Judkins said that after the finger test, a lead cybertruck engineer at Tesla said he did the video wrong.
The engineer told him the frunk increases in pressure every single time it closes and detects resistance, Judkins said. It’s going to assume you want to close the frunk and maybe something like a bag is getting in the way, which would make it close harder.
Are you kidding me? You did the test wrong on a safety critical feature? No you dumbass engineer, you designed it wrong. Why in the holy fuck would you make a safety critical algorithm keep applying more pressure on subsequent attempts??? That’s literally the opposite of what you do for safety.
This is why, as a software developer, I’m against designing any system that assumes what the user wants and tries to do it for them automatically. On the occasions where the assumption is right, it’s a mild convenience at best. When it’s wrong, it is always infuriating if not dangerous.
“Smart” may as well be synonymous with “unpredictable”. I don’t need my computer to be smart. I need it to be predictable, consistent, and undemanding.
Yeah, I’m an embedded software developer myself and yeah, when we architect our code we have safety critical sections identified with software safety reviews and we always go with the assumption that we’re going to run into that one guy who’s the living embodiment of Murphy’s law and go from there with that design to minimize the potential for injury and death.
Can’t imagine who the hell is in charge of the software safety reviews there that let that pass.
Same in the medical devices industry. We have whole teams of non-developers whose job is to find out when and why a surgeon can be a moron. The code is more difficult to write, but it’s way better and more robust.
And also every additional kind of complexity (which stacks BTW) makes you more dependent on the vendor (good for them, bad for you) and on doing things exactly as their imagined user (because it’s disproportionately your problem as laws don’t seem to work in making it theirs).
Distributism is actually a very good political ideology. Sad it’s associated with Catholic religion, because it correctly generalized the principles making democracies and markets and cultures work.
I wonder if the guy that designed autopilot had the same idea. “So when the car detects resistance up ahead in the form of a crowd or wall, it will accelerate to make sure it goes through!”
The engineer told him the frunk increases in pressure every single time it closes and detects resistance, Judkins said. It’s going to assume you want to close the frunk and maybe something like a bag is getting in the way, which would make it close harder.
What the fuck kind of idiots are leading things over there? “Something’s in the way. Better crush it!” What a bunch of morons putting everyone in danger.
I know I’m old school and all that, but why do people want to pay for automatically closing doors of any kind? Automatic opening of cargo spaces I get, if you have your bags full of hands or whatever, but once you put the stuff in there… Seem like such an incredibly unnecessary and costly feature, that also have a high chance of failing in the future. I don’t get it.
Good question. My wife’s RAV4 has a rear door that will only close if you press a button. You can’t close it manually. Furthermore, it’s on the door while it’s open and my five foot tall wife can barely reach it. It’s ridiculous.
You know, that’s true and it didn’t even occur to me. I guess she just wouldn’t have bought it? (I would have been fine with that, I hate SUVs, even hybrids.)
We’ve got a 2019 Rav and I can’t remember how, but you can adjust the height that the door opens to by some series of button pushes. We had to lower it so that it doesn’t hit the frame of the garage door when opening it inside the garage. Maybe just adjust it so that it doesn’t open all the way and it’ll be easier for her to reach the button?
I actually sell these. You can manually lower the door to the height that works comfortably, then hold the automatic door button down for about 3 seconds. That should program the door to a new maximum height.
How do I set the height on my vehicle’s adjustable power liftgate?
When the liftgate reaches the desired height, push the rear liftgate close-button once (button is located on the doorjamb of the rear liftgate, and only accessible when the liftgate is open). Press and hold the button until it beeps 4 times. Click here to view a video.
My Subaru has a similar setup, and there’s a feature for changing the max height of the tailgate. You might wanna see if the same thing exists for you.
Because like you said, it’s a nice to have feature. I like my wife’s auto closing hatch for when I have a handful of boxes for that final grocery run and just walk away and it closes. It’s literally just really nice convenience feature and if it fails, you go back to closing it manually.
