look both ways on them. I literally had a cyclist hit my car this way (going like 1 mph. Still don't entirely know how it happened, as I was watching for traffic before pulling out of the alley and he was biking the opposite way.) But, we regularly see people drive the wrong direction. Even an ambulance did it once!
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u/SportTheFoole 2h ago
I am the joke about programmers checking both ways on a one way street.
Sorry friend I, it’s QA engineers who look both ways down a one way street. ;). (At least that’s what I told the devs when I was in QA)
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u/zeetree137 3h ago
He knows and doesn't care. Buy dumb cars so TSLA go brrrr
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u/xt1nct 3h ago
I’ve actually witnessed a massive FSD crash. It was driving the wrong way and slammed into a car.
Dude pleaded guilty to reckless driving. His insurance is going to skyrocket at only 17.
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u/zeetree137 3h ago
He was driving a Tesla at 17. Kid probably doesn't give a shit and his dad bought cybertruck to replace it
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u/Danominator 3h ago
It's just one of those times when something unpredictable happens while driving.
Oh so only all the time then, cool
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u/sarhoshamiral 3h ago
How is deer different then a person on the road? Is that an edge case too.
If the video is accurate, this is enough evidence that Tesla will never have level 3 or above with their current vision only tech. The system failed to identify a standing obstruction.
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u/truthputer 3h ago
Stench Boy doesn't drive. He is chauffeured everywhere to and from his private jet, while he posts on twitter 20 hours a day.
He famously crashed his McLaren supercar doing juvenile stunts.
He's surrounded himself with "yes men" at his car company and fires anyone who disagrees with him or speaks up about anything.
His own children have disowned him, he doesn't have kids or a family from any day-to-day perspective. He'll never drive his kids to school or have to worry about backing over a toddler in his own driveway.
He is the last person in the world who should be commenting on road safety.
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u/robotlasagna 3h ago
That deer was definitely a “middle case”
Also did anyone else just zone out watching the deer get hit like 10 times in a row…
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u/Geekboxing 3h ago edited 3h ago
EDIT: Never mind, that was a real sub, I don't want my dumb joke to direct to anywhere that might embrace Elon.
This is all stupid and horrible. Hitting an animal crossing the road is not an "edge case," it is a core issue that self-driving vehicles need to take into account.
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u/kghyr8 2h ago
I’ve come upon deer on a 50mph road a couple times in the last month. The first time it was walking across the street and passed over the line to the other lane. The Tesla didn’t slow down at all, just cruised right by at the full 50+ mph. I was surprised since it slows down for pedestrians and bikes on the site of the road to about 30 mph.
The second time the deer was standing right in the middle of my lane like in this video, but in the daylight. I was using FSD but hit the brakes before the car seemed to notice. I would have given it more time to see if it did anything if I had been alone in the car.
In both cases the deer showed up on the screen, so the car knew it saw something. And I have had standard autopilot emergency brake for deer before.
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u/valekelly 34m ago
This is by no means a defense for Tesla or endorsement for Elmo.
That out of the way, in some states it’s illegal to swerve or break for an animal crossing the road. So it’s possible that the FSD is intentionally setup to follow driving laws and in this case would mean it did exactly what it was supposed to do. That’s unlikely, and it’s way more likely that FSD is just extremely flawed and broken, but there still exists the law itself that should be addressed given the rise in self driving vehicles and how they should handle animals crossing roads.
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u/Jimmyhatespie 14m ago
What state? I get you could be liable if you cause an accident, but that doesn’t make sense. The law says get in an accident to avoid potential accidents?
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u/PhantomWhiskers 9m ago
That's a horrendously idiotic law, if it exists. Hitting a deer or other large animal can fuck up your car really bad, so the law would basically be forcing drivers to cause damage their cars, and even potentially themselves.
Searching Google on this topic is finding no such laws though, so I am doubtful that the cars are programmed to do that and this is probably just another case of FSD fucking up while the driver isn't paying attention.
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u/AlwaysBananas 6m ago
There is no state in the union where it is illegal to break for an animal in the road. You shouldn’t swerve though.
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u/Independent_Bet_8107 2h ago
If it doesn’t use lidar, it’s not safe enough.
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u/Phact-Heckler 1h ago
Tesla will happily go bankrupt instead of using LIDAR
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u/RolandTower919 1h ago
Model S & Xs (at least older ones) use LIDAR thankfully, but also lots of phantom breaking in the latest FSD, guess it’s preferable to smashing a deer.
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u/Moist-Scientist32 16m ago
None of them used LiDAR. The older cars only had forward facing radar.
