Allison Sheridan's FSD Adventures

[00:00:20] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving and much, much more. My name is Bodhi and I am your host. And on this episode, we are going to sit down with Allison Sheridan. And Allison contacted me back in February. And by the time you hear this, it'll probably be late March, early April. And she had said that she got a new update for full self-driving and it did not act in a way that she has experienced in the past.

[00:00:50] So she asked if I wanted to come on and talk about it. And of course, why wouldn't I want her to come on and talk about it? So let's go ahead and welcome Allison to the show. Allison Sheridan Hi Bodhi, lovely to be with you again. Allison Sheridan I don't think we have talked. I mean, we've texted back and forth, but I don't think we've talked since Vegas. Allison Sheridan Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not. And after the wonderful Thanksgiving Day special, that was fun.

[00:01:18] Allison Sheridan Yeah, yeah. I'm going to do something for Amos' charity drive next year. So I think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to do a game show. Allison Sheridan Oh, that'd be fun. But yeah, it was great to hang out with you in person. That was really fun. Allison Sheridan Tons of fun. Tons of fun. Over non-sneeze guard appetizers.

[00:01:44] Allison Sheridan Yeah, it worked. Well, I think I got your attention because I started whining about full self-driving, right? Allison Sheridan You did. You did. I put, by the time people hear this, it'll probably be a month from now, a month from the original podcast. But I put out there, who's using full self-driving and how often are you using it? And I got numbers back between 75 and 95%. And then you sent me a message and you're like, that is not my experience. So give us your experience.

[00:02:13] Allison Sheridan Well, we do want to set that I don't drive very much. I've only got about 25,000 miles on my car and it's a 2019. So I don't drive very far at all. So when I'm using full self-driving, it's almost always I'm going to experiment with it and then stop using it again. Oh, an update come out. Let me see how it is. And I think I told you originally it was like a teenage driver who was also drunk. And then I came back and said, okay, it's not drunk anymore, but it's still a teenage driver. And it's been getting better and better and better.

[00:02:41] And lately it's been pretty stinking good, been really happy with it. But I recently got an update and it was abjectly horrible or objectively, that's the word objectively horrible. I mean, absolutely terrible. The first thing it did, I was flying along down this road, I don't know, 35 miles an hour and everything was fine. And a car turned in front of me and then couldn't go into the driveway it wanted to go into. So it was 100% blocking me and the car didn't stop.

[00:03:12] Now I did break and I know how soon it breaks. I have a sense of when it does because I've used it for a long time. And it didn't stop, Bodie. That's you had one job, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we talked on, again, this podcast is coming out after, but on the latest episode of Kilowatt, I talked about a person who's driving his Cybertruck down the road and the lane he was in was ending.

[00:03:38] And the car, the Cybertruck did not end. It was in full self-driving mode. It did not end. It did not move into the left lane. There was no cars in the left lane. It ended up hitting a curb and then it hit a pole. Right. I heard about that. Yeah. And in the defense, and it sounds like at first I didn't describe the road because I was like, I don't know if it's the same road because the pictures were uploaded by somebody else. But now that I've kind of looked into it a little bit, it does seem like it was the right road.

[00:04:05] But the lane ends because the sidewalk kind of juts out like a wart and there's a light pole there. Like it's the weirdest place to put a light pole. It isn't like that on the other side of the street either. It's just on that one side of the street. We have one just like that, that I don't know why they just put it in and it's like there's a turn pocket to get over to the right to turn right.

[00:04:25] And then it juts back out again with the light pole. And I can't believe the light pole is still there because I've almost, you know, logically I look at it and go, oh, I probably need to go back to the left and then turn around this thing. But I can't believe nobody else has hit it. Yeah. And it's weird. It's a weird deal. I don't, I'm sure some city engineer decided that that was a good idea, but it doesn't seem like a good idea from the, from our perspective.

[00:04:50] Now we should kind of start off with you this experience. You have a hardware three and your, what's, do you know what the latest version, software version you're using for? Well, you're going to kind of wreck my story because the end of my story is I've gotten another update and it's not nearly as bad, but I think it is important to know that, know that it does seem to change. So as of right now, I'm running a 12.6.3. I don't remember what I was running right before that, but 12.6.3 is better.

[00:05:19] But I wanted to talk about these things because it really shows how you, you, you gotta be careful with your code people. You know, the stopping when a perpendicular truck is there is important. Another thing it did, I'm, I'm barreling down 40 miles an hour in the right hand lane and all of a sudden it just goes, you're going to have to take over steering because this is just out of control. This situation, I just can't deal with it. There was literally nothing there. There was, there was no sidewalk. There was no, I mean, there was nobody coming out.