I get it’s nice to have, and if it somehow cost nothing I wouldn’t mind having it in a car, if it’s pretty much guaranteed that when it fails it doesn’t prevent me from open/close manually. But I’d much rather not pay for neither the R&D, engineering, parts and manufacturing of it, only to end up with a more complex door mechanism that is more expensive to repair and more likely to break. When all it does is give me the slightest of conveniences. Best example of this is the motorized charging port lid on the Rivian. Like, whyyyy? Cheaper and longer lasting vehicles, please.
Why the hell would it close harder if there is something in the way? That’s not the correct behavior for a lid, that’s the correct behavior for powered shears.
Never tried to force the closing of your trunk lid because there is a bag that is slightly over the limit and you need a little more pressure, even if the bag is a little pressed down ?
The assumption here is that if it is your finger which is in the way, you take it out the way and you are not that stupid to try to close it again if for some reason you are not able move it away, which to me seems to make a lot of sense.
Safety critical? I’d rather have a trunk I can get to close than one I can stick my finger into four times in a row without pinching it. What do you think happens when you slam down a normal trunk on someone’s finger?
Lol. Nah, the trucks are super dumb. I just know I’d want a trunk that would be able to close more than an overly sensitive pressure detection permanently preventing it. For that matter, I think it’s dumb to attach a motor to a trunk.
No thank you. I refuse to engage with a person trying to straw man and change topics from a software safety argument to a personal preference that goes nowhere but you feel free to engage if you wish.
Maybe you didn’t comprehend it? The close force attempt increases with each unsuccessful attempt at closing. That way seems better than it eventually not working at all a few years down the line as all the electronics get more jankety be cause something gets a bit bent or worn out and it always detects a small amount of resistance so it quits closing all together.
Nobody wants to discuss the logic involved with having to open the door and then close it again for it to attempt to close harder and why that isn’t the dire safety hazard that people are trying to make it out to be. These people are the reason why we have to have “no smoking” signs at gas pumps because apparently they’d leave their hand in the door after attempting to close it 3 or 4 times.
It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.
Well apparently it’s programmed to bypass the safety system after 3 attempts under the assumption that the user knows best.
This seems like a really dumb choice, but I can see why an engineer would want to point out that it’s not incompetent engineering but an incompetent business department.
That’s called accountability and that’s why engineers get paid extra. Ethic classes are not the part of engineering degrees in the USA very obviously, I shouldn’t be surprised
I did read it and I’m also reading it in the context of the article and the rabid group-think here claiming that a potential injury after closing your hand in a door four times in a row is somehow the companies fault or the fault of the engineering department.
If you have to rely on the appeal to emotion fallacy to do the heavy lifting for your argument, I suppose you’re correct that there’s nothing left to discuss.
Personally, I learned long ago not to close my hand in a door after the first attempt. I suppose there’s a reason why some people need safety warnings not to use their toaster in the bathtub, and we should all live by those standards.
I don’t understand what “appeal to emotion” you’re talking about.
You seem to project given what you wrote in your second paragraph however, given that’s not even remotely relevant to the conversation here. I hope you’re not ever in charge of anything that matters.
Your entire argument is an appeal to emotion as if logic should be ignored in this situation simply because “safety” when in reality someone would need to close their body part in a door four times in a row before they were even remotely at risk of being injured.
You followed that fallacy up with an ad hominem by claiming that I must be dumb because I don’t blindly support your emotional argument about safety even though you have yet to explain how this is even unsafe in a real world scenario. My second paragraph highlighted similar scenarios where exceptionally special people might injure themselves by doing something idiotic and dangerous that no average person would ever do, yet we must still be warned about.
Care to take a crack at making an argument without relying on fallacies the whole time?
But let’s face it: if the car lid would never close if something is in the way, some other dumb youtuber would have made a video about it and here there would be a discussion about how stupid are the engineers to not let the lid close even if a bag in slightly on on the way and the user know what they are doing.
You’re missing the point of a safety feature. The car shouldn’t, by itself, close the lid if something’s in the way. It should allow the user to push it down, or disable it temporarily, to do so.
The point of a safety feature in any system is to prevent unexpected situation from having unexpected consequences, not to be a magic solution that accommodate for brainless people. In one direction, you can make the judgement call and force the thing down, in the other direction you lose a finger.