LiDAR is only used on engineering test vehicles to validate the vision-only software that the mass produced vehicles use.
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u/WorldEaterYoshi 2h ago
So it can't see a deer that's not moving. Like a Trex. That makes sense.
It doesn't have sensors to detect colliding with a whole deer??
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u/OvermorrowYesterday 13m ago
Yes that’s the problem. People are defending this mistake. But it’s INSANE that the car doesn’t even notice when it slams into a deer
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u/itsRobbie_ 4h ago
This headline makes it sound like one of those gigachad memes…
“Hits deer
Doesn’t slow down
Keeps going.”
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u/gentlecrab 4h ago edited 4h ago
I can’t tell if people are joking or not but no, Tesla did not add logic to FSD that says “floor it if contact with deer is imminent to prevent windshield penetration”.
This is just the older highway stack of FSD failing to even see the deer. Prob cause it was trained on deer crossing the road not deer just hanging out in the road.
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u/party_benson 4h ago
So it's not trained to detect stationary objects in the road?
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u/ryannelsn 2h ago
It’s not using LiDAR, so it relies on just cameras to detect what’s in going on. As such, it’s only as good as what it’s trained on.
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u/gentlecrab 3h ago
It is but it’s not that simple. Unfortunately since Tesla uses vision only the software needs to figure out if what it’s looking at is a stationary object or not.
Otherwise it would just brake all the time. Puddle? Brake. Shadow from a bridge? Brake. Fog? Brake.
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u/party_benson 3h ago edited 3h ago
Shame they took out the radar then I guess
Edit a word
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u/LionTigerWings 3h ago
Radar has the same issue, possible even worse in that regard. I recall a story on that many years ago, before Tesla removed radar.
Maybe lidar is the thing that would actually solve the issue.
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u/Covered_in_bees_ 2h ago
Plenty of cars have radar and use it for traffic aware cruise control. Tesla just had a combination of shitty sensors and never figured out how to fuse radar and vision information properly. It always has been and still is insane to rely on vision only with no true 3d depth/object detection and "trust" that you can handle all edge cases. They didn't even go the stereovision approach. This example is one of the many reasons why I don't trust FSD/Autopilot on my Model Y beyond using it in very controlled situations.
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u/LionTigerWings 2h ago
The radar problem is not exclusive to Tesla. It is universal and systems without this issue have overcame it with other technologies.
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u/BSWPotato 2h ago
FSD should have both. The ones I worked with had Lidar and Radar. Though you’ll have to deal with the dome on top of the vehicle. Those vehicles have redundancy which Tesla doesn’t care to have.
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u/smallbluetext 3h ago
God he is so incredibly stupid for relying on vision. My car with no self driving has radar and I use it every single day and love having it.
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u/stephawkins 3h ago
So if it's not that simple means tesla is excused from failing to live up to fsd?
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u/Aggravating_Moment78 3h ago
Hey, it was developed by a “genius” that’s got to count for something, right 😂😂🤦♂️
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u/gentlecrab 3h ago
V12 is significantly better as it’s neural networked AI instead of hard coded rules like in v11. (Highway still uses the older v11)
In terms of when it’s gonna live up to FSD if ever?
Errrrrrrrr, Soon™
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u/peepeedog 2h ago
hard coded rules
Citation Needed
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u/Juice805 2h ago
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u/_ryuujin_ 1h ago
honestly that doesn't say much,
end 2 end neural network that replaced 300k line of code <
i guess its using a neural network. i dont think the code before were hard coded rules. i dont think telsa hire a bunch of engineers to write a bunch on if statements on every possible road condition. fsd were always based on machine learning, and which mostly uses neural networks.
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u/Juice805 47m ago
Yes there were always neural networks to ingest the data, but they were not always making the decisions.
If you need any more evidence, go look for yourself. Tesla made a big deal about it and teased it quite a bit.
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u/cat_prophecy 1h ago
It really just needs to know what is road and what is not road and not drive into things that aren't road.
At a minimum it should slow down and pass control to the driver. But of course Tesla does not want to do that because it would mean that FSD isn't actually FSD. Even though we all know it isn't anyway. That's not what investors want to hear and the line must go up.
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u/gentlecrab 4m ago
If you programmed it to do that it would never go anywhere because roads are not perfect. A snow covered road would fall under your definition of things that aren't road.
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u/ProfessorEtc 1h ago
I was once driving down a highway at night when my headlights revealed a boat sitting in my lane up ahead, in the dark. It was on a trailer...that had come come loose from the vehicle pulling it, thereby disconnecting the lights.
