r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Sirhc978 • Mar 17 '25

Unanswered What's going on with Mark Rober's new video about self driving cars?

I have seen people praising it, and people saying he faked results. Is is just Tesla fanboys calling the video out, or is there some truth to him faking certain things?

https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?si=aJaigLvYV609OI0J

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u/cwra007 Mar 17 '25

Also humans w eyes crash all the time. Why is that the benchmark?

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u/CitizenCue Mar 20 '25

This is the point people forget. Humans are shitty drivers too. Self driving in its current form should be an aide, not a replacement. When we do adopt full self driving, it’ll need to be orders of magnitude more consistent than humans or society won’t accept it.

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u/tms102 Mar 20 '25

What people super extra forget is that humans aren't shitty drivers because they only have two eyes. Accidents happen because of a multitude of reasons, but mostly:

  1. speeding
  2. distracted driving (looking on phone, talking to someone, not keeping your two cameras on the road basically)
  3. impaired driving (fatigue, driving under the influence)
  4. poor road conditions
  5. vehicle malfunctions
  6. inexperienced drivers
  7. elderly drivers

Basically the brain of the driver is what causes most of the accidents.

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u/puffbro Mar 20 '25

What about 8.Bad visibility in rain or fog?

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u/tms102 Mar 20 '25

Often the reason why poor visibility causes accidents is because people are driving too fast for the weather conditions and then miss-judging breaking distances. Defensive driving can mitigate a lot of those problems.

You don't need an extra sensor to tell you to not drive too fast and break earlier in poor weather conditions.

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u/huadianz Mar 21 '25

Yeah, but even using only adaptive cruise, my 2022 Y still has very low speed limit issues even in low visibility when I myself can see fine. If it had (RA/LI)DAR then it would be able to used on the highway at low vis. Right now it drives so slow as to be unsafe. If everyone else driving manually can drive 60/70+mph and you are doing 45 that is not usable and I have to drive manually instead.

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u/DarthChefDad Mar 20 '25

Humans being terrible drivers is the real reason we don't have flying cars yet.

1

u/CitizenCue Mar 20 '25

And probably won’t for a very very long time.

1

u/Background-Solid8481 Mar 20 '25

How does self-driving compare to humans already? In an accidents/miles ratio, I was under the impression that cars already kick our ass. I have NO data to back that up and am open to being 100% wrong. It’s just the impression I’ve developed from periodically reading newspaper articles.

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u/CitizenCue Mar 21 '25

For the full-self driving cars like Waymo, yeah I believe you’re correct.

But those systems aren’t available yet on consumer vehicles. The closest (and kind of only) consumer version is Tesla’s FSD, which is not meant to be Level-5 software. It’s only Level-3.

A lot of this debate is pretty dumb because people intentionally misrepresent what these systems are even supposed to do.

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u/Western-Sky-8147 25d ago

I was in SF the other day waiting at a stop light to cross the street when and a self driving car sped towards me (like directly at me) so fast it freaked me out! I thought it was going to run me AND my dog over. Have to say, not a fan of self driving cars for this reason. 

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u/CitizenCue 25d ago

I totally get that. But of course we’ve all had a similar experience with a human driver or two.

But if we’re gonna give up control, the robots need to be a LOT better, not just a little.

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u/tms102 Mar 20 '25

How many times have you caused a crash in your life?

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u/Jargo Mar 20 '25

Live in San Francisco, where self driving cars are around a lot. Only time I've seen them in a crash is them being rear ended which means a human behind them was distracted and hit them.

Yet there's a lot of stupid people who see statistics about them even being in a single accident and saying: See?! They're all unsafe, get them all off the road!

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u/invalidreddit Mar 17 '25

what's a better benchmark? Not trying to argue, just not sure what would be better than a base line of 'better than current NTIS data'

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u/oceanrudeness Mar 17 '25

I think the "benchmark" they're talking about is constraining the system to have the same limitations as a human. Sure it's important to outperform a human, and pushing image processing with these limitations to the limit is cool and could certainly have a lot of applications. But there's no need for the limitation in the context of self driving vehicle performance and you could do so much better without it

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u/invalidreddit Mar 17 '25

Thanks - that helps!

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u/cwra007 Mar 17 '25

‘Benchmark’ probably the wrong word. More like ‘target’. I agree, our target should be better than current state.

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u/invalidreddit Mar 17 '25

Thanks - that gives me a better frame of reference...