[00:05:49] There was nobody going in. There was no obstructions. There wasn't a shadow. It wasn't raining. There weren't lights in its eyes. There was nothing wrong. And it just went, I can't do this. But the, the third thing it did, and I found the reason for this one is I was going along at 35 miles an hour and the speed kept increasing past the speed limit.

[00:06:08] And I'm used to being able to dial back on the right scrolly wheel to say, okay, the maximum speed I'm going to allow is going to be say 40 in a 35, or maybe I want it to be 35 in a 35. And I'm used to being able to do that. And I was wheeling this thing down and it just kept accelerating. And I don't, I'm not even sure that indicator is there anymore of what you want to drive versus what the speed limit is versus what actual is. There used to be three and I think there's only two now. And so I kept dialing back.

[00:06:37] Well, yesterday I went and looked and there's a new feature that has a speed offset percentage. Bodhi, what, what percentage offset would you default that to if you introduced a new feature? Well, as percentages change, it would be difficult because, you know, if I'm driving 50, I'd want to probably 10%. But if I'm driving 80, I'd probably want it 7%. If I'm guessing. Bodhi, it was 40%. What?

[00:07:08] By default, it was set to 40% faster. Oh, I thought I was being clever. Yeah. No, that would have been, that would have been clever sliding scale. That's why like five miles over might be a good number like it used to have. But no, it was set by default and it had new on a little badge. So that's why it was doing that. And that is still there in whatever I just said. I was running a 12.6.3. All right. The last thing it did that I was really surprised at is I stopped at a stoplight and there were

[00:07:38] three lanes going in my direction. The light was red and it was not close to turning green. In fact, it was just the next thing it did was it let cars turn left in front of me. So this was a red, red light, not, not even slightly moving towards the green range. And in spite of this condition, the car started to inch forward into the intersection. Like, like it's just like, yeah, creepy. It's just like, okay, I'm going to go. It got into the crosswalk. What are you doing?

[00:08:05] So I wasn't impressed with that change. And like I said, I think it's better. I haven't driven a lot since then with full self driving, but it was not, not great. Um, I did try it in Steve's car, which was on the same version and it, um, let's see, it was coming up to a light and it was going to be turning left at the light. Okay, great. That's no problem. But about 15 feet before the light, it turned left.

[00:08:30] So like into a straight towards a curb, just perpendicular, just like turned left into a curb. I pulled it back before I did it, but that wasn't good. And it also was way too slow, like, like painfully slow. If Steve had driven, he would have lost his ever love of mind if he'd been in the car when this was going on. After turning onto a 35 mile an hour road after two blocks, it was still not up to 35 miles an hour.

[00:08:55] So we got my car over there trying to go 180, you know, Steve's car is just tootling along. It turned right onto a main road and it took the turn at nine miles an hour. And it, by the next intersection, it was only up to 18. This is on a 40 mile an hour road. And then one of the things we've had trouble with it is a full self-driving in the past has been, we've got a bunch of dips on this main road near our house and it would go just barreling at these dips. And so like it would bottom out the car and we'd have to pull it out.

[00:09:23] Well, now it, it went down to about 11 miles an hour to go through the dip, which is a little slower than it needs to. If it just got down to like 15 or 20, it'd be fine, but it got down to 11 and then it kept doing that at every intersection, whether there was a dip or not. Oh yeah. The drips are for the water drainage. Yeah. All that water we have. Uh, yeah. I mean, you guys did get some rain in the last couple of weeks, way more than Arizona. Uh, yeah. Maybe Steve make yours is like 40% higher.

[00:09:52] Maybe Steve, there's a, there's a hidden like miss Daisy mode that Steve happens to be on. Maybe, but he tried it, uh, the, tried it again recently. And he said, he still didn't think it was great. Um, but I don't think he had any of these kinds of experiences where it was driving that slowly. Cause I mean, he would not have tolerated that pest the first time I got lucky. Nobody was behind me. So I was able to keep trying it and seeing, all right, let's see how stupid are you going to be?

[00:10:19] But, uh, I, I just thought it was a weird anomaly that it would be getting better and better and better. And then suddenly way worse. Yeah. And we should say you live in the LA area, so it's not like there's no Teslas. It's not like they haven't mapped that road, you know, X, you know, uh, there's just, you could throw a rock and hit a Tesla anywhere. I can open my front door and see four of them. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's not like they're not in the area to, to, that's just a weird thing.

