Tesla’s autopilot strikes yet again and this time it is their new and improved Full Self Driving software that is making mistakes. Apparently, their testing data set didn’t quite cover scenarios where the car might be looking at the moon. Tesla’s FSD feature is now available for almost every Tesla car owner whose car comes with the supported hardware. The feature is now subscription-based for $99 to $199 per month depending on which package car owners had before.
The FSD package wasn’t a monthly subscription before. Tesla used to sell it as a one-time purchase of $10,000. Although the subscription will make them more money in the long run, it’ll also allow the customer to check out the new features that come with FSD without paying the $10,000 premium. The people who bought Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot package can also get the FSD package for $99 per month. However, it seems that this new FSD package can’t cope well when the moon is involved. Especially when it’s low and on the yellow side.
How often do you encounter a moon that yellow? While this might be a fairly rare case, it did happen nonetheless. The vehicle was constantly picking up the moon as a yellow traffic light and the autopilot system was slowing down the vehicle again and again. Looking for and fixing each and every use case is impossible for engineers. So I guess we can cut Tesla some slack especially since FSD is still in the trial period.
Tesla has been having problems with their FSD software with Elon Musk admitting that it’s a harder problem than he initially thought. He said in a tweet that “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect”. He further added that “Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality”. This seems to be a similar real-world scenario where AI can struggle.
However, the company is usually quick to address issues like these once they are brought to their attention. So it’ll be interesting to see how quickly they patch this yellow moon bug. We’ll also ignore the fact that Elon Musk has often exaggerated just how good the FSD really is. Considering that the feature is name Full Self Driving while it still requires constant driver supervision anyways.