Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta has impressed with its capacity to navigate city streets and it now looks like it can also detect and avoid road debris, according to a new video.
Like Tesla Autopilot, the automaker’s new Full Self-Driving Beta requires driver attention at all times since it can encounter things that it doesn’t know how to react to and even things that it can’t detect.
Tesla even warns that “it may do the wrong thing at the worst time.”
Road debris, or any kind of stationary object on the road, has been one of those problems for Tesla’s Autopilot in the past.
The system would just keep the car in its lane and if the driver wasn’t attentive, it would sometimes result in accidents.
Now one Tesla owner with the new Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software powered by the Autopilot core rewrite shared a video that shows FSD avoiding road debris:
James Locke wrote about the new video:
“Went for a little drive and caught beta FSD safely avoiding debris on the road.”
While the driving visualizations don’t seem to show the road debris, it does appear that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta moves the steering wheel a bit to avoid the object.
Electrek’s Take
Personally, I’ve seen Autopilot avoid objects on the road, like road kills, but it hasn’t been consistent in my own experience.
Too often, it wouldn’t avoid a stationary object on the road, even vehicles, and it’s why we need to pay attention at all times.
Now seeing FSD beta with the core rewrite being able to avoid road debris is encouraging, but we are going to need to see more examples.
One thing I am really looking forward to seeing is Tesla’s FSD being able to avoid potholes.
Like road debris, some of them can be dangerous and need to be avoided while others are safer to drive over and the difference can be hard to make even for human drivers.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Tesla’s FSD reacts to those situations because a solution is going to be needed in order for a fully self-driving system to work.
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