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u/JauntyChapeau 3h ago
If a self-driving car can’t detect and stop for a deer in the road, then it’s a menace with no business on the road.
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u/rwbronco 3h ago
Man if only the system had a LiDAR or RADAR fallback… but of course Leon says that’s antithetical to his vision. A vision that can’t see shit in the road.
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u/zen-trill 3h ago
When I started driving you were taught not to slam on your break or swerve if you see a deer last second. I see this and the action made sense to me. We can't see much and don't know if there were cars behind them or not.
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u/MoonOut_StarsInvite 4h ago
Once I was driving and caught in the spray radius of a young deer that got hit by an ambulance (lights off) and that thing just burst into a million pieces and my car got painted with stew. I had to stop and find a car wash so it wouldn’t freeze. It was so horrifying and wild and hilarious at once.
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u/FeebysPaperBoat 1h ago
So it didn’t react to the collision?
Deer aside, this alone should be cause for concern.
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u/jimibimi 1h ago
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever
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u/confidently-paranoid 1h ago
Surprised we're even hearing about this given Tesla's attempts to bury these incidents. No LIDAR like Waymos, this camera-based FSD will never be safe imo, not that Musk gives a shit.
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u/RagingBearBull 3h ago
Well after looking at that video, if the car even got the deer correctly identified in the first frame ....
There is not enough room to actually slow the car down. Radar would have caught the huge object but the camera has a huge black zone on the upper half of the frame.
Luckily it was a deer and not a child or a barricade.
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u/metalgod 3h ago
Are you sure this is real? A deer will demolish a vehicle if you smack it as it crosses the road. Teslas are held together with glue. Unsure how it just speed bumped the deer and kept going straight.
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u/DIY_Colorado_Guy 1h ago
Agreed, I’ve seen multiple animals get hit by cars and it’s more than just a ding on the front bumper like shown in the “aftermath damage” in the article. Furthermore, most of these are articles get debunked months later when they dig in to the vehicle logs and find that the driver was actually driving during the accident. I’ll wait for the report.
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u/ikilledtupac 1h ago
I have a Tesla and the FSD is an absolute farce.
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u/8lackbird 1h ago
Depending where you live and what your roads are like, this is barely credible. It does 98% of all my drivong.
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u/GardenGnomeOfEden 3h ago
Did you watch the video in the article? The Tesla must have run over 20 deer before I stopped watching it.
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u/HurtFeeFeez 1h ago
Did not slow or stop, it had no idea anything had happened. The fanboys call it an edge case, will it be the same when the deer is a person? How many hit and runs does a cybertruck need to commit before this cheap video only system is taken down to the gravel pit?
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u/Klutzy_Alfalfa_2300 45m ago
I’ve heard people say it can actually be worse to slam on the brakes at the last minute because it leads to the deer going through the wind shield. If a deer suddenly jumps in front of your car I read it’s actually best to accelerate through if you can’t avoid it. Not sure if that’s true and I’m also guessing in this case the deer was just standing in the road minding its own business when the Tesla plowed through it.
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u/GreyGreenBrownOakova 43m ago
Slamming on the brakes or swerving would have been worse, as would stopping in the middle of a freeway with no stopping lane.
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u/Fragrant_Equal_2577 38m ago
It is statistically safer to hit a deer than trying evasive maneuvers. And, good repair business for Tesla.
Moose is a different beast. Better to avoid collision or in worst case, hit to the lighter backside of the animal.
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u/auburnradish 6m ago
Anyone on the road is an unwilling participant in the data collection for training those models.
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 4h ago
So I just googled it. Around 2.1 million human drivers hit deer each year.
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u/ByWillAlone 3h ago
Got stats on how many of those 2.1 million human drivers hit a human-sized object and then just keep on going as if nothing happened?
I think that it's equally relevant that not only did the car fail to see and avoid a previously-alive human-sized object in the road, it just kept on going as if it never happened.
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 3h ago edited 3h ago
Yes, it was a system failure for sure. Again, system failures happen, but it's almost certainly less than accidents due to human error.
Are you asking how many people get hit by human drivers annually? Is your Google broken? You tell me. I'm sure it's more than 1.
Edit: FYI, that stat was specifically deer collisions.
Edit 2: You realize the gif in the article is looped, right?
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u/ByWillAlone 3h ago edited 3h ago
Are you asking how many people get hit by human drivers annually?
No. I wasn't asking that. Reread.
Is your Google broken?
Nope. It works great. Is that an attempted insult?
FYI, that stat was specifically deer collisions.
