NHTSA Steps Up Investigation Into Tesla FSD In Low Visibility Conditions
Once again, Tesla is in hot water with the feds over its so-called "Full Self-Driving" system. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has upgraded its preliminary investigation into the system's failures to detect low-visibility conditions to a full-blown Engineering Analysis, its highest level of investigation. This is often the final step before issuing a recall. Electrek reports that the analysis covers 3,203,754 vehicles equipped with FSD.
The investigation began in 2024, when a Tesla running FSD struck and killed a pedestrian. While this was the most serious case, additional similar crashes led NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation to look into FSD failures in low-visibility conditions, such as sun glare, fog, or dust. Thanks to Tesla's strictly camera-based system, such conditions make it essentially blind. A degradation detection system is supposed to identify low-visibility conditions and alert the driver to take over. However, in nine incidents, including the pedestrian fatality, this system failed to realize that it was blind until it was too late.
Tesla released an update to degradation detection after the pedestrian was killed, but further analysis determined that it would have only affected three out of the nine crashes, which is still a failing grade. Even worse, ODI believes that while Tesla is not deliberately hiding information in this case (though a separate investigation is underway for significant delays in crash reporting), there may be even more crashes like this than Tesla has reported. From the NHTSA report:
Tesla also described internal data and labeling limitations that prevented a uniform identification and analysis of crash events with the subject system engaged. ODI believes this limitation could have led to under-reporting of subject crashes over portions of the defined time-period.
All this, plus FSD's failures to stop for railroad crossings and stopped school buses, paints a pretty bad picture for a system that Tesla likes to claim is "self-driving."
When cameras can't see
This excerpt from the NHTSA report spells out what pretty much everyone saw coming except Elon Musk:
In the crashes that ODI has reviewed, the system did not detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred. Review of Tesla's responses revealed additional crashes that occurred in similar environments and where the system either did not detect a degraded state, and/or it did not present the driver with an alert with adequate time for the driver to react. In each of these crashes, FSD also lost track of or never detected a lead vehicle in its path.
You know what would detect obstacles beyond visual range in low-visibility conditions? Radar, which Tesla FSD stopped using in 2021. Even earlier Teslas equipped with radar had it turned off in an update. At the time, Elon Musk said in a Twitter post:
Vision became so good that radar actually reduced SNR, so radar was turned off.
Humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.
But if you have the technology to perceive the environment better than humans can, why wouldn't you use it? Radar is literally an acronym for "radio detection and ranging," which is extremely useful when vision is impaired. The low-visibility conditions causing FSD's cameras so much trouble have little effect on radar or lidar systems. Modern cars, most of which don't claim to drive themselves, use radar for everything from parking sensors to adaptive cruise control. Automated emergency braking, which will be required on light-duty vehicles starting in 2029, may have prevented some of these crashes. Why not use what's been proven to work?
Unfortunately, Teslas made since FSD stopped using radar are no longer equipped with it. A potential recall could, hypothetically, order older Teslas to reactivate theirs, but that wouldn't help the camera-only cars from the past five years. For those systems, we'll probably have to rely on yet another software update that would help FSD realize when it's driving blind and give the driver enough warning to take over before another crash. Hopefully, it would work better than the last one.