Can a self-driving car be courteous?

Tesla owners have been given a month of free Full Self Driving (Supervised) to see for themselves how far the technology has come. We can use FSD (Supervised) as long as we give full attention to the road ahead (Yes, there is a camera in the car checking that.) and keeping hands on the steering wheel prepared to take over if the car does something unexpected. I truly have been enjoying having the car do all the driving, signalling, turning, stopping, avoiding pedestrians and bikers. Set a destination and watch the magic. On Friday, I was using FSD to take me to the Southside of Fredericton and the car did something that really surprised me. You will see in the short clip below that there is lots of traffic and an oncoming vehicle signalled for a left turn across my lane. The car ahead almost stopped to let him turn but not quite. My Tesla made a full stop to let him cross, even though it knew there was a green light a ways ahead—a true act of courtesy. I did nothing. It is what I would have done, and that is what people are experiencing with FSD—it is acting so humanlike.

If you are interested in such things, the version of software doing this 'magic' is based on Artificial Intelligence. Super computers are given millions of hours of videos showing good driving habits in countless situations. The computer learns how to drive from these. This replaces an older method which involved writing hundreds of thousands of lines of computer coding trying to explain how to drive. One of the advantages of FSD is that the Tesla has eight cameras and no distractions. Everything we do is recorded on a little jump drive in the car. It is only shared with Tesla if there is an accident or we report a problem. It is not perfect yet, but it is being improved every day. I have had three updated versions of the software in the past ten days. I have several things I would like to see changed—time will tell how that goes.

If you are really excited about all of this, let me know and I would be happy to give you a demonstration.

- David