[00:10:48] How long between updates do you think, uh, was it a couple of weeks? Cause maybe they did push this and maybe they're like, Oh. Yeah. I, I think it was Bode cause it was maybe a week at most. So that, and that's pretty quick. Usually we get them every few months and this was like another one back to back. It was like, my bad. I really should go back and look and see if the, uh, the about thing on the updates said stuff like, Oh yeah, we suck. This was terrible. We made a bunch of mistakes. That was a beta release. Sorry.

[00:11:19] Well, it's all beta. Somehow I think the release notes won't say we suck. No, no. The release notes are hilarious. They always tell you how many lines of code they eliminated. Like that's what the actual user really needs to know. Maybe it was too, too many, uh, this time. Did the next one say how many they added? Um, Alison. So with Elon now admitting on, uh, earnings calls that hardware four is probably going

[00:11:46] to, uh, need to be, uh, in your car for you to get full self-driving and they're probably going to have to do a retrofit. Are you going to get your cars retrofitted? That's a really good question. You know, we paid for it upfront. Uh, to be fair, we paid the lowest of anybody probably or close to anybody. We only paid, I think 4,000 on my car, maybe 6,000 on Steve's. I don't know if we will or not. It all depends. I mean, is he going to charge me $12,000 to get hardware four? I think Tesla's paying for it. Then we're doing it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:16] Yeah. No, I mean, you absolutely should. I don't, I would be, I would be, I'm curious to know if they'll just replace the hardware four with your, and keep your current cameras or if they'll actually, uh, upgrade your cameras too. So what is hardware four? Is it like a giant mechanical box? Is it a circuit board? From what I understand, it's a, just a, well, I, I think it's just a circuit board, but it's

[00:12:44] under, it's behind the, um, I think you find it behind the, the dash. Yeah. It's like behind the glove box, I think. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm just curious what it was, you know, I hear hardware four and I think, well, an upgrade, is they going to have to, you know, tear into the side of the, uh, non-existent engine block? You know, what is, what does that look like? If it's a circuit board, that doesn't sound too bad. Yeah. So it says it's a located hardware four is, uh, is attached to the bulkhead.

[00:13:13] So you open the front doors and the windows on the sides, you open the hood. Okay. So it must be on the other side of that, um, that apron on your frunk. Okay. All right. I am real curious, you know, if they say we're, they're going to pay for it, can you just picture them coming back and saying, uh, yeah, but now you got to go on the month to plan, even though you are, you already paid for it, what you didn't get. I, you know, there's a lot to be said, uh, about Elon at the moment, but, uh, I do think

[00:13:41] Tesla does a pretty good job as a rule of taking care of their customers. When this kind of thing comes up, there's plenty of stories of them not taking care of their customers, but like my, my solar panels on my house, they added extra solar panels to my house. When we moved from the old house to the new house, because it wouldn't generate as much as what was in my contract, but that I had with solar city. So they're like, well, because it's in a different way, we added more solar panels. And on top of that, we brought too many.

[00:14:10] So there's, I have like four extra solar panels on my house or two extra solar panels on my house because the symmetry was off. So like they went above and beyond and they probably didn't pay anything for those solar panels. They might even come off somebody else's house. I don't know, but they look like they, they're, they fit right in. Oh, that's good. Okay. Well, here's hoping I'm not holding my breath though. All right. Alison, uh, why don't you tell people where to find you?

[00:14:38] Well, everything good starts with pod feet.com. That's where you can find all of my shows. The longest running Apple centric podcast called the no silica cast is up. There will be 20 years in May and I've got a, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Bit of a, bit of a milestone there. And, um, I've also got a show called chit chat across the pond where I talk to interesting people about tech and programming by stealth with barbu shots where we're learning to program in an audio podcast, believe it or not. That's really cooking along. We're having lots of fun there too.

[00:15:08] Excellent. Alison, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your experience. Always fun. Normally I would thank my guests for coming on and, and being so kind with their time. Um, and that's what I would normally do right here, but I'm not going to do that right now. And that's because we have more Alison to come. Alison and Steve were very kind to share some of their CES interviews with me.

[00:15:33] And we are going to hear a very short interview where Alison interviewed a representative from Komatsu and Komatsu. And hopefully I'm saying the name, right? They are a, they deal in heavy equipment and really it's, it's more than just heavy equipment, but they have equipment for construction, demolition, forestry, surface mining, you know, it goes on and on and on underground soft rock mining.