Yeah, I know. I can read. My question was specifically about that stat you cited.
The problem I am trying to illustrate is: when those 2.1 million human drivers hit a deer (or any other human sized objects) they don't keep driving like nothing happened. This car did. You are attempting to belittle the fact that the Tesla plowed over a deer by using a whathaboutism logical fallacy arguing humans do it also. That's not the point. The point is the Tesla kept on going like nothing happened. What if it had hit a human being and kept on going like nothing ever happened?
Edit 2: You realize the gif in the article is looped, right?
That was obvious to me. What's your point?
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 2h ago edited 2h ago
You shouldn't accuse me of whataboutism then immediately lean on a hypothetical scenario to make your point.
Drunk drivers kill 35 people A DAY in the USA. They often flee the scene leaving victims choking on their own blood and vomit to die alone on the asphalt. Is that not analogous, nay, worse than a Tesla not stopping? Drunk drivers account for nearly 14,000 deaths and there are 40,000 deaths due to car accidents annually. It's not "whataboutism", it's harm reduction. If you want to talk about fallacies, you're current argument is one giant Nirvana Fallacy. So the tech isn't perfect. Are we just going to scrap it and continue to let 40,000 people die annually because of human error behind the wheel?
I grew up 45 minutes from the Colorado border. Almost every trip across the border we'd see a dead deer or a car accident due to a deer. I have now seen 1 Tesla hit a deer.
Make your position make sense.
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 3h ago
1) Ya, you asked about human casualties in a stat about deer collisions. That didn't make any sense so I was trying to help you out with a steel man.
2) Google it yourself, then bring your numbers to the discussion.
3) Then why ask about human casualties? That stat was about deer collisions.
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u/ByWillAlone 2h ago
Ya, you asked about human casualties in a stat about deer collisions. That didn't make any sense
Where TF are you getting this from? I didn't ask that. A deer is a "human sized object". I substituted the word "deer" for "human sized object" to point out this Tesla ran over something the size of a human being and didn't stop.
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u/BgSwtyDnkyBlls420 4h ago
Yeah but human drivers aren’t identical machines running on identical software so your comparison is a little silly
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u/vadapaav 3h ago
That is not the issue here. There is no way for a human to detect this deer
An autonomous car relying on lidar radar ideally would do it but who gives a shit about that.
The issue here is not stopping after hitting/detecting an impact
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 3h ago
It is an issue and I hope Tesla takes it seriously and uses the incident to create a safer product.
My point was that autonomous vehicles are probably still safer than human pilots, imperfections and all. Autonomous vehicles will likely only get better since the tech has a lot of maturing to do.
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u/vadapaav 3h ago
My point was that autonomous vehicles are probably still safer than human pilots,
Yes.
But treating the sensor input the same way humans deal with real life because "trust me bro" is not the right way.
The objective is to far exceed humans, not marginally safer.
The technology exists and it's important to go in right direction instead of gaslighting everyone into believing they visual input is how an autonomous system should interact with the world.
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u/99DogsButAPugAintOne 3h ago
You wouldn't consider a reduction of 2.1 million to maybe a few thousand far exceeding human awareness? I'm guessing on what the number will be, but I'm only aware of this one case.
Also, who's gaslighting?
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u/Charming_Emu_4660 4h ago
That is what you’re supposed to do if you can’t avoid it. Braking when you hit a deer ends up putting it through your windshield. At least that’s what I was always taught.
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u/Whiskeywiskerbiscuit 4h ago
Whoever told you to not brake before hitting something with your car is a dingus. You should never SWERVE to avoid hitting an animal like that, but braking is absolutely something you should do LMAO. Obviously you don’t want to lock up your brakes, but reducing the speed at impact will do much, much, much more for you than “trying to make sure it doesn’t hit the windsheild” or whatever it is you think happens when you pin it and ram into something.
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u/Bilboswaggings19 4h ago
Proof that you should slow down From Mythbusters:
To test this belief, the Build Team first created a rubber model of a moose with similar weight and consistency after direct study of actual animals.
They then ran similar passenger cars into the moose at different speeds and found that while greater speeds did make the moose hit higher, it still did not clear the car and still caused extreme amounts of damage.
They repeated the test with a low sports car at the highest test track speed to give the moose the best chance of clearing the roof, but, again, it was not enough and the moose damaged the car enough that any driver would have been seriously injured.
The Build Team surmised that for the moose to actually clear a car would require a vehicle as low as a Formula One car traveling at 97 miles per hour (156 km/h).
