‘No Big Issues’ Says Bicycle Professor Of Tesla’s Driverless Video In Amsterdam

Next month in Austin, Texas, Tesla plans to roll out a modest fleet of driverless Model Y’s. It’s relatively unchallenging for autonomous vehicles to mix with motor traffic on the wide roads of a car-centric US city in a sunny state. However, cynics have long predicted that AVs will flounder among the flocks of cyclists in European cities such as Amsterdam. Hold my Heineken, implied Tesla recently, posting a video on X claiming to show that the latest version of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system can deftly negotiate Dutch roads dotted with people on bicycles.

Tesla’s Amsterdam video shows the driver’s hands underneath but not touching the car’s steering wheel. The company’s online disclaimer states that using FSD “[requires] active driver supervision.” Tesla’s small print also states that FSD—misleadingly marketed since 2016 as having driverless “capability”—does “not make the vehicle autonomous.” FSD, Tesla quietly cautions, “may suddenly make unexpected maneuvers or mistakes that require immediate driver intervention.” The company’s 3,600-word “limitations and warnings” page further warns that FSD may not operate as intended when encountering pedestrians and bicyclists.

Merging with cars is less of an issue, it seems, because after uploading the Amsterdam time-lapse, Tesla posted another video showing one of its FSD-equipped cars successfully negotiating the famously anarchic free-for-all disgorging onto Avenue Champs-Élysées in Paris. “FSD can handle Arc de Triomphe no problem,” boasted Tesla on May 16. Elon Musk’s firm added, sotto voce, that “activation and use [in Europe]

is subject to regulatory approval.”

This approval—for Tesla’s imperfect $99-a-month technology and other AV systems—could come as early as next year.

Salad days

Motor vehicle use on many public roads around the world are allowed by rules formulated by the UN Economic Commission for Europe, or UNECE. This Switzerland-based body also sets rules for several other international sectors, including agriculture. Before Brexit, Little Englanders would fume that meddling EU bureaucrats in Brussels banned curvy cucumbers when, in reality, the body ruling on the vegetable’s straightness—an important benchmark for trade buyers—was actually UNECE in Geneva.

Salad-measuring aside, UNECE has hosted the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations since its creation in 1952. This body crafted the 1958 UN treaty on road transport, which has been signed by 58 countries including France and the Netherlands. Signatory countries ensure compliance with automotive design and safety standards, and allow the independent crash testing of motor vehicles. Neither China nor the US have signed up for this UN treaty—American and Chinese automakers self-certify that their cars are safe and crash-worthy. In 2018, the forum’s Working Party on Braking and Running Gear morphed into the Groupe de Rapporteurs pour les Véhicules Autonomes (GRVA), a sub-committee in charge of AV rules. Currently, these rules mandate the presence of a human driver in an AV who should be ready to take control at a moment’s notice and is ultimately responsible for the vehicle’s behavior.

China and most other countries, including the US, will likely sign up for UNECE’s updated rules on AVs due next year, says François Guichard, the UN’s lead on driverless cars. Perhaps pointedly, the GRVA secretary remarks that Tesla’s FSD is an ADAS (advanced driver-assistance system) and “not AV.”

Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

Control

Despite Musk’s many overblown claims about FSD, it’s not the most advanced AV-adjacent technology available. Some entry-level cars in China now come equipped with basic autonomous driving modes and upscale ones have even more advanced systems. None of these are yet allowed across Europe. Several luxury models from BMW and Mercedes-Benz have partial autonomous driving capabilities. However, they are only allowed in Germany, and motorists still have to take back control in many scenarios, including during rain showers.

As defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the stages of automated driving are measured on a scale of 0 to 5, with Level 0 involving no driving automation through to Level 5, which is full automation. Levels 1 through 3 still require active attention from those in the driving seat. BMW claims its Personal Pilot AV system operates at Level 3, one notch above Tesla’s FSD.

The FSD videos of Paris and Amsterdam posted online by Tesla were speeded-up time-lapse shorts and did not show any of the usual glitches and crashes common to AV fleets, such as the snafus that have afflicted a small number of the 10 million trips that Waymo’s robot taxis have carried in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin.