[00:15:57] But Alison is going to, uh, introduce us to a electric dredger. Now I could tell you what that is, but then I would spoil the interview and we don't want to do that. So let's go ahead and hit that interview. We are possibly interviewing someone about the, well, we're definitely interviewing them, but we're interviewing them about possibly the largest piece of equipment I've seen here. We are looking at a giant underwater remote controlled construction equipment, piece of equipment.

[00:16:28] And I'm here with Madeline Pierce, who's going to tell us a little bit about it. So what was the problem that this was designed to solve? So this helps with, uh, underwater dredging. Uh, and it- What do we dredge for? Uh, you're just removing, uh, material from the river. Yeah, but I think there's something, it's a climate problem or helping with it. So you can help, uh, restore ecosystems or help prepare for natural disasters. Oh, oh, okay. All right. So what we're looking at, it looks like it should be, um, well, actually it looks like

[00:16:56] one of my grandson's little construction equipment. But, uh, this thing is massive. It's, uh, what is it? Like 35, 40, 30 feet long. And, uh, I see a pole sticking up out of it. What's the pole for? So the pole is for GPS. It helps, uh, communicate with the, uh, tele-remote controller. Oh, okay. So we've got somebody with a little remote control, a little joystick that's driving all of this, right? And so that must limit the depth you can get to with this. Yeah. So this, uh, can be operated, uh, up to seven meters underwater. Oh, that's still pretty big.

[00:17:24] And if you're doing a river, that's probably, well, I guess there's big rivers we should talk about, but yeah. Um, now this isn't the first one of these Komatsu's made? No. So there was a diesel mechanical version that has been made since the seventies, uh, and it had a snorkel. So to allow for air to get to the engine. So that limits it even more on depth, right? Yeah. Yep. And eventually we want this to get to 50 meters. Oh, wow. Now how would you do that over what you're doing today? Uh, they want to remove the GPS mask. So it'll be tethered with a buoy at the top above the water, uh, to help communicate with

[00:17:54] the controller. Wow. One of the first questions Steve asked when we got in here was how did they get this into CES? Cause I'm guessing this weighs a couple of pounds too. Do you have any idea how much it weighs? Uh, it weighs 30,000 kilograms. Oh, holy cow. This thing is really impressive. Well, I love the idea of this. This is all electric then, right? Yes. Completely electric. Forgot to mention that. So it's, uh, it's, uh, every little girl's dream to be able to drive a piece of construction equipment underwater. I think this is really cool. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

[00:18:23] This is just one more reason why I should have spent another day at CES. Like I flew in on Monday, uh, went to whatever event that was that evening and had a great time. Honestly, I got to spend a lot of time with Allison and Steve and Tom Merritt and Rob Dunwood and, uh, Amos and, and a bunch of really cool people that I never thought I would meet in real life. So it was a really cool experience.

[00:18:48] But the other reason I should have stayed was because I did not see nearly enough of the show floor. Like it is just massive. And there's so many more things that I would have liked to have seen. So, um, thank you, Allison for sharing and Steve for sharing the interviews with me. I will, uh, give Allison's show a plug and website, a plug one more time.

[00:19:13] The No Silicast is where you should go to keep up on all things tech, but Allison is sharing all of her CES, uh, interviews. And I know she is working on, uh, she has a, I'm forgetting the name, but there's an assistive, uh, trade show that she goes to in Southern California too. I know she is working on that as well. So long story short here, the, the point that I'm trying to make is you should go follow Allison. Everything good starts with podfeed.com.

[00:19:41] And again, thank you to Allison for coming on and spending a little bit of time with me. Now this isn't the last time you're going to hear Allison this week, because this is podfeed week here on the podcast on the kilowatt podcast. So, uh, Allison's going to come on and we're going to talk about different, uh, EV options. And we'll, we'll talk about that on Friday show. So thank you everybody for listening.

[00:20:04] I will be back, uh, the second week of April, whatever that day ends up being. I think it's like the ninth or the eighth. Um, that's when I'll return to regular shows. That is the eighth. So not sure when this is coming out. I think it's the end of April, end of March, beginning of April. Anyway, well, it doesn't really matter. I hope, I hope you all have enjoyed all of the shows up to this point and, uh, yeah, looking

[00:20:32] forward to chatting news. So thank you everybody. And I will talk to you soon.