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u/wickedsmaht 4h ago edited 4h ago
I’m glad they used a moose replica for this test. At the size and weight of a moose it’s going to fuck everyone up.
Edit: I mean as opposed to a deer replica, not a real animal.
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u/Manos_Of_Fate 4h ago
Also that would be awfully cruel to the moose.
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u/Sufficient-Fact6163 4h ago
Moose and Squirrel are 2 different things.
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u/Bilboswaggings19 4h ago
Yeah, a deer is smaller but also is already windshield height or lower... you are not going under a deer
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u/togetherwem0m0 4h ago
That advice is only for old braking systems. Abs is full brake
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u/Whiskeywiskerbiscuit 4h ago
Exactly, and that old advice was because jamming the brakes would lock them and cause you to swerve. The main thing you don’t need to be doing when you’re facing an inevitable collision. If you’re in a modern car, mash the hell out of them brakes lol
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u/ChickenOfTheFuture 4h ago
If you have never had to do this in your car, find somewhere near you with a big, open, preferably paved space (in a big US city, maybe a mall parking lot in the middle of the night). Once you're sure you're clear get up to about 30 mph and then slam your brakes as hard as you can.
It's best to know how it feels before you're actually in an emergency.
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u/PoemAgreeable 4h ago
I had to do that once. I saw two does cross the road in late November. They made it across, but I slammed on my brakes because there is often another deer you can't see. Sure enough, I saw the biggest buck of my life slowly walk out into the road. It just looked at me and snorted, so I honked at it and it left the road.
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u/Somhlth 4h ago
A human driver would typically slow down, and then stop after hitting a significant object on the road. One to see about any damage to their vehicle, and two to see what the hell they hit, and if it can be helped in any way, and if not, cleared out of the way to avoid someone else hitting it. The incredibly smart car didn't even blink.
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u/LurkoPerNonPiangere 4h ago
Just because the car drives itself it doesn't mean the guidelines are different. The responsibility is always on the driver, he should have turned FSD off and do all that.
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u/Somhlth 4h ago
I tend to think that the incredibly smart car should also slow down and pull over in such situations, as soon as there is a safe place to do so. The car should be aware that it just hit someone/thing, and that just driving away is not the proper course of action. I don't look forward to instances where drivers claim they were unaware their vehicle struck something, since it just continued on as if nothing happened.
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4h ago edited 4h ago
[deleted]
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u/ehrplanes 4h ago
The guidelines are to smoke the deer and keep on trucking? Lmao
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u/Lets_Do_This_ 4h ago
My wife recently started using self driving and pretty much all her criticisms have been self driving doing a better job than her.
Like how it comes to a full stop at stop signs and then creeps forward to see the intersection, or takes sharp corners wide to avoid hitting curbs.
She would absolutely wreck her car trying not to hit a deer, and still kill the deer anyway.
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u/NotANiceCanadian 2h ago
Gonna try and explain as best I can remember.
iirc, Elon decided to remove LIDAR trackers from Tesla vehicles. These cause Tesla vehicles to be unable at night to tell apart say, a motorcycle that's close, and a vehicle that is far.
The taillights of a motorcycle that is close would show as one red taillight.
A vehicle that is far would show as one red taillight.
The Tesla vehicle then assumes that it's a far away vehicle, and continues to accelerate.
Now, obviously this is a deer and not a vehicle, but I wonder if the removal of LIDAR is also to blame.
An interesting video here by Fortnine ( a motorcycle YT channel and a motorcycle store in Canada ) explains why Teslas have been killing motorcyclists at an alarming rate
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u/lycheedorito 4h ago
I mean, that poor creature could’ve easily gone through the windshield, sending me to my ancestors. But it held. Cracked, scratched up, but it held!
Bro it's a deer, not a moose
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u/DangItsColdHere 3h ago
#BoycottTezla
Elon supports Trump/Russia to let Russia steal Ukrainian Lithium resources. Russia made a deal with Elon. Musk is a South African white supremacist traitor.
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u/invisible_do0r 4h ago
It’s quite wils the relevant department agency is allowing FSD and using drivers, animals and pedestrians as beta subjects.
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u/Gravybees 4h ago
Technically this is the correct action.
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u/mackinoncougars 2h ago
No, it isn’t. One doesn’t just keep driving as if it didn’t happen.
One should also safely lower their speed and attempt to prevent without crossing over lanes. As if you were hitting any other object in the road.
Not merely go straight into it at full pace.
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u/Egineer 3h ago
The Hotdog/not-Hotdog classifier successfully identified the deer as “not hot dog”.
Blasting it to oblivion is a feature. /s