Using AI to reduce the speed of Tesla’s Amsterdam clip, a YouTuber uploaded his own version of the video, and digitally papered over the gaps missed by the time-lapse photography. Robot*irl claimed that the way Tesla’s FSD managed the “hardcore difficulty of European city streets” was “unbelievable.” He added that “FSD stays not only safe and polite but also smooth” despite the presence of “pedestrians and cyclists absolutely everywhere.”

In truth, only a handful of cyclists and pedestrians were shown in the clip, and it remains unclear how FSD would react amidst the rush-hour swarms of cyclists that Amsterdam has long been famed for. “I have never seen so many bicycles as, for instance, in Amsterdam,” wrote Karel Čapek in 1933 (he’s the playwright who coined the word “robot”). He added: “They are no mere bicycles, but a sort of collective entity; shoals, droves, colonies of bicycles, which rather suggest teeming of bacteria or the swarming of infusoria or the eddying of flies.”

Cyclists still swarm around the capital of the Netherlands, a phenomenon studied by Marco te Brömmelstroet, a professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Urban Cycling Institute. Brömmelstroet—known on social media as “fietsprofessor”, Dutch for Bicycle Professor—describes the “self-organized and efficient” flow of cyclists in Amsterdam as the “choreography of the unstoppable dance.”

The numbers of those who flock to this daily dance could increase, says Brömmelstroet, once “people know robot drivers cannot kill.”

After watching Robot*irl’s version of the video, Brömmelstroet says that he had “no big issues” with Tesla’s FSD-in-Amsterdam demonstration and that, far from encouraging driverless car use, the introduction of AVs could entice people to “take back their rights to the public streets.”

Cars, suggests Brömmelstroet, could “become a very small feature in cities of the future since their inherent advantages dwindle as soon as people unlearn to be afraid.” However, he warns that auto companies could cotton on to this “flaw” in AVs and make their algorithms “more aggressive.” He says cities might then be urged to “discipline people off the road even more than we did since the 1920s.”

Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, is the go-to expert on this removal from the street of pedestrians and cyclists, which he documented in his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. He believes rampant AV use could further marginalize those not in cars.

“No city has any business ever permitting robot cars because the convenience of the tiny fraction of affluent customers they can serve necessarily comes at a cost to many others, especially in a city such as Amsterdam, where street space is scarce and practical alternatives to driving are ubiquitous,” says Norton, who’s also the author of a book on autonomous driving.

“In a North American city, robotic cars may easily do more harm than good by serving the affluent so well that the city can appear to be innovating boldly in transport, thereby reducing the pressure to do something to better serve the majority,” Norton worries.

Referring to Tesla’s Amsterdam video, Norton agrees that FSD treated some of the detected pedestrians and cyclists “much like a good human driver would.” However, he stresses that the video also shows that, at other times, FSD was “aggressive for the sake of its human occupant’s convenience” and that it will “violate the rules of the road to save time for its passenger.”

FSD does what human drivers routinely do. “The robotic driver is taking advantage of cyclists’ and pedestrians’ interest in not getting killed,” says Norton. “I would guess that several of the cyclists were more cautious than their observance of their right of way required them to be, specifically because the Tesla was driving assertively. If so, this means Tesla already uses intimidation.”

Tesla’s FSD is AI-reliant, cautions Norton. “It learns what works best–from its occupant’s point of view–and does it. And the business incentives to pursue this path are overwhelming. This means that [FSD] will learn to get as assertive as necessary to minimize delay to its occupant, and will learn to up the assertiveness level as needed.”

The claim from automakers that AVs will be safe and lawful road users has been shown to be bogus, says Norton: “A decade ago, the robotic car proponents were all promising perfect rules compliance. But that’s long gone.”

Instead, AVs must bully to prosper, believes Norton, and he predicts a dystopia for non-motorized street users. “Intimidation is sure to be accompanied by numerous other techniques that subordinate, such as blaring alarms, facial recognition in car-mounted cameras, and ‘educational’ campaigns targeting pedestrians and cyclists.”

Aggressive rule breakers or not, Brömmelstroet casts doubt on the urban potential for AVs in Europe. “Our cities don’t need driverless cars,” he says. “They need more carless drivers.”