You’re missing the point of a safety feature. The car shouldn’t, by itself, close the lid if something’s in the way. It should allow the user to push it down, or disable it temporarily, to do so.
I get the safety feature. The point is that here I am saying to the car to close the lid even if something is in the way. I made a conscious decision to do so, and more than one time, so I expect the car to do it. But I agree that it could have been designed in a better way.
The point of a safety feature in any system is to prevent unexpected situation from having unexpected consequences, not to be a magic solution that accommodate for brainless people. In one direction, you can make the judgement call and force the thing down, in the other direction you lose a finger.
Which is exactly what happened here. He made the judgement call to ignore the safety feature (and probably ignored how the feature works)
He did the test wrong because he's experimenting with "safety" algorithms that the manufacturer has provided little-to-no documentation on and is having to come up with answers on his own. Maybe he wouldn't be "doing it wrong" if Tesla hadn't over-engineered every aspect of their piece of shit truck in the first place. This thing is a solution in search of a problem, and it'll chop your fingers off until it finds it.
That was very nearly my exact same thought. Maybe not for curious children with carrot-sized fingers, but for adults, how convenient! Business competitor's body won't quite fit in your fancy frunk? Just while away on your phone for about 10 minutes, let the cat do its magic, and off go the legs! Travel-sized!
He went through a bunch of vegetables and, admittedly, it was pretty impressive how it handled them. But then with no hesitation it took off the tip of the carrot and he still decided to try his finger
What person with an automated cargo door closure mechanism has thought “stop protecting my stuff and just fucking close”?
I’ll admit it annoys me when there’s something in the way that keeps my door from latching and it reopens, but I’d rather have to clear the door and shut it manually than it force itself closed and jams the door or break my shit.
Its just like elevators, really. You put your hand in to stop the doors closing, they open again before touching your arm. Next time they close gently on your arm. Third time, the doors snap shut and the elevator ascends without further warning, resulting in traumatic amputation.
Wait what? Are there actually elevators “programmed” this way‽ (can this behavior even be changed in the controller?)
Because I have never “tested” this behavior per se (I mean you mostly want your elevator to move anyway so you ideally remove the obstruction the first time it didn’t fully close…)
I’ve seen cases where it takes some time to the group of people in the elevator to figure out the obstruction. Because it won’t even touch the object, just reopen again and again.
So no, elevators don’t do that, and I assume the parent comment is sarcastic.
Thats what I was hoping, but it was presented so deadpan that theres enough countries in the world that this could theoretically be true for some of them
It’s a joke about how the safety system on the car works. From another comment in this thread:
Based on what it didn’t cut through, his finger should have been safe but apparently Tesla designed the thing to keep increasing the pressure if it detects resistance each time until it can close, which is absolutely baffling. I don’t know of any other safety feature that turns down the safety the more it activates. The fact that it reacts to the exact same conditions differently each time should, in itself, be deeply concerning for any safety feature.
I was joking, commenting on the absurdity of a safety system that deliberately gets less safe each time it triggers. Can you imagine the crush injuries and lawsuits if that were true? Not to mention all those movie scenes where someone repeatedly stops the elevator so they can confess their love to someone? They would end in tragedy.
No, elevators are infinitely patient, and will never close the doors on any object large enough to be a crush hazard. Dog leashes, yes sometimes, but not arms and feet.
What person with an automated cargo door closure mechanism has thought “stop protecting my stuff and just fucking close”?
The same person that sometime need to force the door to close because even if his things are in the way, he know there will not be damages, just a bag a little more pressed. Or some more trashed trash you are taking to the landfill
I’ll admit it annoys me when there’s something in the way that keeps my door from latching and it reopens, but I’d rather have to clear the door and shut it manually than it force itself closed and jams the door or break my shit.
Which is what the system assume in this case. It stops 3 times, the 4th it suppose that the human know what he is doing.
Are there any crashes already involving pedestrians? I really wonder how broken those pedestrians are after the hit. I think the chance to survive a hit from a Cybertruck is minimal.
And I am even surprised that it is allowed on your streets.
To be fair, the survivability of being hit by any big US pickup is pretty small. Perhaps the cybertruck is even worse though.
Pickups are explicitly exempted from a lot of crash/pedestrian safety laws in the US (I think related to them being classed as commercial vehicles), despite every other car on the road there being a pickup.
Bonnets cover the engine, evs don’t have engines, and their motors and other important components aren’t always centrally located nor do they need much regular maintenance so the front is sometimes made into a storage compartment, the frunk.
I hate that term, trunk doesn’t inherently mean on the back. It’s just a container for storage. Going by that naming convention a traditional car trunk should be called a bunk (back + trunk)
I get the idea automation, its great when it saves time and effort but when it represents a minuscule chance of chopping a limb off you it should never be implemented to the public.
The crazy part to me is that he tried a carrot and it didn’t open for it. Yet he thought it was a good idea to try his finger which it about the same size.
The harder you push the pedal the more you want your speed to decrease, obviously. But if you push it hard enough then the decrease from your current speed to Zero is no longer enough. So now the engineers need to decide if you’ll speed up first, so the decrease from the new speed to zero is larger, or if it’ll slam you into reverse instead.
I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it’s astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.
It snapped the tip of the carrot, which wouldn’t be a lot of resistance
Based on what it didn’t cut through, his finger should have been safe but apparently Tesla designed the thing to keep increasing the pressure if it detects resistance each time until it can close, which is absolutely baffling. I don’t know of any other safety feature that turns down the safety the more it activates. The fact that it reacts to the exact same conditions differently each time should, in itself, be deeply concerning for any safety feature.
It might have been dumb of him to try it, but that doesn’t change that it’s still unsafe.
I wonder if FSD backs up after running over a pedestrian to confirn that ‘Yup, it was something with the road there’ before continuing to drive forward again.
Not say I agree but here is the logic. Self closing trunks are pretty common on many vehicles. A problem that is/was (I think a lot of manufacturers have mostly fix it) happen was the trunk lid would detect the resistance from a grocery bag or something. You know the stuff that in the past you could have just shut the lid with a little force. When this resistance was felt the lid would open back up. A good thing for safety but it can lead to the trunk never closing.
I bet when Tesla wrote the code they forgot to give it a maximum pressure it could close with regardless of how many times it closed. Or they set the maximum pressure way too hard.
Yes, it snapped the thin tip of the carrot. I didn’t watch the video, but it sounded like he went from safest to least safe, so produce first and body parts afterward (arm, then hand, then finger).
We live in an age where the notion of “thinking something through before doing it”, also known as “common sense” has been replaced with the need to get it out there onto the internet as fast as possible before someone else beats you to it. The need for social gratification on the internet beats the need for self-preservation.
The first time I recall realizing this what when another YouTube dipship picked up a Portuguese Man-o-war and people got pissy when it was pointed out how lucky he was to not have been stung and how it was sheer dumb luck that he was still alive
People defended him saying “He didn’t know it was dangerous, he didn’t know what it was…” And that’s the whole fucking point… We used to live in a society were people were smart enough to not touch shit that they don’t know if it’s dangerous or not. The concept of erring on the side of caution is now abandoned because of stupidity and social media credits.
“we used to” No the fuck we didn’t. Humans have always been dumb, shortsighted, and curious. The internet just makes it really easy to see the ones that fuck up enough to be entertaining.
Yeah. You’re right that we’ve always been dumb and stupid and would do stupid shit to impress our peer group
But I firmly believe social media has inflated the definition of “peer group” to include “internet followers”, which jacks the whole stupidity up to 11.
For example, you’re a nineties kid walking through the mall with your friends in your JNKO jeans and your slap-it watch. One of your friends decides he’s going to be an idiot by balancing on the railing of the second floor and you all have a good laugh. Edit: If his friends hadn’t been there, would he have done it? I doubt it. But now his “friends” don’t have to be there, because they’re just random followers to give him social media points.
That’s sort of what I meant. Its not the we didn’t do dumb shit as kids, its that social media credit has motivated people to do dumb shit when they normally wouldn’t.
Edit: also, WE grew out of it. Nowadays they are socially and financially incentivized to NOT grow out of that phase.
Truth. As an 80s kid / 90s teen, I feel pretty lucky to be alive. I’m grateful for the few times in my life when common sense kicked in, and I said no.